1 00:00:00,293 --> 00:00:02,956 (Kirschenbaum) Please welcome Ian Bogost. 2 00:00:02,956 --> 00:00:08,249 (applause) 3 00:00:08,249 --> 00:00:12,317 I'm gonna, do I have to pay extra to get the text I'm gonna use on my monitor? 4 00:00:12,317 --> 00:00:14,445 (laughter) 5 00:00:14,445 --> 00:00:17,174 Like and up-sell opportunity. 6 00:00:19,081 --> 00:00:22,957 I'm really happy to be here. We've been talking about, 7 00:00:22,957 --> 00:00:28,001 I've been talking to Matt and others about coming for about a year and 8 00:00:28,001 --> 00:00:32,410 now finding I'm here, so I can't, I don't know if, I made this a point that 9 00:00:32,410 --> 00:00:36,856 after a year's worth of anticipation, but I'm excited to talk to you today 10 00:00:36,856 --> 00:00:41,667 because this is a little bit of a different subject for me, 11 00:00:41,667 --> 00:00:45,431 I'm gonna show you some stuff that I haven't shown anybody, at least in public 12 00:00:45,431 --> 00:00:49,530 before but don't get your hopes up, it's not that exciting, but it's maybe 13 00:00:49,530 --> 00:00:53,160 maybe vaguely interesting, at least novel 14 00:00:53,160 --> 00:00:58,606 And I'm thinking through some questions that I'm gonna try to think through 15 00:00:58,606 --> 00:01:01,564 in front of you, as I was just invited to do, which means that 16 00:01:01,564 --> 00:01:05,399 this is gonna be a little more meandering than my typical talk, and hopefully 17 00:01:05,399 --> 00:01:09,182 that will make it even more entertaining. 18 00:01:09,662 --> 00:01:13,978 So, I wanna start by talking about Kickstarter, and Kickstarter if anyone 19 00:01:13,978 --> 00:01:20,597 does not know is a website crowd funding platform, where you can go and you can 20 00:01:20,597 --> 00:01:26,541 create a project. You want to macramé a set of owls for your family and 21 00:01:26,541 --> 00:01:29,414 you can post that with a video and put a bunch of details about 22 00:01:29,414 --> 00:01:33,832 what you're doing and why and you can ask for contributions and anyone 23 00:01:33,832 --> 00:01:38,594 in the world can contribute to your project and you have to set a goal 24 00:01:38,594 --> 00:01:44,213 a financial goal. If it reaches that goal in a month's time, then you receive the 25 00:01:44,213 --> 00:01:47,533 money minus a set of fees taken out by Kickstarter by Amazon Payments and 26 00:01:47,533 --> 00:01:52,538 after a 120 days of waiting and etc. etc. you'll get this pile of money, 27 00:01:52,538 --> 00:01:56,247 which you can then use to execute your macramé project or your video game 28 00:01:56,247 --> 00:02:00,249 or whatever it is that you're making. And as of just this week, 29 00:02:00,249 --> 00:02:04,561 this website is four years old, so it's been around for long enough 30 00:02:04,561 --> 00:02:08,438 that we have some sense of what it is and what it might be doing, 31 00:02:08,438 --> 00:02:11,542 what it might mean, if you want to put it that way. 32 00:02:13,818 --> 00:02:17,525 When I first ran into Kickstarter. When I first started using it-- 33 00:02:17,525 --> 00:02:24,672 I guess I should say, it was already into real serious money that was being raised. 34 00:02:24,672 --> 00:02:28,186 The first project on Kickstarter, I think asked for like twenty dollars 35 00:02:28,971 --> 00:02:32,637 to someone that wanted to make some sort of personal art project 36 00:02:32,637 --> 00:02:38,060 and they got thirty five dollar instead. But then strange things started happening. 37 00:02:38,060 --> 00:02:43,281 You know, people were asking for $2500 to make interesting machined metal 38 00:02:43,281 --> 00:02:51,190 pen cases and got, you know, $300,000. And so the stakes rose pretty quickly. 39 00:02:51,190 --> 00:02:56,356 This is already two years ago almost, that this Pen Type-A was funded. 40 00:02:56,356 --> 00:02:59,081 Note, now this thing is interesting, and it's interesting to me personally 41 00:02:59,081 --> 00:03:02,172 because I bought one although I didn't fund the Kickstarter. 42 00:03:02,172 --> 00:03:05,583 I found the Kickstarter just as it was ending and I was able to go to their 43 00:03:05,583 --> 00:03:10,021 website and buy one of these pens and what it is it's a stainless steel 44 00:03:10,021 --> 00:03:16,013 enclosure for this particular, highly sought after, pen, gel pen 45 00:03:16,013 --> 00:03:19,748 filler from Japan, which if you're into this sort of thing, which I wasn't 46 00:03:19,748 --> 00:03:24,248 I was just very curious. This is apparently you know, a difficult kind of insert to 47 00:03:24,248 --> 00:03:29,695 find a nice pen for. You know, and it raised a hundred times its goal. 48 00:03:29,695 --> 00:03:35,222 And I funded it, you know, immediately after I placed my order and then I waited 49 00:03:35,222 --> 00:03:40,666 a very long time. And by May of 2012, about a year ago, I received my 50 00:03:40,666 --> 00:03:45,829 Pen Type-A, which I was totally disenchanted with. I mean, it was 51 00:03:45,829 --> 00:03:50,147 it was, I had forgotten about it, for one thing. It was like a hundred dollars. 52 00:03:50,147 --> 00:03:54,475 So it was not an unsubstantial investment. You know, a hundred dollars a year later 53 00:03:54,475 --> 00:03:57,791 It was the opposite of found money-- lost money. 54 00:03:57,791 --> 00:03:59,897 (laughter) 55 00:03:59,897 --> 00:04:02,995 And it just was an unremarkable designed object, I mean it seemed 56 00:04:02,995 --> 00:04:07,415 like it would be cool, I mean, doesn't it look nice? Has a ruler on it, but 57 00:04:07,415 --> 00:04:11,375 it just kinda didn't work. It wasn't enjoyable to hold. 58 00:04:11,375 --> 00:04:14,724 Something about it was just sort of useless and pointless 59 00:04:14,724 --> 00:04:19,422 and it sat on my desk until, I mean I used it a couple times just to try it, but 60 00:04:19,422 --> 00:04:23,360 I never used it in earnest, as a pen. And it sat on my desk until last week 61 00:04:23,360 --> 00:04:29,508 when I discovered that I inadvertently had thrown it away while I was cleaning up 62 00:04:29,508 --> 00:04:34,361 So this shows you kind of how invested I ended up being in this Pen Type-A project 63 00:04:34,361 --> 00:04:38,931 Now, what's interesting about this example is that I think it's actually the norm, 64 00:04:38,931 --> 00:04:43,226 rather than the exception. It's just that we'd like to think that the norm is 65 00:04:43,226 --> 00:04:48,756 me realizing the brilliant and incredible design of an object like this. 66 00:04:48,756 --> 00:04:53,022 How providing a small amount of seed capital, to an aggregator that allows 67 00:04:53,022 --> 00:04:58,671 creators to realize their dreams and then, to take delivery of this miraculous object 68 00:04:58,671 --> 00:05:01,728 and incorporate it into my life with great glee, but 69 00:05:01,728 --> 00:05:06,610 something different seems to happen. Now, things got very very high stakes 70 00:05:06,610 --> 00:05:11,842 very quickly over the past couple years on Kickstarter. And we even saw 71 00:05:11,842 --> 00:05:18,542 products that were really ambitious in their nature, like the big Ouya, 72 00:05:18,542 --> 00:05:26,099 open-sourced Android-based game console. Not only exceed their funding targets 73 00:05:26,099 --> 00:05:29,985 enormously but also kind of used the Kickstarter platform as a way of 74 00:05:29,985 --> 00:05:33,456 announcing themselves, as a way of launching a much much bigger project 75 00:05:33,456 --> 00:05:38,361 so you know, this is an interesting hybrid product that not only got crowd funding 76 00:05:38,361 --> 00:05:42,832 an enormous amount of money, but also is backed by venture capital now 77 00:05:42,832 --> 00:05:47,520 they're actually gonna release this system all sorts of promises were made here, 78 00:05:47,520 --> 00:05:51,433 but one of the things that remains the case is that what makes this an 79 00:05:51,433 --> 00:05:55,274 appealing project is not so much the product, but 80 00:05:55,274 --> 00:06:01,385 something more than the product. The idea of an open, accessible television connected 81 00:06:01,385 --> 00:06:05,277 video game system. That's an idea that people like. You get your XBOX or you get 82 00:06:05,277 --> 00:06:11,256 your Playstation and you enjoy playing games on the TV, but there's a limitation 83 00:06:11,256 --> 00:06:15,090 as to what kind of games you can access or what kind of games people can deploy on 84 00:06:15,090 --> 00:06:18,722 those systems because of the way the platform owners got control content and 85 00:06:18,722 --> 00:06:22,652 in this promise of letting anyone make a game like you could make a game for your 86 00:06:22,652 --> 00:06:25,077 Android phone that you could play on your computer 87 00:06:25,077 --> 00:06:27,935 is enormously appealing to people. And of course you know, there's 88 00:06:27,935 --> 00:06:32,208 other kind of, what you might call, mass culture, traditional culture... 89 00:06:32,998 --> 00:06:37,969 Kickstarter successes. This is the most successful project, not in terms of 90 00:06:37,969 --> 00:06:41,995 capital raised, but in terms of number of total contributors, which is greater than 91 00:06:41,995 --> 00:06:48,013 90,000, like 91,000 backers for the Veronica Mars Movie Project. 92 00:06:48,013 --> 00:06:51,865 And you know, again-- what you see here is on the one hand, yeah sure, I mean-- 93 00:06:51,865 --> 00:06:56,189 You like Veronica Mars, the television show from [inaudible] 94 00:06:56,189 --> 00:06:58,441 Ten years ago? 95 00:06:58,441 --> 00:07:00,607 It'd be great to have a movie, right? I mean we've been talking about this 96 00:07:00,607 --> 00:07:03,574 for a long time and sure, if you know, there were a movie I would go see it. 97 00:07:03,574 --> 00:07:06,997 But at the same time, there's something more than just a promise of a movie 98 00:07:06,997 --> 00:07:12,975 there's also the idea of being a part of the Veronica Mars Movie Project, 99 00:07:12,975 --> 00:07:19,773 which this idea of becoming a patron of sorts, even a micro-patron allows. 100 00:07:19,773 --> 00:07:25,337 And then, you know, there have been weirder and less, I don't know-- 101 00:07:25,337 --> 00:07:29,560 promotionally successful endeavors, Amanda Palmer, the recording artist 102 00:07:29,560 --> 00:07:32,677 got a lot of flack for raising over a million dollars on Kickstarter, 103 00:07:32,677 --> 00:07:38,117 going on tour, then offering her fans the opportunity to perform at her shows 104 00:07:38,117 --> 00:07:42,649 for free, and you know, then she did a Ted Talk this year about it, so you know, 105 00:07:42,649 --> 00:07:45,989 so there's also this sense in which this is like a kind of publicity platform or 106 00:07:45,989 --> 00:07:49,845 kind of platform on which to get in trouble, to talk about things, 107 00:07:49,845 --> 00:07:55,352 to introduce ideas, to do something much greater than just raising money. 108 00:07:55,352 --> 00:08:01,197 And even when you do raise enormous amounts of money for ideas that may or 109 00:08:01,197 --> 00:08:05,898 may not be any good, but at least capture people's attention, then ten million dollars 110 00:08:05,898 --> 00:08:10,907 for this e-ink watch thing called Pebble got a tremendous amount of press 111 00:08:10,907 --> 00:08:17,164 when it first launched, and of course it raised all these contributions, and now 112 00:08:17,164 --> 00:08:22,520 here, I just pulled this off the internet today. So this was May 18th. 113 00:08:22,520 --> 00:08:26,668 That's about a year ago. And here we are waiting for the opportunity to get our 114 00:08:26,668 --> 00:08:31,570 Pebble watches, right? So there's an interesting disconnect between the 115 00:08:31,570 --> 00:08:34,505 real world and the Kickstarter world. 116 00:08:34,505 --> 00:08:37,200 Now, I want you to suspend your disbelief about this. 117 00:08:37,200 --> 00:08:40,595 Don't read between the lines, I'm not saying that this is a failure, that Pebble 118 00:08:40,595 --> 00:08:43,822 now owes us something, there are many who've levied these critiques 119 00:08:43,822 --> 00:08:48,047 against Kickstarter including some attempted lawsuits for projects that 120 00:08:48,047 --> 00:08:51,866 weren't realized, but just that there's something greater going on here than 121 00:08:51,866 --> 00:08:54,743 just the funding of a product, the pre-order of a product, 122 00:08:54,743 --> 00:08:59,396 the patronage to a particular artistic project or a design project. 123 00:08:59,396 --> 00:09:03,323 Here's another recent example that shows you kind of how weird 124 00:09:03,323 --> 00:09:11,249 that these projects can get. A mother on her daughter's behalf 125 00:09:11,249 --> 00:09:16,837 launched a Kickstarter project to send her daughter to a RPG camp over the summer 126 00:09:16,837 --> 00:09:20,623 she wanted to raise $800, and you know this is one of these things that just 127 00:09:20,623 --> 00:09:22,834 kind of latches on to the public imagination, right? You know, 128 00:09:22,834 --> 00:09:25,078 a little girl who wants to proto computer games and wants to 129 00:09:25,078 --> 00:09:27,738 go to a camp to do it, and there's a whole story about her brothers 130 00:09:27,738 --> 00:09:30,876 making fun of her and it got actually very strange, so one of the things 131 00:09:30,876 --> 00:09:35,032 you can do is offer these, there are these different reward tiers, you know 132 00:09:35,032 --> 00:09:37,727 you could contribute a dollar, ten dollars and you get different things, sometimes 133 00:09:37,727 --> 00:09:42,818 t-shirts, and one of the high level reward tiers here was like a hand-written apology 134 00:09:42,818 --> 00:09:45,966 from her brothers, actually kind of quite perverse interaction in their 135 00:09:45,966 --> 00:09:54,146 family dynamics, wasn't exactly comforting but anyway, Susan Wilson raised not $800, 136 00:09:54,146 --> 00:10:00,819 but $24,000 and then everyone started trying to dig into her past and figure out 137 00:10:00,819 --> 00:10:06,786 if there was something not above board going on and they accused her of being 138 00:10:06,786 --> 00:10:13,263 a millionaire and having, there was this photo of the mother with, what's his name? 139 00:10:13,263 --> 00:10:20,614 The billionaire, Warren Buffet. She reportedly had these start-ups 140 00:10:20,614 --> 00:10:23,811 and had all this money, and then there were a number of kind of 141 00:10:23,811 --> 00:10:30,036 anti-women's rights trolls who decided they would use this as a platform to 142 00:10:30,036 --> 00:10:35,464 talk about how you shouldn't criticize boys for programming. 143 00:10:35,464 --> 00:10:39,184 Whatever they had in mind to express. It's the internet and they're gonna 144 00:10:39,184 --> 00:10:45,149 express it. So, these scams were later revealed to be false or at least 145 00:10:45,149 --> 00:10:49,019 apparently false, you know, in the sense that she wasn't trying to dupe anyone 146 00:10:49,019 --> 00:10:53,126 she was out of work, she was donating all of the excess monies to stem 147 00:10:53,126 --> 00:10:55,073 education sources for girls, 148 00:10:55,073 --> 00:10:58,310 but none of that was clear when this Kickstarter was launched. 149 00:10:58,310 --> 00:11:01,130 So in retrospect, you can look back on it if you go research it today you'll see 150 00:11:01,130 --> 00:11:05,629 all of the kind of debriefing, right? Boing Boing has a good one. 151 00:11:05,629 --> 00:11:08,731 Explaining how everyone is insane, and here's exactly what it looked like, but 152 00:11:08,731 --> 00:11:12,518 when this first went off, it was not clear at all what was going on, it very well 153 00:11:12,518 --> 00:11:15,322 could have been someone trolling or someone doing publicity because 154 00:11:15,322 --> 00:11:19,846 those are activities that are supported by Kickstarter certainly. Now Kickstarter 155 00:11:19,846 --> 00:11:24,322 when they approve these projects, does a kind of very cursory look at them, they don't 156 00:11:24,322 --> 00:11:30,723 necessarily block projects from proceeding so long as they have a concrete outcome. 157 00:11:30,723 --> 00:11:35,417 So once again we have here, like this example of a Kickstarter project being 158 00:11:35,417 --> 00:11:39,773 something more than just the thing that it's raising money for. It's doing much more, 159 00:11:39,773 --> 00:11:44,081 in fact arguably, that part of the project is even bigger than the purported goal 160 00:11:44,081 --> 00:11:49,082 which is just sending a girl to camp. Now, these are old numbers from 2012, but 161 00:11:49,082 --> 00:11:53,121 when you look at the statistics on Kickstarter projects, you'll see that 162 00:11:53,121 --> 00:12:00,661 actually the ones that do succeed, are not in the minority, but by no means do 163 00:12:00,661 --> 00:12:03,544 all of these projects succeed, and it's interesting thinking about what success 164 00:12:03,544 --> 00:12:09,110 means. When you think about having a project succeed, all sorts of things 165 00:12:09,110 --> 00:12:13,174 may enter your mind. You know, it sold well, you realized its potential, 166 00:12:13,174 --> 00:12:16,917 that you completed it, but in this case what success means is that the 167 00:12:16,917 --> 00:12:21,520 Kickstarter was successful. So, you know, thirty days went by, the minimum amount 168 00:12:21,520 --> 00:12:25,672 of money that was requested was raised and sometimes much much more than that 169 00:12:25,672 --> 00:12:28,188 that's what these numbers track as success. 170 00:12:28,188 --> 00:12:32,443 Now there are other ways of looking at success as well. 171 00:12:32,443 --> 00:12:38,817 This is a CNN Money survey of ship-times for the top fifty Kickstarter projects 172 00:12:38,817 --> 00:12:42,785 and I can't remember what top means for them, I don't know if it means by money 173 00:12:42,785 --> 00:12:47,420 or by contributors, but we'll just take it at its word and say these seem to be 174 00:12:47,420 --> 00:12:53,145 some of the largest, we see the Pebble watch there at the bottom, and we see 175 00:12:53,145 --> 00:12:59,437 some of the other projects, we see a hand stylus, which is a pen for tablets. 176 00:12:59,437 --> 00:13:03,281 Now, some minority of them actually shipped on time. 177 00:13:03,281 --> 00:13:06,513 What does that mean, on time? Well, it means the people who created 178 00:13:06,513 --> 00:13:11,222 the project said, "hey, we're gonna get you these t-shirts in anticipation of those 179 00:13:11,222 --> 00:13:14,732 bumper stickers in anticipation of the concept art, which eventually we may 180 00:13:14,732 --> 00:13:18,154 put into a video game, which then we will give," right which is supposedly what 181 00:13:18,154 --> 00:13:23,061 you were funding is this video game. A vast majority of them were late and 182 00:13:23,061 --> 00:13:29,613 some of them were very very late indeed. You again see some of these are just 183 00:13:29,613 --> 00:13:34,578 maybe never gonna happen. The ZPM Espresso Machine, which I don't have a screenshot of 184 00:13:34,578 --> 00:13:39,551 is an interesting example in a sense that the Kickstarter success actually reduced 185 00:13:39,551 --> 00:13:43,590 its potential for success because the quantities they had to make 186 00:13:43,590 --> 00:13:48,595 were so enormous that they couldn't go about it in the kind of hand-built way 187 00:13:48,595 --> 00:13:52,876 they had planned and so in a lot of cases and in the case of the pen, the Type-A Pen 188 00:13:52,876 --> 00:13:57,037 exactly the same. If you want to do a small metal milling project you could 189 00:13:57,037 --> 00:14:00,793 maybe kind of make that work on a $2500 budget make a few of them, but when you're 190 00:14:00,793 --> 00:14:04,750 becoming a manufacturer then things are much more complicated. 191 00:14:04,750 --> 00:14:10,820 This is another personal example for me that I think kind of draws things together 192 00:14:10,820 --> 00:14:17,138 this is a clever idea, it's a little miniSD holder that you put in the 193 00:14:17,138 --> 00:14:22,863 SD card slot of your MacBook or your MacBook Air that can add up to 64GB 194 00:14:22,863 --> 00:14:25,790 of flash storage which you'd use as a hard disk and you could use 195 00:14:25,790 --> 00:14:30,004 for backups or whatever, I thought this was really great and I had had not only a 196 00:14:30,004 --> 00:14:33,573 hard drive failure, but also a time machine failure and I was 197 00:14:33,573 --> 00:14:37,632 quite worried about the state of my data at this moment when this started to arrive 198 00:14:37,632 --> 00:14:42,583 and so I bought one of these and again, here what I was thinking about was 199 00:14:42,583 --> 00:14:49,173 not really the product, so much as my own anxiety about my data and then, let's see 200 00:14:49,173 --> 00:14:53,099 it reached its goal on August 2 of 2012, sometime about a month ago, I finally 201 00:14:53,099 --> 00:14:58,793 got my mini drive and I got this new 11" MacBook Air in the meantime which 202 00:14:58,793 --> 00:15:02,518 doesn't have an SD card slot, so they're literally just sitting on my desk 203 00:15:02,518 --> 00:15:06,077 in their packaging, and like a year will go by and I'll probably throw them away 204 00:15:06,077 --> 00:15:09,463 like the pen or I'll give them away to somebody, right? So again, 205 00:15:09,463 --> 00:15:14,949 my participation in this project isn't something that I feel cheated from 206 00:15:14,949 --> 00:15:19,993 exactly, but it's something bigger, weirder than just me buying a product 207 00:15:19,993 --> 00:15:23,376 on a website or me funding somebody to do something that 208 00:15:23,376 --> 00:15:27,121 seems like it might be an exciting idea. Now, you know, many of these projects 209 00:15:27,121 --> 00:15:30,781 are successful, for various degrees of success, we can see here how Ouya is 210 00:15:30,781 --> 00:15:35,354 still on Amazon and it's about to ship and they've been sending out dev kits 211 00:15:35,354 --> 00:15:37,880 and I've got a dev kit, you know, this is like a going concern, 212 00:15:37,880 --> 00:15:42,202 that wasn't at all obvious back when the project launched but we can look at it 213 00:15:42,202 --> 00:15:45,974 in retrospect and say oh, well they managed to pull it off 214 00:15:45,974 --> 00:15:51,020 I don't think we can know whether they pulled it off because of, in spite of, 215 00:15:51,020 --> 00:15:55,448 irrespective of the Kickstarter campaign. But nevertheless it's an example of a 216 00:15:55,448 --> 00:15:57,728 Kickstarter project that's gonna become a reality. 217 00:15:57,769 --> 00:16:03,675 But the important thing to me is to recognize that this thing, the machine 218 00:16:03,675 --> 00:16:09,140 the product, is different, this is gonna sound really obvious when I say it, but 219 00:16:09,140 --> 00:16:12,646 bear with me here, this is different from this. Right? 220 00:16:12,646 --> 00:16:18,340 So when you go to this webpage, is bigger than this thing. Okay? 221 00:16:18,340 --> 00:16:22,813 When you buy this, and someone will go and buy it from Amazon or from GameStop 222 00:16:22,813 --> 00:16:27,438 or wherever they sell it, and they will have a completely different experience 223 00:16:27,438 --> 00:16:30,322 as well as a common experience, right, but a completely different experience 224 00:16:30,322 --> 00:16:36,697 than someone who got this, so when you buy Ouya by funding their Kickstarter, 225 00:16:36,697 --> 00:16:40,839 you're buying something different than when you buy Ouya when you go to the 226 00:16:40,839 --> 00:16:44,386 GameStop. What this says to me is that... 227 00:16:46,956 --> 00:16:50,533 the experience, the Kickstarter experience itself 228 00:16:50,533 --> 00:16:54,391 is worthy of consideration, and in fact, maybe the most interesting 229 00:16:54,391 --> 00:16:58,837 thing about Kickstarter as a platform is not the crowdfunding features, 230 00:16:58,837 --> 00:17:01,307 which is one of the things that's celebrated about it, not the idea that 231 00:17:01,307 --> 00:17:05,122 a bunch of people can get together and make something happen, we want an open 232 00:17:05,122 --> 00:17:09,377 an open source, television connectable Android-based game system, 233 00:17:09,377 --> 00:17:12,527 let's make it happen. That's kind of the rhetoric of the internet, right? 234 00:17:12,527 --> 00:17:15,089 Everybody gets together and then miracles happen and we all get what we want. 235 00:17:15,669 --> 00:17:20,216 No, the most interesting thing is that the people are participating in a kind of 236 00:17:20,216 --> 00:17:24,256 activity that they weren't participating in before, at least something is different 237 00:17:24,256 --> 00:17:26,696 about the way they were participating in that activity and the closest thing 238 00:17:26,696 --> 00:17:33,480 I can think of to compare to the Kickstarter experience is maybe QVC 239 00:17:33,480 --> 00:17:37,864 where, you know, you buy stuff, and you really are buying it at some level, 240 00:17:37,864 --> 00:17:42,834 you get it, it comes in the mail eventually maybe, but the experience that you're 241 00:17:42,834 --> 00:17:47,489 participating in is much larger and very different from walking into the store and 242 00:17:47,489 --> 00:17:53,177 buying whatever the Shania Twain best hits or here's another QVC example, 243 00:17:53,177 --> 00:18:00,312 A lot of the things we buy, we also don't intend to use as products, 244 00:18:00,312 --> 00:18:04,002 so I like this screenshot because not only does it have QVC, but also it has these 245 00:18:04,002 --> 00:18:08,860 excercise kits, right? You know, that you're gonna go out and excercise, 246 00:18:08,860 --> 00:18:12,424 actually, the vast majority of excercise gear and equipment and health and 247 00:18:12,424 --> 00:18:18,048 diet related stuff, you buy it in order that you can promise yourself something 248 00:18:18,048 --> 00:18:22,619 and then you use it once, or you get the Bowflex or you got the Ab ripper or 249 00:18:22,619 --> 00:18:27,223 whatever the latest gimmick is, and you have it and by buying it you got something 250 00:18:27,223 --> 00:18:30,695 Right? What you got is a sort of sense of yourself, about a promise to yourself 251 00:18:30,695 --> 00:18:34,453 an idea of what you might be, and that was real whether or not 252 00:18:34,453 --> 00:18:37,734 you did anything about it. And it's easy to say, well I mean, you're just 253 00:18:37,734 --> 00:18:41,826 buying random crap on QVC, but then you kind of go back and you look at this stuff 254 00:18:41,826 --> 00:18:45,706 and I mean, what's the difference between buying random crap on the internet and 255 00:18:45,706 --> 00:18:51,346 buying random crap on QVC, and you know, the big difference is one of class maybe, 256 00:18:51,346 --> 00:18:54,977 one of the different kinds of communities who participate in these activities, 257 00:18:54,977 --> 00:19:02,442 but I do think that the QVC viewer is more aware of their relationship to 258 00:19:02,442 --> 00:19:08,346 television sales than the Kickstarter backer is to their relationship to 259 00:19:08,346 --> 00:19:12,125 whatever it is that Kickstarter is doing. Right? They know what's going on. 260 00:19:12,125 --> 00:19:16,843 And we started to see this kind of bleed out into the Kickstarter campaigns 261 00:19:16,843 --> 00:19:21,660 themselves of all the discussion around them and you see this is from 262 00:19:21,660 --> 00:19:26,597 the Veronica Mars Kickstarter further down the page, and you know, it's got the 263 00:19:26,597 --> 00:19:32,824 kind of voice of the character here too, but these are the updates, 264 00:19:32,824 --> 00:19:36,955 part of the updates that were running on this site, we really wanted to do 265 00:19:36,955 --> 00:19:40,418 these things, we wanted to be the fastest Kickstarter project to reach a million dollars 266 00:19:40,418 --> 00:19:45,612 in funding, we wanted to have the largest number of backers. Why? 267 00:19:45,612 --> 00:19:49,401 What does this have to do with making movies? Well, it has nothing to do with me 268 00:19:49,401 --> 00:19:52,180 well, I suppose you could say with the more people backing your movie 269 00:19:52,180 --> 00:19:56,070 then the kind of the greater success you might have, but actually if we zoom out 270 00:19:56,070 --> 00:20:00,576 and you can read about this, the Kickstarter for Veronica Mars was 271 00:20:00,576 --> 00:20:04,893 less about funding the movie than it was about proving something about the 272 00:20:04,893 --> 00:20:09,434 hypothetical movie to the studio that was gonna do the really expensive work of 273 00:20:09,434 --> 00:20:12,584 marketing and distributing, right? Making a Veronica Mars film 274 00:20:12,584 --> 00:20:15,746 doesn't cost nothing, but it costs much less than making a successful 275 00:20:15,746 --> 00:20:19,524 Hollywood production does. And so, and whether or not this is apocryphal, 276 00:20:19,524 --> 00:20:22,751 we'll never know, but according to the film-makers, and they made this very 277 00:20:22,751 --> 00:20:27,433 clear in the Kickstarter by the way, the who is it-- Warner Brothers or... 278 00:20:27,436 --> 00:20:30,865 whatever the network is that owns this property, you can make a film 279 00:20:30,865 --> 00:20:35,191 talking about it as one of these cult classics, the fans want a film, etc. etc. 280 00:20:35,191 --> 00:20:38,317 you've got to prove to us that there's a market. Part of this is just like the 281 00:20:38,317 --> 00:20:41,389 Hollywood gimmick, you know, the executive made you go run through loops, 282 00:20:41,389 --> 00:20:46,322 just show me something. Make it blue. So then, this Kickstarter said 283 00:20:46,322 --> 00:20:49,237 you need to show us, you need to commit and then we'll be able to get this project 284 00:20:49,237 --> 00:20:52,495 green lit. Now my guess is that it was green lit already and that this was a 285 00:20:52,495 --> 00:20:57,417 marketing gimmick in the way of presenting the idea of participation because when you 286 00:20:57,417 --> 00:21:01,919 have a cult film or a cult TV series like this, what do the fans really want? 287 00:21:01,919 --> 00:21:05,425 Well they want to be a part of it and they want to feel as connected to it as possible. 288 00:21:05,425 --> 00:21:08,387 They go to conventions. In the case of Veronica Mars, they're not necessarily 289 00:21:08,387 --> 00:21:11,641 doing cosplay or fan-fiction, but I'm sure there's some of that 290 00:21:11,641 --> 00:21:16,766 out there you could find and so these selling points were less about the 291 00:21:16,766 --> 00:21:20,609 financial aspects of the project, especially since if they wanted to 292 00:21:20,609 --> 00:21:25,879 the stars and the producers could fund it themselves and they've got the resources 293 00:21:25,879 --> 00:21:30,550 to do it, it's rather about creating a kind of mythos, a sense that you're 294 00:21:30,550 --> 00:21:37,776 participating in this project. And they give you stickers, t-shirts, all sorts of 295 00:21:37,776 --> 00:21:41,184 other paraphernalia that you could only get if you back the Kickstarter 296 00:21:41,184 --> 00:21:46,001 and then they wouldn't be offered again. So, one way to think about Kickstarter is 297 00:21:46,001 --> 00:21:51,700 that it is a form of entertainment. In the way that QVC is a form of 298 00:21:51,700 --> 00:21:55,352 entertainment. Or if you don't like the word entertainment, it's a form of 299 00:21:55,352 --> 00:21:59,076 distraction, it's a kind of leisure activity in the same way that Facebook 300 00:21:59,076 --> 00:22:02,913 is a kind of leisure activity. Even though it's also a communication platform. 301 00:22:02,913 --> 00:22:05,638 Or the way that Twitter is a kind of leisure activity, even though it's also 302 00:22:05,638 --> 00:22:10,025 some kind of communication platform. And that you can sit there online 303 00:22:10,025 --> 00:22:13,175 like many of you might be doing right now and just sort of look at stuff, right? 304 00:22:13,175 --> 00:22:16,171 Oh there's these things happening, and I'm just kind of taking in the things 305 00:22:16,171 --> 00:22:18,687 that are going on and that's what happens when we watch television, when we flip 306 00:22:18,687 --> 00:22:23,770 through the channels and so when you have this kind of very competitive, interesting, 307 00:22:23,770 --> 00:22:28,016 nail-biting in some cases, experience of watching a Kickstarter play out, 308 00:22:28,016 --> 00:22:31,490 is it gonna make its funding targets, and then they add stretch goals, 309 00:22:31,490 --> 00:22:35,273 you know if we reach additional money then these new things that will unlock 310 00:22:35,273 --> 00:22:39,081 and everyone will benefit from them. Watching that process play out, 311 00:22:39,081 --> 00:22:44,318 is its own kind of entertainment, its own kind of experience. And this is something 312 00:22:44,318 --> 00:22:48,745 that is very difficult for us to understand. So just yesterday, or two days ago, 313 00:22:48,745 --> 00:22:54,658 a friend of mine in the game development community named Scott Jon Siegel posted a 314 00:22:54,658 --> 00:23:00,452 blog post about this new game Kickstarter called Road Redemption. 315 00:23:00,461 --> 00:23:03,531 I don't actually know anything about the game but Scott called it 316 00:23:03,540 --> 00:23:07,007 everything wrong with Kickstarter game development condensed into a single 317 00:23:07,007 --> 00:23:10,645 Kickstarter campaign and he went through and delineated all of the different things 318 00:23:10,662 --> 00:23:13,755 that he thought were troublesome and then he's right about all of them. 319 00:23:13,755 --> 00:23:16,800 It's things like the creators had said, we're gonna launch on all of these 320 00:23:16,800 --> 00:23:20,710 platforms simultaneously and we're a bunch of guys who maybe know 321 00:23:20,713 --> 00:23:23,597 how to make games, I don't know. We're not gonna tell you much about that. 322 00:23:23,597 --> 00:23:28,050 We want to raise $160,000 and we're gonna use $90,000 of that 323 00:23:28,050 --> 00:23:32,865 for salaries and there's nine of us. Okay, well how's that work out? I don't know 324 00:23:32,865 --> 00:23:39,328 but they don't provide any detail, so Scott went and he showed how all of the 325 00:23:39,328 --> 00:23:44,012 kind of risk and anxiety and even some of the design problems associated with games 326 00:23:44,012 --> 00:23:47,552 are kind of being reproduced in these Kickstarters which have now become 327 00:23:47,552 --> 00:23:52,722 like lottery tickets. Maybe if you have the right Kickstarter and you really 328 00:23:52,722 --> 00:23:56,854 manage it well, then you get a bunch more money than you asked for and it's unclear 329 00:23:56,854 --> 00:24:01,419 whether this will be the case, but these guys are only well, two-thirds of the way 330 00:24:01,419 --> 00:24:06,298 through and they already have half of their goal. So this is right, 331 00:24:06,298 --> 00:24:10,049 in some sense. Scott is right that maybe this is a stupid game, and maybe it's a 332 00:24:10,049 --> 00:24:14,879 terrible way of going about justifying your project to a public who will then 333 00:24:14,879 --> 00:24:19,152 have something like an investment in it, but that also doesn't matter maybe. 334 00:24:19,152 --> 00:24:23,724 And when I talk to people who back Kickstarters, a lot of the reason 335 00:24:23,724 --> 00:24:28,832 they do it is just, they just don't know. They just like it. It's like QVC, I dunno. 336 00:24:28,832 --> 00:24:33,491 I don't know why I'm buying these things. I wanted to have a connection with it. 337 00:24:33,491 --> 00:24:37,236 I wanted to have a moment. In some cases they know the creators. 338 00:24:37,236 --> 00:24:42,397 A lot of these projects are funded by trust networks. Oh, I'm familiar with their 339 00:24:42,397 --> 00:24:46,129 previous work. I don't have it in here, but if you think about the... 340 00:24:48,759 --> 00:24:52,534 Tim Schafer's Double Fine Adventurer project, which was I think the 341 00:24:52,534 --> 00:24:57,277 second highest grossing after Veronica Mars now, a lot of the reason to contribute 342 00:24:57,277 --> 00:25:02,676 to that has nothing to do with your desire to receive and or play the game that they 343 00:25:02,676 --> 00:25:07,997 are promising to make, but rather you remember playing Tim's adventure games 344 00:25:07,997 --> 00:25:10,834 for Lucas Arts and enjoyed those games and you kind of want to have a memory 345 00:25:10,834 --> 00:25:14,774 of that moment and if that costs you a dollar or five dollars or fifty dollars, 346 00:25:14,774 --> 00:25:20,135 okay. It was worth it. Now, I think some of this attitude is starting to be 347 00:25:20,135 --> 00:25:27,090 reincorporated into creators' sort of sense of what they are doing with their 348 00:25:27,090 --> 00:25:31,205 Kickstarter projects, and what I mean by that is that we've developed a little 349 00:25:31,205 --> 00:25:34,910 bit of self-awareness that something is greater than just the funding regime 350 00:25:34,910 --> 00:25:38,850 that's at work in these projects, this just launched today. Sissy Fight 2000. 351 00:25:38,850 --> 00:25:43,861 A common trope for these Kickstarter projects a re-release of an old game 352 00:25:43,861 --> 00:25:48,422 or movie or something that's being remade or revamped. In this case it was a kind of 353 00:25:48,422 --> 00:25:53,956 early, ahead of its time, multi-player game made by Eric Zimmerman and 354 00:25:53,956 --> 00:25:57,483 some other folks and it's been offline for some time and 355 00:25:57,483 --> 00:26:00,586 they wanna bring it back and they have a small goal that they're trying to reach 356 00:26:00,586 --> 00:26:03,679 and they want to release it out into the wild again 357 00:26:03,679 --> 00:26:07,781 and Naomi Clark who worked on this game originally is also part of the new Kickstarter 358 00:26:07,781 --> 00:26:12,212 when she announced it this morning. She had these like immediate 359 00:26:12,212 --> 00:26:17,102 clarifications, right? So, she tweeted the link and not a moment later. 360 00:26:17,721 --> 00:26:22,269 If anybody's interested, it's for a free playable online version and we're 361 00:26:22,269 --> 00:26:24,583 gonna release all the source code. So we're kind of already presenting 362 00:26:24,583 --> 00:26:29,296 evidence that this is not a scam. We're anticipating someone is like 363 00:26:29,296 --> 00:26:33,886 Oh my God, another one of these game remake projects! I've had enough of this. 364 00:26:33,886 --> 00:26:37,140 No no, there's something different there. So, I was already aware of that. 365 00:26:37,140 --> 00:26:41,184 And then, this isn't a profit-making Kickstarter for pre-ordering products 366 00:26:41,184 --> 00:26:45,348 we're trying to restore a lost game, so we're recasting the project 367 00:26:45,348 --> 00:26:52,417 as almost like an archival effort, right? Eric also [inaudible] effort. 368 00:26:52,417 --> 00:26:56,425 And this is really interesting because first it shows me that some of this 369 00:26:56,425 --> 00:26:59,337 self-awareness is already kind of bleeding through back into the computer space. 370 00:26:59,337 --> 00:27:04,413 But also it seems to provide evidence that there's some truth to the lottery ticket 371 00:27:04,413 --> 00:27:08,114 reality of Kickstarter. In other words, maybe the default assumption 372 00:27:08,114 --> 00:27:12,631 we have now is that when you make a Kickstarter, really what you want to do is 373 00:27:12,631 --> 00:27:15,733 win the lottery. You say, aw, only twenty thousand dollars. 374 00:27:15,733 --> 00:27:18,679 and then two million dollars comes your way and then yeah, you kind of 375 00:27:18,679 --> 00:27:21,726 do some minimal amount of work to make your game or whatever it is 376 00:27:21,726 --> 00:27:24,790 that you're making work, and then maybe you can just bank some of that money away. 377 00:27:24,790 --> 00:27:27,743 It's a way of taking advantage of the trend. I don't mean to sound 378 00:27:27,743 --> 00:27:31,340 cynical about it necessarily, it's just kind of how the world works these days 379 00:27:31,340 --> 00:27:34,467 right? You find a trend on the upswing and then you try to get your foot in the 380 00:27:34,467 --> 00:27:36,781 door and do something. I think a lot of people are going about 381 00:27:36,781 --> 00:27:41,879 their business that way. At least to the degree that now it seems necessary. 382 00:27:41,879 --> 00:27:46,947 Or at least recommended, or at least beneficial to hedge and say no, no, really 383 00:27:46,947 --> 00:27:50,327 I'm a goodie. I'm not trying to take advantage of you. I'm just doing this 384 00:27:50,327 --> 00:27:54,722 in order to strike it rich on Kickstarter. Now, the problem here, is that this is 385 00:27:54,722 --> 00:27:59,589 boring. Right? Like whenever you think about Sissy Fight, the moment 386 00:27:59,589 --> 00:28:04,355 oh, ok. You're just doing an archival thing? Okay. That's cool, good for you. 387 00:28:04,355 --> 00:28:09,202 It seems like a worthwhile project. I guess I'll see ya around. Right? 388 00:28:09,202 --> 00:28:12,609 I mean, it's just not the kind of thing that makes you as excited as a 389 00:28:12,609 --> 00:28:15,705 project that you can experience as entertainment, 390 00:28:15,705 --> 00:28:18,520 but the weird thing is that this is kind of exactly what Kickstarter was 391 00:28:18,520 --> 00:28:23,246 made for actually. Was allowing people to get things done in a kind of modest way 392 00:28:23,246 --> 00:28:27,120 that they wouldn't have been able to do otherwise. Jason Rohrer made a game 393 00:28:27,120 --> 00:28:30,822 a few years ago for the NintendoDS called Diamond Trust of London and he had 394 00:28:30,822 --> 00:28:34,924 a very complex and troubled relationship with a series of publishers trying to get it 395 00:28:34,924 --> 00:28:38,756 out on that platform and without going into enormous detail, there's a grave 396 00:28:38,756 --> 00:28:42,971 complexity to publishing a game on a platform like the Nintendo DS 397 00:28:42,971 --> 00:28:46,470 because you can't just do it yourself. You've got to meet Nintendo's requirements 398 00:28:46,470 --> 00:28:49,828 you've got to order a certain number of units. They've got to do all the manufacture 399 00:28:49,828 --> 00:28:55,442 it's very complicated. So, Jason hadn't released this game, but he had it made 400 00:28:55,442 --> 00:28:57,881 and it was made specifically for the DS and it didn't make sense to just 401 00:28:57,881 --> 00:29:02,437 release it on the PC and so he made a Kickstarter and he calculated and 402 00:29:02,437 --> 00:29:06,515 Jason being the kind of very intricate mathematical mind that he is, 403 00:29:06,515 --> 00:29:11,634 he did a budget. He had everything laid out in enormous detail. Shipping and the 404 00:29:11,634 --> 00:29:16,017 manufacture, the cartridges. All he was looking to do was to get this game out 405 00:29:16,017 --> 00:29:19,717 to people who wanted to buy it. He made some special editions and so forth. 406 00:29:19,717 --> 00:29:22,391 This is kind of a perfect Kickstarter, right? He asked for, I mean, look: 407 00:29:22,391 --> 00:29:27,463 $78,715, right? He knew exactly what he wanted. He got that and a little bit more 408 00:29:27,463 --> 00:29:33,527 you could say is gravy and maybe he'll, he already lives on a shoestring budget 409 00:29:33,560 --> 00:29:36,492 so who cares about contributing a little extra to Jason Rohrer? 410 00:29:36,492 --> 00:29:39,341 It's not like he raised two million dollars for a game he'd already made. 411 00:29:39,341 --> 00:29:43,316 Again, this is kind of a perfect Kickstarter, just like the Sissy Fight 412 00:29:43,316 --> 00:29:47,190 one is. At the same time, it doesn't provide us with that same experience. 413 00:29:47,190 --> 00:29:51,119 So we have this kind of weird situation which is a cognitive dissonance between 414 00:29:51,119 --> 00:29:55,394 the way that Kickstarter seems to want to work. The thing that it 415 00:29:55,394 --> 00:29:59,188 thinks it's doing. Or the thing that we think it's doing. And the thing that it 416 00:29:59,188 --> 00:30:02,973 really does best. There's a space or a gap between them and Kickstarter 417 00:30:02,973 --> 00:30:07,348 has really not been very helpful at helping us think through this with them. 418 00:30:07,348 --> 00:30:11,641 This is one of the founders Kickstarter Yancy Strick(ler) talking to FastComany 419 00:30:11,641 --> 00:30:17,495 I think earlier this year. And the context for this quote. It was a story about these 420 00:30:17,495 --> 00:30:20,494 big budget Kickstarters like the Veronica Mars thing. 421 00:30:20,494 --> 00:30:24,018 "I would never want to scare the girl who wants to do a $500 lithography project 422 00:30:24,018 --> 00:30:28,270 'cause that's why we started this thing. We think we have a moral obligation to her." 423 00:30:28,270 --> 00:30:33,880 And, you know. I mean, that sounds good, but then the projects that are making 424 00:30:33,880 --> 00:30:36,865 the most money and of course they take a cut, not to mention the most that are 425 00:30:36,865 --> 00:30:39,750 getting the most attention are in fact, exactly the opposite 426 00:30:39,750 --> 00:30:42,783 of this kind of project. So, I mean you might have a moral obligation 427 00:30:42,783 --> 00:30:46,346 to someone which you can fulfill. I guess that could be the meaning of this quote, 428 00:30:46,346 --> 00:30:49,714 we have a moral obligation and really my moral obligation is telling you, 429 00:30:49,714 --> 00:30:52,731 the press, that I have a moral obligation and now we're done with that. 430 00:30:54,121 --> 00:30:57,739 And again, I don't mean to be cynical, I just mean to point out that the rhetoric 431 00:30:57,739 --> 00:31:01,385 of this kind of conversation, it does not match the reality of what takes place 432 00:31:01,385 --> 00:31:04,335 on the site and at the same time when we look at projects that are 433 00:31:04,335 --> 00:31:09,426 effectively a $500 lithography project, which Diamond Trust of London isn't 434 00:31:09,426 --> 00:31:12,819 a $500 project, but it's essentially that. None of this money is going into 435 00:31:12,819 --> 00:31:16,442 anybody's pockets except all of these distributors and manufacturers. 436 00:31:16,442 --> 00:31:19,571 It's just a way to get something in the world that wouldn't be possible otherwise 437 00:31:19,571 --> 00:31:22,445 that's kind of exactly this kind of project. But at the same time, 438 00:31:22,445 --> 00:31:27,729 that's kind of not where the site is the most successful. So, thinking about this, 439 00:31:27,729 --> 00:31:31,690 I've realized, well maybe this isn't unique to Kickstarter at all. 440 00:31:31,690 --> 00:31:35,193 Maybe it's just happening the most on Kickstarter, maybe Kickstarter is a signal 441 00:31:35,193 --> 00:31:39,410 for other kinds of activities like this. And indeed, if you look around 442 00:31:39,410 --> 00:31:44,796 you'll see all sorts of this kind of Kickstarter-like pre-product 443 00:31:44,796 --> 00:31:51,070 entertainment content. This is a game that's currently being produced and 444 00:31:51,070 --> 00:31:56,929 they've raised a million dollars for it and the game may or may not ever 445 00:31:56,929 --> 00:32:02,520 exist, but it's a kind of activity that you can participate in whether or not 446 00:32:02,520 --> 00:32:06,100 you participate in the game. This is off of Kickstarter and there's many other 447 00:32:06,100 --> 00:32:09,534 crowd-sourcing venues too. Or even just do pre-sales and if you build enough 448 00:32:09,534 --> 00:32:13,598 sort of momentum for yourself, then that seems to work. The best example of this is 449 00:32:13,598 --> 00:32:16,817 probably Minecraft, which was just a... I remember when I first heard about 450 00:32:16,817 --> 00:32:19,234 Minecraft and I tried it, and I was like, "this isn't going anywhere," and now 451 00:32:19,234 --> 00:32:23,916 they make hundreds of millions of dollars a year on Minecraft by pre-selling it and 452 00:32:23,916 --> 00:32:26,967 building, so, you know, there's an idea that this has worked in the past, 453 00:32:26,967 --> 00:32:30,386 so maybe it'll work for me, but the mistake is that that's gonna be the 454 00:32:30,386 --> 00:32:34,357 lottery win, like one in a million of these will succeed at that scale and 455 00:32:34,357 --> 00:32:37,174 what the rest of them are really providing is this kind of experience, kind of 456 00:32:37,174 --> 00:32:42,631 entertainment experience. Or even just like Steam, this is just one of the many 457 00:32:42,631 --> 00:32:48,351 sites that tracks price changes on Steam and other digital download services. 458 00:32:48,351 --> 00:32:52,515 And you can see like 50-75% off these games on Steam so what most people do 459 00:32:52,515 --> 00:32:55,958 when they buy games on Steam is they'll go and they'll wait and 460 00:32:55,958 --> 00:32:58,500 a new game will come out, okay, I'll wait until it goes on sale, and it goes on sale 461 00:32:58,500 --> 00:33:02,931 for like 70% off, costs a couple dollars now, and you buy the game and you 462 00:33:02,931 --> 00:33:06,957 end up with this enormous Steam library and you don't play any of the games. 463 00:33:06,957 --> 00:33:10,093 And you know that's kind of okay. Like how many books on my shelf 464 00:33:10,093 --> 00:33:13,929 have I not read? More than I'm willing to admit. I know I buy them because 465 00:33:13,929 --> 00:33:17,470 I want them in my life or I really do intend to read them, or I want to be 466 00:33:17,470 --> 00:33:21,170 the person who will have read them. You know, and it's okay. 467 00:33:21,170 --> 00:33:24,197 It's not a problem, you know, they say something about me, I can display them, 468 00:33:24,197 --> 00:33:27,205 you know, Steam's library is a little bit like a bookshelf in that regard, 469 00:33:27,205 --> 00:33:31,026 you can't necessarily share it as well, but it's a place where you store 470 00:33:31,026 --> 00:33:35,259 the stuff that might be important to you. You don't know yet, because you haven't 471 00:33:35,259 --> 00:33:40,422 played any of them. So from the creator's perspective, what would we rather have? 472 00:33:40,422 --> 00:33:44,336 Would you rather sell fewer of your games to more people who will play them, 473 00:33:44,336 --> 00:33:47,806 or your films or whatever, or sell more of them to people who, 474 00:33:47,806 --> 00:33:49,816 they probably won't play or watch them, 475 00:33:49,816 --> 00:33:51,788 but maybe they wouldn't have done so anyway. 476 00:33:52,318 --> 00:33:57,280 Maybe a kind of honesty in this, at some perverse level, but no matter the case, 477 00:33:57,280 --> 00:34:00,765 the point is that this kind of activity is taking place more and more. 478 00:34:00,765 --> 00:34:03,894 And one of the reasons it's taking place more and more is that anything that we 479 00:34:03,894 --> 00:34:10,195 get digitally is cheap if not nearly free. What I mean is not necessarily that it is 480 00:34:10,195 --> 00:34:14,009 free to make or free to create or manufacture or distribute, 481 00:34:14,009 --> 00:34:18,104 but the digital version of it, the idea of it, the distribution in the case of a 482 00:34:18,104 --> 00:34:23,399 Steam game or the rendering of the Kickstarter page-- that is essentially 483 00:34:23,399 --> 00:34:26,086 essentially free. In fact, you can go watch the Kickstarter campaign without 484 00:34:26,086 --> 00:34:28,590 paying a cent. So it's like free entertainment, like television. 485 00:34:30,660 --> 00:34:36,649 Liz Losh has this argument in her work on digital rhetoric about the kind of public 486 00:34:36,649 --> 00:34:40,787 function of different digital projects and this has been really important to me 487 00:34:40,787 --> 00:34:43,631 over the years because it's exactly the opposite of what I was doing for so long 488 00:34:43,631 --> 00:34:48,381 and I had to face the harsh reality of her kind of critique of some of my ideas of 489 00:34:48,381 --> 00:34:51,883 what digital rhetoric meant or how it worked and the example I always use 490 00:34:51,883 --> 00:34:56,430 to describe this is a game we made at my studio a number of years ago called 491 00:34:56,430 --> 00:35:00,053 Fat World about the politics of nutrition very complicated simulation game 492 00:35:00,053 --> 00:35:06,809 funded by the ITVS and distributed as this kind of documentary game about the 493 00:35:06,809 --> 00:35:14,515 inner relation between food politics and health. And this was a miserable failure 494 00:35:14,515 --> 00:35:17,157 at all sorts of levels, which I'm not going to talk about, but 495 00:35:17,157 --> 00:35:21,664 we can talk about it later if you want. But it had a really strong argument. 496 00:35:21,664 --> 00:35:25,349 Procedural argument that connected some of the dynamics of politics and 497 00:35:25,349 --> 00:35:31,662 corporate interest to general health in America, and if you compare this 498 00:35:31,662 --> 00:35:35,543 example of a procedural argument with this other kind of digital argument, the kind that 499 00:35:35,543 --> 00:35:38,609 Liz talks about, this is the other one: 500 00:35:38,609 --> 00:35:41,926 The White House's Apps for Healthy Kids Contest. You can see the difference 501 00:35:41,926 --> 00:35:46,830 immediately. What this is is a contest the White House put on for people to make apps 502 00:35:46,830 --> 00:35:52,225 about exactly the same topic, about nutrition and obesity and that's it. 503 00:35:52,225 --> 00:35:56,064 And they'll give away some money and this is one of the winners, 504 00:35:56,064 --> 00:36:01,698 which proportedly allows children to become empowered by choosing between 505 00:36:01,698 --> 00:36:04,910 carrots and cake. You know, the kind of standard nonsense to be seen with 506 00:36:04,910 --> 00:36:10,456 entertainment. So the thing about the Apps for Healthy Kids Project is that from a 507 00:36:10,456 --> 00:36:15,586 rhetorical perspective, it didn't really have to do anything other than exist. 508 00:36:15,586 --> 00:36:18,649 And so the White House in particular, the [inaudible], it's got these kind of 509 00:36:18,649 --> 00:36:23,916 big form fields, and happy web 2.0 looking stuff on the internet it says, 510 00:36:23,916 --> 00:36:28,044 we're tech savvy. It allows the White House to communicate a sense of 511 00:36:28,044 --> 00:36:33,331 engagement with current trends in, not necessarily crowd sourcing in this case, 512 00:36:33,331 --> 00:36:36,838 but in contests, and like the X Prize and so forth. Makes them look hip 513 00:36:36,838 --> 00:36:40,461 whether or not any of the products that are created for it are any good, 514 00:36:40,461 --> 00:36:43,257 it doesn't matter. In fact, it's maybe better if they're not any good because 515 00:36:43,257 --> 00:36:46,969 if they were it would just detract from the real rhetorical project, which is 516 00:36:46,969 --> 00:36:52,695 making the administration appear a certain way. Now, so Liz Losh's argument about this 517 00:36:52,695 --> 00:36:57,175 is that this is a kind of digital rhetoric this way of making arguments public. 518 00:36:57,175 --> 00:37:02,076 You know, when you say we're investing in a video game to train soldiers about 519 00:37:02,076 --> 00:37:05,916 cultural differences in the Middle East, you don't even have to make the game. 520 00:37:05,916 --> 00:37:09,675 It doesn't matter if anybody plays the game, but you've told a story 521 00:37:09,675 --> 00:37:13,798 about what you're doing or what you could do with a piece of digital media, 522 00:37:13,798 --> 00:37:17,210 which is itself kind of the result. So, this has been happening 523 00:37:17,210 --> 00:37:22,770 for a while now, and I kind of realized now that it's a part of everything. 524 00:37:22,770 --> 00:37:27,439 And here I'm gonna shift gears a little bit, but I promise it'll come back around. 525 00:37:27,439 --> 00:37:30,783 So, I think a lot about computer platforms and I've done research on computer 526 00:37:30,783 --> 00:37:33,267 platforms, I'm interested in the history of computer platforms and I've got this 527 00:37:33,267 --> 00:37:36,706 series of books called platform studies, where people can write about computer 528 00:37:36,706 --> 00:37:41,743 platforms, so when I saw a project like the Ouya, it really piqued my interest 529 00:37:41,743 --> 00:37:45,023 not just in the perspective of 'what does this tell us about Kickstarter,' but 530 00:37:45,023 --> 00:37:49,417 What does this tell us about the creation and development of computer platforms 531 00:37:49,417 --> 00:37:56,272 more broadly speaking. It made me realize that actually, this trend of using a platform 532 00:37:56,272 --> 00:38:01,006 development project as a way of talking about or performing a set of identities 533 00:38:01,006 --> 00:38:04,821 and practices that are bigger than what we might do with the system. 534 00:38:04,821 --> 00:38:08,841 This is actually not new at all, in fact we've seen this happening long before 535 00:38:08,883 --> 00:38:15,329 Kickstarter with many of these hardware prototyping platforms like Arduino. 536 00:38:15,329 --> 00:38:20,103 So I started taking a deeper look into these systems as a part of some 537 00:38:20,103 --> 00:38:24,806 research that we're doing at Georgia Tech in conjunction with the Intel Science and 538 00:38:24,806 --> 00:38:28,527 Technology Center for Social Computing. 539 00:38:28,527 --> 00:38:32,623 So over the past few-- I'll come back to Arduino-- the Kickstarter-like example 540 00:38:32,623 --> 00:38:37,266 from the past year or so, is this small- scale computer called Raspberry Pi. 541 00:38:37,266 --> 00:38:41,361 And the interesting thing about Raspberry Pi is, well there's lots of interesting things 542 00:38:41,361 --> 00:38:46,022 but to me the interesting thing is that it's really just a bare bones Linux system 543 00:38:46,022 --> 00:38:48,974 that you couldn't buy and you couldn't buy it because they couldn't manufacture it 544 00:38:48,974 --> 00:38:51,808 quickly enough because they didn't anticipate demand, and so 545 00:38:51,808 --> 00:38:56,623 right before Christmas, this broke out of the kind of populous community and 546 00:38:56,623 --> 00:39:00,818 hacker community and kind of "maker" community into the general population 547 00:39:00,818 --> 00:39:03,609 a little bit. In fact I had what my wife was asking me and about half of 548 00:39:03,609 --> 00:39:08,268 friends of hers had heard about it, and so what the Raspberry Pi became 549 00:39:08,268 --> 00:39:13,152 was the kind of Tickle Me Elmo of last year and this is the thing you want but 550 00:39:13,152 --> 00:39:17,093 can't get and the reason you want it is not really even because you know 551 00:39:17,093 --> 00:39:20,745 what it is, right? I mean, what is that for any random person? 552 00:39:20,745 --> 00:39:24,005 It looks computery, but what does it do? Who knows? Just like you don't know 553 00:39:24,005 --> 00:39:25,876 what the Tickle Me Elmo is. 554 00:39:25,876 --> 00:39:27,487 (laughter) 555 00:39:27,487 --> 00:39:29,149 Or why you would want it anyway. I guess I want it because 556 00:39:29,149 --> 00:39:32,878 it's an Elmo, right? So, you know, these things kind of overtake the reality 557 00:39:32,878 --> 00:39:36,519 and they become bigger than what we really were participating in when we were 558 00:39:36,519 --> 00:39:41,957 participating in the Raspberry Pi craze was the idea that we might be the kind of 559 00:39:41,957 --> 00:39:46,311 individual or family or whatever for whom this would be an important 560 00:39:46,311 --> 00:39:48,860 part of our lives, right? This is something... or, just like when you 561 00:39:48,860 --> 00:39:53,892 buy the Tickle Me Elmo, what you're really doing is saying something about yourself 562 00:39:53,892 --> 00:39:57,493 as a parent, right? This is what I've done to get you this Christmas present 563 00:39:57,493 --> 00:40:00,968 that you wanted. Now, turns out there are examples of these kinds of hardware 564 00:40:00,968 --> 00:40:05,805 development projects on Kickstarter itself. This is one called Twine, which is 565 00:40:05,805 --> 00:40:10,846 a so called "internet of things" system that allows you, it has sensors built in, 566 00:40:10,846 --> 00:40:14,071 it connects to a wifi network, and it can provide signaling you can use to send 567 00:40:14,071 --> 00:40:18,268 text messages or other things. I'll come back and talk about this in more detail. 568 00:40:18,268 --> 00:40:20,941 You can see that they were actually successful in their Kickstarter. 569 00:40:20,941 --> 00:40:26,695 And here's another one called blink(1), which is a light that you plug into your 570 00:40:26,695 --> 00:40:31,443 USB port and it can change colors and you can program it to do different things. 571 00:40:31,443 --> 00:40:37,535 Now, the guy who is behind Thing M actually, also backs Kickstarters, 572 00:40:37,535 --> 00:40:40,293 and I talked to him when I first started researching this idea of what 573 00:40:40,293 --> 00:40:45,020 Kickstarters are and even before he launched his project, he was very aware 574 00:40:45,020 --> 00:40:49,806 of this dynamic and said, you know, "I back projects I want to see exist, 575 00:40:49,806 --> 00:40:54,033 even if I never get anything back in return." And so I think he had 576 00:40:54,033 --> 00:40:58,187 the sense, and this is kind of a savvy business sense to have, that maybe 577 00:40:58,187 --> 00:41:01,141 what I want to do is present an idea that's simple and compelling enough 578 00:41:01,141 --> 00:41:05,663 that people want the idea of it, whether or not they want the product, right? 579 00:41:06,693 --> 00:41:11,550 He also told me that even if he doesn't need it, or even if it's too expensive, 580 00:41:11,550 --> 00:41:15,227 or even if it's just, you know, there's too much stuff in my world already, 581 00:41:15,227 --> 00:41:18,944 I don't need another gadget, maybe I'll back it just because this is a thing that 582 00:41:18,944 --> 00:41:22,152 I want to endorse, like clicking the 'like' button, right? But you can do it 583 00:41:22,152 --> 00:41:27,928 with your wallet. So, thinking about these kinds of dynamics with Kickstarter, with 584 00:41:27,928 --> 00:41:30,391 this kind of idea of participating in the entertainment or leisure 585 00:41:30,391 --> 00:41:35,025 of the idea of things, one of my PhD students, Tom Jenkins and I started 586 00:41:35,025 --> 00:41:39,032 taking a look at as many of these hardware prototyping platforms like Arduino and 587 00:41:39,032 --> 00:41:45,201 Raspberry Pi as we could get our hands on. And we tried to look at the functions. 588 00:41:45,201 --> 00:41:49,627 The stated functions. The purposes to which these would be put and we 589 00:41:49,627 --> 00:41:55,293 found some patterns, not surprisingly. Many are educational apparatuses, or 590 00:41:55,293 --> 00:41:59,713 they aspire to teach students basic electronics skills, and there's some 591 00:41:59,713 --> 00:42:02,990 argument that all of them are like this, all of them are kind of educational 592 00:42:02,990 --> 00:42:06,590 platforms, but some of these systems have framed themselves explicitly. 593 00:42:06,590 --> 00:42:10,472 This is the Propeller Board, which is, you know, explicitly talks about being 594 00:42:10,472 --> 00:42:14,068 conceived to educate users on the uses of a particular pattern of a 595 00:42:14,068 --> 00:42:19,731 microprocessor, right? The Raspberry Pi is another example. It's creators see 596 00:42:19,731 --> 00:42:24,541 it as an educational apparatus and describe it as this tiny, cheap, 597 00:42:24,541 --> 00:42:28,481 computer for kids, about $35 to buy one, and in fact, they have a kind of back-story 598 00:42:28,481 --> 00:42:33,399 about students at the University of Cambridge who arrived in the 1990s 599 00:42:33,399 --> 00:42:37,996 and exhibited more of the traits of low- level hobbyist programmers than those 600 00:42:37,996 --> 00:42:42,123 who arrived a decade later and they're trying to recuperate some of that kind of 601 00:42:42,123 --> 00:42:45,477 natural inborn capacity with, not necessarily with electronics, but just 602 00:42:45,477 --> 00:42:50,477 even with programming or being able to operate a machine like a computer on a 603 00:42:50,477 --> 00:42:55,451 lower level, so you know, education is certainly one of these goals. 604 00:42:55,451 --> 00:42:59,638 Other platforms seem to be intended as kind of toys, as recreational apparatuses, 605 00:42:59,638 --> 00:43:04,707 as hobbies, and it's sometimes difficult to separate the toy use or the fun use 606 00:43:04,707 --> 00:43:08,822 from the educational use, it's that kind of chocolate covered broccoli business. 607 00:43:08,822 --> 00:43:13,582 So this is littleBits, which is really meant for play, but it's also 608 00:43:13,582 --> 00:43:17,151 an educational electronics system, you can connect these different components together 609 00:43:17,151 --> 00:43:23,433 This is called the MaKey MaKey, which is essentially a kind of fun electronic 610 00:43:23,433 --> 00:43:28,937 interface creator where you can wire it up with, you know, bananas or like Play-Doh 611 00:43:28,937 --> 00:43:33,289 and paper to control a video game. So, you know, it tries to make 612 00:43:33,289 --> 00:43:40,292 experimentation interesting and fun and rewarding. And another use is 613 00:43:40,292 --> 00:43:43,891 art and design and certainly, a lot of these platforms were conceived as a 614 00:43:43,891 --> 00:43:48,677 way for artists and designers who don't have a deep electrical engineering 615 00:43:48,677 --> 00:43:52,961 or computer science background to make things, especially physical hardware 616 00:43:52,961 --> 00:43:57,816 apparatuses with computers. It starts with the wiring system, which was an open-source 617 00:43:57,816 --> 00:44:01,776 electronics prototyping kit that was influenced by the processing software 618 00:44:01,776 --> 00:44:04,876 environments, you could kind of do the same creative coding with hardware 619 00:44:04,876 --> 00:44:09,824 you could do with visual design and processing, which had been itself 620 00:44:09,824 --> 00:44:13,193 influenced by John Maeda's Design by Numbers project, so this idea of 621 00:44:13,193 --> 00:44:19,765 [inaudible] creativity. And you know, Arduino and its related forms and shields 622 00:44:19,765 --> 00:44:24,023 and all of the extensions to it also rise out of the wiring project, 623 00:44:24,023 --> 00:44:30,250 from 2000 onwards and these things are emerging along with new programs that 624 00:44:30,250 --> 00:44:33,780 inner-mesh art and culture at universities at NYU, at USC, 625 00:44:33,780 --> 00:44:38,259 at Carnegie Mellon, at Georgia Tech and other institutions. And these things found 626 00:44:38,259 --> 00:44:41,135 homes very quickly in these programs. It's almost like running a textbook. 627 00:44:41,135 --> 00:44:45,857 Nobody reads it except you get in the course and to some extent these devices 628 00:44:45,857 --> 00:44:51,779 have served that niche. And another common usage for these systems is monitoring. 629 00:44:51,779 --> 00:44:56,041 Systems that intend to provide event notification for different conditions. 630 00:44:56,041 --> 00:45:00,158 Here we can return to the Twine. One of the example uses of this device... 631 00:45:00,158 --> 00:45:04,439 This is from the website, kind of from their marketing, you know... 632 00:45:04,439 --> 00:45:08,323 if the temperature is over 27 degrees, and the Twine is facing up then send a 633 00:45:08,323 --> 00:45:11,328 message to Eric that John is at the lake, and this is a ridiculous example, but 634 00:45:11,328 --> 00:45:14,349 it gives you a sense of what you could do with it as a temperature sensor 635 00:45:14,349 --> 00:45:17,660 and a moisture sensor, so, you know, if your basement is going to flood, 636 00:45:17,660 --> 00:45:21,311 you could put the moisture sensor down there and it would send you a text message. 637 00:45:21,311 --> 00:45:27,422 The blink(1), it kind of has the same features, right? A notification from Skype 638 00:45:27,422 --> 00:45:31,823 or something like that, so all of these functions are interesting, but, but... 639 00:45:31,823 --> 00:45:36,633 if you kind of back up and think about it, all of these devices sort of suffer... 640 00:45:36,633 --> 00:45:41,210 or benefit, depending on your perspective from the same issues that Kickstarter does. 641 00:45:41,210 --> 00:45:44,027 In a sense that what does one really-- are you really gonna do this with your 642 00:45:44,027 --> 00:45:47,032 Twine, you spend like 150 bucks on this thing, you throw it down in your basement 643 00:45:47,032 --> 00:45:50,682 with the moisture sensor and you kind of forget about it? Is this a use that 644 00:45:50,682 --> 00:45:54,942 corresponds with the real world, or just with people who like the idea of using 645 00:45:54,942 --> 00:45:58,325 these hardware tinkering platforms? And same for the blink(1) or even for 646 00:45:58,325 --> 00:46:02,553 the Arduino. In Raspberry Pi, you can see all the people talking about getting one 647 00:46:02,553 --> 00:46:08,405 I already used that example, and in some sense if we have to draw one thread 648 00:46:08,405 --> 00:46:13,087 all the way through all these systems, one commonality, it's a kind of vagueness that 649 00:46:13,087 --> 00:46:18,305 a general purpose computer has a clear set of possible uses: for communication, 650 00:46:18,305 --> 00:46:24,655 for work, for advertising, whatever, but the materials and supporting devices for 651 00:46:24,655 --> 00:46:31,330 Arduino and Fidgets and Twine, they don't explain much about them, right? 652 00:46:31,330 --> 00:46:34,433 There's a kind of measure of circular reasoning in this platform space. 653 00:46:34,433 --> 00:46:38,958 On the one hand, they are supposed to offer simpler, easier, more accessible 654 00:46:38,958 --> 00:46:41,635 entry into hardware development, but on the other hand, they don't provide 655 00:46:41,635 --> 00:46:44,687 much scaffolding to do that, actually. And they don't really give you many 656 00:46:44,687 --> 00:46:49,553 examples of valid viable uses, you're just supposed to discover them, apparently. 657 00:46:49,553 --> 00:46:55,006 So, the abstract values of being engaged with play or education or experimentation 658 00:46:55,006 --> 00:46:58,249 or comfort or empowerment, that's really the function that these are serving, right? 659 00:46:58,249 --> 00:47:01,251 I mean, you might adopt one as a way of feeling a certain way and 660 00:47:01,251 --> 00:47:04,583 maybe carrying out that feeling, right? But primarily by kind of performing a 661 00:47:04,583 --> 00:47:08,893 certain identity, right? So, one of the things that we've been interested in 662 00:47:08,893 --> 00:47:13,437 in my lab, Tom and I have been recasting, re-framing these particular platforms 663 00:47:13,437 --> 00:47:18,722 as what we call tinkering platforms and trying to kind of reclaim some of the 664 00:47:18,722 --> 00:47:22,906 lost opportunity, so, you know, the idea that you would spend several hundred 665 00:47:22,906 --> 00:47:28,315 dollars on a Twine device and sensors in order that you could then, again, like 666 00:47:28,315 --> 00:47:31,535 throw it into your basement so that it could tell you if it was flooding, 667 00:47:31,535 --> 00:47:35,912 this seems like a less viable kind of direction for the actual use of this system 668 00:47:35,912 --> 00:47:40,512 than something else that we might be able to invent, and the same is true for Arduino 669 00:47:40,512 --> 00:47:45,418 and Raspberry Pi. It's almost like the, they're in-viable actually, 670 00:47:45,418 --> 00:47:48,701 as real products, and so we should treat them for what they are, which is these 671 00:47:48,701 --> 00:47:52,107 kinds of aspirational products, but that doesn't stop us from imagining what 672 00:47:52,107 --> 00:47:55,883 real versions of products like this might look like, and for Tom and I, we've been 673 00:47:55,883 --> 00:48:00,275 exploring a kind of return to the hardware store mentality as an alternative. 674 00:48:00,275 --> 00:48:03,431 So, you kind of go in to the hardware store or the RadioShack and you 675 00:48:03,431 --> 00:48:06,342 rummage through some bins and you find some components that cost a few dollars 676 00:48:06,342 --> 00:48:09,476 and you solve a little problem in your world and nobody needs to know 677 00:48:09,476 --> 00:48:15,350 about it even. So we've been designing systems that use the PIC microprocessor. 678 00:48:15,350 --> 00:48:21,081 And one of the reasons you choose an 8-bit microprocessor with 16 bytes of 679 00:48:21,081 --> 00:48:24,616 memory is because it's cheap, usually twenty cents. They have to be programmed 680 00:48:24,616 --> 00:48:27,678 in assembly that's relatively straight- forward and so again, the context of this 681 00:48:27,678 --> 00:48:31,738 this ISTC we started building little computers that are very modest 682 00:48:31,738 --> 00:48:34,921 and don't aspire to much, but they only cost a couple bucks, 683 00:48:34,921 --> 00:48:38,992 we're trying to get it down to a dollar, and a few sensors for input and output, 684 00:48:38,992 --> 00:48:41,712 here's a light that's blinking, we milled some boards, 685 00:48:41,712 --> 00:48:47,588 and we've been kind of experimenting with methods of development for this. 686 00:48:47,588 --> 00:48:50,208 And one of the things we've been doing is just going and talking to people who are 687 00:48:50,208 --> 00:48:54,912 in the community about really random specific needs that they have and to 688 00:48:54,912 --> 00:48:59,334 see if we can solve them. So Concrete Jungle is a local organization in Atlanta 689 00:48:59,334 --> 00:49:05,264 that reclaims neglected produce from public spaces, so we've been working 690 00:49:05,264 --> 00:49:09,780 with them as an example of this kind of, to keep us honest, something we don't have 691 00:49:09,780 --> 00:49:13,100 necessarily have a strong commitment in, but we would like to be able to solve, 692 00:49:13,100 --> 00:49:17,902 on fruit ripeness detection, so we built some prototypes and so [inaudible] 693 00:49:17,902 --> 00:49:21,410 when we do this, we use these laminate bags and so forth, and then we can kind of 694 00:49:21,410 --> 00:49:25,659 build these small apparatuses that allow us to detect fruit ripeness. 695 00:49:25,659 --> 00:49:29,676 This is one very stupid example of how you might use this, but it's kind of like the 696 00:49:29,676 --> 00:49:34,250 more stupid examples I have, the better. This is really what I'm going for. 697 00:49:34,250 --> 00:49:40,096 So, to close out and kind of to return to Kickstarter, I think if you think of 698 00:49:40,096 --> 00:49:44,890 Kickstarter less as a funding platform and more as an entertainment platform, then 699 00:49:44,890 --> 00:49:47,323 you have the right start, but actually what you need to do is 700 00:49:47,323 --> 00:49:51,271 take that even further and think of Kickstarter as primarily an entertainment 701 00:49:51,271 --> 00:49:54,398 platform in the same way that like Facebook has become more of an 702 00:49:54,398 --> 00:49:57,992 entertainment platform than a communications platform. And so, 703 00:49:57,992 --> 00:50:03,699 while it's true that the Pen Type-A is more than that $100 metal pen that 704 00:50:03,699 --> 00:50:07,739 never gets used, it is indeed this kind of memento of my excitement and interest 705 00:50:07,739 --> 00:50:12,162 in the design project itself and the students who were pursuing it. 706 00:50:12,162 --> 00:50:16,042 There's also a sense that it would be nice if there were an alternative world in which 707 00:50:16,042 --> 00:50:20,085 it were also a pen, in which we can also get pens. At least occasionally. 708 00:50:20,085 --> 00:50:24,965 And I actually think what's happened is that making things like pens is actually 709 00:50:24,965 --> 00:50:30,411 much much harder now than making ideas about pens or about games or about films 710 00:50:30,411 --> 00:50:34,037 or about computers or about whatever. And part of that is because of the 711 00:50:34,037 --> 00:50:38,471 incredible surplus of targets for our attention. All of the different things 712 00:50:38,471 --> 00:50:41,785 that we could possibly be looking at at any given time, but I think it's also 713 00:50:41,785 --> 00:50:46,568 partly because our idea of what a real pen or a real game or a real film or 714 00:50:46,568 --> 00:50:52,578 a real computer or whatever, that it has become too grandiose. That there's really 715 00:50:52,578 --> 00:50:56,319 no reason why this needs to exist in the form that it does. It was actually just fine 716 00:50:56,319 --> 00:51:01,070 to have the pen, and so when I reflect on kind of the philosophy that we've been 717 00:51:01,070 --> 00:51:04,695 using and thinking about tinkering platforms, one of the ideas is that 718 00:51:04,695 --> 00:51:10,367 maybe what we want when we make things these days are more modest goals, 719 00:51:10,367 --> 00:51:13,616 rather than more ambitious ones, to find those kind of small pockets where we can 720 00:51:13,616 --> 00:51:18,069 actually affect just little tiny change in our own individual personal lives 721 00:51:18,069 --> 00:51:22,382 and then we can kind of recast the experiences that we have with these 722 00:51:22,382 --> 00:51:25,970 entertainment projects in a different way. To be aware of what they are in the 723 00:51:25,970 --> 00:51:29,851 same way that we want to be aware that QVC is more than just a place to buy things. 724 00:51:29,851 --> 00:51:34,727 So, that's it. Thanks.