Gamification to Lamification in Less Than 150 Words

Although the gamification trend at this particular historical moment is unstoppable, it's so problematic in so many horribly obvious ways that we need more writers like Oliver Burkeman willing to dismantle the flimsy logic behind treating life like Pacman. Better yet, he does it in less than 150 words:

The current public face of gamification is Jane McGonigal, author of the new book Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better And How They Can Change The World, but many of her prescriptions are cringe-inducing: they seem to involve redefining aid projects in Africa as "superhero missions", or telling hospital patients to think of their recovery from illness as a "multiplayer game". Hearing how McGonigal speeded her recovery from a serious head injury by inventing a "superhero-themed game" called SuperBetter, based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which her family and friends were players helping her back to health, I'm apparently supposed to feel inspired. Instead I feel embarrassed and a little sad: if I'm ever in that situation, I hope I won't need to invent a game to persuade my family to care.

 (Guardian link).

Why Writing That Targets Humans Remains Cutting Edge

Thousands of digital marketers and gadget geeks will soon be descending on Austin, each determined to be personally responsible for overloading Twitter with their snapshot insights from SXSW Interactive. And while SXSWi has become a launching pad for exciting new technologies such as Foursquare and Twitter, the panel I’d most like to attend (if I were going) focuses on the apparently unhip technology known as the written word.

This Saturday (March 11), Kyle Monson, a content strategist at JWT, will talk about Brand Journalism: The Rise of Non-Fiction Advertising. What is brand journalism? No one is quite sure. As Monson notes in a recent interview with Razorfish.com:

Brand Journalism is, in short, a method of engaging our audience in discussions about the brand. This is done by creating compelling content and messages as well as by incorporating the audience’s own viewpoints. We’re teaching brands to mimic publishers and journalists in how they produce content, and to mimic humans in how they communicate with their audience.

While Monson admits that brand journalism might just be a new name for the well-established practice of corporate communications and PR, his panel description notes that “we're still trying to teach big companies and ad agencies how to communicate like humans, how to listen, and how to use transparency as a messaging tactic.”

It’s strange to think that in 2011 this is still the case, but as this article about Groupon’s success demonstrates, some of the most forward-thinking content-driven marketing involves nothing more than harnessing the very basic and ancient technology of empathy, understanding and trust.

Einar Sneve Martinussen Makes WiFi Visible

This project, which makes wifi visible, is worth checking out. I'm captivated with it for a number of reasons, the most prominent being that my CFC media lab classmate Dylan Reibling thought of this idea a few months ago. Don't worry, his idea wasn't stolen – this is one of those cases when a good idea spontaneously appears in the brains of a bunch of different people around the world at the same time. Here's more info on the project and its creator Einar Sneve Martinussen.

A Spam Email Worth Sharing

There was something wonderful about the language used in this spam email, so I thought I'd share it:

Patch Up With Your Girlfriend With Luxury Designer Replica Watches
If you are worried about your breakup, then you should be bold enough to patch up it with grace and style

By having a beautiful luxury designer replica watch, your girlfriend will be surely inclined towards you at once. All of a sudden, natural feelings of love, peace, comfort, romance, and sex will be restored again between you and your girlfriend for long time.

Gopnik on the Internet Mind

One of the things that John Brockman’s collection on the Internet and the mind illustrates is that when people struggle to describe the state that the Internet puts them in they arrive at a remarkably familiar picture of disassociation and fragmentation. Life was once whole, continuous, stable; now it is fragmented, multi-part, shimmering around us, unstable and impossible to fix. The world becomes Keats’s “waking dream,” as the writer Kevin Kelly puts it.

The odd thing is that this complaint, though deeply felt by our contemporary Better-Nevers, is identical to Baudelaire’s perception about modern Paris in 1855, or Walter Benjamin’s about Berlin in 1930, or Marshall McLuhan’s in the face of three-channel television (and Canadian television, at that) in 1965. When department stores had Christmas windows with clockwork puppets, the world was going to pieces; when the city streets were filled with horse-drawn carriages running by bright-colored posters, you could no longer tell the real from the simulated; when people were listening to shellac 78s and looking at color newspaper supplements, the world had become a kaleidoscope of disassociated imagery; and when the broadcast air was filled with droning black-and-white images of men in suits reading news, all of life had become indistinguishable from your fantasies of it. It was Marx, not Steve Jobs, who said that the character of modern life is that everything falls apart.

We must, at some level, need this to be true, since we think it’s true about so many different kinds of things. We experience this sense of fracture so deeply that we ascribe it to machines that, viewed with retrospective detachment, don’t seem remotely capable of producing it. If all you have is a hammer, the saying goes, everything looks like a nail; and, if you think the world is broken, every machine looks like the hammer that broke it.

-- Adam Gopnik on the Internet brain

Books as Bombs Quote

It may be that in the nineteen-sixties, when television was still muzzling itself, from fear of provoking advertiser displeasure or F.C.C. reaction, books were a more accessible form for social criticism and dissent. It may also be that books were still a little radioactive then, a little dangerous. Friedan’s book came out in the wake of some celebrated censorship trials—“Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “Tropic of Cancer,” “Fanny Hill.” One of Coontz’s respondents recalled “The Feminine Mystique” being treated “like a banned book.” The sense that an object is somehow forbidden gives it greater power.

-- New Yorker article on The Feminine Mystique

Review of Steve Martin's An Object of Beauty (Reprint)

Comedian Steve Martin explores the New York art scene in his first full-length novelToronto Star | December 5, 2010 | Ryan Bigge

An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin

Grand Central Publishing, 292 pages, $32.99

By virtue of his many decades of A-list celebrity, Steve Martin is a famous author. But unlike James Franco (who last month released Palo Alto, a debut collection of short fiction) or Pamela Anderson (who has written not one, but two quote-unquote novels), Martin has spent the past decade proving that he’s not a dilettante capitalizing on name-brand recognition. Starting with his 2000 novella Shopgirl, Martin has been keyboarding at a steady pace, publishing a second novella in 2003 (The Pleasure of My Company), along with his 2007 memoir Born Standing Up.

An Object of Beauty is Martin’s first full-length novel, an examination of how art and commerce intersect in New York (“Auctions were, and still are, spectator sports, where the contestants are money”), as chronicled by an art writer with the unfortunate name of Daniel Chester French Franks. Providing a peek inside Sotheby’s auction house along with the back rooms of various Chelsea galleries (“from which new art was mined and then trucked into residences of Manhattan”) the novel exposes the strange rituals and logic-defying prices of the contemporary art world, in a way similar to Sarah Thornton’s non-fiction book Seven Days in the Art World. But since An Object of Beauty begins in the early 1990s and concludes with the recent recession, Martin instead provides Eighteen Years in The Art World.

Our heroine is Lacey Yeager, a good-bad girl determined to open her own gallery no matter who gets crushed along the way. As Lacey explains to her confidant Daniel Franks:

“I’m seeing a guy who’s got me figured out. He never says I love you.”

“That’s good?”

“I love him for it.”

During her 20s, Lacey quickly learns to convert objects of beauty into objects of value — be it artworks or, indeed, herself. Her off-again, on-again lover, Patrice Claire, notes that “both you and paintings are layered. You, in the complex onion-peel way, dark secrets and all that.”

The problem with Lacey, however is that “Patrice was used to the steadfast responses of paintings, not the unpredictable responses of people.” Thus, the Picture of Lacey Yeager eventually becomes as grotesque as Dorian Gray.

While Martin effectively mixes research with an obvious passion and insight into art (he’s a noted collector himself), the novel contains a few unnecessary brushstrokes, mostly involving 9/11. It’s not that funnyman Martin isn’t equipped to handle the challenge — it’s more that there isn’t anything to add to that particular tragedy. As the Toronto literary journal Taddle Creek notes on its submission guidelines, “The magazine wishes it didn’t still have to be said, but it does: no stories about September 11th, the Y2K bug, or tsunamis.”

As you might expect from a lifelong comedian, there are plenty of witty asides throughout — a hotel “where the lighting had been preset to sex” and “Basquiat was achieving sensational prices but at least had the courtesy to be dead.”

More often the novel provides a serious attempt at documenting the financial and creative ripples made possible by Warhol’s self-aware pop art. It would seem that the true wild and crazy guys are contemporary artists able to create surreal punchlines (“Maurizio Cattelan made a life-size sculpture of the pope flattened by a meteor that had just fallen through a skylight”) that earn them millions.

My Review of Combat Camera

I will spare you the details, but up until recently I've been too busy to blog. So harried, in fact, that I lacked the time to post published work, which is really quite sad when you think about it.

Anyway, here is my review of Combat Camera by A. J. Somerset.

Combat Camera: Imprisoned behind the lens

A damaged ex-war photographer struggles to define some notion of redemption while paying the bills with second-rate porn

Toronto Star | Oct 24 2010 | Ryan Bigge

Lucas Zane is a photographer in his mid-40s whose career has lost focus. While that might sound like a bad joke (a photographer losing focus — get it?), Zane has a healthy appetite for strange humour: “At the bedroom door he paused. What is the proper form for dealing with a wounded, hung-over, messed-up porno chick in one’s bedroom?”

Zane, once a successful photojournalist who survived tours of Nicaragua, Lebanon and Afghanistan, now spends most of his time trying to avoid innumerable psychological landmines: “The mind, allowed to wander, can easily stray into a bad neighbourhood.” After post-traumatic stress amplifies his alcoholic tendencies and effectively ends his career, Zane finds himself snapping niche porn in Mississauga to pay his grocery bills.

London, Ont.-based A. J. Somerset, himself a photographer, uses his debut novel to juxtapose the “elegant lies” of the camera with the brutal rationalizations required to perform and distribute pornography. This might sound like Russell Smith territory, whose most recent book Girl Crazy also features Internet nudity and scenes set in strip clubs, but there’s nothing particularly erotic about Combat Camera. The niche porn is raw and violent while strippers appear bored if not worse.

To be fair, Zane finds these financially motivated exposures of the flesh to be especially unarousing due to a bullet wound that has inflicted a variety of physical dysfunctions. Unable to act upon Melissa’s flirtations (the aforementioned hung-over, messed-up porno chick) he instead expresses his affection by becoming a protective father figure.

Throughout the novel, Somerset alternates between the immediate and blunt trauma inflicted upon civilians in various warzones and the slower-acting but no less injurious actions of a culture lacking in modesty: “This is the story of our time. Hardcore goes mainstream. A generation gets its sex ed from the Internet. Teenaged girls photograph themselves in the mirror and post the pictures online, call it empowerment, go wild with empowerment at Fort Lauderdale, demonstrate empowerment at Mardi Gras for cheap strings of beads, email their empowerment to boys they like.”

As the above demonstrates, Somerset is a confident, gifted writer, which explains why Combat Camera has already won the Metcalf-Rooke Award. Somerset is able to seamlessly switch between dialogue and Zane’s internal monologue as he darts between grim horror and grim comedy. He also avoids the arid claustrophobia endemic to novels where much of the action takes place within the main character’s mind.

But the most satisfying aspects of this novel involve Somerset’s refusal to make obvious the numerous parallels between photography and fiction:

 • “You define what’s in the story and what remains untold.”

 • “Pictures don’t preserve anything, much less the truth. What you put on film is 1/250th of a second.”

 • “Photographs never lie, but liars can take photographs.”

Such observations offer an ongoing argument between the camera lens and the keyboard, with the novel eventually revealing the strengths and limitations of both.

Although the subject matter and tone could not be more different, Combat Camera retains echoes of Maggie Helwig’s superlative Girls Fall Down from 2008, which also features a photographer as protagonist. In Girls Fall Down, the photographer in question is slowly losing his sight, provoking a desperate chase to capture his surroundings before the inevitable darkness arrives.

Combat Camera’s Zane, meanwhile, hides behind his camera in order to shut out the world around him, haunted by everyone he has imprisoned in silver prints, unable or unwilling to see what’s right in front of him.

Hawkblocker Explained

I looked down. I was wearing £90 Nikes, £270 Sevens, a £45 Topshop jumper and a £200 Philippe Starck watch. There was a smartphone in my left pocket, a fancy wallet in my right, and I’d paid £32 for my haircut. I’d essentially taken close to £1,000 of my own hard-earned (well, you know what I mean) cash, blended it into a fine puree, poured it all over myself and smeared it around like a lover with a tub of icing.

 And thus was born the new ad-review site Hawkblocker.

Books Stink: Super Sad True Love Story Review

Super Sad True Love Story: Immigrant love in dystopia

Gary Shteyngart goes over the top with his corporate satire, but his third novel still has bite

Toronto Star | August 21, 2010 | Ryan Bigge

On the Bookavore tumblr, an anonymous Brooklyn bookseller recently posted an “E-books Article Drinking Game.” Trigger phrases and their alcohol equivalents include “any discussion of book world after 2020 — one drink” and the debilitating “smell of a real book — clean out the liquor cabinet, drink until you pass out, wake up next morning, puke, then continue drinking.”

Meanwhile, in Super Sad True Love Story, anti-hero Lenny Abramov is forced to mask the odour of his formidable book collection with Pine-Sol Wild Flower Blast. In Gary Shteyngart’s satiric dystopia of the near future, books stink. Literally. (“Duder, that thing smells like wet socks,” notes an airplane passenger, referring to Lenny’s collection of Chekhov short stories.) But a crashing American dollar and the possible repossession of Manhattan by the Chinese means Lenny has bigger problems than the uncoolness of his antiquarian reading habits.

Shteyngart’s comic timing has always been exceptional, but with Super Sad he demonstrates his socio-cultural radar is equally well calibrated. Anticipating the triumph of our smartphone-addicted, attention-span deprived, Google-stupid culture, Shteyngart is less concerned about the future of the book (i.e. Kindle versus hardcover) and more focused on whether books have a future, period. (“Lenny Abramov, last reader on earth!” declares his friend Noah, over drinks at a popular new bar on Staten Island called Cervix.)

Although there is plenty of overlap between Super Sad and his previous two novels (especially Absurdistan), pushing the setting 15 minutes into the future helps make Shteyngart’s obsession with slang, sex, the Russian immigrant experience and the shortcomings of the American military-industrial-political-media complex appear fresh. Is his strategy is a success? This depends on whether you find such corporate monstrosities as LandO’LakesGMFord and ColgatePalmoliveYum!BrandViacomCredit hilarious or hokey.

Like many futuristic dystopias (Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or We by Yevgeny Zamyatin), the bleakness of Super Sad’s over-surveillanced and politically restrictive America is relieved by a sweeping romance. But Shteyngart is only willing to allow Lenny partial happiness. As his semi-girlfriend Eunice Park explains in a quasi-diary entry on Facebook-of-the-future site GlobalTeens, “he’s gross physically, but there’s something sweet about him.”

Although the novel is told through the alternating journal entries of Lenny and Eunice, their romantic chemistry is never entirely explained. Opposites attract, but 39-year-old Lenny and 24-year-old Eunice are less a couple than an engineered way of highlighting the novel’s major tensions. That said, their ongoing relationship is messy, complicated, argument-ridden and complicated by past obsessions and emotional scars — which is to say, entirely believable.

Since the novel’s title functions as an obvious spoiler, suspense is instead generated by Lenny’s tenuous job prospects at the Post-Human Services division of Staatling-Wapachung (a company that promises immortality to those who can afford it) and ongoing corporate intrigue. As befits a novel with Super Sad in its title, Shteyngart eventually stops cracking jokes as the country he loves starts to crumble for the last time.

Can a novel filled with references to TotalSurrender panties and a website called AssLuxury also serve as a serious work of cultural and political commentary? Duder, I’m not entirely convinced. Can an author successfully mock our rapidly depleting attention spans through the creaky medium of the novel? Duder, yes. And for such audacity Shteyngart deserves to be read —preferably in a quiet room, in a few sittings and without the compelling but empty distractions of Facebook, Twitter and iPhone.