goodmachine

"Propose to any Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossibility in it. 

If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple."

Charles Babbage, 1852.

Hi! Welcome to the rainforest.

Today we're going to talk about tropical birds, and one especially interesting bird in particular. Then, somehow, we'll get into gift-giving in social networks. Stick with me, it'll be fun.

This post is partly inspired by @ivanovitch's recent thoughts on why "viral" marketing is both a vexatious and fundamentally wrong-footed way to think about messaging, and why we need to get over it, pronto. To paraphrase his starting point: instead thinking "viral" and of trying to "infect" people with whatever your idea is, why not consider instead why people choose to share things that interest them?

This is potentially important stuff, and goes well beyond the marketing dept's natural desire to feel a bit more like the Tooth Fairy, flitting from pillow to pillow with love, and a bit less like a germ-warfare technician, concocting infection with a sneer.

By looking at actual motives, genuine volition over imaginary compulsion, we might develop some thoughts on how unpeople like brands get to play, or not. (Although you're going to have to wait for Pt. 2 for a proper bit on brands, and Pt. 3 for how games leverage gifts, and the immense importance thereof).

For now I want to look at the smallest possible gifts - links - as the magnetic force that holds together of networks of people.

Back in the jungle, an awesome sight awaits

Tropical birds are the teenage millionaires, the creative bohemians of the animal kingdom. I mean, look at this guy:

Because I'm worth it

Raised in a world of superabundant variety, dining exclusively on tasty dew-kissed grubs and luminous nectar, the local residents haven't had much real work to do for the past 18 billion years, other than to peck at interesting holes and evolve wildly.

It's a good life, you might say.

Yes: they've devised iridescent uniforms, learnt crazily ornate dances, sport nifty ultraviolet feet. Each individual is apparently some kind of insanely concentrated orgy of sexual communication. With feathers on. Just look at them demanding you look at them.

But the male bower bird is prince of all.

Not in this case because he's an especially snappy dresser (like his colleagues) but because he's a magnificent communicator.

This is his strategy: he finds, hoards and displays interesting objects from the forest. He weaves a nest of twigs and roots at ground level, cunningly shaped to so as amplify his voice when he's inside it, hooting away. And then, having laid out a dozen or so curious, interesting finds (ultrablue beetle-shells in little pyramids, balls of deer crap arrayed in lines, dabs of red fungus in artful rows) he sings a bower-amplified song, and waits for the ladies.

The campaign has begun:

Hey that's like me

Human beings, and lately the digital, social-network kind (homo clickiensis) obviously have a tremendous amount in common with bower birds, both male and female.

What are links, if not edible tokens of speculative love?

What are retweets, if not the new shy glances?

How do we look for new mates? By their song - by the shape, colour and velocity of their various interests, streamed out in realtime as a bunch of social objects, for curious beaks.

Everything we post, retweet, or link to, is simply a gift.

And this is not merely a person-to-person, or person-to-clan gift, but a gift that makes the network work.

Networks are made of this

Gift-giving (even and especially gifts to strangers) is central to creating the network, which (all technology briefly ignored) is made of bottled love and deferred obligation (altruism is a kind of reputation bank) but is also a military parade for marks of the tribe, a display of gentle inter-species hatred and in-species competition.

Competition (and her hairy-handed grandsons Conflict, Fear, Loathing etc) are, it turns out, as vital to forming all kinds of communities as mere tokens of love and symbols of groupishness, even when the competition is strictly for attention, instead of land. More on the unspeakable joy and social utility of clan war here.

Digression: Note on Google

Note that Google is seldom seen as being at the forefront of any kind of social anything: but this is wrong. Google was (and is) implicitly social at the core: PageRank fundamentally leverages social intelligence, because humans are the ones that linked web pages together, for social reasons, beyond simple utility. We made the web; they just drew the map, or lately, the graph.

Social search has been (implicitly) a basic part of web infrastructure for some time now (the realtime and explicitly social web is just a little amplification, a mere nicety, if you wanted to push the argument) as we moved one generation beyond keywords. Gifts are not an interesting but peripheral sideshow, a minor part of web culture: gifts are part of who we are - gifts matter. Ask Google.

Symbols

So for now, the giftiness, as distinct from whatever the gift actually happens to be, aka the symbolic value, is the thing.

This goes beyond merely phatic ("Wazz'up?") communications which description leaves out two things: firstly the intentional flavour of a gift, and secondly, the persistent and actionable characteristics of gifts given online (a link left in a public forum doesn't just vanish). So my identity is not described by my network, but what I add to it: the sum of gifts given.

And symbolic gifts create symbolic debt. Reciprocity (you share with me on the tacit understanding that I'll share with you) is very much implied in any "donation" as anthropologists and game theorists have long shown. This is how reciprocity-clubs, or groups of local interest are made ("parochial altruistic structures" in the jargon, like families, clans, or healthy businesses, even) and in which the parish is the online world.

When digital gift-giving is the peer-peer easy, anonymous, online, unbranded, inexhaustible, more-or-less weightless I'll-just-leave-this-here (one-to-any-number) kind, the display aspects of this gift are even more critical, even more like our pal the bower bird.

Note on brands

So when the market gets involved in playing gift-games, and brands step in loaded with entertainment as wampum, we see plainly how symbolic value is bound to get snarled up, and brands' pretense of having genuine wants - as opposed to needs - looks very much at its thinnest. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why brands can have fans, followers, and fanatics... but not friends.

Back to the forest

... and the awesomely disorganised communal sing-song.

Birdsong, I'm pretty sure, is universally acknowledged as the most joyous sound on Earth. It's the anthem, the flag, the very emblem of Nature's grand design. Unless you're a bird that is; in which case we can assume it's mostly just ads.

Further Reading

Excerpt from Mauss, The Gift [PDF]

The Short Answer - for all your negative response needs.

Ray Johnson, "May Wilson" 1963-4

I don't know what you know about Fluxus. So let me tell you what I know, or at least, what I believe is true. I'm here in the guise of a yabbering, swivel-eyed prophet here to bring you The Word, to tell you that Fluxus is everywhere, that the spirit is strong, it's here, now, among us again... like it never went away.

Let me explain.

Fluxus is often (well: always) compared in the art-historic slideshow with Dada. I'm not sure this comparison is really necessary or ideal, but it'll definitely do as a point of departure. Fluxus and their lunatic grandparent had at least one thing in common: anti-art. Both were motivated by the urge to abolish Capital A-art, to destroy the tower*, as it were. But where Dada bit, sneered and spat, Fluxus did it differently. Fluxus (by and large) accented making over breaking, and Fluxus did it with a gloriously crap anti-style, with fun.

And now, without meaning to win anything, Fluxus won the war. Fluxus is everywhere and nowhere in particular, universally present and vaguely ignored. But most important of all is what Fluxus says, which is this: come & play. 

Say, can you levitate?

Fluxus was not interested in just bursting the balloon just to hear the noise. Instead, Fluxus had a much bigger aim: they wanted to make art available by making it ordinary and ubiquitous, to make it something you can do too.

They were dealing in public magic, in other words. Want some?

Fluxkit (1965)

Everything is connected, somewhat

Fluxus was about as networked as you could be in 1962, with the web just a twinkle in the Pentagon's eye. Fluxus society was a pretty loose affiliation, one linked by postcards, parties, posters, phonecalls and xeroxed memos, boxes of toys, mail art and mailing lists for very many never-realised events. Mail-art would eventually become (in curator-speak) 'telematic' art, which in turn became 'net.art', and well... here we are today.

Not only did Fluxans embrace communications as a conduit, but what was being communicated (and this is where Fluxus starts to feel doubly modern and relevant again) is often this: rules for play.

Endless fluxpieces (the "Event Scores") are simply instructions for playful human programming: stand here and imagine this, take these five keys at random, tell someone this lie, tear those papers in half, etc. Diagrams for a poem, notes for a drawing, words for a game, or a musical score written as a gentle imprecation to not worry too much if anything goes wrong.

Cheapism

Fluxus is a toybox: dumb, trivial, self-conscious, funny, a meandering conversation liable to drift into transcendentally stupid territory, if you like that kind of thing. Invariably made of the cheapest materials, hot from the mimeograph, it was already poised to just fall apart in your hands. Perfect.

If you wanted to hold a Fluxevent in your hometown, prime mover and spiritual father George Maciunas would just mail you one in a suitcase, or might just send a set of instructions on how to make your own. (If you were really lucky and you received a suitcase: your box might contain another box, containing a solemnly-labelled grasshopper turd).

Above: three pieces by genial superfool and shambling fluxchap Ben Vautier. Ben is still at work, and his naked, no-stunts stuff is more or less guaranteed to make any day into a happier one.

WARNING Fragile

The point of Fluxus was the idea (portable, mutable, temporary, fun) over the execution (cheap, cursory, standardised, let's-do-it-now). Adherence to the DIY spirit was also presumably in part the eventual, lethal weakness of Fluxus: a real revolution needs flags, songs, heroes, objects, durable icons - crafted stuff as well as strategic craftiness: all the stuff Fluxus wasn't. And if you're not willing to get into the revolutionary kitsch game, expect failure.

Consider this: no 'classic' fluxobjects exist, apart from Cage's highly effective provocation 4'33 which gives you an idea of how thorough-going the anti-heroic, iconoclastic position was. Fluxus was distinctly lacking in fleshly pleasures too: it was just far too spindly, witty, and cerebral to ever be genuinely hip, except amongst, you know, spindly, witty, cerebral types, or so I'd imagine.

Fluxevents however, were obviously somewhere between a party, a sporting event and a group show. I assume they were a blast: or if not, a fairly peculiar noise of some kind.

Fluxlove

It started for me a while back when a friend (thanks, Mark) gave me a plain white 5" x 7" card, printed on which were printed mystifying, absurd, and immediately brilliant instructions:

1. Start to smile...

This was Mieko 'C' Shiomi's Disappearing Music For Face from 1969. At that precise instant it didn't really matter what I was reading, or who it was by. I'd never seen anything like it. I was knocked sideways... and left smiling.

A Digression: Fluxus thinks big

All roads lead to Fluxus? The full extent of their imagined genealogy, taking in everything from the fountains of Versailles to vaudeville, as conceived by George Maciunas in this fantastic Expanded Arts Diagram [opens in new window] of 1966.

Fluxus and Games

This is Saito's Sound Chess, a somewhat interesting idea: covered chess pieces in boxes make for a kind of hugely obfuscated sound-memory version of chess.

But hold on, here comes the small print: "The resulting complexity of play borders on the impossible". And there it is - a potentially interesting idea fumbled in the name of art, or Art. I can't help wishing that 'art' or 'experimental' as in the context of '- games' wasn't mere apology: a euphemistic prefix to mean 'not actually functional yet' or 'reflexive joke here'.

There are plenty of unplayable Fluxgames which end in comedy, bathos, a soggy punchline, a wan non-comment on rules. Being worshippers of the glitch and the productive screw-up is one thing, making unplayable games another, a fairly disposable gag. But a charitable reading suggests that these are better approached as one-hit concept-toys or live, structured little performances rather than actual games (with all the normal expectations thereof). Alternatively, just pretend you're on The Island of Dr. Moreau for ludologists, and you are Dr. Moreau, stitching together a half-cobra, half-weasel, in a doomed attempt to create new life. It works for me.

Better still, copy-pasting rules without actually trying to construct formal games can have interesting side benefits, as we'll see.

Life of Brian

Without Fluxus, no Eno.

Eno, at the height of his wizardy powers, perfectly combined a playful rule-making with usefully self-aware work-making, resulting in stuff you'd actually want to hear, rather than merely an idea of how that might be constructed.

Standing aloof from the process of making (or in his case, partly kept apart by manual incompetence) is critical: you can't zag unless you catch yourself in the same old zig. Well-known pieces like Oblique Strategies (made with Peter Schmidt) are a cookbook of little cognitive or procedural disruptions to achieve just that. They have that classic Fluxus koan-effect of knocking you out of line, into somewhere different, just as the Event Scores intended. Obeying randomly-picked rules puts you into a game-space, a pleasurable or necessary loss of agency. Why be a player when you can be a pawn?

Clearly there's a lot more to Eno than son-of-Fluxus, notably a distinctly English flavour of cybernetics and a (not-especially-English) audio-erotic focus, but we'll save that for some other time.

Fluxus considered irritating + wearisome

Any collective is as good as its best people, and as bad as its worst.

This therefore, is a disclaimer written in twelve-foot letters of fire. Before you run to see what the web knows about Fluxus (plenty, but poorly distributed, a hairy mass of mildly contending histories) be warned that there's a vast mountain of negligible stuff out there: wingless poetry, less-than-zen moments, and a lot of immensely tiring self-reference.

Fluxus' best moments were more or less the early ones, and the movement never truly 'died' along with founder Maciunas, but more or less fizzled out. And as for quality control during the height of Fluxus, there wasn't enough of it.

The odd 'cc' mark - geddit? - on some pieces indicated George M's 'official' approval but - and here I speculate - fun and control were assumed to be from mutually hostile planets, or harmful to the groupish, anti-heroic stand Fluxus took. Still, it was the times, I'm told.

Mama, Weer All Fluxus Now

Why we're here: as I started by saying, it seems to me that the spirit of Fluxus is strong again.

Not so much just in a dusty, greyscale corner of the artworld, but out here where we live and work, surrounded by social toys, communications devices and (therefore) opportunities for engaging, networked, creative play; what the movement was all about in the first place.

This is due in part to having (the obvious bears repeating from time to time) a printing press, craft-shop, photo studio and edit suite etc on your desk. Fluxus made cheap tools work hard.

The recent interest by brands (naturally) in play, and playful event-spectaculars (or mainly sponsored documentation thereof, as above) now extending into group-gaming in general, is the next big wave of social media, being, I think, the things you do after you've said hello.

It's an irony that won't be lost on modern observers that anti-commercial movements like Fluxus have more in common with their notional enemies: notably a rigorously democratic instinct, albeit a twisted, art-addled version thereof.

What would have once been pure fluxstyle concept-art stunts and spectacles are now routinely inserted into culture at large by adland (compare this Honda spot (say) and George Brecht's Motor Vehicle Sundown for example) without anyone appearing to notice or mind.

What could be more natural and desirable than the playful transformation of the world, after all?

The Final Word

Elsewhere

Where else but Ubu?

The biggest Fluxus show ever mounted in Britain. I missed this, obviously.

Artpool.hu

A tiny flickr set featuring work you may not have seen elsewhere; at least, that's roughly the idea. I'll keep adding to it as and when.

* The part-time nihilists and priapic photoshop monkeys of /b [NSFW] are the logical apotheosis of Dada. Not interesting, in other words.

Artnotart site feat. assorted Fluxworks

Great post from last year by the magnificent Momus, which inspired me to write this one.

Echo Bazaar is just about the most fun you can have with a web browser these days.

If you're even remotely interested in games, social narrative etc, and what you can achieve with a vintage game format and some neat new twists, you should give EB a whirl. Possibly you're not remotely interested in these things, in which case you should definitely take look inside. At once, if possible.

You need a Twitter account (don't worry, it won't spam you or your followers) to play, and that's all. Now "adventure game" is the only way to describe EB, and as a consequence I hear a lot of people shifting uncomfortably and looking around for something completely different to do, but stick with me a while. You won't be disappointed.

To be clear, in no sense is Echo Bazaar from the superfuture. It has no augmented reality features, no automated chatbots, no location-based elements and so on. It doesn't need them.

Instead, Echo Bazaar is just an an absurdly great game: gently wonky, vaguely sinister, tremendously well-written. It's still in beta and already writhing with invention, comic detail, possible evolutionary directions. It fits nicely into your day too, by making only modest demands on your time, being entirely pick-uppable and put-downable.

And of course, you get to meet people and kill them too. What more do you want?

Now Read On

The game is set in a fog-bound, parallel Victorian London. It's powered by serial 'storylets,' riffs from the c19 London myth-kitty, bent into pleasingly familiar comic-horror shapes. While we're here noticing things, I have to say it's a pretty neat trick to relocate the whole city of London to a lightless "Fallen" underground, strictly from a genre/ narrative-production standpoint. 

At a stroke, we're now technically (this from the perspective of someone who neither knows/cares what 'steampunk' is meant to be, that is) in the 18-19th intercentury: among the catacombs, tunnels, cellars, infernal caves and intestinal castle corridors of Gothic fiction. Where there were carrier pigeons, now there are messenger bats. Inhabitants of both eras are made available for narrative cross-breeding, hence music-hall horror, encounters with undead pugilists, troglodyte melodramas unfolding serial-fashion. By the way, if you're allergic to elves and trolls - or what the late Peter Cook once referred to en passant as "all manner of goblinry" - then Fallen London will not distress. 

There's no serious attempt to map fictional spaces onto real ones here (Bugsby's Way/Reach/Marsh does make an appearance in the game, but happily we're not in the immoderately portentous Sinclair/Ackroydian psychogeographic London) which is, to be clear, another major plus. 'Pervasive' and/or 'locative' game designers take note: reality is your fourth wall, your bubble-burster. No danger of that here: at least, not yet.

On Keeping it Fluffy

Lightness of touch makes all the difference.  

Mainline English comic writing often dips into a distinctively elasticated, jaunty self-deprecation: as if the mere act of speaking or writing were vaguely painful or distressing. This appears especially in the context of smart people teasing the genre they're notionally writing in. Beyond antiquarian jollies and/or well-turned pastiche (good things nonetheless, especially when not done in a half-arsed manner) a gentle reluctance to play with total seriousness is good news again. Echo Bazaar's charm-attack is allied to old-fashioned indie resistance to normal business, where normal business is increasingly a grim-faced gigantism, over-imagineered, self-regarding and wanton surrealism.

The Bazaar is pretty cheering strictly because of what it isn't, in other words. 

The same restraint that helps it walk smartly past Taking It All Too Damn Seriously turns us similarly away from the path of gloomy thrills, avoiding repulsively prurient Jack the Ripper horrorism or worse, CSI: Greenwich 1894 - an inevitable franchise expansion there I'd guess, one we might call 'Vixploitation' - and instead keeping the tone intimate, playful: even when you're killing someone for stealing your Counterfeit Head of John the Baptist, that is. 

It's the hugely unlikely, hovering spirit of PG Wodehouse (flicking peas at HP Lovecraft, say) that makes Echo Bazaar into more than just another wee trot through the imaginarium.

Dual Purpose

EB succeeds however you take it. It's structurally engaging enough to keep you happily grinding, clicking away like a happy lab-rat for the next enabling item, for the next narrative turn, but at the same time (if you're the kind of person for whom this matters) it's extremely well-furnished in there. Beyond universally legible starting points like Dickens or Conan Doyle, my operatives detect TS Eliot and GK Chesterton and - for all I know - an unnatural commingling of Kellow Chesney and Flann O'Brien, not to mention untold volumes of primary source material. There's some chewy and ambitious world-making going on, for sure, and the setting is wholly expandable: Victorian-Gothic Londonism is almost a free-standing genre in itself, capacious enough for all kinds of referential fun, apocryphal play. And if this stuff is not readily apparent, it doesn't matter a bit.

Inside Information

I've been told that the creators of The Bazaar eat only hazelnuts, and that they live together in a ratproof shed on a dredger's platform, moored on the shores of The Unterzee. They all inhabit the same crumpled, crackling and filthy bed, squabbling over bundles of sigil-blackened vellum, cotton bags of shells, greasy volumes of recondite poetry. By night they sing ancient river-shanties. They do not sleep.

Emerge

You'd need to have suffered a career in academia to call some of the sweeter narrative touches 'emergent' so let's just say EB's all a-pop with pleasing consistency: there is no light in Fallen London, hence no flowers, so women wear little decorative mushrooms in their hats. Of course. That's just the kind of professional-level whimsy that we're here for.

But player behaviours are certainly emerging: in the last few weeks we've seen little factions emerging, clans budding, fighting strategies being exchanged on Twitter, and most importantly perhaps, user-content fading in, which points forward to some interesting social-technical ambitions.

Without getting into this topic too deeply, the social action elements are considerably better engineered (eg tactful and adult, implicit understandings of likely use-cases being what counts here) than the very many graspy, pesterful - and inordinately successful - Facebook games (you know, for kids) whose naked intent is to own the names of everyone you know in short order.

I'm looking forward to seeing if they can maintain currently high standards of etiquette while growing the player-base.

In-game rules are evolving quickly and in some fairly odd directions too: now that I've stumbled across the vaguely disgusting power to eat rats-on-a-string (and lately, a mysterious blue sea-crystal called glim) I've become considerably stronger, better at all sorts of things. But whereof we cannot speak...

B...bb...b...bb.... beta!

EB is still in beta, meaning there are obviously some loose slates, minor infelicities. But the fact that the game is being created as it's played, along with the knowledge that you're helping to make it better by playing it or giving feedback adds to the fun considerably. Being part of something that perhaps doesn't quite know where it's going yet just feels very much in key, somehow.

Society/ All aboard/ Let it be known

Lastly, as it's a Twitter thing, you get a better class of player aboard, including some otherwise fairly respectable people.

It used to be said that Doom was golf for geeks, a social event for teams as much as anything. EB is shaping up to be... I don't quite know what. But shapes are forming in the ether... Having said that, if you are one of the people who has 'killed' me, whether in earnest or in sport, then, ladies and gentlemen, rest assured: I'm coming for you.

Unless you'd prefer some vigorous sparring by the Observatory, that is. 

Go and play Echo Bazaar

Thinking about digital games as leisure, it occurs to me that the essence of a great number of games is a very unleisurely pursuit indeed, namely: tidying up. 

The blue circles need to be put together. You must put them together.

The yellow cubes go next to the green ones.  All falling blocks will overflow unless stacked neatly. Place the red things near the red things to remove the red things. Have you emptied the triang? Is the pentoid aligned?

Think of the number of 'place & vanish' (Bejewelled, Tetris et al) games there are - and now consider (with horror) the precious years they've stolen from us.

Real, actual tidying would be more fulfilling, and might make things a bit... tidier. But no, we're busy. No tea until we've tidied up the abstract mess in our imaginary room, the one that can never be completely and finally tidy. 

And still the little grey shapes fall...