Archive

I’ve been noodling on the question of why it feels like reservations are needed for so many things now, and what it means for the future. Here’s what I think…

Since the pandemic began, I’ve taken to walking up and down a nearby hill every lunchtime. Every day, I pass the Burns Monument, a Neo-Greek temple commemorating Robert Burns. Normally it’s closed to visitors, but during the Edinburgh Art Festival this month you can visit a sound installation by Emeka Ogboh.

It’s hard to express how disappointed I am with the V&A Dundee museum – how incredulous I was at its tiny permanent gallery when I first visited, and how annoyed I’ve been by its gaslighting of visitors who had the temerity to point this out.

So I’ve wanted to write this photo essay (included below) for some time, but I decided to be responsible and wait for two things. Firstly, to finish the draft of my gamification book, which I did last month, and secondly, to give the V&A Dundee museum enough time to improve its ways.

Well, the museum opened almost three years ago, and granted, there’s been a pandemic, but I haven’t heard anything that’s made me change my assessment. And to be honest, I just wanted to get it out of my head.

I’m still vacillating over what to do with the essay now it’s finished. Most of my followers and readers don’t live in Scotland and aren’t likely to have a strong reaction to this, but I’m a little nervous about sharing it with places like r/Scotland on Reddit. Or perhaps I’m just waiting for the right moment. We’ll see…

Last week, I delivered the first draft of “Untitled Gamification Book” to my editor. I think it’s going to be a good book! It should have something new for even the most familiar with gamification, but it’s accessible for people who’ve never heard the word at all. I hope it will delight and annoy everyone in equal measure. But this is not the time for self-promotion, with the publication date still unannounced.

It’s not the first time I’ve written a book, but waiting to hear the verdict feels very different this time. My other book, A History of the Future in 100 Objects, had a publisher, but it since it was funded on Kickstarter I didn’t feel beholden to any specific person while writing it. I deliberately chose a more traditional route with my new book, with all the good and ill that it entails.

Toward the end of my draft, I struggled a lot with the knowledge that the book would become dated as soon as I stopped writing. Of course, this is an inevitable consequence of writing any book about technology or current affairs, but the protracted book publishing process doesn’t help when compared to newspapers or magazines, let alone websites or newsletters.

But hey, I knew this going in, and it’s a trade I willingly made. Newsletters are good for some things and books are good for other things. Plus there’s a lot in the book that deals with very recent developments in gamification, but there’s much more that looks back years and decades and even centuries, so I’ve made my peace with it. Mostly.

Hello!

A longer piece today on people cheating at what I call “coercive gamification”. Before that, a quick roundup of my recent appearances:

Hello new subscribers from my Digital Sight Management and QAnon pieces!

This is a very off-the-cuff email today. I’m keeping some newsletters more informal because if I spent a lot more time on them, they’d become blog posts and I’d send them far less frequently.

But I’m still writing serious stuff – in fact I’m doing an outline about cheating in gamification – and I’ll try to make it easy to tell the difference between my more and less serious emails. Please do let me know what you think about the balance!

Theme Park of the Glen

Hello new subscribers! Thank you for joining my newsletter, which as promised, will be updated very infrequently.

And hello old subscribers! If you haven’t already seen it, check out my recent blog post, What ARGs Can Teach Us About QAnon which went extremely viral, got republished on Vice, and landed me an interview on the New York Times.

I spotted this ad on the tube recently, and it made me think about Apple’s unappreciated dominance over the lives of hundreds of millions of people:

- what a deal! Clearly there must be a catch, and sure enough, there is a tiny asterisk next to “App!” I wasn’t able to see it from my side of the carriage, but there’s an even-tinier line of text right at the bottom of the ad that doubtless discloses just how much you’ll have to pay to get those 600 “free” prints.

Metafilter is a weblog that anyone can contribute a link or a comment to. A typical weblog is one person posting their thoughts on the unique things they find on the web. This website exists to break down the barriers between people, to extend a weblog beyond just one person, and to foster discussion among its members.

I joined Metafilter shortly after it launched, snagging a coveted three-digit user number (). This was in February 2000, almost twenty years ago – aeons in internet time. Not only have I been a member for most of my adult life, I’ve been there for most of my life there.

Despite growing up near Liverpool, I never visited any Beatles attractions other than popping into the Cavern a couple of times. It’s like living in London and never visiting The Tower: there’s always something more exciting going on.

I broke the habit of a lifetime by finally going to The Beatles Story, a museum on the Albert Dock. It was just about fine given entry cost £17. The whole place felt worn down and cramped, as if it hadn’t been properly refurbished since opening in 1990.

It’s hard to shake the feeling you’re having the same thoughts and ideas as everyone else if you just watch and read and listen to the same content – which these days tend to be the most upvoted or retweeted.

This is a problem if your job involves coming up with original ideas. You could find other ways to discover content, like trusting editors to find you the best stuff, but ultimately you end up in the same place.

The best answer I’ve found so far is just to read a lot more. This means you can be less picky and just read whatever interests you, rather than whatever a newspaper or blog or prize name as the top ten or twenty books of the year. So that’s what I’ve been doing this year – instead of reading my usual 30 books in twelve months, I’ve finished 66 books in six months.

When you listen to a stand-up comedian, you probably know their stories are being exaggerated for comic effect. That’s fine! Everyone understands they aren’t watching a documentary. We don’t need a disclaimer on the front door telling us the events depicted inside are fictional, even if we might appreciate it if there’s an element of truth.

Similar unspoken conventions apply to everything from like Playboy letters, to Chicken Soup for the Soul, to pretty much everything David Sedaris writes. The older the medium, the more established the conventions. Some thought Robinson Crusoe was a true story when it was first published in 1719, but today you just need to glance at the cover of a book to know whether it’s fiction or not.

The corollary is that new media hasn’t yet developed those conventions – and the newer the media, the greater the uncertainty. Take these heartwarming tweet threads by about , , and . All went fearsomely viral, nearing a million likes and retweets in total, and they all have picture-perfect happy endings.

Since buying a house a couple of years ago, I’ve noticed more and more people talking about overpaying their mortgages, and I find the whole idea mystifying.

The mechanics of mortgages were alien to me until recently, and they may well be to you as well. In the UK, most people opt for 25 year mortgages with a reasonably substantial deposit, usually around 5-10% of the value. For the first few years, the interest rate on the mortgage will be higher because your loan-to-value ratio will also be higher – that is, the amount you’ve borrowed vs. the value of your house. That means your monthly mortgage payments will also be relatively high.

But as time goes on and your mortgage payments add up, the amount you’ve borrowed will decrease. More importantly, the value of your house has probably gone up. In some areas, it might have gone up a lot. That means your loan-to-value ratio will be lower, so banks will trust you more and offer you a significantly lower rate of interest if you remortgage. Right now, you could get as low as 2% interest on your mortgage, vs. the 4+% at the start of your mortgage.

It doesn’t sound like a big difference, but when you’ve borrowed hundreds of thousands of pounds, it adds up to hundreds of pounds per month in increased mortgage payments. I was genuinely shocked by how much our mortgage payments decreased after just two years when we remortgaged for a lower rate, and I thought I was financially savvy.

The rise of Conservative MP Rory Stewart has sparked an intense frustration in me. Many people who would never vote for a right-wing party have confessed liking this “British eccentric with preternatural intelligence”, as Hadley Freeman from the Guardian described him.

What is it, precisely, that Freeman admires – other than the headline fact that Stewart opposes a no-deal Brexit (but, of course, still wants Brexit and doesn’t want a second referendum)? He quotes Latin; as a child, he named his toy horse Bucephalus “for the horse that Alexander the Great tamed as a youth”; still as a child, he had a fondness for reciting Hamlet; he gives impassioned speeches in the house about hedgehogs. That sort of thing. Never mind the fact that he against measures to prevent climate change; against regulation for fracking; for welfare benefits cuts; against laws to promote equality and human rights.

Now that millennials are ageing into their status as Prime Consumers of culture, it’s no surprise that our childhood era of the 90s is being mined for nostalgia. Not all of this is cynical – I’m as charmed by games like Hypnospace Outlaw that harken back to the early days of the web and Geocities as anyone else.

But there’s a point where nostalgia tips over into hagiography. Lately, I’ve seen people pine for those days where we weren’t always being distracted by our smartphones, where we would all be present and engaged in discussions at all times. Or how programming was much more fun in C and Assembly, whereas nowadays everyone’s forced to use Javascript and Unity. Or how society was much more united in the TV we watched and the newspapers we read.

The New Yorker is the most consistently well-written longform magazine I’ve read, and it’s been the source of so many of my ideas over the years. It’s also the one of the most unread magazines out there, gracing coffee tables across the world in artistic tsundokus.

For the first few years I was a subscriber, I read it from cover to cover (OK, not the NY city-specific bits, come on!) – even the bits I initially found confusing. Since I decided to spend more time reading books recently, I needed to be more judicious about my New Yorker reading habits lest I stop reading it completely. So here’s my tips on how to read The New Yorker!

There’s the book I’d like to write. And there’s the book I ought to write.

Last year, someone from Samsung’s strategy team asked to talk to me about whether “gamification” could be a possible use (if not a killer app) for a hypothetical augmented reality heads-up display.

I admitted, yes, Zombies, Run! was an example of gamification in action, although I quickly explained that I detested the term. Gamification “experts” will tell you that merely applying a coating of points, achievements, levels, and progress bars to otherwise-boring activities is not the way to turn it into a fun or engaging game – but promptly ignore their own advice when designing games for big companies that want to improve productivity, games that invariably are about points andz achievements and leaderboards. So no, I didn’t think that gamification – as commonly understood and practiced – was a killer app for anything.

Hello everyone – thank you for subscribing! This is my first newsletter so please forgive any formatting oddities.

I have friends who can’t imagine a worse punishment than visiting Disneyworld or sailing on a cruise. These lifeless environments are smeared with the fingerprints of designers desperate to part you with your money, whereas – I imagine them saying – nature demands no payment.

And I get that. It can be suffocating to be in a place where everything is trying to manipulate you against your will, like most malls, or, well, the internet. Exploring nature is a refreshing change; there’s no comparison between Yosemite, or the mountains of Kamikochi in Japan, and the Westfield Stratford mall.