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On December 9th 2007, a curious event took place at the University of South Carolina football stadium. As 29,000 people filed inside, each was given a piece of paper bearing four names and phone numbers. During the event, each person called those names and asked them to vote for Obama in the coming primary election.

Those 29,000 attendees called over 35,000 voters in the space of ten minutes – enough for the Guinness Book of Records to certify the event as the ‘largest phone bank‘ in history – and all for very little cost to the Obama campaign.

The record only stood for a few months, because on August 27th 2008, a line of people six miles long – over 80,000, all told – waited for seats at Invesco Field in Denver. They were there for Obama’s acceptance speech as the Democratic nominee for the election, but once again, they were going to be called upon to help out the campaign with more phone calls.

These events were replicated hundreds of times across the country, and some were focused more directly on making calls. I recall hearing about one in which the speaker walked the attendees through how to make their very first phone call to a voter. Yes, you might be nervous, he said, but I’ll show you how to do it – and he then proceeded to make a live call through the loudspeakers. Suitably encouraged, the thousands of attendees made their own phone calls – and why not, since everyone sitting next to them was making a call.

Of course, the majority of phone calls were not made in stadiums or live events, but at home or in campaign offices. Ever tech-savvy, the Obama campaign aimed to track and analyse all calls made. Even in September 2007, during the earlier days of Obama’s primary fight, the campaign had developed online tools and leaderboards:

Naturally, there was an Obama ‘08 iPhone app, which provided news updates to half a million users and (of course) encouraged users to make phone calls to votes. Over 50,000 calls were made, a figure that doesn’t include calls made by people who used an iPod Touch, and whose calls couldn’t be tracked.

The campaign had a single, clear goal: get Obama elected as President of the United States. Accomplishing this goal would require gaining a majority of the delegate votes in the Democratic Presidential Primaries in over fifty states and regions; each of those states had different rules for selecting their delegates, some of them quite unusual and rather game-like. With the Primaries won, the campaign had to win the general election.

Not only did this require a massive ground operation, going door to door in every state – not only did it demand massive phonebanking operations, some of which are describe above – but it also needed hundreds of millions in donations to adverts. In the end, Obama raised over $600 million dollars, most of which came over the internet:

3 million donors made a total of 6.5 million donations online adding up to more than $500 million. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less. The average online donation was $80, and the average Obama donor gave more than once.

70,000 campaign supporters used their MyBO fundraising pages to raised $30 million from friends and family; donation meters, leaderboards, targets, goals, rewards, and achievements – all of these most powerful reward and tracking mechanism, ripped straight from game design, were applied to the business of winning the most important and most serious game of 2008: winning the US election.

And they won. Keep reading →

Amid all the anguish and strife surrounding the BBC’s Strategic Review and the news that 6 Music, BBC Switch, and BBC Blast are going to be axed, I couldn’t help think of an alternate version of Back to the Future:

Biff Tannen: …Where’s my money?

George McFly: Uh, well, I haven’t finished cutting those websites yet, but you know I… I figured since people liked them and they didn’t cost so much…

Biff: Hello? Hello? Anybody home? Huh? Think, McFly. Think! I gotta have those paywalls. Do you realize what would happen if you keep on putting that public service content out for free? I’ll get fired. You wouldn’t want that to happen, would ya? Would ya?

George: Of course not, Biff. Nah, I wouldn’t want that to happen. Now, look. I’ll, uh, cut the online budget by 25% and I’ll only make sites that are about TV and radio programmes. All right?

Biff: Eh, that’s okay for a start, we’ll see how it works. Oh, McFly, your shoe’s untied.

[jabs his finger up to George's face]

Biff: Don’t be so gullible, McFly.

No prizes for guessing who the BBC is in this exchange (or Rupert Murdoch).

Most of the coverage of the Strategic Review has been about the audience efforts to save 6 Music; clearly it’s a station that many people are very attached to. However, the money saved by killing 6 Music is only £9 million, or 1.5% of BBC Radio’s £587 million budget. It’s baffling that the BBC would choose to kill 6 Music given its steadily growing audience and listener hours; surely, if money was the issue, they could have found that 1.5% among the other stations? But one might imagine that 6 Music was chosen on purpose, precisely to generate this kind of audience backlash and prove that the BBC actually does make valuable and popular content; but that’s just speculation.

Still, even if 6 Music were to be killed – which would be a shame – it would hardly spell the end for BBC Radio. But imagine if BBC Radio’s budget were cut, not by 1.5%, but by 25% – that’s £147 million. Here’s what they’d have to chop:

• Radio 1
• Radio 2
• Radio 3

and they’d still need to find £2 million to make up the shortfall. A 25% cut would cripple BBC Radio.

Or let’s look at TV, which the BBC spends £2.335 billion on. A 25% cut would require savings of £584 million, and for that, you’d need to axe:

• BBC 2 (including Horizon, The Thick of It, Mastermind, University Challenge, Songs of Praise, Newsnight…)

Alternatively, you could kill everything other than BBC 1 and BBC 2, which would mean saying goodbye to:

• BBC 3
• BBC 4
• CBBC
• CBeebies
• BBC Alba (BBC Scotland)
• BBC News 24
• BBC Parliament
• BBC Red Button
• BBC HD

Either way, the BBC’s TV operation would be devastated.

Keep reading →

In Publishing: The Revolutionary Future, an article in the New York Review of Books, Jason Epstein talks about the massive changes that are in store for publishing and books with the advent of digital content and devices. The article begins well, summarising the revolutionary changes wrought by Gutenberg’s press, and quickly reaches the present day with mention of the Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, Apple iPad, and the era of a ‘practically limitless choice of titles’. So far, so good.

And then Epstein says this:

Digitization makes possible a world in which anyone can claim to be a publisher and anyone can call him- or herself an author. In this world the traditional filters will have melted into air and only the ultimate filter—the human inability to read what is unreadable—will remain to winnow what is worth keeping in a virtual marketplace where Keats’s nightingale shares electronic space with Aunt Mary’s haikus. That the contents of the world’s libraries will eventually be accessed practically anywhere at the click of a mouse is not an unmixed blessing. Another click might obliterate these same contents and bring civilization to an end: an overwhelming argument, if one is needed, for physical books in the digital age.

You read that right: by Epstein’s logic, because you can access any book with one click, another click could obliterate the contents of the world’s libraries and consequently bring civilization to an end. I suppose I’d better be careful where I click, then – I might delete the internet!

The belief that storing words digitally is more dangerous than storing it on paper is a popular one among NYRB writers; a couple of years ago, Robert Darnton, Director of the University Library at Harvard, argued (a bit more sensibly, it’s fair to say) that digital storage, unlike paper, has to contend with the obsolescence of hardware and software at a rapid pace*.

*I wrote about Darnton’s article in a post here called Defending the Library of Google

True enough, but what many commentators who are not familiar with technology fail to realise is that digital content’s most powerful advantage is that it can be perfectly and rapidly copied, not merely to backups but to local and offline copies in hundreds or thousands or millions of locations around the world.

There are good arguments for keeping physical books in the digital age, and I hope that they continue to be produced and archived indefinitely, but the possibility that some Google employee (perhaps formerly from the Buzz division) might click ‘Delete’ instead of ‘Publish’ and thus wipe out every single digital record in existence is, well, just not one of them. Even the most durable book or stone tablet will degrade over centuries and millenia, and if there are only a few hundred or thousand copies made, they can be easily lost of destroyed; indeed, the main reason why we have the records we have from ancient Rome and Egypt are because they were popular stories or publication, so that many copies of them were made.

Equally, what we write and create today will survive, not simply due to the durability of the software or hardware (and there’s certainly room for improvement there) but because of the volume of copies – and we have the power to create not just hundreds of copies, but millions. Keep reading →

…and the Case for Public Service Games

The BBC is a world-class broadcaster that produces some of the very best TV, radio and news. It’s also an organisation that is desperately holding on to its past glories, while ignoring the potential and importance of the internet.

What is the BBC for? According to its Royal Charter, the BBC’s purpose is to create and distribute content that will “inform, educate, and entertain,’ – content that would not exist without a broadcaster that is publicly funded by a compulsory TV licence fee. As the Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, said recently:

The BBC exists to deliver [...] programmes and content of real quality and value. Content that deepens understanding, changes attitudes, makes people encounter the world with new eyes and new ears. Content – news, music, drama, documentary – which would not be made and which they would never enjoy if the BBC did not exist.

Look around you. Look at commercial media both here and around the world. Is it possible in 2009 to believe that – with all its undoubted shortcomings – if you took the BBC away you would end up with anything other than a big black cultural hole?

The BBC’s mission is truly noble. It spends millions spent on science and nature documentaries that are the envy of the world, thoughtful examinations on history and politics, daring and challenging dramas, news that strives to be fair and impartial, and unabashedly intelligent radio and music. If you took the BBC away, there really would be a cultural gap because I really doubt that the commercial sector would take up the mantle.

But, of course, that’s not all what the BBC does. It also spends hundreds of millions on game shows, soap operas, dramas, chat shows, pop music, and light entertainment – genres that are served reasonably well by the commercial sector. In theory, there’s nothing wrong with this, providing that the BBC’s programmes were somehow better or different than those on ITV, Channel 4, or Sky; but they’re not. Eastenders, Spooks, and Strictly Come Dancing may be great shows, but they’re not unique or distinctive when compared to Coronation Street, Primeval, and the X-Factor on ITV.

As it happens, most people seem perfectly fine with the current state of affairs, and they don’t care if the commercial sector is harmed by the BBC. To most, the BBC provides good value for money – it gives them a decent selection of shows that they watch regularly – some of which really are unique and ‘public service’, others which are simply entertaining – and they neither think nor care that this is unfair.

Nevertheless, the fact that the BBC openly competes with the commercial sector when it isn’t supposed to is a contradiction that has severe consequences. This contradiction is a legacy from when it was very expensive and difficult to make TV, and there were technical limits to the number of channels that could be broadcast; under those circumstances, it made sense to have the BBC create a wide range of programmes. But now that it’s easier to make TV and we have more or less unlimited channels via digital TV and the internet, the BBC’s production of decidedly ‘competitive’ TV and radio programmes seems less justifiable but somehow excusable given that it’s been doing so for the past several decades.

And so, we love the BBC for its documentaries and its worthy cultural content, and we ignore the fact that many show we enjoy, like The Weakest Link and Eastenders, are in fact perfectly possible outside of the BBC. Given popular sentiment, the BBC is not likely to stop making game shows and soap operas, so there’s nothing to worry about there.*

(*Except for the problem of the high salaries being paid to top performers like Jonathan Ross, which continues to draw negative attention from the media and the government. We’re outraged that a publicly-funded organisation is paying such a high salary to anyone, but it’s mainly because the BBC is competing with the commercial sector, and in the commercial sector, salaries can reach into the millions).

Putting aside the BBC’s anti-competitiveness for a moment, there are two other big problems.

The first is the issue of the TV licence fee and its murky future in a digital world. The second is the fear and lack of understanding the BBC’s upper echelons have of the rapid shift in audience attention to interactive forms of media and entertainment; that is, games. Keep reading →

Update 2 Nov: Just set up a wiki to document resources about the Network Challenge at http://redballoon.wikispaces.com – feel free to join in!

You may have heard of DARPA before – they’re the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. In 1969, they created ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet, and more recently, they run the DARPA Grand Challenge, which is a competition for groups to create driverless cars.

A couple of days ago, they announced the DARPA Network Challenge to mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet. Like the Grand Challenge, it’s a simple competition: On December 5th, ten large red weather balloons will be inflated and moored at at locations across the US. The first individual to submit the latitude and longitude of all ten balloons will win $40,000.

The purpose of the competition is to ‘explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.’ Without the internet, it’d be impossible for all but the very largest organisations – the government, the military, Google, etc. – to win this competition; but with the internet, it’s possible for millions of people across the world to collaborate on a single goal.

The Network Challenge is not the first to test the mass problem-solving abilities of online communities; open source projects see thousands of people work on extremely complex problems over long time scales. Some of the tasks in Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) have brought these problems into the physical world; in I Love Bees, thousands of people answered payphones across the US.

But the Network Challenge is the first to pose such a geographically-massive task in such a small timescale. Those red balloons aren’t going to stay up forever – they’re only going to be moored for six hours. And while they’ll be moored at ‘readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roadways’, the continental United States has an area of 8 million square km and 6.5 million km of roadways (4.2 million if you’re just counting the paved ones).

It’s a deceptively simple challenge that ought to be reasonably straightforward to solve, but gets extremely difficult and time-consuming when you think things through. Online discussions about the Network Challenge seem to think that you could win this just by following Twitter hashtags and Facebook. Far from it. That might do for a few balloons in cities, but not those by a desert road that no-one ever drives down; and believe it or not, but not everyone uses Twitter – and even if someone does, that’s no guarantee they might not keep the information to themselves for bargaining.

Given this, $40,000 seems like a pittance compared to the effort involved, but the small prize money is really a key point of the competition. It’s not supposed to cover any expenses – in fact, it’s probably as small a sum as they could reach without getting insultingly low.

The reason for the small prize money is because DARPA are exploring the different kinds of motivation that can be brought to bear on this type of problem. If a team treated the Network Challenge like paid work, $40,000 would buy very little time. However, if it’s treated differently – like a game, or like a citizen-science project such as GalaxyZoo – money is basically irrelevant. And it’s those non-monetary types of motivation that DARPA will be keen to evaluate – which works, and which don’t?

So, let’s get onto the fun stuff – how do you win the DARPA Network Challenge?

(Caveat: This is all assuming that DARPA is going to make this hard. If all the balloons end up in cities or by highways, it’ll be much easier). Keep reading →

Iain Banks’ latest novel, Transition, is perhaps his strongest work in recent years, straddling his science fiction persona (Iain M Banks) and his non-genre, non-M persona (Iain Banks). For me, it combined his fantastic world-building imagination that we see in his Culture novels with the more rooted nature of his traditional novels – with a good splash of the mystery and weirdness that characterised The Bridge (another crossover novel that sits among my favourites).

A common complaint of Transition is that it leaves too many unanswered questions. It certainly seems that way, but a closer reading of the novel suggest that answers to most – if not all – of those questions can be uncovered, and it’s quite fun to speculate on them.

Since there isn’t much speculation about the book online yet, I’m starting a resource here where I explore some of the questions raised. Obviously it contains MEGA SPOILERS so if you haven’t read the book, you really should go away, right now.

I’ve tried to root all of these speculations in the text of the book, with relevant quotes. I’d be very happy if anyone with alternative theories contributed in the comments – I’ll then add them to the blog post if appropriate. I intend to keep on updating this post as more and better theories are generated.

So, let’s start:

Who (or what) is Mrs. Mulverhill?

There are several unusual things about Mrs. Mulverhill:

1. She almost always wears a veil. Even when she isn’t, her eyes are often obscured, e.g. “hair veiling her face.” Why? “Madame d’Ortolan had always assumed this was mere affectation, but perhaps the lady wished to conceal some angle from which she looked less than racially pure, when the race concerned was human. Who knew?”
2. She never provides a first name.
3. We get to see her eyes on two occasions. Adrian Cubbish sees “catlike slits for pupils, not round ones,” and Temudjin Oh sees “slitlike pupils in amber irises.”
4. Adrian Cubbish describes her as an astonishingly good dancer: “…she moved round me, curling and uncurling and rising and falling, circling about me like she was caressing my personal space.”

Let’s face it: Mrs Mulverhill has something to do with cats. She has cat’s eyes, and she dances like a cat. Her clothes often seem catlike (all black, etc) and she occasionally speaks in a ‘purr’. Madame d’Ortolan doesn’t even think she’s fully human. And interestingly, her lack of a first name may then be related to the fact that Madame d’Ortolan’s cats do not have first names either (M. Pamplemousse, and Mme Frenolle). All of this has a bearing on the next question…

Of course, Mrs Mulverhill isn’t actually a cat – she looks like a human. But Adrian Cubbish does find it hard to place her: “The face behind the veil looked Asian, I thought. Maybe Chinese, though less flat than Chinese faces usually are. Sort of triangular. Eyes too big to be Chinese, too. Cheekbones too high as well. Actually, maybe not Asian at all.” Later, he says, “You look a bit alien yourself, Mrs M. No offence.”

Adrian’s difficulty may simply be down to the fact that Mrs Mulverhill comes from another world in which the standard racial types are different. However, there is a tantalising possibility is that she’s from Calbefraques – a world in which the Mongols had a much greater influence over world history, and could conceivably have mixed genes in interesting ways. Does this have any significance? It’s not clear yet. Keep reading →

Note: I am not about to reveal any secrets about Spooks: Code 9 or its production. A dedicated fan of Spooks could have written this, and while I’m not one, I did spend a lot of time thinking about, and watching, the show. These are my own opinions, and not that of Six to Start.

Last year, I worked on the online extension of a BBC 3 TV series called Spooks: Code 9. When I tell people this, they’re often excited and impressed when they hear the word ‘Spooks‘, and I have to explain that it wasn’t the long-running BBC 1 spy thriller that many know and love, but a spin-off.

Except Spooks: Code 9 (SC9) wasn’t a spin-off of Spooks. It was set in 2013, a year after a nuclear bomb had blown up London, and there was no continuity of events or characters from the original series (set during the present day). The only thing in common it had with Spooks is that it involved MI5 and it shares the same name (originally, it was just going to be called ‘Liberty’).

It’s easy to understand why SC9 was made; the BBC had a successful and popular thriller in Spooks, and the production company, Kudos, was clearly smart and reliable (they’d also made the excellent Life on Mars). Why not try and extend the formula to the younger end of the market? After all, the CSI brand had two spin-offs, so who’d begrudge the BBC just one?

But it wasn’t that simple. As the show neared launch, ‘Spooks’ was tacked on to the name, and ‘Liberty’ turned into the impenetrable ‘Code 9′, which meant absolutely nothing except for being a codeword in the show. Tying the show to the Spooks brand was a risky move – it helped raise its profile and increased the chance that fans of the original series would tune in, but it also set the expectation that it would be just like (or at least, similar to) Spooks. This was bad, for two reasons.

The first was that the show clearly wasn’t like Spooks – it was aimed at a far younger audience, and so it had younger characters and younger themes; anyone expecting the sort of characters and interactions from the original, decidedly middle-aged, series, would be disappointed. Secondly, anyone who didn’t like Spooks but might have tuned in to a younger, edgier show might now be turned off because they’d think that – yes – it’d just be like Spooks.

So what happened? Firstly, many criticisms of SC9 mentioned the fact that it wasn’t Spooks – and it got worse:

Spooks Code 9 is an utterly cynical venture and a damning indictment of the lack of imagination at work in commissioning new drama … Moreover, given its patronising awfulness, SC9 actually damages the Spooks brand. And that’s what it’s about – the brand.

The unthinkable had happened – the branding plan had backfired and SC9 was now dragging the golden goose down with it! Sadly, I think that if SC9 had a different name (i.e. not Spooks), everyone would have given the show more of a chance.

Not that that would’ve helped much, because regardless of it was called, SC9 was bad. Really bad. I couldn’t find a single positive review of the first episode, and believe me, I looked; reviewers criticised the script, the absence of anyone over 40, and the show’s consistent focus on the youth market through various club scenes, drinking, and romantic angst. What should have been the opening to an intriguing and exciting new world had emerged as a bland show that used tired tropes, like newsreel montages and all six main characters explaining why they thought they should become a secret agent.

After the first two episodes, which were shown back-to-back and were equally painful to watch, the audience numbers plummeted. Ep1 had 810k viewers, Ep 2 had 703k viewers – and Ep3 had 447k viewers. In a week, the show had lost almost half of its audience. By the sixth and final episode, SC9 had a mere 245k viewers.

I thought this was very sad, and not just because we were making the online extension. Episode 4 wasn’t bad, Episode 5 was pretty decent, and Episode 6 was really quite entertaining. In fact, the first minutes of the finale are captivating.

We open with a man (of apparent Arabic descent) pacing around a room in agitation. He’s throwing things into a bag while dialling the same number again and again on his mobile, and it’s always engaged. The man jumps into a car and drives out of the city, still dialling without success. Finally, on the motorway, instead of getting an engaged tone, he gets nothing at all; and then the radio turns to static. The traffic all around slows, then stops, and everyone gets out, because there’s a mushroom cloud behind them.

That’s how SC9 should’ve started – with a bang.

I haven’t talked much about the books I’ve read recently, and having finished a slew of them recently, I thought I’d take a look back at all the books I’ve read this year. On the whole, there aren’t as many as usual; work, magazines and periodicals, and notably Infinite Jest, really took their toll.

January

The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World by Lewis Hyde. A beautifully-written book about why people make creative works, how they should be compensated (with reference to gift-based economies in the past), and the sources of inspiration. There was a TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert doing the rounds a few months ago about nurturing creativity; it’s pretty good, but if you want to know more about the subject, Lewis Hyde’s book is absolutely the place to go. I finished this book in a couple of weeks, I think.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. An incredible novel that I’ve written about previously and took five weeks of sustained effort to get through. I probably finished this in March.

April

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. When I bought this in June 2008, I got a dozen pages in and developed a headache from the second-person narration and shamefully abandoned the book. My second attempt was much more successful and I came to appreciate the literally mysterious structure. I’ll admit that a few of the chapters dragged for me, but the rest of the book more than made up for it.

May

Many of these books were read on a four day cruise to Cork, Ireland.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Much has been written about Taleb’s assertion that people fool themselves into thinking they can accurately predict and/or quantify the chances of extremely rare events occurring (e.g. stock market crashes). Several people have told me they liked the book but can’t stand it because Taleb is so full of himself; I think this is besides the point. He is full of himself, but that doesn’t stop the book from being interesting and entertaining.

I found it irritating that the Guardian condemned David Cameron for talking to Taleb, because of Taleb’s ‘wacky’ views (which were subsequently clarified by Taleb). I’m no die-hard Taleb fan myself – and I’m not a David Cameron fan either – but I think Taleb has things that politicians would be well-advised to hear, and scare-stories from the Guardian do no-one any good.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace. Much as I enjoyed Infinite Jest, like many others, I absolutely adore DFW’s essays and articles. His essay on television is incredibly foresighted for something written in 1993, although I would have been interested in his opinion of the HBO-style dramas of recent years; his coverage of the Illinois State Fair is wonderfully funny and characteristically introspective. Probably the best essay, which the book was named after, is about his trip on a cruise ship. I’d already read the essay online, but I was happy to re-read it, and I’m sure that I’ll never see the words ‘lapis lazuli’ in the same way ever again… (it also became obvious, from this book, that Neal Stephenson is a massive fan of DFW).

Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner. What are the minds (or ‘mindsets’) that are required to succeed and flourish in the information-rich, hyper-competitive, fast-moving, etc, etc, world of the 21st century? Gardner attempts to explain here. This was an interesting book, but not much stuck with me apart from the later sections on the ‘respectful’ mind.

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood. If you’ve ever heard me talking about Margaret Atwood, it is normally about one of two subjects. Firstly, the fact that British people think she’s either British or American. Secondly, the fact that she strenously denies that Oryx and Crake (and the new The Year of the Flood) are not science fiction – which they plainly are – while simultaneously decrying science fiction. Having said that, I have actually read and enjoyed The Handmaid’s Tale, and since I have a real interest in economics and history these days, no amount of science-fiction denial was going to get in my way here. Payback was a good look at the history of debt and the way in which it’s been treated and contorted over the centuries, although it ends on a bizarrely hard-line note (which is probably not surprising given the eco-apocalyptic nature of her novels, but there you go). Keep reading →

I just published a post, Why Smokescreen in the Best Game Ever*, on the Six to Start blog with some game design thoughts behind Smokescreen, our latest game. It goes into a fair level of detail about some of the interesting features in Smokescreen and provides the reason why we added them; if you’re into ARGs or games in general, I think you’ll find it interesting.

Over the next few weeks, I’m hoping to write several more posts going into more detail about the different aspects of the game (e.g. mission design, audio, story, interaction, etc), and we’ll also have posts by other people involved in the game as well! So this will be a good opportunity to see how we design games, and where our thinking is currently at.

These are my links for August 18th from 12:55 to 12:55:

• Shots Magazine – Evolving Alternate Reality – Shots chats to Six To Start co-founder Adrian Hon about their latest projects for Channel 4 and Muse
  "Every time I go to talk to the guys at Channel 4 we have the same argument. What is it? Is it a game? Is it an adventure? Is it a drama? Is it a thriller?" Adrian Hon is having a tough time describing his new project, Smokescreen, an online educational project for Channel 4. "In truth it's all these things." …