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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." …

In his keynote at the Netherlands Festival of Games in Utrecht, Elan Lee compared a successful game to a magnet. A good game pushes away most people, but still makes them aware of what’s going on; it pulls people towards itself; and it charges those who come closest, so that they become part of the game itself, entertainment everyone else.

I thought this was a nice and simple metaphor for games and ARGs. OK, I still don’t understand the push part of it, but the notion that the closest players become charged really nails a core essence of ARGs. 16 hours after Elan’s keynote, I was in Cardiff, talking to a group of writers about multiplatform storytelling. On the train there, I resolved to talk a little about ARGs in general.

(And also about Perplex City. Over the last couple of years, I haven’t spoken about Perplex City much, but hearing Elan talk about I Love Bees (2004) and Last Call Poker (2005) reminded me of how neat Perplex City was, and how I ought to highlight that.)

Initially, I considered simply stealing the magnet metaphor, and I got as far as drawing a little magnet in Keynote when I decided that:

a) I really ought to try doing my own metaphor before stealing someone else’s (with attribution, naturally)
b) I wasn’t sure whether I could pull off the ‘push’ bit when I didn’t fully understand how the mapping worked

So I decided on a new one, about football. Some caveats – it’s not a genuinely original metaphor, since I’ve heard Dan mention it before, and I’m sure the comparison to sports has been made many times in the past – but it’s new for me and perhaps new in this specific case.

EVERYONE

Despite football’s massive international popularity, most people don’t watch it. This is true of almost everything; most people are not Christians, most people haven’t read Harry Potter, and most people haven’t watched Who Wants to be a Millionaire. It’ll also be true of your game.

However, even if you’ve never watched a single game of football, you’ll know about the concept. You’ll know that two teams kick a ball around, that they score goals, that Manchester United is a popular team, and that David Beckham plays. Through the efforts of its fans and players, football is at least comprehensible by pretty much everyone, which allows them to participate in the game, even in the most remote way (by watching celebrations on the news, or seeing jokes about it on TV).

FANS

One step closer in, we have football fans. This massive group encompasses everyone who actively follows football, from die-hard fans who hold season tickets and loyally supports at every away game, to interested outsiders myself who will switch on the TV if a particularly important match is on (say, the Champion’s League final).

The most hardcore fans are so dedicated, they’ll dress up at games; they’ll form a brass band that irritatingly plays the Great Escape theme tune at every England match; they’ll raise money for charity, and they’ll even buy their own clubs. These guys provide entertainment not only for their fellow fans, but for everyone. They often play football themselves in amateur teams.

If you considered the world of football fandom to be a game, then these hardcore fans would be the players. But I’m not. Because the players are actually…

THE PLAYERS

It’s telling that when we think of ‘football players’, we think of paid professionals like Cristiano Ronaldo or Wayne Rooney. Of course, a football player is simply someone who can play football, whether they’re 7 years olds playing with a tennis ball at school, or a 70 year old in the local pub team. Wayne Rooney is ‘just’ an exceptionally talented player, the hardest of the hardcore.

He, and other professional players, are so good that people will pay thousands of pounds to watch them every year. They provide the energy and the spectacle that turns football from being a simple urban game about 22 people kicking an inflated liver in between two posts into a worldwide phenomenon, complete with its own community, fandom, fan fiction and commentary.

This is what your game can become, if you can make it so good that people dedicate their lives to mastering it, and if it’s interesting for other people to watch them.

A COMPARISON

Starcraft is a science fiction strategy game, in which you direct an army from above to blow up your opponent’s. In South Korea, Starcraft is a national sport. There are at least two TV channels devoted to it, and the top Starcraft players are celebrities who open shopping malls, have fan clubs, win lots of money, etc.

None of this should be surprising. Starcraft is a fun game to play, so much so that:

a) Millions of people have played it
b) Hundreds of thousands of people are obsessed with it
c) Hundreds of people are fearsomely talented at it

Just like football. So, naturally, Starcraft has become a sport.

WHERE IT BREAKS DOWN

This football metaphor worked well at the multiplatform storytelling workshop today, and a couple of people said they liked it. However, it has a few flaws.

Firstly, it references a game that has no story. You could argue that the actions of players creates a meta-story about injuries, rivalries, transfer windows, etc, but that’s not the point of football; the point is scoring goals. This is not so true of ARGs with stories – which is to say, most of them.

Secondly, the metaphor fails to capture the wide range of involvement that players have in ARGs. In Perplex City, some players bought  thousands of puzzle cards and came to every live event; others just visited a couple of blogs a month; but they’re both, technically, players. In football, you have 22 players in a game – that’s it. You can have multiple teams and multiple leagues, but there exists a sharp divide between the guys kicking the ball and the guys watching them. A good ARG recognises and encourages a continuum of involvement, because it allows people to choose what suits them best. So I think that this metaphor is just too general – it works for almost any game, whereas I would like something a little more specific to what I do.

Of course, any metaphor breaks down when you inspect it too closely. I imagine that this football metaphor is best suited to a general audience, rather than an expert one. If you have a favourite metaphor for ARGs or games, or if you have ideas on how to improve this one, please let me know!

(Also, I’ll be putting my keynote presentation about ‘Why Stories in Games Suck’ online shortly.)

In case you aren’t in the UK or haven’t been following the news lately, there is something of a crisis in British politics. Partly caused by an expense scandal in which some MPs have been making rather dubious claims, the Labour government is now seeing cabinet ministers resigning more or less every single day. Forget about Obama’s speech in Cairo, or a plane crashing in the Atlantic – the one thing that’s on our TV screens every hour of every day is the political crisis. To be fair, we also had the local and European elections yesterday, but in this country, if it’s not a general election, it’s not a real election.

On confusing party and government

The response by Labour party MPs and activists to the resignation of cabinet ministers and/or rebel MPs is typically, “How dare they harm our party’s chances in the elections!” Take this quote from the Guardian:

The Labour MP for Chorley, Lindsay Hoyle, said grassroots members were angry at the “treacherous behaviour” of senior figures such as former communities secretary Hazel Blears.

“People are also bitterly disappointed with James Purnell [former work and pensions secretary]. More consideration should have been given to the damage this is causing the party.”

What Lindsay Hoyle doesn’t seem to realise here is that most people don’t care about the damage that James Purnell has caused to the party, because no-one actually cares about the Labour party any more. This is not an idle claim; it looks like Labour attracted a mere 23% of the local election vote today. Granted, people often use local elections as a protest vote, but 23% is disastrous any way you look at it. Less than 1 in 4 voters ticked the box for Labour today. No-one cares about damage to the Labour party.

The astonishing thing is that MPs are using this language in public at all. If this were America, you’d have people saying ‘James Purnell is damaging this country by walking out now’, etc, rather than being so tone deaf about what voters care about.

On cabinet reshuffles

It seems like there’s a cabinet reshuffle every year or so. I find the nature of these reshuffles to be mystifying. How on earth is any minister supposed to do a proper job if they keep on moving around so often? What makes a Health Secretary a good Home Secretary? Why does an Agriculture Secretary make a good Foreign Secretary? Why is it so difficult to keep these guys in a job longer than two years? Everyone knows how much inertia the civil service has, surely the longer someone is in a job, the more chance they have of effecting coherent and working policy. I note that the US seems to get along perfectly well by appointing Secretaries for four year stretches at a time, with much less drama.

On poor government and apathy

Stuart Ian Burns wrote today:

Basically, we’re screwed. When Gordon Brown eventually goes (and under normal circumstances he should), there’s no one to take his place, at least no one better (better than that?). The Tories will win the next election either way and they’re going to be just as rubbish, and all along, those of us who are desperate for something to believe in are going to continue to be sidelined in favour of greed and make-do and mend and the usual lies and spin.

If the Tories will the next election – and they probably will – it’s because, for most people, there is no viable alternative.

Why is there no viable alternative? It’s not because there is no ‘British Obama’. Of course there is the potential for a intelligent, charismatic and inspirational leader in the UK – there are 60 million people in this country, I find it hard to believe there isn’t someone out there who could do the job. No, I think there are two problems.

The first is that the British electorate are cynical and apathetic. It’s true. Exactly why this is the case is down to a combination of factors, including the political system, our country’s history and age, the media, and the current political climate. But I don’t think that we always have to be cynical and apathetic. There’s a reason people were obsessed with the US election last year – it’s because we wanted it. We wanted to be excited. I want to be so inspired that I’ll go out every weekend knocking on doors and calling people up and posting leaflets about a candidate I care about, a candidate who I think can really make a powerful, historical difference.

People will do that. It wouldn’t even take that much convincing – we already have a perfect model to follow. What I find laughable are the craven attempts of both the Conservatives and Labour party to imitate Obama’s grassroots and online strategy. They just don’t get it. You can’t just whack up a Facebook page and Daily Kos-like site, and expect people to take part; there needs to be substance and hope behind the structure. It’s like people who expect ’social media’ to suddenly make their products successful – you’ve got to have a good product first.

The second problem is the structure of British party politics. As I am repeatedly told, we have a Parliamentary system here, not a Presidential system, and that’s why we don’t have public primaries to elect party leaders (and thus Prime Ministers). But that’s not a good reason – it’s just an explanation of a poor system. In any case, it is largely the MPs of the political parties who determine who their leader will be. What’s more, the existence of party lists means that prospective MPs are often parachuted into safe seats, for which they have to do pretty minimal campaigning and don’t have to face a primary challenger.

I gather that this may be changing with the Conservatives (I need to check the details) but the point is that the closed nature of party politics is such that a putative British Obama would have a hard time at becoming an MP, let alone party leader.

What’s the solution? My crazy idea is that the Liberal Democrats should decide to go for broke this election – they’re not going to win anyway, so they might as well try anything. First, they should cede power to the entire public (not just party members) in electing both MPs and the party leader. Then, they start a massively local and grassroots campaign to find out what people actually care about – and do this not simply by holding town hall meetings that no-one actually goes to, but doing a simultaneous door-stop/leaflet/online campaign. Next, harness the energy of young people (who are hopefully inspired by this) to ‘do an Obama’. It may not work, but at least they’ll have given it a real try. Of course, this all relies on having an inspiring leader, and while I don’t have a real beef against Nick Clegg, he’s no Obama.

Still, it’s an idea.

Infinite Summer is a challenge to read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009. On their website, they say:

You’ve been meaning to do it for over a decade. Now join endurance bibliophiles from around the web as we tackle and comment upon David Foster Wallace’s masterwork, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages¹ ÷ 93 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat.

I’m quite interested to see how the challenge works, and exactly how it works as a communal exercise. Co-ordinated reading campaigns are old news, having been done on scales from book groups, to schools, to cities, to entire countries; putting them online (and in this case, on Twitter), and tackling a notoriously difficult book, is sure to attract note. I just don’t know how good an idea it is. I freely admit that this makes me sound like a curmudgeon (yes, a 26 year old curmudgeon).

I finished Infinite Jest a few months ago. In the foreword, David Eggers has this to say:

Let’s talk about age, the more pedestrian meaning of the word. It’s to be expected that the average age of the new Infinite Jest reader would be about twenty-five. There are certainly many collegians among you, probably, and there may be an equal number of thirty-year-olds or fifty-year-olds who have for whatever reason reached a point in their lives where they have determined themselves finally ready to tackle the book, which this or that friend has urged upon them. The point is that the average age is appropriate enough. I was twenty-five myself when I first read it…

…And thus I spent a month of my young life. I did little less. And I can’t say it was always a barrel of monkeys. It was occasionally trying. It demands your full attention. It can’t be read at a crowded cafe, or with a child on one’s lap…

…And yet the time spent in this book, in this world of language, is absolutely rewarded. When you exist these pages after that month of reading, you are a better person. It’s insane, but also hard to deny. Your brain is stronger because it’s been given a monthlong workout, and more importantly, your heart is sturdier, for there has scarcely been written a more moving account of desperation, depression, addiction, generational stasis and yearning, or the obsession with human expectations, with artistic and athletic and intellectual possibility.

When I read the foreword, two things crossed my mind. Firstly, I was vaguely disappointed (and then disappointed at being disappointed) at being a whole year older than Eggers’ average age of 25. It only reinforced my sad, gradual realisation that I am often no longer the youngest person in the room.

Secondly, I did the maths and figured that I could easily manage 33 pages a day, thus matching Eggers’ reading speed of a month. Given that I can read most books in a few hours, it seems that Infinite Jest, even with its complexity and innumerable footnotes, wouldn’t withstand my powers for long. At the very least, I thought, I could read 50 pages an evening, finishing the whole thing in little over three weeks.

It took me five weeks. Five weeks of hard, frustrating, and occasionally brilliantly illuminating work. Reading 33 pages a day was a real achievement.

Infinite Summer has a reading pace of 11 pages per day, with an apparent emphasis on chat. Much as I understand the sentiment behind this – not scaring off readers – I don’t think the project makes much sense. What is the point of Infinite Summer? Is it to get people to actually read the book? Or is it to get people to talk about reading the book? The prominent mention of the #infsum Twitter tag on the website makes it clear that chatter is a big part of this challenge. While this provides valuable encouragement and peer pressure to keep on reading, and of course I love any project that promotes reading, I can’t help but think that Twitter – or any other standard online discussion medium – may be counter-productive.

If I were taking part in Infinite Summer, there would be times where I would read far more than 11 pages in a day, and other times when I would read far less. Whatever my rate, I would always be at a different point in the book than pretty much everyone else; so what am I supposed to Twitter about, without spoiling the book for others, or being spoiled myself? And as I’m reading, am I thinking about the story and characters, or am I thinking about what I’m going to say online? There are ways to build discussion systems that can address these problems, and perhaps Infinite Summer will do that, but if it doesn’t, it’ll be a missed opportunity.

Eggers says that Infinite Jest demands full attention. It took him four weeks, it took me five weeks; it might take you four days or four months. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. What matters is that you get through it, because if you don’t, you’ll have left a great book unfinished. If a reading challenge helps you, that’s great. Perhaps it’s better if it’s read together. However, from my experience, when you’re reading Infinite Jest, you don’t want any distractions, and Infinite Summer may be just that.

On Wednesday night, I was invited to a Wired UK dinner about ‘The Future of Entertainment’. At the end of the night, we were asked what we thought entertainment would look like in 15 years; some people predicted the death of copyright, others talked about the rise of videogames and live experiences. In a nod to the hosts, I talked about publishing, giving my usual doom-and-gloom analysis about the frankly obvious death of publishers, whether they’re in the music, TV, book or even videogame industry. I think that jolted them a little, and the guy from Conde Nast actually walked out of the room at that point (although, on balance, I don’t think that had anything to do with what I said).

That wasn’t the only time we talked about publishing though; earlier on, there were pointed questions about whether magazines had any future. Given that The New Yorker and The Economist are the healthiest they’ve been for quite some time, I’m not ready to call time on those two magazines yet, and I’m sure that the high end of the market (which Wired UK aspires to) will do just fine. Much of the reason for this is that their content is very expensive to commission and very hard to imitate. It also happens to be presented in a really good format.

Format is important. For instance, I can read a lot of text on the iPhone’s screen without strain, and there are plenty of people out there who spend over an hour a day browsing the web and reading books on the iPhone; it’s certainly more convenient than carrying a bunch of books around, and in any case, you can’t surf the web on a book.

Lately, most of my iPhone reading has been of RSS feeds. I use a great application called Byline that not only downloads and stores the latest news items from my Google Reader feeds, but crucially, it also synchronises the information back, meaning that if I’ve read an item on my iPhone, I won’t have to read it again on my computer. When I’m travelling any distance, it’s a very good way of keeping up to date, and keeping my unread items count from getting too big (I receive, and read, about 500 items every day).

That’s not the only reading I have to keep up with; I have weekly subscriptions to The New Yorker and The Economist, and a monthly subscription to The Atlantic. That’s a lot of pages to be getting on with every week, and if I neglect them – as I did when I spent a month reading Infinite Jest – then the resulting pile can take several days of concentrated reading to get through. During those days, I got the distinct sense that I was on the cusp of losing the battle, and something had to give; I just was trying to read too much, and I was starting to enjoy it less.

A few days ago, I realised there was another problem; I was reading badly. Sure, the iPhone meant that I could read my RSS feeds on the tube, saving precious minutes and providing me with news whole minutes or even hours before I sat down in front of a computer, but it was really a terribly slow way of reading them. At home, not only is the experience of reading RSS feeds much easier, since I have a faster net connection and a much, much bigger screen, but it’s also much better.

Now, whenever I’m tempted to read on my iPhone, I just open up a magazine. Whether I read it at home or on the tube, it’s still the same magazine, with the same high quality layout and high density of text, easily beating the iPhone’s little screen. So far, this is working out splendidly well, and I’m spending less time obsessing over RSS feeds and playing Flight Control on my iPhone, and more time reading quality content; and when I get home, I have more time to read my RSS feeds (which, as mentioned, actually takes less time), watch Mad Men, play games, and read books.

I might still unsubscribe from The Economist and The Atlantic though…