(Kirschenbaum) Please welcome Ian Bogost.
(applause)
I'm gonna, do I have to pay extra to get the text I'm gonna use on my monitor?
(laughter)
Like and up-sell opportunity.
I'm really happy to be here. We've been talking about,
I've been talking to Matt and others about coming for about a year and
now finding I'm here, so I can't, I don't know if, I made this a point that
after a year's worth of anticipation, but I'm excited to talk to you today
because this is a little bit of a different subject for me,
I'm gonna show you some stuff that I haven't shown anybody, at least in public
before but don't get your hopes up, it's not that exciting, but it's maybe
maybe vaguely interesting, at least novel
And I'm thinking through some questions that I'm gonna try to think through
in front of you, as I was just invited to do, which means that
this is gonna be a little more meandering than my typical talk, and hopefully
that will make it even more entertaining.
So, I wanna start by talking about Kickstarter, and Kickstarter if anyone
does not know is a website crowd funding platform, where you can go and you can
create a project. You want to macramé a set of owls for your family and
you can post that with a video and put a bunch of details about
what you're doing and why and you can ask for contributions and anyone
in the world can contribute to your project and you have to set a goal
a financial goal. If it reaches that goal in a month's time, then you receive the
money minus a set of fees taken out by Kickstarter by Amazon Payments and
after a 120 days of waiting and etc. etc. you'll get this pile of money,
which you can then use to execute your macramé project or your video game
or whatever it is that you're making. And as of just this week,
this website is four years old, so it's been around for long enough
that we have some sense of what it is and what it might be doing,
what it might mean, if you want to put it that way.
When I first ran into Kickstarter. When I first started using it--
I guess I should say, it was already into real serious money that was being raised.
The first project on Kickstarter, I think asked for like twenty dollars
to someone that wanted to make some sort of personal art project
and they got thirty five dollar instead. But then strange things started happening.
You know, people were asking for $2500 to make interesting machined metal
pen cases and got, you know, $300,000. And so the stakes rose pretty quickly.
This is already two years ago almost, that this Pen Type-A was funded.
Note, now this thing is interesting, and it's interesting to me personally
because I bought one although I didn't fund the Kickstarter.
I found the Kickstarter just as it was ending and I was able to go to their
website and buy one of these pens and what it is it's a stainless steel
enclosure for this particular, highly sought after, pen, gel pen
filler from Japan, which if you're into this sort of thing, which I wasn't
I was just very curious. This is apparently you know, a difficult kind of insert to
find a nice pen for. You know, and it raised a hundred times its goal.
And I funded it, you know, immediately after I placed my order and then I waited
a very long time. And by May of 2012, about a year ago, I received my
Pen Type-A, which I was totally disenchanted with. I mean, it was
it was, I had forgotten about it, for one thing. It was like a hundred dollars.
So it was not an unsubstantial investment. You know, a hundred dollars a year later
It was the opposite of found money-- lost money.
(laughter)
And it just was an unremarkable designed object, I mean it seemed
like it would be cool, I mean, doesn't it look nice? Has a ruler on it, but
it just kinda didn't work. It wasn't enjoyable to hold.
Something about it was just sort of useless and pointless
and it sat on my desk until, I mean I used it a couple times just to try it, but
I never used it in earnest, as a pen. And it sat on my desk until last week
when I discovered that I inadvertently had thrown it away while I was cleaning up
So this shows you kind of how invested I ended up being in this Pen Type-A project
Now, what's interesting about this example is that I think it's actually the norm,
rather than the exception. It's just that we'd like to think that the norm is
me realizing the brilliant and incredible design of an object like this.
How providing a small amount of seed capital, to an aggregator that allows
creators to realize their dreams and then, to take delivery of this miraculous object
and incorporate it into my life with great glee, but
something different seems to happen. Now, things got very very high stakes
very quickly over the past couple years on Kickstarter. And we even saw
products that were really ambitious in their nature, like the big Ouya,
open-sourced Android-based game console. Not only exceed their funding targets
enormously but also kind of used the Kickstarter platform as a way of
announcing themselves, as a way of launching a much much bigger project
so you know, this is an interesting hybrid product that not only got crowd funding
an enormous amount of money, but also is backed by venture capital now
they're actually gonna release this system all sorts of promises were made here,
but one of the things that remains the case is that what makes this an
appealing project is not so much the product, but
something more than the product. The idea of an open, accessible television connected
video game system. That's an idea that people like. You get your XBOX or you get
your Playstation and you enjoy playing games on the TV, but there's a limitation
as to what kind of games you can access or what kind of games people can deploy on
those systems because of the way the platform owners got control content and
in this promise of letting anyone make a game like you could make a game for your
Android phone that you could play on your computer
is enormously appealing to people. And of course you know, there's
other kind of, what you might call, mass culture, traditional culture...
Kickstarter successes. This is the most successful project, not in terms of
capital raised, but in terms of number of total contributors, which is greater than
90,000, like 91,000 backers for the Veronica Mars Movie Project.
And you know, again-- what you see here is on the one hand, yeah sure, I mean--
You like Veronica Mars, the television show from [inaudible]
Ten years ago?
It'd be great to have a movie, right? I mean we've been talking about this
for a long time and sure, if you know, there were a movie I would go see it.
But at the same time, there's something more than just a promise of a movie
there's also the idea of being a part of the Veronica Mars Movie Project,
which this idea of becoming a patron of sorts, even a micro-patron allows.
And then, you know, there have been weirder and less, I don't know--
promotionally successful endeavors, Amanda Palmer, the recording artist
got a lot of flack for raising over a million dollars on Kickstarter,
going on tour, then offering her fans the opportunity to perform at her shows
for free, and you know, then she did a Ted Talk this year about it, so you know,
so there's also this sense in which this is like a kind of publicity platform or
kind of platform on which to get in trouble, to talk about things,
to introduce ideas, to do something much greater than just raising money.
And even when you do raise enormous amounts of money for ideas that may or
may not be any good, but at least capture people's attention, then ten million dollars
for this e-ink watch thing called Pebble got a tremendous amount of press
when it first launched, and of course it raised all these contributions, and now
here, I just pulled this off the internet today. So this was May 18th.
That's about a year ago. And here we are waiting for the opportunity to get our
Pebble watches, right? So there's an interesting disconnect between the
real world and the Kickstarter world.
Now, I want you to suspend your disbelief about this.
Don't read between the lines, I'm not saying that this is a failure, that Pebble
now owes us something, there are many who've levied these critiques
against Kickstarter including some attempted lawsuits for projects that
weren't realized, but just that there's something greater going on here than
just the funding of a product, the pre-order of a product,
the patronage to a particular artistic project or a design project.
Here's another recent example that shows you kind of how weird
that these projects can get. A mother on her daughter's behalf
launched a Kickstarter project to send her daughter to a RPG camp over the summer
she wanted to raise $800, and you know this is one of these things that just
kind of latches on to the public imagination, right? You know,
a little girl who wants to proto computer games and wants to
go to a camp to do it, and there's a whole story about her brothers
making fun of her and it got actually very strange, so one of the things
you can do is offer these, there are these different reward tiers, you know
you could contribute a dollar, ten dollars and you get different things, sometimes
t-shirts, and one of the high level reward tiers here was like a hand-written apology
from her brothers, actually kind of quite perverse interaction in their
family dynamics, wasn't exactly comforting but anyway, Susan Wilson raised not $800,
but $24,000 and then everyone started trying to dig into her past and figure out
if there was something not above board going on and they accused her of being
a millionaire and having, there was this photo of the mother with, what's his name?
The billionaire, Warren Buffet. She reportedly had these start-ups
and had all this money, and then there were a number of kind of
anti-women's rights trolls who decided they would use this as a platform to
talk about how you shouldn't criticize boys for programming.
Whatever they had in mind to express. It's the internet and they're gonna
express it. So, these scams were later revealed to be false or at least
apparently false, you know, in the sense that she wasn't trying to dupe anyone
she was out of work, she was donating all of the excess monies to stem
education sources for girls,
but none of that was clear when this Kickstarter was launched.
So in retrospect, you can look back on it if you go research it today you'll see
all of the kind of debriefing, right? Boing Boing has a good one.
Explaining how everyone is insane, and here's exactly what it looked like, but
when this first went off, it was not clear at all what was going on, it very well
could have been someone trolling or someone doing publicity because
those are activities that are supported by Kickstarter certainly. Now Kickstarter
when they approve these projects, does a kind of very cursory look at them, they don't
necessarily block projects from proceeding so long as they have a concrete outcome.
So once again we have here, like this example of a Kickstarter project being
something more than just the thing that it's raising money for. It's doing much more,
in fact arguably, that part of the project is even bigger than the purported goal
which is just sending a girl to camp. Now, these are old numbers from 2012, but
when you look at the statistics on Kickstarter projects, you'll see that
actually the ones that do succeed, are not in the minority, but by no means do
all of these projects succeed, and it's interesting thinking about what success
means. When you think about having a project succeed, all sorts of things
may enter your mind. You know, it sold well, you realized its potential,
that you completed it, but in this case what success means is that the
Kickstarter was successful. So, you know, thirty days went by, the minimum amount
of money that was requested was raised and sometimes much much more than that
that's what these numbers track as success.
Now there are other ways of looking at success as well.
This is a CNN Money survey of ship-times for the top fifty Kickstarter projects
and I can't remember what top means for them, I don't know if it means by money
or by contributors, but we'll just take it at its word and say these seem to be
some of the largest, we see the Pebble watch there at the bottom, and we see
some of the other projects, we see a hand stylus, which is a pen for tablets.
Now, some minority of them actually shipped on time.
What does that mean, on time? Well, it means the people who created
the project said, "hey, we're gonna get you these t-shirts in anticipation of those
bumper stickers in anticipation of the concept art, which eventually we may
put into a video game, which then we will give," right which is supposedly what
you were funding is this video game. A vast majority of them were late and
some of them were very very late indeed. You again see some of these are just
maybe never gonna happen. The ZPM Espresso Machine, which I don't have a screenshot of
is an interesting example in a sense that the Kickstarter success actually reduced
its potential for success because the quantities they had to make
were so enormous that they couldn't go about it in the kind of hand-built way
they had planned and so in a lot of cases and in the case of the pen, the Type-A Pen
exactly the same. If you want to do a small metal milling project you could
maybe kind of make that work on a $2500 budget make a few of them, but when you're
becoming a manufacturer then things are much more complicated.
This is another personal example for me that I think kind of draws things together
this is a clever idea, it's a little miniSD holder that you put in the
SD card slot of your MacBook or your MacBook Air that can add up to 64GB
of flash storage which you'd use as a hard disk and you could use
for backups or whatever, I thought this was really great and I had had not only a
hard drive failure, but also a time machine failure and I was
quite worried about the state of my data at this moment when this started to arrive
and so I bought one of these and again, here what I was thinking about was
not really the product, so much as my own anxiety about my data and then, let's see
it reached its goal on August 2 of 2012, sometime about a month ago, I finally
got my mini drive and I got this new 11" MacBook Air in the meantime which
doesn't have an SD card slot, so they're literally just sitting on my desk
in their packaging, and like a year will go by and I'll probably throw them away
like the pen or I'll give them away to somebody, right? So again,
my participation in this project isn't something that I feel cheated from
exactly, but it's something bigger, weirder than just me buying a product
on a website or me funding somebody to do something that
seems like it might be an exciting idea. Now, you know, many of these projects
are successful, for various degrees of success, we can see here how Ouya is
still on Amazon and it's about to ship and they've been sending out dev kits
and I've got a dev kit, you know, this is like a going concern,
that wasn't at all obvious back when the project launched but we can look at it
in retrospect and say oh, well they managed to pull it off
I don't think we can know whether they pulled it off because of, in spite of,
irrespective of the Kickstarter campaign. But nevertheless it's an example of a
Kickstarter project that's gonna become a reality.
But the important thing to me is to recognize that this thing, the machine
the product, is different, this is gonna sound really obvious when I say it, but
bear with me here, this is different from this. Right?
So when you go to this webpage, is bigger than this thing. Okay?
When you buy this, and someone will go and buy it from Amazon or from GameStop
or wherever they sell it, and they will have a completely different experience
as well as a common experience, right, but a completely different experience
than someone who got this, so when you buy Ouya by funding their Kickstarter,
you're buying something different than when you buy Ouya when you go to the
GameStop. What this says to me is that...
the experience, the Kickstarter experience itself
is worthy of consideration, and in fact, maybe the most interesting
thing about Kickstarter as a platform is not the crowdfunding features,
which is one of the things that's celebrated about it, not the idea that
a bunch of people can get together and make something happen, we want an open
an open source, television connectable Android-based game system,
let's make it happen. That's kind of the rhetoric of the internet, right?
Everybody gets together and then miracles happen and we all get what we want.
No, the most interesting thing is that the people are participating in a kind of
activity that they weren't participating in before, at least something is different
about the way they were participating in that activity and the closest thing
I can think of to compare to the Kickstarter experience is maybe QVC
where, you know, you buy stuff, and you really are buying it at some level,
you get it, it comes in the mail eventually maybe, but the experience that you're
participating in is much larger and very different from walking into the store and
buying whatever the Shania Twain best hits or here's another QVC example,
A lot of the things we buy, we also don't intend to use as products,
so I like this screenshot because not only does it have QVC, but also it has these
excercise kits, right? You know, that you're gonna go out and excercise,
actually, the vast majority of excercise gear and equipment and health and
diet related stuff, you buy it in order that you can promise yourself something
and then you use it once, or you get the Bowflex or you got the Ab ripper or
whatever the latest gimmick is, and you have it and by buying it you got something
Right? What you got is a sort of sense of yourself, about a promise to yourself
an idea of what you might be, and that was real whether or not
you did anything about it. And it's easy to say, well I mean, you're just
buying random crap on QVC, but then you kind of go back and you look at this stuff
and I mean, what's the difference between buying random crap on the internet and
buying random crap on QVC, and you know, the big difference is one of class maybe,
one of the different kinds of communities who participate in these activities,
but I do think that the QVC viewer is more aware of their relationship to
television sales than the Kickstarter backer is to their relationship to
whatever it is that Kickstarter is doing. Right? They know what's going on.
And we started to see this kind of bleed out into the Kickstarter campaigns
themselves of all the discussion around them and you see this is from
the Veronica Mars Kickstarter further down the page, and you know, it's got the
kind of voice of the character here too, but these are the updates,
part of the updates that were running on this site, we really wanted to do
these things, we wanted to be the fastest Kickstarter project to reach a million dollars
in funding, we wanted to have the largest number of backers. Why?
What does this have to do with making movies? Well, it has nothing to do with me
well, I suppose you could say with the more people backing your movie
then the kind of the greater success you might have, but actually if we zoom out
and you can read about this, the Kickstarter for Veronica Mars was
less about funding the movie than it was about proving something about the
hypothetical movie to the studio that was gonna do the really expensive work of
marketing and distributing, right? Making a Veronica Mars film
doesn't cost nothing, but it costs much less than making a successful
Hollywood production does. And so, and whether or not this is apocryphal,
we'll never know, but according to the film-makers, and they made this very
clear in the Kickstarter by the way, the who is it-- Warner Brothers or...
whatever the network is that owns this property, you can make a film
talking about it as one of these cult classics, the fans want a film, etc. etc.
you've got to prove to us that there's a market. Part of this is just like the
Hollywood gimmick, you know, the executive made you go run through loops,
just show me something. Make it blue. So then, this Kickstarter said
you need to show us, you need to commit and then we'll be able to get this project
green lit. Now my guess is that it was green lit already and that this was a
marketing gimmick in the way of presenting the idea of participation because when you
have a cult film or a cult TV series like this, what do the fans really want?
Well they want to be a part of it and they want to feel as connected to it as possible.
They go to conventions. In the case of Veronica Mars, they're not necessarily
doing cosplay or fan-fiction, but I'm sure there's some of that
out there you could find and so these selling points were less about the
financial aspects of the project, especially since if they wanted to
the stars and the producers could fund it themselves and they've got the resources
to do it, it's rather about creating a kind of mythos, a sense that you're
participating in this project. And they give you stickers, t-shirts, all sorts of
other paraphernalia that you could only get if you back the Kickstarter
and then they wouldn't be offered again. So, one way to think about Kickstarter is
that it is a form of entertainment. In the way that QVC is a form of
entertainment. Or if you don't like the word entertainment, it's a form of
distraction, it's a kind of leisure activity in the same way that Facebook
is a kind of leisure activity. Even though it's also a communication platform.
Or the way that Twitter is a kind of leisure activity, even though it's also
some kind of communication platform. And that you can sit there online
like many of you might be doing right now and just sort of look at stuff, right?
Oh there's these things happening, and I'm just kind of taking in the things
that are going on and that's what happens when we watch television, when we flip
through the channels and so when you have this kind of very competitive, interesting,
nail-biting in some cases, experience of watching a Kickstarter play out,
is it gonna make its funding targets, and then they add stretch goals,
you know if we reach additional money then these new things that will unlock
and everyone will benefit from them. Watching that process play out,
is its own kind of entertainment, its own kind of experience. And this is something
that is very difficult for us to understand. So just yesterday, or two days ago,
a friend of mine in the game development community named Scott Jon Siegel posted a
blog post about this new game Kickstarter called Road Redemption.
I don't actually know anything about the game but Scott called it
everything wrong with Kickstarter game development condensed into a single
Kickstarter campaign and he went through and delineated all of the different things
that he thought were troublesome and then he's right about all of them.
It's things like the creators had said, we're gonna launch on all of these
platforms simultaneously and we're a bunch of guys who maybe know
how to make games, I don't know. We're not gonna tell you much about that.
We want to raise $160,000 and we're gonna use $90,000 of that
for salaries and there's nine of us. Okay, well how's that work out? I don't know
but they don't provide any detail, so Scott went and he showed how all of the
kind of risk and anxiety and even some of the design problems associated with games
are kind of being reproduced in these Kickstarters which have now become
like lottery tickets. Maybe if you have the right Kickstarter and you really
manage it well, then you get a bunch more money than you asked for and it's unclear
whether this will be the case, but these guys are only well, two-thirds of the way
through and they already have half of their goal. So this is right,
in some sense. Scott is right that maybe this is a stupid game, and maybe it's a
terrible way of going about justifying your project to a public who will then
have something like an investment in it, but that also doesn't matter maybe.
And when I talk to people who back Kickstarters, a lot of the reason
they do it is just, they just don't know. They just like it. It's like QVC, I dunno.
I don't know why I'm buying these things. I wanted to have a connection with it.
I wanted to have a moment. In some cases they know the creators.
A lot of these projects are funded by trust networks. Oh, I'm familiar with their
previous work. I don't have it in here, but if you think about the...
Tim Schafer's Double Fine Adventurer project, which was I think the
second highest grossing after Veronica Mars now, a lot of the reason to contribute
to that has nothing to do with your desire to receive and or play the game that they
are promising to make, but rather you remember playing Tim's adventure games
for Lucas Arts and enjoyed those games and you kind of want to have a memory
of that moment and if that costs you a dollar or five dollars or fifty dollars,
okay. It was worth it. Now, I think some of this attitude is starting to be
reincorporated into creators' sort of sense of what they are doing with their
Kickstarter projects, and what I mean by that is that we've developed a little
bit of self-awareness that something is greater than just the funding regime
that's at work in these projects, this just launched today. Sissy Fight 2000.
A common trope for these Kickstarter projects a re-release of an old game
or movie or something that's being remade or revamped. In this case it was a kind of
early, ahead of its time, multi-player game made by Eric Zimmerman and
some other folks and it's been offline for some time and
they wanna bring it back and they have a small goal that they're trying to reach
and they want to release it out into the wild again
and Naomi Clark who worked on this game originally is also part of the new Kickstarter
when she announced it this morning. She had these like immediate
clarifications, right? So, she tweeted the link and not a moment later.
If anybody's interested, it's for a free playable online version and we're
gonna release all the source code. So we're kind of already presenting
evidence that this is not a scam. We're anticipating someone is like
Oh my God, another one of these game remake projects! I've had enough of this.
No no, there's something different there. So, I was already aware of that.
And then, this isn't a profit-making Kickstarter for pre-ordering products
we're trying to restore a lost game, so we're recasting the project
as almost like an archival effort, right? Eric also [inaudible] effort.
And this is really interesting because first it shows me that some of this
self-awareness is already kind of bleeding through back into the computer space.
But also it seems to provide evidence that there's some truth to the lottery ticket
reality of Kickstarter. In other words, maybe the default assumption
we have now is that when you make a Kickstarter, really what you want to do is
win the lottery. You say, aw, only twenty thousand dollars.
and then two million dollars comes your way and then yeah, you kind of
do some minimal amount of work to make your game or whatever it is
that you're making work, and then maybe you can just bank some of that money away.
It's a way of taking advantage of the trend. I don't mean to sound
cynical about it necessarily, it's just kind of how the world works these days
right? You find a trend on the upswing and then you try to get your foot in the
door and do something. I think a lot of people are going about
their business that way. At least to the degree that now it seems necessary.
Or at least recommended, or at least beneficial to hedge and say no, no, really
I'm a goodie. I'm not trying to take advantage of you. I'm just doing this
in order to strike it rich on Kickstarter. Now, the problem here, is that this is
boring. Right? Like whenever you think about Sissy Fight, the moment
oh, ok. You're just doing an archival thing? Okay. That's cool, good for you.
It seems like a worthwhile project. I guess I'll see ya around. Right?
I mean, it's just not the kind of thing that makes you as excited as a
project that you can experience as entertainment,
but the weird thing is that this is kind of exactly what Kickstarter was
made for actually. Was allowing people to get things done in a kind of modest way
that they wouldn't have been able to do otherwise. Jason Rohrer made a game
a few years ago for the NintendoDS called Diamond Trust of London and he had
a very complex and troubled relationship with a series of publishers trying to get it
out on that platform and without going into enormous detail, there's a grave
complexity to publishing a game on a platform like the Nintendo DS
because you can't just do it yourself. You've got to meet Nintendo's requirements
you've got to order a certain number of units. They've got to do all the manufacture
it's very complicated. So, Jason hadn't released this game, but he had it made
and it was made specifically for the DS and it didn't make sense to just
release it on the PC and so he made a Kickstarter and he calculated and
Jason being the kind of very intricate mathematical mind that he is,
he did a budget. He had everything laid out in enormous detail. Shipping and the
manufacture, the cartridges. All he was looking to do was to get this game out
to people who wanted to buy it. He made some special editions and so forth.
This is kind of a perfect Kickstarter, right? He asked for, I mean, look:
$78,715, right? He knew exactly what he wanted. He got that and a little bit more
you could say is gravy and maybe he'll, he already lives on a shoestring budget
so who cares about contributing a little extra to Jason Rohrer?
It's not like he raised two million dollars for a game he'd already made.
Again, this is kind of a perfect Kickstarter, just like the Sissy Fight
one is. At the same time, it doesn't provide us with that same experience.
So we have this kind of weird situation which is a cognitive dissonance between
the way that Kickstarter seems to want to work. The thing that it
thinks it's doing. Or the thing that we think it's doing. And the thing that it
really does best. There's a space or a gap between them and Kickstarter
has really not been very helpful at helping us think through this with them.
This is one of the founders Kickstarter Yancy Strick(ler) talking to FastComany
I think earlier this year. And the context for this quote. It was a story about these
big budget Kickstarters like the Veronica Mars thing.
"I would never want to scare the girl who wants to do a $500 lithography project
'cause that's why we started this thing. We think we have a moral obligation to her."
And, you know. I mean, that sounds good, but then the projects that are making
the most money and of course they take a cut, not to mention the most that are
getting the most attention are in fact, exactly the opposite
of this kind of project. So, I mean you might have a moral obligation
to someone which you can fulfill. I guess that could be the meaning of this quote,
we have a moral obligation and really my moral obligation is telling you,
the press, that I have a moral obligation and now we're done with that.
And again, I don't mean to be cynical, I just mean to point out that the rhetoric
of this kind of conversation, it does not match the reality of what takes place
on the site and at the same time when we look at projects that are
effectively a $500 lithography project, which Diamond Trust of London isn't
a $500 project, but it's essentially that. None of this money is going into
anybody's pockets except all of these distributors and manufacturers.
It's just a way to get something in the world that wouldn't be possible otherwise
that's kind of exactly this kind of project. But at the same time,
that's kind of not where the site is the most successful. So, thinking about this,
I've realized, well maybe this isn't unique to Kickstarter at all.
Maybe it's just happening the most on Kickstarter, maybe Kickstarter is a signal
for other kinds of activities like this. And indeed, if you look around
you'll see all sorts of this kind of Kickstarter-like pre-product
entertainment content. This is a game that's currently being produced and
they've raised a million dollars for it and the game may or may not ever
exist, but it's a kind of activity that you can participate in whether or not
you participate in the game. This is off of Kickstarter and there's many other
crowd-sourcing venues too. Or even just do pre-sales and if you build enough
sort of momentum for yourself, then that seems to work. The best example of this is
probably Minecraft, which was just a... I remember when I first heard about
Minecraft and I tried it, and I was like, "this isn't going anywhere," and now
they make hundreds of millions of dollars a year on Minecraft by pre-selling it and
building, so, you know, there's an idea that this has worked in the past,
so maybe it'll work for me, but the mistake is that that's gonna be the
lottery win, like one in a million of these will succeed at that scale and
what the rest of them are really providing is this kind of experience, kind of
entertainment experience. Or even just like Steam, this is just one of the many
sites that tracks price changes on Steam and other digital download services.
And you can see like 50-75% off these games on Steam so what most people do
when they buy games on Steam is they'll go and they'll wait and
a new game will come out, okay, I'll wait until it goes on sale, and it goes on sale
for like 70% off, costs a couple dollars now, and you buy the game and you
end up with this enormous Steam library and you don't play any of the games.
And you know that's kind of okay. Like how many books on my shelf
have I not read? More than I'm willing to admit. I know I buy them because
I want them in my life or I really do intend to read them, or I want to be
the person who will have read them. You know, and it's okay.
It's not a problem, you know, they say something about me, I can display them,
you know, Steam's library is a little bit like a bookshelf in that regard,
you can't necessarily share it as well, but it's a place where you store
the stuff that might be important to you. You don't know yet, because you haven't
played any of them. So from the creator's perspective, what would we rather have?
Would you rather sell fewer of your games to more people who will play them,
or your films or whatever, or sell more of them to people who,
they probably won't play or watch them,
but maybe they wouldn't have done so anyway.
Maybe a kind of honesty in this, at some perverse level, but no matter the case,
the point is that this kind of activity is taking place more and more.
And one of the reasons it's taking place more and more is that anything that we
get digitally is cheap if not nearly free. What I mean is not necessarily that it is
free to make or free to create or manufacture or distribute,
but the digital version of it, the idea of it, the distribution in the case of a
Steam game or the rendering of the Kickstarter page-- that is essentially
essentially free. In fact, you can go watch the Kickstarter campaign without
paying a cent. So it's like free entertainment, like television.
Liz Losh has this argument in her work on digital rhetoric about the kind of public
function of different digital projects and this has been really important to me
over the years because it's exactly the opposite of what I was doing for so long
and I had to face the harsh reality of her kind of critique of some of my ideas of
what digital rhetoric meant or how it worked and the example I always use
to describe this is a game we made at my studio a number of years ago called
Fat World about the politics of nutrition very complicated simulation game
funded by the ITVS and distributed as this kind of documentary game about the
inner relation between food politics and health. And this was a miserable failure
at all sorts of levels, which I'm not going to talk about, but
we can talk about it later if you want. But it had a really strong argument.
Procedural argument that connected some of the dynamics of politics and
corporate interest to general health in America, and if you compare this
example of a procedural argument with this other kind of digital argument, the kind that
Liz talks about, this is the other one:
The White House's Apps for Healthy Kids Contest. You can see the difference
immediately. What this is is a contest the White House put on for people to make apps
about exactly the same topic, about nutrition and obesity and that's it.
And they'll give away some money and this is one of the winners,
which proportedly allows children to become empowered by choosing between
carrots and cake. You know, the kind of standard nonsense to be seen with
entertainment. So the thing about the Apps for Healthy Kids Project is that from a
rhetorical perspective, it didn't really have to do anything other than exist.
And so the White House in particular, the [inaudible], it's got these kind of
big form fields, and happy web 2.0 looking stuff on the internet it says,
we're tech savvy. It allows the White House to communicate a sense of
engagement with current trends in, not necessarily crowd sourcing in this case,
but in contests, and like the X Prize and so forth. Makes them look hip
whether or not any of the products that are created for it are any good,
it doesn't matter. In fact, it's maybe better if they're not any good because
if they were it would just detract from the real rhetorical project, which is
making the administration appear a certain way. Now, so Liz Losh's argument about this
is that this is a kind of digital rhetoric this way of making arguments public.
You know, when you say we're investing in a video game to train soldiers about
cultural differences in the Middle East, you don't even have to make the game.
It doesn't matter if anybody plays the game, but you've told a story
about what you're doing or what you could do with a piece of digital media,
which is itself kind of the result. So, this has been happening
for a while now, and I kind of realized now that it's a part of everything.
And here I'm gonna shift gears a little bit, but I promise it'll come back around.
So, I think a lot about computer platforms and I've done research on computer
platforms, I'm interested in the history of computer platforms and I've got this
series of books called platform studies, where people can write about computer
platforms, so when I saw a project like the Ouya, it really piqued my interest
not just in the perspective of 'what does this tell us about Kickstarter,' but
What does this tell us about the creation and development of computer platforms
more broadly speaking. It made me realize that actually, this trend of using a platform
development project as a way of talking about or performing a set of identities
and practices that are bigger than what we might do with the system.
This is actually not new at all, in fact we've seen this happening long before
Kickstarter with many of these hardware prototyping platforms like Arduino.
So I started taking a deeper look into these systems as a part of some
research that we're doing at Georgia Tech in conjunction with the Intel Science and
Technology Center for Social Computing.
So over the past few-- I'll come back to Arduino-- the Kickstarter-like example
from the past year or so, is this small- scale computer called Raspberry Pi.
And the interesting thing about Raspberry Pi is, well there's lots of interesting things
but to me the interesting thing is that it's really just a bare bones Linux system
that you couldn't buy and you couldn't buy it because they couldn't manufacture it
quickly enough because they didn't anticipate demand, and so
right before Christmas, this broke out of the kind of populous community and
hacker community and kind of "maker" community into the general population
a little bit. In fact I had what my wife was asking me and about half of
friends of hers had heard about it, and so what the Raspberry Pi became
was the kind of Tickle Me Elmo of last year and this is the thing you want but
can't get and the reason you want it is not really even because you know
what it is, right? I mean, what is that for any random person?
It looks computery, but what does it do? Who knows? Just like you don't know
what the Tickle Me Elmo is.
(laughter)
Or why you would want it anyway. I guess I want it because
it's an Elmo, right? So, you know, these things kind of overtake the reality
and they become bigger than what we really were participating in when we were
participating in the Raspberry Pi craze was the idea that we might be the kind of
individual or family or whatever for whom this would be an important
part of our lives, right? This is something... or, just like when you
buy the Tickle Me Elmo, what you're really doing is saying something about yourself
as a parent, right? This is what I've done to get you this Christmas present
that you wanted. Now, turns out there are examples of these kinds of hardware
development projects on Kickstarter itself. This is one called Twine, which is
a so called "internet of things" system that allows you, it has sensors built in,
it connects to a wifi network, and it can provide signaling you can use to send
text messages or other things. I'll come back and talk about this in more detail.
You can see that they were actually successful in their Kickstarter.
And here's another one called blink(1), which is a light that you plug into your
USB port and it can change colors and you can program it to do different things.
Now, the guy who is behind Thing M actually, also backs Kickstarters,
and I talked to him when I first started researching this idea of what
Kickstarters are and even before he launched his project, he was very aware
of this dynamic and said, you know, "I back projects I want to see exist,
even if I never get anything back in return." And so I think he had
the sense, and this is kind of a savvy business sense to have, that maybe
what I want to do is present an idea that's simple and compelling enough
that people want the idea of it, whether or not they want the product, right?
He also told me that even if he doesn't need it, or even if it's too expensive,
or even if it's just, you know, there's too much stuff in my world already,
I don't need another gadget, maybe I'll back it just because this is a thing that
I want to endorse, like clicking the 'like' button, right? But you can do it
with your wallet. So, thinking about these kinds of dynamics with Kickstarter, with
this kind of idea of participating in the entertainment or leisure
of the idea of things, one of my PhD students, Tom Jenkins and I started
taking a look at as many of these hardware prototyping platforms like Arduino and
Raspberry Pi as we could get our hands on. And we tried to look at the functions.
The stated functions. The purposes to which these would be put and we
found some patterns, not surprisingly. Many are educational apparatuses, or
they aspire to teach students basic electronics skills, and there's some
argument that all of them are like this, all of them are kind of educational
platforms, but some of these systems have framed themselves explicitly.
This is the Propeller Board, which is, you know, explicitly talks about being
conceived to educate users on the uses of a particular pattern of a
microprocessor, right? The Raspberry Pi is another example. It's creators see
it as an educational apparatus and describe it as this tiny, cheap,
computer for kids, about $35 to buy one, and in fact, they have a kind of back-story
about students at the University of Cambridge who arrived in the 1990s
and exhibited more of the traits of low- level hobbyist programmers than those
who arrived a decade later and they're trying to recuperate some of that kind of
natural inborn capacity with, not necessarily with electronics, but just
even with programming or being able to operate a machine like a computer on a
lower level, so you know, education is certainly one of these goals.
Other platforms seem to be intended as kind of toys, as recreational apparatuses,
as hobbies, and it's sometimes difficult to separate the toy use or the fun use
from the educational use, it's that kind of chocolate covered broccoli business.
So this is littleBits, which is really meant for play, but it's also
an educational electronics system, you can connect these different components together
This is called the MaKey MaKey, which is essentially a kind of fun electronic
interface creator where you can wire it up with, you know, bananas or like Play-Doh
and paper to control a video game. So, you know, it tries to make
experimentation interesting and fun and rewarding. And another use is
art and design and certainly, a lot of these platforms were conceived as a
way for artists and designers who don't have a deep electrical engineering
or computer science background to make things, especially physical hardware
apparatuses with computers. It starts with the wiring system, which was an open-source
electronics prototyping kit that was influenced by the processing software
environments, you could kind of do the same creative coding with hardware
you could do with visual design and processing, which had been itself
influenced by John Maeda's Design by Numbers project, so this idea of
[inaudible] creativity. And you know, Arduino and its related forms and shields
and all of the extensions to it also rise out of the wiring project,
from 2000 onwards and these things are emerging along with new programs that
inner-mesh art and culture at universities at NYU, at USC,
at Carnegie Mellon, at Georgia Tech and other institutions. And these things found
homes very quickly in these programs. It's almost like running a textbook.
Nobody reads it except you get in the course and to some extent these devices
have served that niche. And another common usage for these systems is monitoring.
Systems that intend to provide event notification for different conditions.
Here we can return to the Twine. One of the example uses of this device...
This is from the website, kind of from their marketing, you know...
if the temperature is over 27 degrees, and the Twine is facing up then send a
message to Eric that John is at the lake, and this is a ridiculous example, but
it gives you a sense of what you could do with it as a temperature sensor
and a moisture sensor, so, you know, if your basement is going to flood,
you could put the moisture sensor down there and it would send you a text message.
The blink(1), it kind of has the same features, right? A notification from Skype
or something like that, so all of these functions are interesting, but, but...
if you kind of back up and think about it, all of these devices sort of suffer...
or benefit, depending on your perspective from the same issues that Kickstarter does.
In a sense that what does one really-- are you really gonna do this with your
Twine, you spend like 150 bucks on this thing, you throw it down in your basement
with the moisture sensor and you kind of forget about it? Is this a use that
corresponds with the real world, or just with people who like the idea of using
these hardware tinkering platforms? And same for the blink(1) or even for
the Arduino. In Raspberry Pi, you can see all the people talking about getting one
I already used that example, and in some sense if we have to draw one thread
all the way through all these systems, one commonality, it's a kind of vagueness that
a general purpose computer has a clear set of possible uses: for communication,
for work, for advertising, whatever, but the materials and supporting devices for
Arduino and Fidgets and Twine, they don't explain much about them, right?
There's a kind of measure of circular reasoning in this platform space.
On the one hand, they are supposed to offer simpler, easier, more accessible
entry into hardware development, but on the other hand, they don't provide
much scaffolding to do that, actually. And they don't really give you many
examples of valid viable uses, you're just supposed to discover them, apparently.
So, the abstract values of being engaged with play or education or experimentation
or comfort or empowerment, that's really the function that these are serving, right?
I mean, you might adopt one as a way of feeling a certain way and
maybe carrying out that feeling, right? But primarily by kind of performing a
certain identity, right? So, one of the things that we've been interested in
in my lab, Tom and I have been recasting, re-framing these particular platforms
as what we call tinkering platforms and trying to kind of reclaim some of the
lost opportunity, so, you know, the idea that you would spend several hundred
dollars on a Twine device and sensors in order that you could then, again, like
throw it into your basement so that it could tell you if it was flooding,
this seems like a less viable kind of direction for the actual use of this system
than something else that we might be able to invent, and the same is true for Arduino
and Raspberry Pi. It's almost like the, they're in-viable actually,
as real products, and so we should treat them for what they are, which is these
kinds of aspirational products, but that doesn't stop us from imagining what
real versions of products like this might look like, and for Tom and I, we've been
exploring a kind of return to the hardware store mentality as an alternative.
So, you kind of go in to the hardware store or the RadioShack and you
rummage through some bins and you find some components that cost a few dollars
and you solve a little problem in your world and nobody needs to know
about it even. So we've been designing systems that use the PIC microprocessor.
And one of the reasons you choose an 8-bit microprocessor with 16 bytes of
memory is because it's cheap, usually twenty cents. They have to be programmed
in assembly that's relatively straight- forward and so again, the context of this
this ISTC we started building little computers that are very modest
and don't aspire to much, but they only cost a couple bucks,
we're trying to get it down to a dollar, and a few sensors for input and output,
here's a light that's blinking, we milled some boards,
and we've been kind of experimenting with methods of development for this.
And one of the things we've been doing is just going and talking to people who are
in the community about really random specific needs that they have and to
see if we can solve them. So Concrete Jungle is a local organization in Atlanta
that reclaims neglected produce from public spaces, so we've been working
with them as an example of this kind of, to keep us honest, something we don't have
necessarily have a strong commitment in, but we would like to be able to solve,
on fruit ripeness detection, so we built some prototypes and so [inaudible]
when we do this, we use these laminate bags and so forth, and then we can kind of
build these small apparatuses that allow us to detect fruit ripeness.
This is one very stupid example of how you might use this, but it's kind of like the
more stupid examples I have, the better. This is really what I'm going for.
So, to close out and kind of to return to Kickstarter, I think if you think of
Kickstarter less as a funding platform and more as an entertainment platform, then
you have the right start, but actually what you need to do is
take that even further and think of Kickstarter as primarily an entertainment
platform in the same way that like Facebook has become more of an
entertainment platform than a communications platform. And so,
while it's true that the Pen Type-A is more than that $100 metal pen that
never gets used, it is indeed this kind of memento of my excitement and interest
in the design project itself and the students who were pursuing it.
There's also a sense that it would be nice if there were an alternative world in which
it were also a pen, in which we can also get pens. At least occasionally.
And I actually think what's happened is that making things like pens is actually
much much harder now than making ideas about pens or about games or about films
or about computers or about whatever. And part of that is because of the
incredible surplus of targets for our attention. All of the different things
that we could possibly be looking at at any given time, but I think it's also
partly because our idea of what a real pen or a real game or a real film or
a real computer or whatever, that it has become too grandiose. That there's really
no reason why this needs to exist in the form that it does. It was actually just fine
to have the pen, and so when I reflect on kind of the philosophy that we've been
using and thinking about tinkering platforms, one of the ideas is that
maybe what we want when we make things these days are more modest goals,
rather than more ambitious ones, to find those kind of small pockets where we can
actually affect just little tiny change in our own individual personal lives
and then we can kind of recast the experiences that we have with these
entertainment projects in a different way. To be aware of what they are in the
same way that we want to be aware that QVC is more than just a place to buy things.
So, that's it. Thanks.