I want to say more about this or maybe not this – I want to say more so that the output of my aspirations has some sort of weight.  I do not mean weight in the sense that the meaning behind those words generates any value or meaning, I mean weight in the sense that the tonnage of words is a verifiable measurement that can be taken to indicate that at the very least, I’ve taken this energy and put it to some use.  But rather than struggle for a point or a hook, I let the aspiration speak for itself so I can credit my goals for taking me to whereever I am when I stop and look around.  I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, by the way.  I go on runs not to get in shape but to get tired.

Zack Hiwiller wrote a fantastic piece at Kotaku about over-designing digital experiences, video games in particular.  Zack re-imagined the original Super Mario Brothers as if it were a website launched today.  In his mockup, the user’s hand is held firmly and safely in place as every mystery, question, and point of the experience is mapped out in clear, bullet-pointed text.  The first scene, where a first-time user is dropped into the world and left on his own is met with the following welcome:

Mario!  Welcome to Nintendo Presents Super Mario Brothers!  Press Right or Left to Walk!

The original Mario Brothers was intuitive and that made it so interesting (I knew I loved it when I first got it).  The point of a game is not always to solve it – the point of the game is to play the game and the point of playing is to not have a point.  The concept of making the web simpler has invaded a space that was doing just fine, thank you.  The web should be confusing in some circumstances.  Let’s not breed a generation of web users that depend on instructions, please.  We can overdesign every experience into a useless gesture – like telling two chess players what moves to make.  Eventually, they stop playing the game and start moving the pieces.

I know why we’re doing this.  I’m guilty of it myself.  There is a glut of step-by-step instructions living online.  They’re ugly.  They’re confusing.  They’re everywhere.

New sites are streamlining these lists with friendlier presentations.  Foursquare is the latest hottest newest coolest thing.  They don’t even have landing pages on their site!  I went there to grab their how-to list and found a video instead:

What am I getting at here?  I don’t know, man.  This whole thing is just an exercise for me to just write anyway…  Foursquare has to be defined – it takes a long video to do it and the answer I get to this question: what is foursquare?  Is: a thing that makes you happy.  Which is probably a good answer, because, when I ask myself as if I wasn’t answering this question: what is Super Mario Brothers?  I say: it’s a game, shut up; just keep moving to the right and you’ll save the princess (and isn’t the dungeon music awesome?).  But SMB didn’t require a 2 minute video to define the product.  Not because anyone knew what the thing was – but because nobody needed to be told about it.

Why didn’t they need to be told about it?  Because they were too busy playing it to ask.

♣ Post Script ♣

Check out this interview with Shigero Miyamoto & Satoru Iwata – the top dogs at Nintendo, Miyamoto being the originator of SMB – about their work and how they “trained” users to know the difference between a turtle, bad, and a mushroom, good, without telling the user.

http://us.wii.com/iwata_asks/nsmb/vol1_page4.jsp

My time is slippery and quick – not fast (it’s still slow) but quick like a fat guy who can dunk.

Everyday I’m stuck on a train there is nothing to do and my eyes glaze over blankly through a cloud in my brain that suggests rainfall.  There’s light thunder and you start to smell the rain but ultimately it never produces a single drop, the clouds break up, the train moves along, and Access Hollywood is on and what’s up with Billy Bush anyway?   But somewhere in the gray darkness is a series of seeds that have been planted – probably in the angst filled dramatics of my teenage years.  In the middle of all that hyperbole was an overactive brain that was not searching for quiet, but raising quite a stink about one thing or another.  I did not have rent to pay – I had a trumpet to play.  I did not have a family to feed – I had a family feeding me.   I did not have small talk – I had Kind of Blue.

This is a post about the missed opportunities of not doing anything.  This is not a post about the potential of my seeds.  That was a single entendre.

I can’t not do anything as well as I could when I had 4 lawns to mow in the middle of a summer afternoon when it was Tuesday or Thursday (it didn’t matter to me anyway).  At that time, I could do nothing so well that when the time was over, I was better at something than I was before I started not doing it.  Now I just wait.  Not like a waiter in a restaurant, but like the 13th juror in a courtroom without  a book.  Huh?

When I am not doing something now, I pretend to be doing something, or am wishing I was doing something else, or yelling at myself for failing to do the thing I should be doing, or washing dishes.  The goal of my days is to get myself tired enough to sleep quietly at night.  It helps best if I run and cook an elaborate meal and do the dishes.  I avoid the emptiness of a nothing-moment because they just get filled up with check-lists.

It was more productive when it was meaningless.

The web was going to make the world a better, freer, more open and just place to grow and create and participate. Or something like that. FP recently posted a couple points meant to burst that bubble. It is an important argument to make and I’m glad I read it.  The web is an important thing because a lot of people opine about it.  On the internet.  The medium is the message.

The article linked above describes all the things the internet is not.  Or not yet.  Correlation does not equal causation; so if the Islamic Republic of Iran becomes a Westernized democracy, then Andrew Sullivan would feel proud (or happy or whateversomethinggood).  But we can’t fully credit Twitter or his blog for facilitating that revolution.  Nor can we disqualify their effects.  It’s a complicated argument that I can’t write and don’t want to write and can’t write and nobody reads anyway.

The internet’s revolution is not on the screen.  It is not manifested by another site – but a concept that information can be organized on-demand.  This can revolutionize the way we seek and share information.  When information stops flowing top-to-bottom it effects the old clunky infrastructures that depend on that hierarchy.  Elevators are now on-demand.  They don’t just go up and down and catch you if you’re there or not.  They wait to find out where you’re going and take you on the most efficient route.  Network TV is now also on-demand.  Gardens are now on demand (even if you don’t have any land).  Let’s not stop there – let’s make busses on demand.  Let’s make buildings on demand.  The internet is teaching us how information flows – and good design facilitates that flow in the most efficient way possible.  I don’t think I’m inventing this argument.  The medium of the net is not on the computer screen or phone screen but in the mind of the reader/listener who links and shares and distributes or finds and seeks the think they crave and can now get but have to build first and where do I find the how-to’s about?

There is a 3 month long (or short) performance art piece underway at MoMA.  If you look at the picture above, you will see the representation of a representation of a sculpture made entirely of light that depicts the human condition or probably better yet, human conditioning or even probably better yet than ever, the elimination of human conditioning.

what?

I’m not going to over or under write this anymore.  I’m going all id.

The space within which the user is invited to gaze into the outward gazing eyes of Marina Abramović is bathed in controlled light.  There are no shadows because the space is like a film set without the filming going on (even though this picture demonstrates the fact that there is filming going on, but the medium is not the message here).  The space is fake.  The gazes are  real.  They are empty but they elicit real emotion.  But not in you probably.  What they elicit I can’t tell, but what I can probably say is that the best they can do is answer a question that you didn’t ask or maybe the other way around and ask a question that has no answer.  Not because there is no right answer or wrong answer, but because the answer you would get is so banal and disappointingly true that you were better off not bursting that bubble in the first place.

There is nothing going on here.  If you hate this you are right.  If you love this, you are stupid.  If you don’t know what is going on, you are weak.  If you look at it and get it immediately but realize that once that happens you still don’t know, then you walk away and wonder if the thing that is invisible and dangles like a book on a line in the sun between the eyes of the two participants and the eyes of the 55 observers is the same thing that makes you want to want to want to want.

Ceci n’est pas une [ *blank empty thing* ]