The New York Times' Arts and Leisure section recently asked me to write a piece about the "serious games" movement -- games that are designed to try and influence people and bring about political change. The piece ran on Sunday, and a copy of it is online free at the Times site for a few more days. A permanent copy is archived below!

Saving the World, One Video Game at a Time
by Clive Thompson

Last week, in an effort to solve the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, I withdrew settlements in the Gaza Strip. But then a suicide bomber struck in Jerusalem, the P.L.O. leader called my actions "condescending," and the Knesset demanded a stern response. Desperate to retain control, I launched a missile strike against Hamas militants.

I was playing Peacemaker, a video game in which players assume the role of either the Israeli prime minister or the Palestinian president. Will you pull down the containment wall? Will you beg the United States to pressure your enemy? You make the calls and live with the results the computer generates. Just as in real life, actions that please one side tend to anger the other, making a resolution fiendishly tricky. You can play it over again and again until you get it right, or until the entire region explodes in violence.

"When they hear about Peacemaker, people sometimes go, 'What? A computer game about the Middle East?'" admits Asi Burak, the Israeli-born graduate student who developed it with a team at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "But people get very engaged. They really try very hard to get a solution. Even after one hour or two hours, they'd come to me and say, you know, I know more about the conflict than when I've read newspapers for 10 years."

Video games have long entertained users by immersing them in fantasy worlds full of dragons or spaceships. But Peacemaker is part of a new generation: games that immerse people in the real world, full of real-time political crises. And the games' designers aren't just selling a voyeuristic thrill. Games, they argue, can be more than just mindless fun, they can be a medium for change.

The proposition may strike some as dubious, but the "serious games" movement has some serious brain power behind it. It is a partnership between advocates and nonprofit groups that are searching for new ways to reach young people, and tech-savvy academics keen to explore video games' educational potential.

Together they have found some seriously high-powered backers. Last year the MacArthur Foundation began issuing grants to develop persuasive games, including a $1.5 million joint gift to James Paul Gee, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin, and GameLab, a New York firm that designs games. Meanwhile the United Nations has released Food Force, a game that helps people understand the difficulties of dispensing aid to war zones. Ivan Marovic, co-founder of Otpor (Resistance) -- the Serbian youth movement widely credited with helping to oust Slobodan Milosevic -- helped produce A Force More Powerful, a game that teaches the principles of nonviolent strategy. And the third annual Games for Change conference in New York, held earlier this month, attracted academics and nonprofit executives, including several from the World Bank and the United Nations.

"What everyone's realizing is that games are really good at illustrating complex situations," said Suzanne Seggerman, one of the organizers of the conference. "And we have so many world conflicts that are at a standstill. Why not try something new? Especially where it concerns young people, you have to reach them on their own turf. You think you'll get their attention reading a newspaper or watching a newscast? No way."

Henry Jenkins, an M.I.T. professor who studies games and learning, said the medium has matured along with the young people who were raised on it. "The generation that grew up with Super Mario is entering the workplace, entering politics, so they see games as just another good tool to use to communicate," he added. "If games are going to be a mature medium, they're going to serve a variety of functions. It's like with film. We think first of using it for entertainment, but then also for education and advertising and politics and all that stuff."

Given away free, they have found astonishingly large audiences. The United Nations game, Food Force, has been downloaded by four million players, a number to rival chart-busting commercial hits like Halo or Grand Theft Auto. In May, MTV'S college channel released an online game called Darfur is Dying in which players escape the Janjaweed while foraging for water to support their village: despite its cartoonish graphics, a strangely powerful experience. In the first month alone 700,000 people played it. Of those, tens of thousands entered an "action" area of the game -- political action, that is -- where they can send e-mail messages to politicians and demand action on Darfur.

A Force More Powerful is considerably more complex. Players must make dozens of decisions as they try to foment democratic uprisings, but each action brings unexpected consequences. A huge demonstration may get your leaders arrested by the police, a boycott is safer but less effective, and so on.

"The beauty of the game is that players can teach themselves by trying things out," Mr. Marovic said. The game includes a disclaimer pointing out that not all tactics will work as well in the real world. But "people will learn certain principles," he said, "like why to start with gentler tactics first and move to more aggressive ones only after you have popular support."

This is the central conceit behind all these efforts: that games are uniquely good at teaching people how complex systems work. "You could have some big theory about society, but these days it's like, sorry, people aren't going to read your white paper on it," said Ian Bogost, an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, whose book on serious games will be published next spring by M.I.T. Press. "Put it in a game, and they'll discover what you're talking about themselves."

Professor Bogost has put that theory in action. In 2003 the Howard Dean campaign hired his company, Persuasive Games, to make a game that showed volunteers how the Iowa primary work was organized . Then the Illinois Republicans paid him to devise four games illustrating their major election planks. In one, you have to ferry sick patients through city streets to hospitals until you discover that the hospitals have become overcrowded. The only way to free more money and space is, hilariously, to enact anti-malpractice-suit legislation. In essence the game takes a cherished bit of Republican ideology and renders it into gameplay.

Douglas Thomas, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communications, is developing a redistricting game in which players try to gerrymander different states. "The election system is rigged to keep incumbents in, but nobody understands it," he said. His game is intended "to show them how easy it is to game the system. You'll be able to give it to a first-grade class and let them fix Texas. Then you can say, hey, a 6-year-old can do a more fair job."

Video games, serious-games advocates say, also possess a persuasive element that is missing from books or movies: They let the player become a different person (at least for an hour or two), and see the world from a new perspective. When Mr. Burak first showed Peacemaker to Israelis and Palestinians, he found that they were most interested in playing as their own "side." But when he pushed them to switch positions they developed a more nuanced sense of why the other side acted as it did. In Qatar several people told him that "they kind of understood more the pressures the Israeli prime minister has."

Not everyone agrees with Peacemaker's basic assumption: that both Palestinians and Israelis want peace. I discovered I could get to a ceasefire by removing settlements while assassinating Hamas militants, a strategy I doubt Israeli hawks would approve of. Mr. Burak said Israeli players complained about the bulldozing of Arab villages; Palestinians felt the game ought to more clearly reward the use of "subtle" measures. Still, he said, Peacemaker (which was designed before Hamas's electoral victory or the recent Mideast eruption) inspires an unusual kind of debate: an argument about how rule changes can affect society. "That sort of complex thing is precisely what you can do with a game," Mr. Burak said.

But do these games actually work? Even proponents admit that it's still difficult to say. "These things are just at the prototype level," Professor Jenkins said. "We've just got one classroom here, one classroom there, where we've documented some benefits." And without more studies documenting the effectiveness of the games, he said, "oxygen's going to be sucked out of this."

Ben Sawyer, co-founder of the Serious Games Initiative -- a group devoted to promoting the creation of persuasive games -- worries that with so many nonprofit organizations rushing to get in on the action, some of the results are simply "bad games ones that are just boring," he said. "There are a ton of them in this space." Designing a fun game is hard enough; making it fun and politically nuanced is really tough.

This is why, as Professor Gee put it, some of today's serious games reflect a simplistic point of view -- like America's Army, the military's hit game that puts players in a soldier's boots, or Under Ash, a Syrian-made game that has you play as a Palestinian fighter. "Building morally ambiguous worlds, that's a lot harder," he noted. "We've won the hype wars. People accept that games can be good for talking about issues. But now we need a killer app."

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Gonzalo Frasca, a game designer and professor at the University of Copenhagen, felt it was an awful mission that would further destabilize the Middle East. But instead of writing a furious blog entry about it, he banded together with like-minded designers to create September 12, which presents the argument in a game.

September 12 is played in a single, simple screen. You load it up in your browser and see a gang of terrorists wandering through a tightly packed Arab market, all drawn in a colorful cartoon style. You try to bomb them, but every explosion is so overpowered that it accidentally kills innocent bystanders. Relatives are driven by grief and anger to become terrorists themselves. The more you bomb, the more terrorists you create, until the screen is overrun with them. Thus the game presents its argument: Bombing is no way to win the war on terror.

"I don't really agree with the game on a political level," said Mr. Frasca, "but it was a way to get people to discuss it."

September 12, however, does not behave like a regular video game. It does not try to grab you; it's not even particularly enjoyable. It exists purely to intrigue you long enough so you poke around and figure out the underlying argument: an op-ed composed not of words but of action.

When Mr. Frasca's September 12 first went online, players sent hate mail accusing him of being soft on terrorists. Even more controversial was the release in April 2005 of Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, in which players become the killers. The designer, Danny Ledonne, had high ideas about it: he chose low-fi effects to avoid gratuitous gore and included actual dialogue from the teenagers to give insight into their troubled minds. But when it was released, in April 2005, it caused a storm of outrage. Families of the victims said it was disrespectful; a Miami Herald writer called it a "monstrosity."

The game confronts the questions that lurk behind all serious games: Can video games be art? Can they grapple with disturbing issues, or does the act of playing a game inherently trivialize things?

Mr. Frasca suspects the outcry against such games is generational. Many older people find video games so uninteresting that they cannot appreciate the valuable function they might serve. "There is a taboo with playing with fire," he said. "It's very strong in our culture. We've been told not to play with serious things."

When MTV released its Darfur game, some Sudanese peace advocates were uneasy. "The question is, does this trivialize Darfur?" said Susanna Ruiz, who helped create the game. "Well, I say that doing nothing or saying nothing about the death of people trivializes it even more. It is a simplification of it? Of course it's a vast simplification. But there's an audience that can approach this and think about Darfur that would never pick up a newspaper article on it."

Or as Professor Bogost pointed out: "It's like what Adorno said, the idea that it's barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz. But you saw this around film too, when it first started: 'The medium isn't serious enough to allow for serious discourse.' I find it somewhat contradictory because people criticize games for saying there's nothing good in them, nothing serious. But when games try to talk about a serious issue, they say, 'You can't talk about that in a game.'"

Mr. Ledonne noted that he had been contacted by a few survivors of the Columbine massacre, and only one disapproved of the project. Richard Castaldo, a student paralyzed from the chest down in the attacks, said in an interview posted at the gaming blog Kotaku that he had played the game himself. While he found it "a mixed message at best," he also thought that "it gets people talking about Columbine in a unique perspective, which is probably a good thing."

"Ultimately, a video game is just another medium for artistic expression," he concluded. "Which is why I like this game in a weird way, because if you are going to play games, why not learn something important in the process?"

Ever heard of Amazon's new company, Mechanical Turk? The concept is pretty simple: You sign up as a Turk, and go to the site to see what jobs are available. The jobs all consist of some simple task that can be performed at your computer -- such as viewing pictures of shoes and tagging them based on what color they are. You get a few pennies per job, and according to a recent story in Salon, some people make up to $30 a day by clicking away at these nearly-mindless tasks during slow moments at their day job.

What I love about the Mechanical Turk is that it capitalizes on an interesting limitation in artificial intelligence: Computers suck at many tasks that are super-easy for humans. Any idiot can look at picture and instantly recognize that it's a picture of a pink shoe. Any idiot can listen to a .wav file and realize it's the sound of a dog baring. But computer scientists have spent billions trying to train software to do this, and they've utterly failed.

So if you're company with a big database of pictures that need classifying, why spent tens of thousands on image-recognition software that sucks? Why not just spend a couple grand -- if that -- getting bored cubicle-dwellers and Bangalore teenagers to do the work for you, at 3 cents a picture? As Amazon notes in its FAQ:

For software developers, the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service solves the problem of building applications that until now have not worked well because they lack human intelligence. Humans are much more effective than computers at solving some types of problems, like finding specific objects in pictures, evaluating beauty, or translating text. The Amazon Mechanical Turk web service gives developers a programmable interface to a network of humans to solve these kinds of problems and incorporate this human intelligence into their applications.

Mind you, while the cognitive-science aspects of the Mechanical Turk are incredibly cool, the labor dimensions freak the hell out of high-tech labor unions. "What Amazon is trying to do is create the virtual day laborer hiring hall on the global scale to bid down wage rates to the advantage of the employer," as one WashTech organizer argues. Either way, it's a really odd way to think of human intelligence: Just more processing time, a few more cycles in the machine, and the global community of freelance workers a massively-parallel computer, floating out there in the aether like the world's hugest graphics card.

I actually wrote a little essay for Wired in 2002 that predicted this, sort of.

(Thanks to Jason Fisher for this one!)

Apparently Eric Church, a rising star in country music, has tons of text messages on his phone. But according to this profile in the New York Times, the messages aren't actual communications from other people ...

... Many of those text messages filling up his cellphone aren't from old friends or new fans or enthusiastic label executives. They're from Mr. Church himself. He'll be in a tour bus for the foreseeable future ("My true next weekend off is in December," he said), which means he doesn't get much time to write songs. So whenever he thinks up something that might work, he punches it into his phone and hits send. "It's over a hundred of 'em," he said, sheepishly. "Often just a line, or a title. I don't get a chance to finish stuff."

I love it! Life hacks born from the everyday necessities of travelling country musicians.

This posting will self-destruct in 36 hours.

Well, it won't actually vanish. But most of its audience will be gone by then -- because, according to a new study, the lifespan of a news item on a website follows a power-law curve: The readership for a story is biggest in the first day and a half, decays rapidly, then flattens out into a long tail. That's what Albert-László Barabási, the famous network-theory scientist, discovered when he observed the browsing behavior of 250,000 visitors to a Hungarian news site. As PhysicsWeb reports:

Barabasi's team calculated the "half-life" of a news document, which corresponds to the period in which half of all visitors that eventually access it have visited. The researchers found that the overall half-life distribution follows a power law, which indicates that most news items have a very short lifetime, although a few continue to be accessed well beyond this period. The average half-life of a news item is just 36 hours, or one and a half days after it is released.

I can definitely attest that this is true, by looking at my own blog's log files. Whenever I get tied up in work and can't blog -- as in the last two weeks -- my readership drops quickly until it reaches a long-tail equilibrium, and stays there. Then when I start posting again it zips back upwards. So long as I post regularly, there's always a large audience, because the rolling 36-hour periods for each posting overlap.

That funky graphic above has something to do with the study -- I'm not 100% just what, but it looked pretty cool so I included it.

(Thanks to Morgan for this one!)

I'm coming a week late to this -- another crazed-workweek drought of blogging around here, I'm afraid -- but Wired News published my latest video-game column. This one is about an interesting academic study showing that in some situations, gamers enjoy sucking at a game as much as excelling. The piece is online here, and a copy is permanentl archived below:

The Joy of Sucking
by Clive Thompson

I suck at Super Monkey Ball bowling. It's a simple game: You aim a little ball with a tiny monkey down a surrealist bowling lane, which floats in outer space. Aim with precision and the monkey sends the pins flying. Put too much English on the ball and it goes sailing off the edge of the lane, the monkey shrieking as it plummets through the void.

Last week I tried the game for the first time, and quickly discovered that I had zero kung fu. Time after time, I sent the poor monkey wailing off into outer space. Like I said: I suck.

But here's the thing: According to a new scientific study (.doc), I was nonetheless having a really good time. Failing at a game, the study argues, can be just as pleasant as succeeding.

Recently, a team of psychologists led by Niklas Ravaja at MIND Labs in Helsinki, Finland, decided to study precisely what sort of emotions people experience while playing games. So they took a bunch of gamers in their 20s and had them play Super Monkey Ball 2 bowling, competing amongst each other (the top scorer won free movie tickets). While they played, the gamers were wired up to a bunch of biosensors -- including skin-conductance meters, cardiac monitors and facial electromyographs. Psychologists have long found that by detecting spikes in one's physiological activity, they can pinpoint the precise moment you find something fun or frustrating.

As the subjects played Monkey Ball, their pleasure spiked upward when they knocked down a lot of pins. On the other hand, if the ball closely missed the pins and landed in the gutter at the end of the lane, it produced frustration. This is pretty much what you'd expect.

But then something odd happened: When the players aimed really poorly and sent the ball zooming off the edge into space, their brains didn't register frustration. They registered pleasure. "Although the event in question represents a clear failure," the researchers wrote, "several physiological indices showed that it elicited positively valenced high-arousal emotion (i.e., joy), rather than disappointment."

Sucking, it seems, can be fun.

This is a totally counterintuitive result. Gamers are utterly obsessed with success -- who's l33t, who's the suXX0r. Indeed, much like the Inuit with their 40 different words for snow, gamers have created a sprawling lexicon of slang designed to quantify -- with surgical precision -- exactly how much you suck or rock. (Dude, I totally pwned that n00b llama in pvp!) In theory, totally failing at a game ought to bring nothing but the sting of defeat, right?

Sure, except in one case: When you're playing a game so well-designed that it is delightful even when you screw up.

That's the secret behind Super Monkey Ball 2. The lose condition -- spilling off into space -- is unusually hilarious: a monkey plunging through infinite Euclidean freefall, his scream slowly vanishing into oblivion. As I bowled gutter ball after gutter ball, sure, I was cursing myself -- but I was laughing, too.

And when I think about it, some of my favorite gaming experiences have occurred not when I've been triumphant and victorious, but when the game has gone horribly awry, and the ensuing chaos is a hoot. At one point while playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, I botched a drive-by shooting, and in my panic to escape, accidentally ran over a police officer. As I tore off down the highway with about 20 cop cars wailing behind me and a police helicopter hovering overhead and my engine on fire -- fiddling with the radio to try and find a suitable soundtrack for what was rapidly turning into a suicide drive -- I knew I was doomed. But it was still a blast.

Indeed, some games have elegantly transformed their "fail" conditions into core game mechanics. When the first version of the Burnout racing game emerged, players discovered it was totally fun to watch their crashes in slo-mo. So the designers switched course -- and in the next few versions, made crashing a central part of the play. When you spin in Burnout Revenge, you can jump into bullet-time mode and try and steer your tumbling car into enemies. They harnessed the classic failure psychology of the kamikaze: If I'm going down, I'm taking you with me.

Mind you, there are limits to this approach. There's a fine line between sucking that's pleasurable and sucking that just, well, sucks.

When I'm playing a mission-based game that has irregular save points -- like, say, Far Cry Instincts -- and it forces me to redo a difficult quest over and over and over and over again every time I screw up, that's not fun. That's an affront to decent people of all nations. Same goes for games where camera angles are so lousy you lose track of a battle (like Jaws) or where the puzzles are meaninglessly obtuse (like the third and fourth Tomb Raider games). It's only fun to fail if the game is fair -- and you had every chance of success.

So clearly this isn't easy stuff to design. But the genius of Ravaja's research is that he suggests it is possible -- and indeed ought to be a goal for every game designer. (And as he proved, it's even empirically testable: Slap the wetware on your beta testers and measure how joyful they find it when they go down in flames.)

So consider this the new way to tell when a game is truly great: It's fun even for the l@merz.

I'm writing a piece about this fall's impending Madden NFL 07 game. I'm interested in interviewing a few long-time Madden fans to find out what they think of how the series has evolved!

Anyone out there a) a big Madden fan, and b) want to talk about their thoughts on how the game has changed over time?

If so, email me here and let me know how to contact you!

This is lovely: A Polish artist reskinned Space Invaders so the aliens look they were designed by ancient Armenian carpet weavers. Then he projected the game onto ... an actual, ancient Armenian carpet! The result is a gorgeous, playable rug that riffs neatly off the uncanny aspects both of video games and the mythology of magic carpets. From a web-site writeup:

Janek Simon unites the old geometric designs of Caucasian and Armenian carpets with the low-resolution abstractness of the Space Invaders. The collector carpet furnishing the ethnic-design, world-cuisine magazine becomes a new shopping item for the homecoming marines and the kid back home. It is the Oriental rug for your portable arcade mosque. Follow the voice of the Joystick prophet.

Check out closeups here. Okay, I want a full set of these for my apartment, one for each classic game. Imagine the Pac-Man maze as your carpeting, rendered playable with the flick of a switch!

(Thanks to Kotaku for this one!)

Behold Bossaball: A version of volleyball that takes place on an enormous bouncy inflatable cushion -- and includes two trampolines that propel players a dozen feet in the air, giving them insane hangtime and allowing them to deliver spikes with Scud-missile velocity. You're also allowed to use your feet. Oh, and there's a DJ whose job it is to synch music up with the plays.

See those three pictures above? They're stills from a bossball clip, in which the player holds the ball between his feet, does a backflip six feet in the air, and uses his legs to hurl the ball across the net. Heh. Check out other clips here; as the official website describes the game ...

It's a mix between volleyball, football, gymnastics and capoeira.

To say the least. Obviously, bossball is apiece with other nouveau sports created in recent years -- such as the Slamball that Spike TV has been broadcasting, which also uses trampolines. In one sense, they're pretty silly stuff; part of their appeal is not so much that they're good sports, but that it's fun watching people boinging around in the air.

But it reminds me of a question that often occurs to me: Why are there so few new sports created?

All the main ones -- soccer, football, baseball, basketball -- were codified and mass-marketified decades ago. Why not engineer some new ones? It's hardly likely that we've exhausted all forms of play possible in the physical world, right? In the video-game world, designers have been on a tear for 20 years, pioneering new rulesets that create brilliant, fiendishly tricky play systems. Why haven't we been equally as inventive in the "real" world?

Bossaball and slamball may be rather marginal, but they've at least attempted to engineer a new play mechanic: The use of springboards to expand the vertical range of the athletes. Granted, the springboards are precisely why the games seem so goofy. But at least the designers are trying! And one could imagine that in our age of high-tech materials, a smart game designer could craft gameplay that offered new human abilities without being quite so daffy.

I think part of the problem is that we've forgotten that our major sports were, at some point in the past, designed. Baseball and football and soccer and basketball haven't been with us since the beginning of time. They used to, y'know, not exist, and they only exist now because some dogged game designers had an interesting idea and kept tweaking and tweaking the rules until what emerged was the sports we now know and love. In that sense, baseball's like an iPod: It's the product of a bunch of gorgeously organic design decisions that make the whole thing just feel right. (Imagine if there were five bases: That one design change would create quite a different -- and probably much worse -- game, eh?)

I think there's something about our physical sports that makes their design process seem invisible. They don't seem like designed objects; they just are. That makes designers unlikely to want to create new sports, and more importantly, audiences unlikely to want to learn and appreciate a new one. It's probably significant that video games -- which have ushered in a renaissance of new forms of play -- inititally appealed to geeks who generally weren't interested in physical sports. They were the only people who craved new forms of play.

(Thanks to Jenny Springsteen for this one!)

How are MySpace, Google, blogs and Amazon's recommendation algorithms changing journalism?

I recently tackled that question in an essay I was invited to write for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Their web site -- cbc.ca -- just celebrated its 10th anniversary, so they asked several writers and pundits to muse on how journalism is morphing in the age of the Internet. My essay is online for free here, and there's a copy archived below. (Regular readers of this blog will notice that the essay relies heavily on various lines of thinking I've pursued in previous blog postings!)

Also check out Cory Doctorow's contribution, which does a superb job of tackling the question of veracity, authority, and truth online in the wake of the Wikipedia brouhaha.

Media in the age of the swarm
by Clive Thompson

Here's the bad news: The bestseller is dying.

Here's the good news: The bestseller is dying.

Let me unpack that a bit. Recently, a study found that the amount of time the average bestseller spends on the charts has been eroding steadily, for decades. Back in the 1960s, only three books on average each year hit the #1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list -- and they stayed there for 21 weeks. In the last five years, things have been much more democratic; over 18 books a year become #1 bestsellers. But they remain there for only three weeks. No single book, it seems, can command the sort of broad and longstanding civic attention that "big" ideas used to regularly enjoy. This is the sort of finding that tends to terrify journalists: If the nation can't focus on one single issue at time, how can writers make an impact?

But it turns out things aren't quite so dire -- once you understand what's really going on. It isn't merely that the bestseller is struggling. It's that the nature of popularity itself is changing -- the nature of society's attention span, as it were. And this has deep implications for the future of all types of journalism.

The changes are driven by today's 500-channel universe --and its ferocious stepchild, the internet. The internet has radically changed the way we find out about things, and how we decide they're important.

We're living in a world where the sheer volume of public speech is expanding exponentially. In our parents' days, books and TV shows and radio shows were scarce. The problem our parents faced was simply getting access to these precious, rare blasts of culture and ideas. Now the internet has opened the floodgates, drenching the world in a zillion witty bloggers, searing podcasters, instant pundits, and hipsters recording skatepunk video clips on their mobile phones. The audience's problem has become precisely the reverse: information overload.

This is why blogs and "social" technologies have had such a catalytic impact on media. Bloggers and MySpacers are our filters. They sift through the daily torrent of stuff, then shear off the coolest material and bring it to us. They are the TiVo for our 500-channel mediasphere. The same goes for search tools like Google, or blog-search engines like Technorati: We love them because they tame the six-billion-page internet. RSS -- the tool for helping people scan hundreds of blogs quickly each day -- became popular for the same reason. These technologies are all fundamentally driven by word of mouth, and there's nothing we trust more than word of mouth.

But while word of mouth is powerful, it's also a tricky social force. It doesn't favour all things equally. Word of mouth tends to produce "power law" effects -- in which a small number of websites are granted massive, planet-wide star status, while the vast majority are ignored. The same thing happens to news articles and broadcast segments every day. The vast majority languish in obscurity. But once one of them becomes slightly popular online, it instantly becomes massively so -- as word of mouth quickly takes off like a brush fire, with each digital neighbour passing it along to her friends. That's why we see so many books and websites become famous for intense, short periods, often only a day or two at a time. Remember the "Lazy Sunday" video? Or the "Hamster Dance"? They came out of nowhere, flared brilliantly, then vanished.

This winner-take-all effect is only going to become more and more pronounced as the internet matures, because new tools gives us more ways to reach out, tap each other on the shoulder, and say hey, check this out! Mobile devices, which are becoming more and more video-and-internet equipped, will soon amplify this pass-around culture. Social-networking sites like MySpace will become ever more a part of life.

What does this mean for journalism?

It means that the newspapers and broadcasts and magazines that open themselves up -- that make it easy for the audience to pass them around and share them -- will thrive. Those that close themselves off to the audience's cut-and-paste culture will slowly die. Want proof? Compare the Christian Science Monitor and The Wall Street Journal. The Monitor has a hard copy circulation of barely 71,000, a pale shadow of the Journal's mammoth two million readers. But online, the Monitor dominates: It is proportionately 377 times more frequently linked-to than the Journal. That means it enjoys proportionately far higher traffic, far higher online influence, and far more attention from search engines like Google.

How did the Monitor accrue this advantage? By being promiscuous. The Monitor leaves all its stories permanently online for free, while the Journal locks its behind a pay-to-see wall. Bloggers thus almost never link to Journal articles, while they love to link to Monitor articles. Because it makes itself so amenable to blogging culture, the Monitor taps into pass-around culture and these rolling cascades of popularity. (Granted, the Journal is undoubtedly assuming that what it loses in online audience it gains, financially, by having a more exclusive readership. But that's no way to influence the world, when the world now lives online. And given the steady migration of advertising online, it may not even be the soundest financial ploy.)

So this is how journalists in the future will capture the protean attention-span of society: They'll make it easy for the online world to engage with them.

And, interestingly, they won't try and dictate what the most "important" stories are. Indeed, they'll have to relinquish the very idea that they have the cultural inside track -- that they are the ones dictating the agenda of society's attention span. That's because the internet has a way of figuring out what it finds most interesting - and half the time it's never what we journalists would expect. In the U.S., Washington writers pretty much ignored a racist comment by Senator Trent Lott until political blogs began transcribing his words and passing them around online. It turned into an enormous cultural conversation, and the mainstream media eventually started reporting on it. In the end, Lott was so discredited that he resigned as Senate majority leader.

So here's the future of journalism: You show up at work having no idea whether the article or broadcast you're working on will sink into total obscurity, or rocket into planet-wide notoriety. What's going to pop? That piece on insurance-rate gouging? Trucking garbage over the border? Inuit throat singers? One thing is sure: The more promiscuous we make the news -- the easier it is for the online audience to sample, pass around, cut up, remix -- the more likely it'll gain online currency.

It'll also transform the practice of journalism itself. Ask writers who blog regularly (like me), and they'll tell you how exciting it is to be wired in directly to your audience. They correspond with you, pass you tips, correct your factual blunders, introduce you to brilliant new ideas and people. The internet isn't just an audience: It's an auxiliary brain. But you have to turn it on, and it takes work. You can't fake participation and authenticity online.

So that's a little road map to the immediate future. But I can't take you any further than that. That's because the mediasphere today is driven by new online tools like blogs and RSS, and it's virtually impossible to predict what new tools we'll have in the future. Go back 10 years -- hell, go back three years -- and no one predicted the enormous influence of Napster, instant messaging, blogging, the iPod, MySpace, or Amazon's "people who bought this book also bought [this book]" suggestions. The only thing I can predict is that things will change: Some kid in her dorm room will invent a new way of sharing information online, and we'll all scramble to get used to it.

So, yep -- the bestseller is dead. Our ability to dictate the national conversation is dead. It's now in the hands of the swarm intelligence of the internet. Some will mourn this, many will complain about it, but I think we journalists are simply in a new and much more interesting place.

Now we're part of the audience.

Behold an ancient Japanese "Sangaku" table -- the Sudoku of the 17th century.

Sangaku emerged during the 100-year period that Japan forcibly cut itself off from West, allowing only one Dutch ship a year to dock. The cultural isolation did some weird things to the country's mathematicians. Because they never heard about calculus -- which was developed in Europe -- they developed brute-force ways of solving classic calculus problems, such as how many circles of a particular size fit in a square. They'd draw the enormous, sprawling solutions out on beautifully illustrated wooden tables, which they regarded as religious offerings. (I love it: Using math to praise God. Man, wouldn't it be nice if more religious conservatives in the US made that connection? It's quite a venerable once, too, since many historic mathematicians -- most particularly Newton -- regarded math as the language in which God spoke.)

Anyway, Sangaku fell into disrepute during the 20th century, but Tony Rothman, a Princeton Nobel nominee, is helping spearhead a movement to restore what he calls the sudoku of the 17th century. Like Sudoku, Sangaku was based in principles so simple that children could solve them, as Rothman says in this story:

"Some of the tablets feature solutions provided by 12-year-olds," he said. "But that doesn't mean they were easy. Today's high school geometry problems tend to require only five or six lines to solve, whereas the old problems often demand pages and pages of work. Sangaku were more like math Olympics problems, or the sort of thing your teacher might have put on the wall for extra credit."

According to a new study, having even one stiff drink can make you literally "blind drunk" -- unable to see something right in front of you.

Seema Clifasefi, a psychologist at the University of Washington, did the experiment thusly: She took a bunch of subjects and gave 'em a highball. In some cases, the drink was actually alcoholic; in other cases it tasted like the real thing but was dealcoholized, and the subjects didn't know which they'd gotten. Then they had to watch a 25-second clip of three people playing basketball and were asked to count the ball passes. Part way through the clip, a guy in a gorilla suit walked across the court, beat his chest, and walked off.

Here's the thing: The people who had the alcoholic drink were twice as likely as the others to not notice the gorilla -- even though it walked literally between the basketball players.

The upshot? Bad news for people who think they can have one drink and still drive competently -- since obviously they won't be able to pay attention to multiple stimuli. As Clifasefi said in a press release:

"We rely on our ability to perceive a multitude of information when we drive (speed limit, road signs, other cars, etc.) If even a mild dose of alcohol compromises our ability to take in some of this information, in other words, limits our attention span, then it seems likely that our driving ability may also be compromised ... If you've had one drink, you may be so focused on paying attention to your speed so as not to get pulled over, that you completely miss seeing the pedestrian that walks directly in front of your car."

In psychological lingo, this is a test that proves "inattentional blindness" -- the point at which our attention becomes so overloaded that we fail to notice things under our noses. The gorilla-suit test was invented a few years ago and has become a classic: It even works on totally sober people, since many of them, too, become so absorbed in the basketball game they fail to notice the dude in an ape suit. But nobody had ever tested whether alcohol exacerbates inattentional blindness. Now we know!

And of course, alcohol isn't the only thing degrading drivers' attention-spans. A flurry of recent research has shown that everything from sexy pictures to mobile phones can so impair people's driving and perceptual abilities as to render them effectively legally blind and legally drunk. With all the Motorola Razrs glued to people's cheeks as they cruise past enormous roadside Hooters billboards, it's amazing the highways aren't a towering pile of twisted, burning metal.

Behold the Suzuki LC -- a concept car the company released this year. It's an update of the 1955 Suzulight, Suzuki's first-ever automobile that launched the firm. As Automobile Magazine describes it:

The LC microcar has space for only two people inside its two-door, 10.5-foot-long body. The split-level cabin with plaid seats is decidedly minimalist, but the detailing throughout the car is fantastic. Suzuki's three-cylinder, 660-cc minicar engine is under the hood. It's just the car for zipping through Tokyo's crowded streets.

I want one this instant. I had long planned to buy a Nash Metropolitan, a squat little 1950s car that looks precisely like this one, so I could do a cross-country road trip in it. But then I discovered that, alas, most Metropolitans have a top speed of about 50 mph, which would rule out much interstate driving. I bet an LC could break 60 or 70 mph, though!

(Thanks to El Rey for this one!)

I blogged earlier today about my Wired News column about why there isn't yet a Lester Bangs -- a well-known, genre-defining critic -- for video games. You can read the column here and here, but one of the points I made was that video games have been the first new form of entertainment to grow up in age of blogging -- where amateur writers outstrip the pros. Sure, there's no Lester Bangs for video games in Rolling Stone, nor a comparable Pauline Kael in the New Yorker. But there are thousands of smart, thoughtful bloggers and forum members that every day post better writing than the stuff you'll read in the mainstream press.

In particular, I namechecked 1UP, the excellent video-game community site. Today I went to the 1UP forums, pumped in "Lester Bangs" to see what people were saying, and found that a guy named Mark Freid had posted this exchange from a 1982 with Lester Bangs himself:

Interviewer: Do you think there's a danger of rock 'n' roll becoming extinct?

Bangs: Yeah, sure. Definitely.

Interviewer: What would there be to take its place?

Bangs: Video games. A lot of things we don't like to think about.

It's both prophetic and inadvertantly meta. Perfect.

By the way, if you go to the discussion thread where that quote came from, read through the entire thing. You'll see what I mean about why the online world is eating the pros for lunch in video-game criticism. The posters are smart, erudite, casual, passionate -- everything you'd want in video-game writing.

Remember how you'd play Tetris for five hours solid and then, when you lay down in bed at night, couldn't stop seeing the blocks falling in your mind? Make that sensory hallucination a reality with this excellent Tetris shelving -- wall units that are shaped like the infamous bricks! You actually buy each "brick" individually and assemble them in whatever configuration you want. As the designers, Brave Space, describe them:

This pack flat version of our Tetris Shelving ships to your door and assembles in minutes. With wooden sides and a metal backing, the Tetris Flat is a modular lightweight unit. Blocks can be attached to one another, to the wall or left free floating for life-sized, living room game play. And no, the bottom line doesn't disappear when you make that perfect configuration.

I am so getting these for my kid's bedroom.

(Thanks to Sensory Impact for this one!)

Wired News just published my latest video-game column -- and this one is a response to Chuck Klosterman, the cultural critic who recently asked an intriguing question: Why aren't there any nationally-famous video-game writers? It's online free at Wired News, and an archival copy is also below:

Why No Lester Bangs of Gaming?
by Clive Thompson

Why aren't there any famous critics of video games?

Chuck Klosterman wants to know. In a recent column for guymag Esquire, he argues that games are the most important cultural medium of our times -- "the culture equivalent of rock music in 1967" -- yet they haven't produced a generation of acerbic, barnstorming writers the way rock and film did. "There is no Pauline Kael of video-game writing. There is no Lester Bangs of video-game writing," Klosterman says. What's going on?

It's a hell of a good question, and it deserves an answer. Unfortunately, Klosterman so elegantly misunderstands gaming culture -- and the nature of games themselves -- that he misses out on all the real reasons. So let me go all godmode here and answer the question for him.

Why isn't there a Lester Bangs of video games?

Answer A: Because even if he existed, nobody would hire him.

Brilliant critics don't just sort of "emerge." They're nurtured and hired by editors who care about the medium. Today's mainstream editors mostly neither play games nor think about them much. When they do, they regard games either as juvenile fluff, or dangerous mind-control technology that is programming a kill-crazed generation of moral zombies. (Or, in a lovely bit of doublethink, both.) Nine times out of 10 their favorite angle is the bromidic "do games make ya violent?" crap; the reviews they commission are 400-word pellets.

Worse, they force their critics to write as if games were some bizarre new fad that their shut-in readers have literally never heard of. This kills criticism. No critic can write confidently and with intelligence and style if she's required to approach her subject like an Encyclopedia Britannica entry on nematodes. What if the New Yorker had told Pauline Kael to write her columns under the assumption that the magazine's readers never actually watch movies?

Any serious critic of gaming dips one toe into this swamp and runs screaming.

Answer B: Actually, there are Lester Bangs of video-game writing.

Tons of 'em, in fact! But they're not writing in mainstream media venues. They're blogging their witty analyses on 1Up.com, or doing exuberant podcasts and video blogs, or flamewarring their way to the truth on rollicking discussion boards. Or they're like the geniuses (genuii?) behind Penny Arcade, crafting insanely funny webcomix that communicate more in three panels than most critics can do in 1,000 words.

The point is, gaming culture is on fire right now, for God's sake! It's just not happening in print media or on TV; it's online, the natural environment for gaming criticism, because gamers are total internet freaks. Klosterman can't find a Lester Bangs because he's looking for a glossy-mag-anointed critic. There's no there there. Video games have had the good fortune to come of age when the internet has made it possible for amateur writers to outflank the pros.

Gamers aren't sitting around waiting for goddamn Esquire to tell explain the existential meaning of games. They're doing it themselves. And in any case, Esquire isn't going to tell them, because -- whaddya know -- it doesn't run video-game criticism, for all reasons contained in Answer A.

Answer C: Game criticism isn't economically viable enough to support traditional, professional critics.

Do the math: A serious RPG or first-person shooter or strategy game might take 40 or 50 hours to complete. Even if serious critics don't have time to finish a game, they ought to spend at least 10 hours to experience its complexity. So ask yourself this question: If movies took 50 hours to watch, would there be any movie critics?

Nope. Newspapers and magazines couldn't pay enough to compensate that sort of time. And how exactly would a single critic remain authoritative? Pauline Kael watched, like, 10 movies a week. You couldn't play 10 games all the way through in a week if you tried; there are not enough hours in the day. Any attempt to do this would rupture the space-time continuum and release eldritch forces beyond anyone's control. To cover the field adequately, a single magazine would need a stable of a dozen game critics or more.

This is another reason why bloggers and layperson enthusiasts will always be the most innovative writers on games. They're infinite monkeys, and they've got the weeks to absorb themselves in a game and generate a brilliant take on it.

(Since I am myself a game critic, I realize that I sound like I'm whining here. For the record: I am whining. Shut up. It's still true.)

Answer D: Games aren't like any other medium. We need a new language in which to talk about them -- and that's going to take a while.

Games aren't like movies or TV. They might have narrative in them, but what defines them -- what makes them games -- is not a storyline. It's that they create play. They thus have far more in common with basketball and backgammon than with a movie like Gone With the Wind. Every gamer implicitly knows this: We bitch about the fact that the Paladins in World of Warcraft are overpowered, that the damn guns in Halo 2 obscure the screen, or that the final boss in Tomb Raider: Legend is unkillable.

What we're most passionate about is the design of play -- the invisible rulesets that govern our virtual worlds. You don't write about Grand Theft Auto as if Rockstar has shot another Godfather. You write about it as if it Rockstar had created the next football.

With games, we're in the realm of ludology. It's an insanely rich field of human art and meaning, but it's utterly neglected. It's not taught in schools. It's not written about in newspapers. So we're just now scratching its surface. The game criticism of tomorrow won't look anything like the stuff that Pauline Kael wrote. It'll be some crazy, unruly spawn of sportswriting, gonzo journalism, analytic philosophy, memoir and investigative reporting. The Lester Bangs of gaming is going to be a philosopher of play.

And personally, I can't wait to read him.

Pull out a vinyl record from the 70s or early 80s, and listen to it. Odds are it'll have a big dynamic range -- it'll be whisper-quiet in some parts and booming loud in others. You'll pick up new nuances every time you listen to it. Now listen to any music track recorded in the last ten years, and it'll be radically different. That dynamic range is gone: The entire track is loud, all the way through. The sound sounds a lot more intense, and it "grabs" you more quickly the first time you hear it. But does it still reward re-listening?

Nope, says a writer at Stylus magazine. In this amazing and lengthy piece, he argues that the "loudness wars" are destroying music. Record labels for decades have tried to make records louder, on the mostly-correct theory that louder music is more likely to pull you in on first listen. But the way you make music louder is via "compression". In a normal recording of music, the loudest parts -- the peaks -- are much higher than the quietest ones, the valleys. Compression shrinks the difference between the peaks and valleys, so there's less dynamic range; this frees up more room up top so you can boost the whole volume of the entire song.

See those two graphs overhead? The original is Abba's "One of Us" as recorded in 1981, and you can see the wide dynamic range. The second graph is "One of Us" remastered in 2005, compressed to make all of the sound-wave "big" and louder. The author also argues that the jump-the-shark moment for the recording industry was ... Oasis. In 1987, the average album like Appetite for Destruction by Guns 'N Roses had a dynamic range of 15 decibels. Oasis' 1994 (What's the Story) Morning Glory had a range of a mere 8 decibels -- compressed to make it louder and louder.

But so what? Why does this hurt music? Because of the psychoacoustics of how loudness and quietness affects us. When a song has less dynamic range, even if it's louder we are -- paradoxically -- more likely to tune it out, as the author argues. It's worth reading his entire essay, but here are some excerpts:

• One result of [overcompression] is that modern CDs have much more consistent volume levels than ever before. But when is it desirable for music to be at a consistent volume? When it's not being actively listened to; i.e. when it's intended as background music.
• Music isn't meant to be at a consistent volume and flat frequency; it's meant to be dynamic, to move, to fall and rise and to take you with it, physically and emotionally. Otherwise it literally is just background noise ...
• Music is about tension and release. With very "hot," un-dynamic music there is no release because the sensory assault simply doesn't let-up.
• ... people I see out and about wearing walkmans or MP3 players seldom seem to tap, or nod, or hum along at all though; instead their gazes seem fixed with a steely resolve, their bodies tense and their minds seemingly tenser. To me that isn't the body language of someone enjoying music.
• People are forgetting how to listen, and who can blame them?

I've messed around with lots of home-recording technology -- for music and for my Wired podcasts -- and this guy's right. Compression is addictive. I use a Joe Meek MQ3 to compress recorded instruments and voices, then T-Racks' software compressor to further pump up tracks inside Pro Tools, and with each rev the sound gets fatter and more intense. But maybe I'm removing all dynamic appeal from what I'm recording?

(Thanks to Andrew Hearst for this one!)

Finally -- someone has released the first mass-market hydrogen-powered car!

Except it's a toy. Except that's still pretty cool. As various sites have pointed out, the H-Racer makes for a great educational toy, since it shows kids how you can use solar energy to generate hydrogen -- which then powers your car to peel rubber through the neighborhood.

Gizomodo made the obvious-but-true joke ...

Now all they have to do is just bring this baby up to full size and add a steering wheel. Yeah, that oughta happen in about 200 years or so.

They're right, for all sorts of sad engineering and political reasons. But here's the thing: The H-Racer illustrates that fuel-cell technology really is ready for prime time. It's just that what it's ready for is not full-sized cars -- but pocket-sized gadgets.

The problems standing in the way of fuel cells for full-sized cars are legion: There's no national infrastructure for delivering hydrogen (like there is for gasoline); getting regulatory approval for a new form of car fuel-system isn't easy; and in any case the major oil and auto companies have little interest in pursuing alternative fuels right now. But none of this is true of smaller gadgets.

Consider laptops. One energy expert I spoke to a while back argued that it'd be easy to engineer a laptop that would run for 30 hours on a single AA-battery-sized fuel cell. You'd just slide the cell into your laptop, let it do its magic, and replace it when it's spent. "Sure," the expert said, "your laptop would generate a tiny bit of water, but that's not hard to contain and dispose of." What's more, battery-sized hydrogen cells could easily be rolled out nationally and sold at corner stores; no distro problem there.

Most business travellers I know would happily endure a laptop that urinated, so long as it lasted all the way to Japan and back on one battery.

(Thanks to Core 77 for this one!)

This is a pretty cool piece of research, which began when a group of Stanford scientists decided to investigate whether financial rewards help motivate people to remember things. So they took a bunch of subjects and offered them various rewards -- from "nothing" to $5 -- for memorizing pictures. When given a surprise quiz three weeks later, the subjects were much better able to recall the pictures they'd been paid to recall. In fact, the more money you pay them, the better they'd recall stuff.

No surprise there, in a way. Spouses have complained for years that their career-addled partners can recall minor details of contract negotiations at work, but can't remember their kids' birthdays. It would seem pretty obvious that our brains are at full attention when our living is on the line.

But here's an even cooler thing: The scientists did some brain scanning that shows they can predict when someone is going to remember something -- even before the subject herself knows she will.

They stuck their subjects' heads in fMRI tubes to scan for brain-function activity, and noticed that whenever a subject was being offered a larger sum of money (like $5, instead of 10 cents), there'd be increased activity in their ventral tegmental area (VTA -- pictured above) and their nucleus accumbens (NAcc). Those areas are both thought to be associated with anticipating rewards. And indeed, whenever activity there was high while viewing a picture, the subjects recalled those pictures better later on than others. So the scientists now theorize that by observing VTA and NAcc activity, one ought to be able to predict whether someone will recall something they're seeing or hearing.

The Stanford researchers published a Neuron paper on this in May (PDF online here), and as they say in their press release:

"Many prior imaging studies have examined motivation or memory," Gabrieli said. "But this shows how motivation can set up the brain to learn."

Yikes: An Ohio study has found that in the last ten years, the state's animal shelters have been steadily saving more dogs -- but killing more cats. Since 1996, the number of dogs they received has decreased by 16 percent, while the number of cats rose by 20 percent. What's more, the number of dogs euthanized decreased by 39 percent, while the number of cats that were put to sleep increased by nearly 14 percent.

As Lord notes in a press release for the study:

"What's going on in Ohio is probably pretty reflective of many parts of the country," she said.

So America is turning into a country of dogs. I like both cats and dogs equally, but I have to say, this news doesn't necessarily speak terribly well of the country. More and people are demanding unquestioning obedience, uncritical love, and total loyalty: Not exactly a profile of a confident, tolerant, intelligent population, eh?