Routes: You are part of the game

Thanks to those who joined us for the Routesgame launch a few weeks ago.

Routes is the first of Channel 4 education’s big cross platform games, and over the last two weeks players have been busy Breeding with their mates on their social networks, scoring points by Sneezing on each other and collecting achievements for designing the most absurd experiments. Along the way they’ve been exposed to the fascinating world of genetics and the human genome.

Recently players have started to uncover a bigger mystery beneath the game: On the evening of the launch party the chief scientific consultant of the game, Markus Schoenberg, was found dead in a hotel in Peru. As well as disrupting our launch, the tragic news was obviously a terrible shock for his niece Rachel, who is desperate to find out what happened to her uncle.

Intrigued? Watch episode one of the Routes story.

Further episodes will be published weekly for the duration of the game, and 5 lucky winners will win a chance to feature in the finale.

Battlefront in the Telegraph today

Alexander Rose – one of the campaigners at battlefront.co.uk

I’ve written an article for the Telegraph’s Digital Life today about Battlefront, one of the many cross platform projects we’re doing at Channel 4. Here’s the article text:

Earlier this year, Clay Shirky, the renowned social media commentator and author, was interviewed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts by Brian Eno. The discussion was followed by a question and answer session. One teenage blogger asked how the digital age had changed the way we lived. She was a child of the digital revolution, she explained, and could barely recall the world without the internet.

Shirky’s reponse was telling. He said that the biggest shift in the past five to 10 years was not the explosion of choice – the mushrooming of TV channels, online content and mobile services. Instead, the most radical change was the democratisation of discourse. Before social media, if you wanted to speak in public, you needed permission. If you were a musician, you needed the resources of a record label to promote and distribute your music; if you were a film-maker, you needed a Hollywood studio or TV channel to take a risk on your artistic vision; even if you just had an opinion you wanted to share, you had to get the attention of a newspaper, magazine or book publisher to make that opinion public.

Nowadays, he noted, anyone with a laptop and broadband connection can share their opinions, rants, private thoughts and creative work with a global public audience. This doesn’t mean that all this new content gets equal attention – most is viewed by a few people and ignored by millions – but it’s still a radical shift.

Of course, this change raises new problems and questions – when anyone can voice their opinions, how do you get noticed? If you’re passionate about your message and want to change the world, how can you use the web to reach others who are as passionate as you?

That’s what Channel 4 is exploring. This week, the education team launched a new project, Battlefront, to find out how 20 teenagers in the UK are using the web to campaign about issues affecting their lives. The project works on many levels – there is a main website that aggregates all the campaigns and their progress; a site on Bebo that lets the audience become part of the campaigns and connect with the campaigners; and two five-part TV series that will run on Channel 4 in autumn 2008 and at the end of the project in 2009.

The project demonstrates how social media technologies can be used for good – connecting people who want to share information and change their lives. Social networks offer incredible opportunities for teenagers to share their experiences, talk to peers, and learn from others who have faced the same problems.

This is the single most valuable thing about the web – it connects people who need information with others who already have it. In the case of Battlefront, our campaigners will be part of a large community who are already commenting on their campaigns, offering advice and getting involved. We’ve also recruited a community of mentors, from leading lawyers, designers and social entrepreneurs to experienced campaigners, viral marketers and professional trouble-makers.

Over the next nine months, we’ll follow the teenagers as they develop their campaigns on the web, finding out how to get attention, how to build a community, and how to turn that community into real change. Will Manpreet Darroch succeed in helping to reduce the number of young people killed in road accidents? How quickly can Alexander Rose’s campaign to stop gun and knife crime gather momentum? Can Rachey Betty persuade the Government to increase the minimum wage for under-18s, and raise awareness of how much young people contribute to the workforce? Will James Mummery succeed in his quest to reduce the waste generated by the careless disposal of free newspapers? Can Aimee Nathan encourage us all to start drinking from reusable coffee cups and maybe get a cheaper cup of coffee into the bargain, and how many of us will Tom Robbins encourage to do thoughtful things for other people, by carrying out random acts of kindness?

The legacy of Battlefront will not only be the outcomes of the individual campaigns – it will also be an online database of tips, hints and tricks for future campaigners. This is the other great thing about the web – it creates a permanent record of shared experience, from the conversations of many, not the opinions of a few.

Perhaps, as Clay Shirky suggested, we should rethink our assumption that social media is a threat, and recognise it as a truly liberating opportunity for the next generation to find their own voice, in their own space, and on their own terms.

Battlefront Launches!

We’re very proud to announce that our latest online project, Battlefront, launched yesterday.

The project follows 20 teens as they develop campaigns around issues that they care about. We’re partnering with Bebo on the project, and it will also have presences on other social networks, and 2 series of 5×30mins programmes in our morning Education schedule.

We were looking for a campaigning project for 2008, and chose this one because, rather than C4 deciding what issues are relevant to teens, we’re following teens themselves as they talk about their issues. RawTV, who are producing the project with digital partner Airlock, found 19 teens by scouring the country and social networking sites. There are a broad range of campaigns, from Anti-size Zero to stopping knife crime to starting a national youth orchestra in Iraq.

Over the next 9 months we’ll be following the teens and introducing 45 mentors, from leading lawyers and design experts to experienced campaigners, protestors and trouble-makers. We’ll track their conversations, plans and events to create a database of campaigning tips and tricks for anyone interested in starting their own campaigns.

Finally, we’re looking for a 20th campaigner via the website and Bebo. A key part of the project is telling people that anyone can make change if they want to, so we’re asking people to submit their own campaign ideas to become the 20th campaigner. There’s a lot of really interesting ideas up their already, so go to the site, take a look, and get involved!

Round up of teens/social media reports

The last few months have seen a deluge of reports on social networking, gaming and teens. Most prominent amongst these has been the Byron Review, commissioned by the government to look at risks and opportunities for young children using games and social networks. Its a very well researched, nuanced and balanced review. I saw Tanya Byron give a midway report at the Oxford Media Convention earlier this year, and was very impressed with her approach and process, in particular the fact that she had received more responses and evidence from kids and teens in her research than from adults, teachers and industry. As a result, its one of the best reviews in this area in the world. Also worth looking at is OFCOM’s response to the Byron Review, with lots of good data and insight from teens.

Around the same time, Kay Withers’ IPPR report “Behind The Screen: The Hidden life Of Youth Online” was released. It covers much of the same ground, but is based on a series of in-depth workshops with 13-18 yr olds, so is stronger on detail and anecdotal evidence than the Byron and OFCOM surveys. I’m not sure if it was commissioned expecting the Byron Review to be a typical piece of top-down government policy, but the IPPR have been outflanked slightly by the fact that the two reports are in broad agreement.

Finally, an ongoing research report from Digizen, commissioned by BECTA, on  – you guessed it – young people and social networking. It looks interesting, whilst covering some of the same ground as the previous two. It will be interesting to see the final research as it develops, however.

There you go – plenty of reading to be getting on with. If you’re not too busy using social networks yourself, that is…

PMOG

There’s a good article on Justin Hall’s PMOG game at MIT Tech Review. PMOG (Passively Multiplayer Online Game) is a browser-based game that sits on top of your web experience. Player can design quests by linking routes through other web sites and placing ‘mines’. Players earn XP for completing quests, and can ally themselves with roles and tribes – just like a normal RPG (Role Playing Game). Alice and I funded some early research for PMOG when we were at the BBC, and its good to see the project up and running in beta now. I’ve been playing around with it for the last month or so, and its great fun, especially the first time you find a mine on a site!

The idea of layering gameplay over everyday routines and behaviour is an interesting one, particularly if it can encourage people to explore, collaborate, share and learn more about their environments, online or offline. Jane McGonigal spoke about this in her recent SXSW keynote, but the idea has been around for a while. The origin of popular photo site Flickr was GameNeverEnding, a precursor of PMOG that built a similar game dynamic in which users were encouraged to create their own objects and leave notes for players all over the web. After a couple of Betas, GNE was abandoned, and some of the underlying code became Flickr. You can still see .gne at the end of some Flickr URLs as the last evidence of this legacy code.

New ARGS

Lots of really interesting looking ARGs launched this week. The first up is from SixToStart for Penguin, and is a really nice experiment in story-telling using Google Maps. We Tell Stories will feature 6 stories told via clicking on Google Map tags. After a pretty linear start, it begins to fragment, and finally leads off into different spaces. I won’t give out a spoiler, but look for the info at the end that takes the story into a completely different realm…

Next up is a new Nokia ARG, for those of us old-skool enough to remember the first NokiaGame. Haven’t had a chance to play with it yet and it looks pretty straight-up marketing, but will investigate more later

Finally – emergency subnet. Looks a bit ARG by numbers to me, with lots of the cliches of the genre – flickery, degraded film, psuedo-dystopian political paranoia, and suspiciously attractive protagonists sending out help messages to the ether… Beautiful design, though.

Links roundup

Until we get our delicious feed automatically posting here, here’s some interesting links related to education and teens:

Alltop’s teen blog aggregator
Interesting aggregation of teen blog sites. US-focused, and also very much biased towards girls sites. Are there no blogs for teenage boys?

Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson at SXSW
Writeup of two heavy-hitting thinkers’ session at the Austin geek-fest

YPulse: SXSW and what gamers want
More SXSW coverage (this is just a ploy to justify blagging a trip there next year) with some added insight into what Gamers want

IssueLab Close-up – Youth Media
Huge aggregation of non-profit (ie free!) youth media research. US based, but still some good stuff there

AlleyKatzz Secrets
Slightly odd and a little bit depressing US teens site encouraging girls to share their secrets anonymously. We must have been pitched variants on this idea about 100 times in the last year… See also Anastasia from Ypulse’s similar proposal

ARG stats roundup

Cross Media Specialist Christy Dena has written up some excellent notes on stats for ARGS on her blog. She’s included all the major ARGS of the last few years, including The Beast, I Love Bees, Perplexcity, The Lost Experience, World Without Oil and Regenesis. This is a really good and valuable roundup, and shows some interesting patterns.

Marketing seems to be key to massive take-up – the biggest ARGS are those commissioned for a major product launch (The Beast/I Love Bees/The H3ist) or alongside a TV show (The Lost Experience/Heroes). This probably reflects the super-sized budgets that these ARGS have compared to more home-brewed games such as Meigeist or Lockjaw. There are only a couple of ’stand-alone’ ARGS that have achieved any kind of scale – EA’s Majestic from 2001 (with a reported $10m budget – yikes!) and MindCandy’s PerplexCity.  This is one of the biggest issues within the ARG world at the moment – are they destined to just be funky marketing tactics, or are they the first truly new entertainment format to come along since the growth of the web?

Jane McGonigal on Happiness, Gaming and ARGs

Dan Hon (founder of UK ARG company SixToStart) has written up some fantastic notes on Jane McGonigal’s SXSW keynote, for those of us not lucky enough to attend the geek-fest in Austin, Texas.

Its a fantastic keynote, looking at the kind of feedback and emotions players get from virtual games, and how we might design more real-world interactions that share those qualities. In particular, Jane has been researching recent academic thinking about how we define happiness in our society, and what motivates people in their everyday lives. Here’s an excerpt from Dan’s write-up:

“Happiness is the new capital. If you want someone to value your service, eperience, you need to explicitly generate a positive experience for them. Happiness doesn’t mean what it used to – some people do define it as a warm fuzzy thing still, but I’m hear to say that it’s not a warm puppy, although I have a picture of my puppy coming up in 20 slides, so we will extract some, but this warm fuzziness is not what I want to talk about. I’ve been researching this for a while, so the 4 key principles that have come out of all of this peer reviewed research:

1. satisfying work to do
2. the experience of being good at something
3. time spent with people we like
4. the chance to be a part of something bigger

Not money. Not even necessarily fun. What blew my mind was the realisation that nothing gives you these four things in higher or better quality than games. Games given you satisfying work to do, designed for you to be successful, multiplayer games spent with people you like, and games give you a chance to be a part of something bigger.”

Really inspiring stuff, and light years away from most thinking on ARGs and games in general. Although if this whets your appetite, its worth checking out Amy Jo Kim’s presentation from the 2006 Etech conference – Putting The Fun Into Functional.

Bow Street Runner Ep 2 is up!

On Thursday, we uploaded the second episode of Bow Street Runner the point-and-click adventure we’ve commissioned to accompany the City Of Vice TV series. We’ve responded to some feedback and bug reports from the preview of the first episode, so it now plays really smoothly and its a little easier to save the harlot!

A new episode will go up every Thursday, and you’ll get a unique code when you complete an episode that saves your progress in the game and your esteem levels. So go there now and get playing, and please let us know what you think.