On Wednesday evening I attended a session of the Edinburgh Entrepreneurship Club. The speaker was Ewan McIntosh, an educational technology and social media pioneer with a very well read blog. He gave an very informative talk, pointing out that really social media technology itself should be boring, and that it is good, creative ideas and applications that are the interesting bit. Ewan works for Channel 4 and heads up the Scottish (also N.Ireland and N.England) branch of the 4iP startup fund for new social media projects.
I spoke to a varied and interesting bunch of people after the talk. One prominent feature of our conversations was how a large number of people “just don’t get social media”. Obviously there are conceptual issues to convey, but also is it perhaps only now that useful and relevant applications for the population at large are starting to emerge?
As 2008 draws to a close, I am reflecting on all my wide and varied ExerGaming experiences (post coming soon), but there is one nagging issue at the back of mind. When explaining “ExerGaming” to people, they just don’t seem to get beyond the “novelty factor”.
What excites me about ExerGaming is that it offers the potential to do things that could never be done before. No longer need there be a “one size fits all” approach to sport and physical activity. ExerGames can be designed to adapt to an individual player’s level of skill and ability. Furthermore, networked ExerGames enable players to overcome the constraints of physical location and seek out meaningful challenges and competitions across the globe.
Trying to help people “Get it” about ExerGaming is not easy. It requires a conceptual jump in thinking. In preparing for my review I have been tidying up files on my computer and game across a link to a video clip, which to me, totally “Gets it” in terms of doing new things with technology. Enjoy and let me know if it “Gets it” for you…
As 2008 draws to a close, it is time to pause, take a breath and reflect. A review of my year in ExerGaming will follow in a future post, but first I have been searching for a theme to try and draw my rich and varied experiences together. A collection of thoughts, words and ideas kept coming to the fore: mobile, immersive, miniature, wireless, networked, social, audioscape, tactile.
I had previously written a post “When Worlds Collide” and it suddenly jumped out at me when reading an article in Wired Magazine – “The New Reality”. Simply put, the virtual worlds of the web and video games have become mainstream in a variety of many interesting and exciting ways (e.g. iPhone, Wii and Guitar Hero). Virtual reality is no longer the holy grail. These tactile technology mashups between virtual and physical worlds have brought immersive experiences to the masses.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but whilst there are many and varied problems facing the world today, there is one particular problem that has not received sufficient attention. It is the fact that our planet is now loosing its SPIN at a much faster rate than was predicted and is even beginning to wobble.
Scientists reckon that problem is due to the fact that people are not walking about on foot as much as the used to do and would have in the process helped to keep up the planet’s SPIN. Motor cars are particular disruptive in this regard, not only do they stop people from creating SPIN, but their high speed, tight cornering and rapid breaking all contribute to the wobble effect.
We urgently need to get people back on their feet and start generating SPIN again. Can we SPIN the planet? Yes we can!
For further information see my entry for the forthcoming Social Innovation Camp.
Video games have long been inspired by conventional sporting activities. Indeed, it could even be said that “Pong” was the first “e” Sport. Now their is an immense range of eSports games available from driving simulators through to team management simulators. In a recent newspaper monthly sports magazine a number of tops sports starts were revealed as fans of armchair sports. It was also suggested that the ability to live out fans dreams of managing their team to the top might be useful training for the real thing and questions were raised about whether or not professional video gaming constitutes a sport.
Obviously some eSports games are also ExerGames in that they use a controller that requires body movement in order to play the game. Now all manner of add-on accessories are available for the controllers to make them more realistic for the sport in question (e.g. rackets, bats, clubs). I even noticed that you can now get a specially designed “kit bag” to carry them all in!
ExerGaming – defn 3. A possible stepping-stone to conventional sporting activities.
