Weekend Watching: Area/Code on the new future the TV game
If you only know NYC devs Area/Code from their phenomenal iPhone game Drop7 -- and even if you feel like you know a bit more -- give co-founder Kevin Slavin's presentation at the recent 5D Immersive Design Conference a half hour of your weekend.
Originally linked by Bruce Sterling over at his Wired blog, Slavin covers not only the history and background of the studio (and their fantastic and still too-unknown location/real-world based games like Tokyo's Print Club sticker popularity contest, Superstar and Facebook's Parking Wars) and more on Chain Factor/Drop7 than even I knew, but -- speaking as he was on the future of TV -- makes his strongest point at the end, contending that 'any screen without a mouse ships "broken"'.
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#1 – 12:45 PM June 13, 2009
That was an interesting presentation but it left me thinking. First of all, I'm not especially convinced that a group of engineers - none of whom owned a TV - can really feel good about coming up with ways to get people feel more addicted to crappy shows like "The Hills".
Secondly, his whole point about "live" broadcast TV being an event that we gather around as a society vs newer technology like streaming and time-shifting seems a little patchy. I tried watching an episode of Twin Peaks on cbs.com and what they do is create a room by delaying people who are viewing by a minute or something so you can watch the show together and chat and take quizzes. The chatback program he talks about could work fine with a streaming show. There's no reason why you couldn't look at and vote on comments people made during a show two days ago while also leaving your own.
And finally, the idea of a bunch of people sitting around with laptops in front of a TV is just... kind of depressing right? We've had a great of interacting while watching TV for a long time already. It's called snuggling up with your sweetie.