The attention game

Links and larks around choosing what we focus on

You look away from the screen for a moment.

That's a big sigh! someone nearby remarks.

Without noticing, your body folds back into position and you amble through a scroll-land of LOL-vistas and dread-vignettes. You have the niggling sensation —

• of something slipping away from you (the attention economy)

• that the rhythm of it all needs shaking up (the attention pattern spectrum)

• your internal forest, once verdant and dynamic, is now razed by algorithms and replaced with extractive monocrops with little nutritional value (attention as ecology!)

Author Lia Purpura, on a different way of thinking about attention:

"...once I identified the extractive behaviors I was being recruited for, I could see that I had to exert far more agency. If I believe my inner world is an “ecology” and social media’s algorithms are “incursions” and “extractive”—then I have to think hard about my own part in sustaining the fragile space of my attention, a place I’ve been cultivating with great care all these years."

Play around the world (and other snippets)

Holly Gramazio has been at it again, writing beautifully about games and play. Ricochets was a Barbican exhibition by Francis Alÿs, mostly featuring short films of kids playing. The exhibition has finished so I read what Holly said instead. The cool seating! The way the audio blends! The hand shadows!

Credit: Childrens Games #40 Chivichanas, La Habana, Cuba, 2023. 443 min. In collaboration with Julien Devaux and Félix Blume

There is a lovely pot of funding available from the Natural History Museum related to their "Our Broken Planet" exhibition. It started as a temporary exhibit that continued to blossom in various forms: a podcast, a program of workshops called Generation Hope and now this "Community of Practice" with FUNDING ATTACHED! Different sized pots (£3k - £10k) to support different ways of engaging with the program. Deadline: 23 September 2024.

Here’s another metaphor-model: Ian Ravenscroft explores the set list as the way bands tailor gigs to each venue or audience. His invitation is to think about which mechanisms ("experience levers", as he calls them) cultural organisations can use to remix their content.

The "Museum x Machine x Me" conference at Tate might be good value for £30? Expect perspectives on AI, art and culture with creative computing thrown in. 2-3 October.

In August, crowds in Slovakia protested after the far-right culture minister sacked the directors of the National Gallery and National Theatre for various tenuous reasons like "political activism". Many readers will also be frustrated by the restraints on cultural organisations using their power for positive change. Gradually more Orgs (reference needed) are engaging their "soft power", a term coined by Gail Lord, and leaning into what might loosely be called "action" or activism. In my work with cultural Orgs, the effort is always to frame it as a science issue, not a political one.

Browser bugs. A small, fun web toy snapped by Matt Muir (of Webcurios + Tiny Awards). The browser resizing mechanic is neat.

Comedy and climate come together in "The Talk", a cute parody from Parents for Future UK and Warming Up Comedy.

What is a game and why is it fun?

Ah. Holly has written another thing. Some charming off-the-cuff words about the Roblox Olympics game. Here is the crux of the games industry in-joke (sorry):

"The thing that was true then — and which seems from the Roblox Olympics game to be true now — is that most clients and even most agencies still don’t understand what a game is or why it’s fun."

Her reference point is time spent working at legendary small studio Hide and Seek pitching ideas that rarely got made.

"At the time we were always bummed out by this but in retrospect it was often for the best, because the other possibility was that we’d have to actually make the idea we’d come up with. And then, usually — not always, but usually — someone’s boss’s boss at the client would play it, maybe the first game they’d played in years, and they’d say this is too hard or I don’t understand what’s going on, add another popup to explain it; or someone would go we need the logo on screen for longer, make the text appear slower, or I don’t get this joke, or we should get everyone to give us their email address before they play. And the game would get a little bit worse. And then the same thing would happen again the week after, and the week after that as well."

On the game itself:

"And so you get something like this official Roblox Olympics game, which is beautiful, one of the prettiest Roblox games I’ve seen. It has the Olympic rings and the Visa logo all around, so a whole lot of people have signed off on it. And it’s a really satisfying space to wander around...But the thing you actually do in it, in theory, is play a bunch of little vaguely sporty games, none of which — presumably due to licensing restrictions — are actual Olympic sports: “Tightrope Balance”, “Golden Discus”, “Coin Frenzy”. The games are short and buggy and confusing and look, I don’t want to be a d*ck about it because it’s clear that SO much work has gone into this project. But the actual games that you play in it are not just not fun, they’re in some cases not even functional."

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Next week we kick-off pre-production for a site-specific mobile game. The central challenge with these things is the transition between real-world activities (walking, talking, looking) and screen-world activities (reading, scrolling, clicking). Thought Den has no shortage of experience — this is what I do, hire me! — but gosh it’s hard. Some of our first user tests will gauge the salience of the concept. If people “get it”, managing that transition becomes infinitely easier.

Onwards, autumn!

Thanks for sticking around,

B.

PS - One Minute Park won the "Tiny Awards" and I like it because it’s a slice of old-school web and they made it SO CLEAR AND UNFUSSY to contribute! Compose a nice shot (they’re gently specific) shoot for 60 seconds and upload to the are.na channel (which itself is an interesting tool). The end-experience is a series of full-screen, one-minute windows into parks around the world. Not my pastime, but beguiling and sweet.

Behind the scenes on the area.na channel, where hundreds of videos have been uploaded