I Am Seb

Alice did it, and from there I’ve found some more inter­est­ing people doing it. So to throw myself aboard a band­wagon (and break a long dry spell without post­ing), here are 5 things I’m think­ing about right now:

1. Apps (espe­cially games) tar­get­ing a spe­cific device could be com­ing to an end soon. Google’s announce­ment of Chrome being able to run nat­ive code in a sand­box (cau­tion: really dry tech­nical presentation) is a game-changer. Bye-bye OS-specific applic­a­tions that you buy on (ugh) phys­ical media. Hello things that you open in a browser, which have full web con­nectiv­ity and pres­ence, and which will run on any plat­form sup­port­ing it. Yes, I’m well aware of the less-than-illustrious his­tory of thin-client net­work com­put­ing. What I think makes this dif­fer­ent is that Google have already got the plat­form in the hands of tens (if not hun­dreds) of mil­lions of cus­tom­ers. For free. All they need to do to enable it is flip a switch. Oh, and they’re about to release an oper­at­ing sys­tem based on this technology.
2. Games are about to get big. By this, I don’t mean that people will buy more cop­ies of games, nor that main­stream game devices will become more pop­u­lar (though both are a given in the short term). No, I mean that more people are about to start mak­ing games. There are a couple of things that are bring­ing this about. The first is the massive ubi­quity of plat­forms that can play games, and the second is the emer­gence of content-creation tools that don’t require computer-science or art degrees to use. Unity3D, which coin­cid­ent­ally was announced as an early launch plat­form for cre­at­ing con­tent which runs under Google’s Native Code sys­tem, is just such a plat­form, but there are many more with sim­ilar aims, such as MIT’s Scratch.
3. Which brings me to: the next big soft­ware revolu­tion will be in the cre­ation of inter­preted con­tent. What I mean by inter­preted con­tent is con­tent that the user does not have to cre­ate in painstak­ing detail. Instead, the user sets guidelines and para­met­ers for what they want, and the soft­ware inter­prets the user’s inten­tion and gen­er­ates con­tent. Procedural con­tent has got­ten us most of the way there, and there are some fant­astic (though lim­ited) examples such as Spore’s creature cre­ator, the MakeHuman pro­ject, and LaDiDa avail­able right now. However, the next wave will seam­lessly inter­me­di­ate between clumsy, inex­act humans and the rig­or­ous demands of con­tent cre­ation. I’d really like it if the inter­face to such soft­ware soun­ded like Jarvis from the Iron Man movies.
4. Driving is an under-utilised plat­form for gam­ing, and could make roads much, much safer. Think net­worked vehicles with sensors that score your driv­ing accord­ing to how safe and green it is, with high-score tables, local and national leagues, full social media con­nectiv­ity, etc. Quite why the full extent of car man­u­fac­tur­ers’ use of game mech­an­ics so far is a tree that lights up green in one eco-friendly Honda remains an utter mys­tery to me.
5. Talking of people that don’t get it… copy­right reform has got to hap­pen now. When every­one can make con­tent, and con­tent can go every­where, people will be remix­ing and cre­at­ing on a scale that utterly dwarfs the cur­rent Big Content indus­tries. We need to ensure a strong cre­at­ive com­mons and a legal frame­work that enables people to draw from the rich tapestry of our col­lect­ive cul­ture without fear of prosecution.

So that took a lot longer than expec­ted, mostly due it turn­ing into a stream of con­scious­ness that I had to edit down from about 11 dif­fer­ent ideas that sud­denly occurred to me. More on points 2 and 3 com­ing soon.