Uncategorized – Page 2 – Martha Henson

2013: freelancing, flexible working, funding, frustrations and…

Have been debating as to whether an end of year round up isn’t all a bit self-indulgent, but whatever, nobody has to read it. It’s been an interesting year for me though, having left the Wellcome Trust in at the end 2012 to go freelance and see where that would take me, achieving a couple of life ambitions, getting frustrated in various ways with the areas I work in, trying to find solutions to problems and so on. It seems like it might be useful to reflect on that and share what I’ve learnt along the way.

Freelancing

I’ve not done badly finding work this year, and towards the end of the year began to get a much better sense of the lie of the land in this respect. I had a lovely job at the beginning of the year on a project with a school to help three teenage girls make a film. Having rather fallen out of love with filmmaking after several years working on projects for other people, this felt like a good way to be using those skills and was very rewarding. In March, I joined Tate as Producer: Interactive Media on a part-time maternity cover contract. It was a useful to have a solid basis, with two days free for other other work, and I got to work on Artmaps and the new Tate Britain Mobile guide. I’d love to have done more, to be honest, but it’s all been good learning.

In the last half of the year I got two agency contracts for extended freelance consultancy work on mobile and games, working with Lord and Frankly Green and Webb. I realised that this was where the work was. Cultural organisations in particular don’t hire individual consultants, they hire agencies. I was also lucky to come in on projects where the bid had already been won, so didn’t have to go through that tedious process (more on which later).

Flexible working

Offices make you ill. I’m becoming convinced that the traditional way of working, 9-5 in an office in front of a screen, is unhealthy and unproductive. This year I’ve loved being able to be flexible about the way I work, where I work, and when I work.

It took me a while to figure it out, but now I know when I work best, and don’t bother to do any heavy brainwork when I know I’m going to be slow (the afternoons, usually). If I do the complex stuff in the mornings, it takes me a fraction of the time. I’ve still been doing office days for my Tate work, and the way I feel at the end of the day (tired, a low level feeling of being under the weather) is now much more noticeable in comparison to the working at home days.

Funding/frustrations

A theme for the year was money, and a lack of it for great projects. I went through three unsuccessful funding or tendering bids, saw some unbelievable tenders out there asking for the moon on a stick for no money, had countless conversations with people about how broken the system is and watched as some great companies and great projects folded under the pressure of finding money in this environment.

All the while, the message from funding bodies was that they wanted to see innovation, relentless innovation. Where is the room for best practice in this? For projects with established pedigree, a history of solid engagement or other measure of success? Do you have to throw in a bit of 3D printing to get anywhere these days? This cult of innovation seems to have us in a race to create the new without considering what kind of a world we actually want to live in. A world with more apps/more tech/more new types of products? Really??

It also seems very unsustainable. There seems to be no recognition of the amount of time and resources that go into putting a bid together. For companies or individuals who rely on funding for projects, it’s hugely risky. But I think most of us would agree that we want these sort of projects to exist even if they might not be commercial. I’d love to see some indication that funders such as Nesta, the Arts Council, TSB etc are at least thinking about ways to create a more sustainable and nurturing environment for companies and organisations, not just running huge competitions or banging on about being entrepreneurial. A thought: what if more of this funder money went into a sort of investment model, ie putting the onus on the funder to go out and find great projects, mentor and nurture them, and provide flexible funding where needed.

For organisations putting projects out to tender, maybe they could better consider what they are asking of agencies and make more of an effort to help steer that, build longer term relationships and change their procurement processes to be less onerous and more flexible. Being on the other side of this process has made me feel bad about the time I sent out a tender to seven companies asking for a lot of information in their bid, for example. Not great odds for any of those companies given how much work they have to put in, is it?

Learning and games

I’ve given up trying to find headers that begin with “F”. Anyway… I’ve given a lot of thought this year about how to help educational games fulfill their potential. LEGup (the London Educational Games Meetup Group) went from strength to strength, growing to over 850 members. Kirsten Campbell-Howes (who originally set up LEGup) and I saw a gap for resources about learning games and set up edugameshub. I’m really proud of it, there are some great articles on there and the response has been encouraging.

Now we just have to figure out how to keep it going, grow the content and make it more sustainable. No small task. It’s a lot of work and nobody pays us to do it. But I think it’s important. A constant theme around educational games is their quality, or lack of it. I think edugameshub and LEGup are part of the process of raising that quality, bringing people together, sharing best practice etc, but there is more to be done. This year, I’m keen to encourage edugames makers to see themselves as part of the wider games community, to attend games events and see the quality of work going on out there.

I’m also interested in finding a solution for the gulf between academia and games makers. There is loads of research going on into learning and games that isn’t making it to the people who might best make use of it. How to fix that? Hopefully something that Nesta’s current interest in learning and games can help with.

Finally/fitness

I did two things this year that I’ve always wanted to do: made the 17 day trek to Everest Base Camp, and got my black belt in karate. Both were really hard, and really worthwhile. I’ve found that if you want to do something hard or scary, don’t think about it too much, lock yourself into it, just book the ticket, tell people you are going to do it, do something that leaves you without much choice but just to go ahead and do it, then you probably will.

Sure, I could have given up and chartered a helicopter at the point that I was floored by the high altitude on the trek in Nepal (and people do) but it was really too late to back out once I got on the plane to Kathmandu, so much invested already. It’s kind of freeing to have little choice and you just get on with it, and being locked in will help you push past any fear or discomfort.

I did learn something else on the trek, and that was about being realistic about fitness. I’d really sort of thought that cycling everywhere, doing some long walks, karate and the odd bit of yoga and pilates would prepare me for steep treks at altitude. But of course it doesn’t. The only thing that prepares you for doing steep treks at altitude is doing steep treks at altitude. Or training really hard, with lots of cardio stuff.

I did alright, but the runners on the trek with me found it much easier. I resolved to add more cardio work into my training and to be more realistic about my fitness levels and not be complacent, which I’ve done. I’ve stopped pretending that the cycle commute is amazing exercise, for example, and added in some training rides with hills. It’s made a major difference. More in the new year, and one day I’m going to ride up one of those big alpine inclines and enjoy it. That’s the plan.

The future of games in museums: what should we be doing?

A confluence of related projects and talks has got me thinking about where games in museums should be going in the future. There have been some notable successes in museum games to date, and some failures. Where to go from here? Here are some assembled thoughts on the types of games and game design practices I would love to see more museums exploring.

Collaborative games

Now, I love competitive games, but not everyone does, and competition can be off putting and disruptive in, say, family situations (I’m sure you all have stories about the game of Monopoly that ended in tears). Collaborative games are perhaps more suited to the mixed audiences and interests that are represented by museum visitors.

For example, Spaceteam is absolutely one of my favourite games of the last few years. It manages to be ridiculous, hilarious, breathlessly exciting, social and visually striking, all at the same time. Go find 3 other people with smartphones or tablets and have a go, it’s hard to explain. What’s particularly brilliant about it is the way that players become instantly collaborative through the mechanic of needing to convey information to each other rapidly. There is no competitive element, you are all working together to stop your spacecraft coming apart at the seams.

There are also lots of board games that work this way, (I tried Forbidden Island the other week, which is a good example), search for co-operative play on Boardgame Geek. The UVA Bay Game, a team based sim about sustainability, is another interesting case, and seems to have resulted in genuine behaviour change as players realised they would have to work together to solve the issues, both in the game, and in real life.

Discussion based games

Where discussion is happening, thinking is happening. Most museums want to be in some way thought-provoking, and recognise that seeing people deep in conversation about the objects or display they are looking at is a good sign. But many people don’t feel entirely comfortable sharing opinions about art, or history, or science, feeling they lack knowledge or will say something that will be ridiculed. Or, perhaps, it isn’t part of their normal group nature to have discussions of this sort. This means if you want to encourage discussion, you may need to scaffold it in some way, and games can be great for this.

One of the most interesting game experiences I’ve had was playing Liliane Lijn’s Power Game at the ICA a few years back. The atmospheric set helped, but at it’s heart it was a sort of poker game (actually based on Chemin de Fer, I believe) where you had to make the case for why the word you had been given was more powerful that another. Everyone at the table would then vote, and if you won, you got the chips in the middle. It’s more complicated than that, in truth, but what it means is that you end up having to make arguments for abstract concepts you wouldn’t normally think about (i.e. is “war” more powerful than “love”?).

An online discussion game which I’ve enjoyed playing is the Foresight Engine. In this, there a future scenario to which players must respond by playing different types of card that discuss the outcome or effect of that scenario. You get points for each response you play, for responses to discussions that you start, and for having your response highlighted by a moderator/judge. It is effectively a collaborative crowd-sourced future forecasting tool and it’s been applied in all kinds of real world situations (they used it in Christchurch to help citizens work through the implications of certain scenarios for their earthquake damaged city, for instance). I’m certain a card based game that was a mix between this and Power Game could work really well in a museum setting, perhaps as part of events.

Rapid, casual games

Fast, casual games with the right mechanics can be super addictive. This is why I don’t open Bejeweled Blitz unless I know I have at least half an hour to lose to it, even though each game only takes a minute (and is totally brainless, yes, I know, I don’t care). They can also manage to convey a simple point effectively, as we found with the Axon game at Wellcome. In Axon, players click to move a neuron forward via protein targets, with games lasting sometimes just a few seconds, and in doing so (as we found via a survey of players) they learn something small but interesting about foetal brain development, get a sense of the aesthetics of modern brain imagery, and have their interest piqued sufficiently to follow up with a visit to Wikipedia.

Also look at super fast task based or point and click based games such as Wario Ware or McPixel. Each level takes seconds. This format can work really well, be exciting even if the task is incredibly unsophisticated (and therefore work for a range of abilities) and can also be fun to watch. Try also Tenya Wanya Teens if it comes to a place near you. It’s physical, quick, and fun for spectators as well. Oh and whilst we are talking about crazy fast games that are also hilarious, if you haven’t tried QWOP, or any other of Bennett Foddy’s games, you really must.

The temptation is for museums is to create games that convey a lot of information (because we have so much interesting content, so it’s understandable), or that are a bit worthy. But those games are really really hard to do well, and risk turning off a lot of people. For in-gallery games, museum visitors may be time conscious, or assume it will be serious, or just want to watch, and fast, funny games could be the answer.

Pervasive games

Museums are great spaces. And recently Lates events have become very popular. Many of these are already using pervasive games to get people interacting with the spaces in new and different ways. Hide and Seek’s Sandpits do something similar, as at the National Maritime Museum a while back. Capture the Museum (Thoughtden and National Museums Scotland) is a team based pervasive game that also uses smartphones to deliver puzzle based challenges (if I’ve got that right, I haven’t had a chance to play yet).

So this isn’t a new idea, but it would be great to see museums do more of this. These sorts of games are often easier to run and develop (and therefore cheaper) than digital games but are frequently overlooked. If you can turn them into a card or board game or just a set of instructions, you could also distribute online which helps it reach a bigger audience.

Yes, many museums don’t want people running around and yelling during regular museum hours, but not all games have to involve this. At SFMOMA, their ArtGameLab crowdsourced games to be played in the public spaces that were more sedate, but still fun (e.g. go around the museum critiquing artworks using only your facial expressions).

Card/board games

Having mentioned card and board games above, I think it’s worth highlighting them. Are there any examples of existing museum card or board games? I wonder why not.

Locative, mobile games

Taking the game out of the museum is not new. We tried it with Magic in Modern London, Tate did Magic Tate Ball (more toy than game, I guess, but still), and others have released games on mobile. But it feels like the potential of mobile is not yet being fully exploited, particularly around location, and the relationship between objects and the landscape, whether urban or rural.

Developing bespoke apps of this type can be expensive and difficult (but if you get it right, wow). But there are other platforms you can use, I recently looked into using the SCVNGR platform for a museum project and was disappointed to find out that it was now unsupported, which is a shame, because it would have been perfect. But you could use other trail apps to add challenges or mini games, or work with Junaio and its AR functionality to create something playful. In researching SCVNGR I found another ex employee has created a similar platform called Edventure Builder, which could be worth exploring.

Online, casual games

This has probably been the most successful approach to date. Tate, Science Museum and our Wellcome Collection games High Tea and Axon have all demonstrated that online casual games distributed to portals can be successful in reaching large audiences, and having an impact in terms of learning (read the High Tea evaluation here). The Science Museum had a rarer success with Launchball, a game that was only on their website yet reached a large audience (via a post on Reddit, if I recall correctly), but in general distributing to portals seems to be the most effective approach.

What this means is that there is already a good existing model for doing this. Use it! The potential audience is in the millions. And if you develop in a way that your game can be released to mobile as well (using Unity, say), it’s even bigger. This approach isn’t the cheapest, and you need to work with real game design pros, but it can be very effective. When you look at the value of High Tea, it was working out at about a penny per play, and had a genuine impact on players in terms of learning and thinking about the subject matter.

Games based on 3^rd party platforms

I’ve already mentioned this in terms of locative games, but there are many game development tools out there that are relatively simple to use (I list some in this previous post on making games on a budget). There are also tools that were designed for other things but could be repurposed to playful ends.

I saw an online production recently (the Nightvision Experiment) that frankly didn’t work for me in terms of plot or acting, but used a clever mechanic of delivering the entire story via twitter and youtube. And The Dark Room used just Youtube and it’s annotation function to create a smart, funny sort of video text adventure. There is no reason social media can’t be used to create games, or interactive experiences, and in fact Liliane Lijn was at one point running her Power Game over twitter as well.

Console game partnerships

I don’t think anyone has tried this yet in museums (although the Wellcome Trust did try it as part of their broadcast and games funding work), but I’m sure there is potential here. Obviously museums are unlikely to be able to afford to develop a AAA console game of their own, they cost millions. There are increasing numbers of indie devs producing games for consoles (especially since Unity can output to several of them) for lesser budgets, but still, it’s expensive.

However, museums do have content. They have stories, settings and objects, and they have all kinds of experts. Many are respected global brands. Might a canny partnership be possible between a console game producer and a museum? Perhaps where a museum can do and fund some development work into the factual elements (or even non factual elements), provide some information, setting, or idea inspiration?

Evaluation

I do go on about this, but this needs to happen more. I’ve just read a fascinating evaluation for a Science Museum game (that I hope will be shared soon) and it was *really* illuminating. I wish I’d seen it earlier. It made me think that we’ve all done enough games now that there should be a pretty good body of knowledge about what works, and what doesn’t, and we should be building on this. Some of this information does get shared at conferences and so on, but it still feels like a lot of museum game development (and other digital development, in fact) happens in the dark.

We can copy other apparent successes, but without knowing in depth information about the player responses, we may just be repeating an empty exercise in gathering hits.

Games people

Museums need to focus on working with people who are good at making games, and not get so hung up on the platforms or technologies. This essay by Suzy Glass isn’t about games specifically, but it could be, and it is absolutely spot on about this issue.

Museums also need to be working with those people right from the start of a project, not waiting until they’ve put together an extensively scoped funding proposal without any games expert input. And that means hiring someone, freelance, or full time and paying them from the start. It will be worth the investment. I’d also like to see less of small games and other digital agencies time being wasted by having to jump through multiple time consuming (and therefore expensive) hoops as part of the procurement process, when they have a worse than 5 to 1 chance of getting the commission.

Those are my assorted, random, thoughts, please feel free to add yours!

An encounter with Patrick Moore (people are complicated)

A story I would like to share, on hearing that Patrick Moore passed away today (or perhaps yesterday). Already twitter is filled with a mix of sadness at his death and discussion of his positive legacy for science, but also reminders of his sexist comments and fairly extreme right wing views. I think it’s OK to talk about both these things, challenging the latter and celebrating the former.

When I was much younger I was a huge astronomy nerd and Moore was obviously an icon. When I was perhaps around 11 or 12 I was at an astronomy conference in London with my mother, who would escort me to astronomy weekends, observatory viewing sessions, and events like this. Yeah, I know, I was a weird kid. During a coffee break at the conference, Patrick Moore was there just sort of hanging out, and my mother encouraged me to go say hello.

I did, and Moore was charming and friendly. He was obviously pleased that I was so enthusiastic about the subject, apologised that he couldn’t talk for longer, and invited me and my mother to come visit him in Selsey. We arranged a time to do so via post (imagine, using the postal service to arrange a meeting!). I even kept his typewritten notes to me, see below, so I must have been a bit starstruck (pun intended).

We went to visit during a holiday nearby, and he was a great host. He showed us his telescope (no jokes please, seriously) and various bits of astronomical equipment and garden observatory. Finding out that I played music, he played his xylophone and recordings of some marches. We had tea and cake. He was clearly keen to encourage my interest in astronomy and science. We left after a couple of hours of visiting and that was the end of any correspondence, beyond a thank you letter from me of course, but the encounter left a huge impression on me.

Years later, I was immensely disappointed to discover his political views, and especially disappointed to hear his sexist comments about women ruining TV and so on. How to square this with the avuncular character I’d met who was so supportive of my enthusism for science? People contain multitudes, I guess. His views are clearly more complex than the impression you get from what is reported, but this isn’t a defence of them. It’s disappointing that he wasn’t challenged more on this in his lifetime.

We sometimes forget that people in the public eye are as nuanced, messy and complicated as any of the rest of us, and we shouldn’t expect them to be otherwise. We can be grateful for Patrick Moore’s kindness and great work in popularising astronomy and angry about his views at the same time.

Thoughts from SXSW: learning and games, how to create US/UK links?? A plea! #swswi

Posted in haste from my phone…

So far, SXSW has been eye opening. From the sessions I’ve been to and the people I’ve met, I’m discovering that there is a ton of work and thinking being done in the area of games for formal and informal learning across the US. At the same time, I’m finding that there is little awareness of what’s being done in this area in the UK.

Also, there has been a lot of discussion about how to make this innovative work more mainstream. It seems like pooling information, resources and learnings could be a good start, and that everyone working in this space could learn from each other. I know I could. So, this post is a plea for suggestions about how to do this, or for directions to places where this discussion might already be happening.

A google group? A wiki? both? Something else altogether? Suggestions in the comments or @ me on twitter and I’ll add them here. Thanks!

Updated after twitter discussions:

Museum games wiki as possible model: Museum games wiki

Q: are there not some serious games lists already out there?

Yes, lots of people working in this area in us but because it’s multidisciplinary it’s fragmented.
So q: is how to bring that all together.

any other thoughts from people?

Frozen Planet and documentary fakery

Today’s fuss about “fakery” on Frozen Planet has provoked an interesting response on twitter, a chorus of jokes and commentary which essentially said “well *duh*, of course not everything on TV is real! Which idiots thought it was?” And no, I don’t think the Frozen Planet example, of cutting zoo footage with footage from the wild in a way that implied the former was happening in the latter and then telling everyone they did so on the website, is really that bad. In fact, they should be commended for providing behind the scenes information, as they also do in their end “making of” sections in the show. However, it does give me an excuse to talk about documentary fakery, on even very small scales, which has been bothering me as a filmmaker for some time and which I’d dearly love to have a bit of a debate about.

Firstly, let’s not assume that everyone does in fact realize the degree to which television, even documentaries, is manipulated and manipulative. Not everyone has worked in TV, made their own films, is media savvy, or even that critical of what they see. Why should they be, watching TV is often something people do to switch off and get swept away at the end of a long working day. Also, it’s not like we got taught to analyse television in this way at school (unless kids do now?) So the fact that shots are staged, noddies are sometimes done in the absence of the interviewee, bears are filmed in a zoo rather than the wild and so on will indeed come as a surprise to many people who aren’t necessarily idiots. Because documentary includes shots of real life, people do mistake it for an accurate representation of real life.

Even those who think they are smart about the way TV is made, who can spot the ways in which Come Dine With Me features staged shots, who sees the strings being pulled in the X Factor or even news interviews, even they aren’t always aware of the power you can wield in the edit, which perhaps one never is until you’ve tried it yourself. When editing an interviewee, for example, it is sometimes trivially easy to cut them to sound like fools, or edit out their inconsistencies to make them into geniuses. I feel a huge responsibility to interviewees for this reason, and it can be a tricky balance.

But does it matter that probably a majority of people are indeed very definitely being mislead by things like added sounds in nature documentaries, Kevin McCloud pretending to have “just arrived” at the recently finished houses on Grand Designs, and so on? In those examples it can seem fairly harmless, but they are still a fraud and very rarely made clear as such, and so it bothers me on some really basic level.

It also bothers me partly because these techniques are also used in documentaries that are trying to make a point, maybe political, maybe about a social issue, and whilst all intentions may be good, they are still on some level defrauding people who aren’t aware that it’s happening. Perhaps in some really really tiny way, like staging a shot of someone arriving to work on their bike (as I have done), when they do always arrive to work on their bike. But even that is still a fraud, and can undermine the validity of the rest of what the programme is saying. For those who do realize something is staged, it provokes the question “hmmm, I wonder what else is faked that they aren’t being clear about?”.

Finally, it also bothers me because often it looks REALLY NAFF. The noddies, interviewing someone whilst walking towards the camera as if it isn’t there, pretending you’ve got two cameras by asking someone to do something again and shooting it the resulting stiff and forced action from another angle etc

Done well, of course, this is all about making the programme more watchable and more flowing. And of course there is no way to make any sort of programme without editing. I’m certainly not suggesting that everyone should always make all their footage available. But it is something I wrestle with every time I make a film and sometimes I wonder about coming up with a Dogme 95 style list of rules for documentary that would do away with a lot of this. What would the resulting documentary look like?

Mostly, I’m talking about a point of principle, a philosophy of filmmaking that I haven’t quite worked out for myself. And I’m talking about not making assumptions about how people watch TV. But if nothing else, what I want to say is that I do think a little more transparency would be a good thing, if only because I think it’s something that many people would genuinely find really really interesting.

Hello world!

My website had been languishing without update for over two years so, rather than try and design a whole new site with my rubbish and outdated web design skillz (CSS what??), I’ve created a blog instead. Will mostly be used as a place to collect the stuff I work on as Multimedia Editor at the Wellcome Trust, so videos and interactive stuff about biomedical science and related art. I also reserve the right to post whatever other flotsam and jetsam float into my brain demanding internet space, which will probably include old projects I’ve worked on but potentially also pictures of cats with stupid captions which never gets old as far as I’m concerned.

Would love any feedback on the work I put up here.

If you’re so inclined, you can follow me on twitter, am @marthasadie.

Most of my videos end up here on the Wellcome Collection YouTube channel, but some also here on the Wellcome Trust one.