What's your take on Second life?
Frank Rose: There are couple of problems with second life, one is that the graphics are incredibly crude, just doesn't work very well. But the other one is, the other problem in second life is that essentially there are no rules, there are no goals, it's not a game. You know games are structured experience, you know where we are given rules to follow and goals to achieve and, you know that's what makes them so compelling, you know, whether it's World of Warcraft or chess. And second life doesn't have those. Virtual reality I am not really sure where that's going to get but its certainly at the moment doesn't have the kind of appeal, it hasn't seized the imagination the way it did a few years ago.
What is happening though is that by turning entertainment properties by turning stories into a kind of participatory experience they begin to become like games themselves. You know the thing about a game, video games especially is that you know you are protagonist you know, you become the character that everything is happening too. It really thrust you into the middle of this road and you know you totally engage with it. So you know I think that's one of the places where things like this are going. There have been several different experiments ways of trying to figure out how take advantage of this. You know one is ultimate reality games which tend to be very long, experiences that engage people on any number of levels from casual involvement or whether people just go to a website and look at what's happening to very, very active or they sort of apply their minds solving the whole series of riddles and puzzles and so forth. But these things tend to take place over many months and they are not really replicable, you know once it's over, its over.
You know what other people are starting to experiment now what is experiences that last more or like 10 minutes, 15 minutes and you know happen to you when you set something in motion for example you know you go to a website for a movie and you enter your phone number and a few minutes later your phone rings and you know perhaps you are trust into the middle of a situation that has to like has to do with a thriller that you are dealing with.
So you know - I don't think these things have been perfected either but it's a really intriguing way of looking at entertainment.
Who is effectively adapting traditional narratives for the user experience?
Well one very interesting manifestation certainly is what Anthony Zuiker is doing, this is the guy who created the CSI series, he is you know single handedly made forensics say major subject of study in American University and he is essentially moving on from that and creating a whole different series of entertainment properties that you know really engage people on a number of different levels. The first which is going to introduce at Comic-Con in San Diego in July and which will be available for sale starting I believe September 8th is a series of novels, thrillers that incorporate not only text, but videos which you can watch on the web or which you can on your iPhone or your iTouch you can do the whole thing. You can read it and then watch the video and go back to reading again.
This points up to a whole new way of you know experiencing novels, say --. It's constructed so that you don't have to watch the video if you don't want to or if it's not available to you wherever you happen to be at the moment, but if you do it gives you a little something etcetera. It gives you a kind of a deeper understanding of what's happening and frankly given that this is a thriller about serial killer a pretty scary understanding of what's happening or what could be happening.
There is also going to be a website involved of course which will enable people to talk to each other about you know sort of communicate online. You know participate in the whole thing in one level or another. And its again it's a bit of an experiment but it's a very bold and interesting experiment and I think this is clearly someone who has shown himself to be a master story teller and will see where he takes it.
How can news media enrich the user interface?
Newspapers are, you know, rapidly evolving if they are going to be successful at least into websites that incorporate all kinds of different media and incorporate the reader as well in the whole experience. You know, obviously if you are, if you are going to some website to learn about some news development what you really want is, you know, not just to be able to read the text about it, although you certainly want that, but you also want to be able to watch video about whatever it is that's happening, you want to have maps sort of flash interactive experiences that take you into the story and give you a deeper understanding of it.
You want and expect to be able to express your opinion about it, you know, there on the site to communicate with other people about it and really the news is I think fast becoming a group experience. It's not longer something that you sit there on isolation at your kitchen table reading the newspaper in the morning.
Is the passive user experience over?
We already live in an attention economy essentially, you know, where the, where the, where the real scarcity is attention is getting attention in people's minds and I think that's only going to become more so. What's happening with this kind of depth of experience that you know internet story telling offers is that, some people will be you know, start to deeper and deeper so to speak into particular stories and obviously ignore other ones entirely.
And I think that goes for any kind of story, whether it's a science fiction, you know, entertainment whether it's a marketing message that company like Nike for example or Coke get you to sort of sucks you into and in kind of game like experience. Whether it's, you know, whether it's a news. And I think you know one clear, you know, ramification of this is that you know, we are just becoming more and more connected and I mean the Internet obviously is connecting anyway, but this gives us things to connect on and an opportunity to really do so.
So that it becomes relatively easy to go from reading about something or watching something to acting on it. And acting on it with other people as well.
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