henry's blog

I’ve been doing a lot of work recently with a client who’s working with publishers on bringing their content to the iPhone. Naturally, with the recent announcement of the iPad, we’ve been having a lot of discussions about the possibilities raised by the device and what its arrival means for its surrounding marketplace and ourselves as iOS developers. This post is an attempt to nail down some of the ideas that have fallen out of those discussions.

I haven’t been a full-time iPhone developer for a long time (who has?), and an ebook developer for even less. Before that, I worked for a (primarily) online agency with a long and distinguished (and continuing!) history of creating interactive experiences with a very strong focus on narrative and story. Up until today, I didn’t think there was much common ground between the two: after all, a book is a book and a game is a game, right? However, in trying to map out the differences between the two, I’m starting to think that all the stuff I’ve learned about presentation, narrative flow and appropriate modes of interaction might actually come in useful when trying to figure out where to go next with ebooks on a device that has many more capabilities than a simple ebook reader.

My background as an interactive developer means that I tend to want to make stuff that’s as immersive and interactive as possible, playing with the available technology. When I’m making ebooks, however, I’m trying to make something that’s as much like a real book as possible, down to spending days over perfecting a page-turn effect. How to reconcile the two? Is it by making ebooks that make heavy use of hypertext, breaking a book down into a non-linear, user-directed stream of fragments? Maybe with some whizzy graphical effects, flying from fragment to fragment (I’m pretty sure I remember some monstrosities along these lines spewing forth out of CD-ROMs back in the early-90s day)? Of course it isn’t. It does raise a few interesting questions though: once a book stops being a slab of dead tree and becomes a bitstream, how does it retain its “bookness”? How much can you meddle with the experience of reading a book before it stops being a book? Should we even be meddling at all? That pretty much all existing ebook readers have gone to great pains to emulate the physicality of real books, pages, page turns and all suggests that, at least for the moment, erring on the side of caution in this respect is very much the order of the day. I’d suggest, though, that perhaps this for similar reasons that (according to folklore, at least) early PCs were coloured the same beige as all other office equipment at the time: until people are used to a new, disruptive technology, dress it up like the familiar, old technology.

A big steer on the way I’ve been thinking about this is this wee snippet of a conversation on the always-excellent Shift Run Stop podcast with the author Chris Cleave. The episode can be downloaded here, but I’ll transcribe the relevant bit here for the impatient. You really should listen to the podcast though, it’s awesome.

~33:11
Cleave: “I don’t know how much the concept of authorship is relevant [in the environment of a game] where people can choose.”

(Cleave then goes on to describe the kind of game he’d like to play with his audience, collaboratively buidling a novel which is super-interesting in itself, but probably best discussed another time).

Once you place control of the flow of a narrative in the hands of a player, you hand over at least part of the authorship of that narrative to the player. This is not a bad thing: a well crafted interactive narrative is an immensely satisfying thing to play, arguably because of the role you’re taking in authoring the ongoing story. Valve are particularly good at this. However, it does mean that you can no longer claim that the resulting story has a single author, and here’s the crucial point: making a narrative interactive divides authorship duties between the original author and the player, fundamentally changing the way that it is experienced.

If we accept, then, that the essential defining characteristic of a book (e or otherwise) is the experience of reading a linear, authored text in the form into which it was painstakingly crafted by the original author, where does that leave us with expanding the ebook?

Firstly, it strikes me that at the very least, the capabilities of an iOS (or similar) device have great potential in being able to define the context in which that text is read. There are examples of books that have shipped or released in tandem with CDs. By listening to a custom soundtrack while you read the book, you’re getting a more immersive experience than reading the book alone, although that’s still the core act. Extra meaning and texture has extended the basic reading experience in a way that doesn’t interfere with the structure of the text and the authors intended meaning: preserving “bookness”.

Extending this train of thought, GPS data could be used to make certain portions of a text only visible in a specific spot, or kinds of spot (think: parks, bars, the top of a hill etc…) and I’m sure there’s many, many other ways a smart device can be used to enhance the context in which an ebook is read. This feels like a really exciting area to me.

Secondly, although I don’t really enjoy reading ebooks on an iPhone (more a personal foible than a fundamental flaw in the technology), I have been really enjoying playing through old (and not so old) Z-machine games in Frotz. In a nutshell, these are text-based adventures that you play by typing commands like “walk north”, “take lamp”, “kill troll” etc. Something about them feels ‘right’ on the iPhone in a way that ebook readers don’t; while you’re still reading a lot of (in a lot of cases, very well-written) text, the read / think / interact / read / … rhythm feels more suited to an interactive device, rather than the artificial simulation of dead-tree book rhythm you get with an ebook reader (why are we still simulating pages on a device whose form factor is nothing at all like a page in a book?). With a bit of thought to adapting the flow of text to better suit the nature of the platform on which it’s being delivered, I think some truly satisfying ebooks can be produced which stand up as interesting works in their own right, rather than clumsy copies of traditional books. Six To Start and Penguin Books did some groundbreaking work in this area on the We Tell Stories project in 2008.

Not to be left off the bandwagon. In no particular order:

Jon Hopkins – Insides
Richard Hawley – Truelove’s Gutter
British Sea Power – Man of Aran
Health – Get Color
Grammatics – Grammatics
Fuck Buttons – Tarot Sport
Moderat – Moderat
Tim Exile – Listening Tree
Mothertrucker – Dark Transmi55ions
Hudson Mohawke – Polyfolk Dance

In early 2008, Cadbury’s were launching a new TV advert and wanted a new online presence for their “Glass and a Half Full Productions” brand. This site would provide information about Cadbury’s and the adverts, and also house some fun interactive bits & bobs inspired by these adverts.

We pitched for and won two interactive activities. The first of these activities, and the one which I’ll talk about in this post was named ‘Tricked Out Trucks’. The brief was simple enough: we were to create a tool which would allow visitors to the site to customise an airport truck in 3D. The creator of the best design (as picked by a panel of luminaries) would win that truck for real, all pimped out and delivered to their door. Apparently, the client had come to this concept without ever having seen Den Ivanov & PARK Studio’s Brahma Bus in 2007, and were very surprised when we told them about it :)

We ended up differing from PARK Studio’s (pretty seminal) app in two ways. First, rather than allow freehand drawing, we assumed that most casual visitors to the site either wouldn’t have the artistic skills or inclination to draw an elaborate design, so we provided preset patterns which the user could customise to their liking and decals which they could transform and place freely. Second, we wanted to allow users to make modifications to the shape of the truck by adding body mods: spoilers, wheels and wing mirrors.

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Last summer, Mathmos asked us if we fancied doing something for the 45th birthday of their iconic Astro Lamp. We felt that a natural fit for this would be a screen saver that simulated the lava lamp.

From a coder’s perspective, this project had two interesting problems to solve. Firstly, we had to consider the physics at work inside a lava lamp in order to create a realistic simulation. Secondly, once you’ve figured out where your blobs are, their sizes and how they’re moving, you need to draw them in a satisfyingly blobby way.

In this first post, I’m going to talk about the physical model we created to simulate the motion of blobs in a lava lamp. You can read Part II here.
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I’m a big fan of the MondoGlobo podcasts, and there’s been a cracking two-part interview with Rudy Rucker recently in the Neofiles strand. The first time that I’ve had to do the podcast equivalent of skipping back a few pages in order to listen again to a particularly interesting bit. Top stuff!

Part One

Part Two