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The Future of Entertainment

This is a PAST event. See "Meeting Notes" section for audio, video, documents and other information.

Original event date/time: Friday November 17th, 2006, 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

What will entertainment of the future look like?

• HDTV? Home theater? Photorealistic video games? Fully immersive virtual reality?
• social impacts of broadcast/download
• personalised entertainment though games or interactive films
• copyright and ownership issues
• the reduced cost barrier to people making and distributing their own work (aka YouTube)
• going out or staying in and the feelings of being overwhelmed with choice in what to do on a Friday night.

Of course, the best place to be on a Friday night is at the Future Salon.

Abstract:

This is a past event.

Meeting Notes:

Some of the main ideas from the discussion:

• The main phenomena is how there used to be "just a few channels" but now there are so many sources of entertainment that everyone can choose their own. Different people had different terms for this. Larry described it as different "subcultures" -- cultures used to be geographically distinct, "US culture", "Asian culture", "UK culture" and so on, today you have the "Arabic pop" culture which crosses geographic boundaries (e.g. crosses from Algeria to France and vice-versa). Jessica described the phenomena as "fragmentation", a term used in the advertising industry to describe, e.g. how TV audiences are "fragmented" compared with the way they used to be. Melanie described the phenomena as "the long tail".

• There is too much entertainment to watch, so you have to rely on other people to choose your entertanment for you. In the old days your entertainment was forced upon you by some editor at the BBC. Today, your entertainment is forced on you by your friends who send you links in email.

• In the old days, people we so surrounded by "real life" that they wanted entertainment that is artificial and scripted. Today people are so immersed in electronic media that they crave "realness".

• Copyright and intellectual property is a huge unsolved problem. How will musicians and movie producers be paid in the future? People fight back against draconian DRM schemes by cracking the schemes and putting the files on free file-sharing systems. The BBC is paid for out of a "TV tax", which many people don't like, and Germany has tried to institute an "Internet tax" but the people resisted and it failed. Schemes to get people to donate to support artists sometimes works, but relies heavily on social pressure -- often absent on the Internet. Other schemes, such as payment based on statistical sampling, rely on surveilance, which people also resist.

• Virtual Reality (VR) still hasn't arrived. Technological progress causes "waves of VR" (Melanie's term) as people try again to make it work. But problems such as vertigo and bad optics causing eyestrain remain unsolved.

• We talked a lot about the Wii and whether its motion-sensor input would usher in a new era in gameplay, with new and innovative video game genres that haven't existed before. Ben would be happy to be able to make a sword-fighting video game -- controlling a sword is impossible with existing joysticks. Maybe the Wii motion-sensing input device will be able to do it?

• "Vicarious living" (my term) is becoming more and more prevalent today, as more and more media comes from the real lives of other people. Examples are "reality TV" (e.g. MTV's Real World), watching slideshows from people travelling the world on Flickr, and YouTube.

  (I described my trick for using Google Earth for finding strange places and finding people that travel through that place on Flickr. For example see http://www.flickr.com/photos/jungle_boy/show/ This is a person I found at random on Flickr by searching for the name of a place in Ecuador I got from Google Earth -- which I in turn found at random by spinning the globe and stopping it with my eyes closed. If you want to know how to get the full-streen slide shows, send me an email. You need to install an additional program.)

• Are these trends good or bad? John mentioned how British TV tried broadcasting 6 camera angles, and found viewers didn't want to spend their time flipping between camera angles -- they wanted a professional to control the camera angles so they could sit in their comfy chair and watch the ball game. Sometimes more is not better.

• There was quite a bit of back and fourth between Larry and John about how the problem of "too much information", which plagues people in their professional lives (e.g. it takes 10 years to master a new field -- and getting longer), also impacts people in their entertainment world. In the professional world you want depth of understanding, but in entertainment you want to be broad and shallow, so you know the things you need to know to "fit in" culturally. But the amount you need to know, even in a broad and shallow way, has exploded. So there is a very powerfull parallel between the "information overload" people feel at work and the "information overload" people feel when they try to keep on top of the "culturally relevent" entertainment.

• Along with this has come a shift in people's attitudes, from "I know everything" to a recognition that it's impossible for them to know everything about anything. At the same time, because anything can be looked up instantly on Google (or ask.com), people feel psychological pressure -- people feel like they should know everything (which is impossible) because stuff is so easy to look up.

• There was also debate as to what exactly "entertainment" means. At first glance we always think of "passive" entertainment, like TV and movies. But a lot of people have hobbies, such as amateur astronomy, that are a huge amount of work -- but they still consider it entertaining. Likewise, attaining a high level on World of Warcraft takes a huge amount of work, yet we still consider it "entertainment".

• And in another twist, people in china make a living playing video games, earning higher levels in games like World of Warcraft. Is that work or is that entertainment? And some people even put things like "World of Warcraft Guild Leader Level 6" on their resumes to reflect the leadership skill they have attained.

• Jessica had a great phrase, "Letting the cats out of the bag.". I think this beautifully captures the "surprise element" of entertainment. Basically the idea is that what is most entertaining is often what reveals hidden secrets of human nature -- and once that cat has been let out of the bag, society moves on to the next cat. So in the 50's talking about interracial marriage on TV was shocking. In the 1990's, talk shows went from intellectual debate, as on Donahue, to the "shocking" transgendered people, amputees, and "white trailer trash" of the Jerry Springer show -- which itself has become boring and passe as people now get on YouTube to see human behavior that the Jerry Springer show, now stuck on the "formula" that worked in the past, can't conceive of.

Wayne's personal take:

The biggest surprise to me was how we started off by talking about how our culture was "fragmenting"... yet ended up discovering that we had, through the internet, a shared culture after all.

And that shared culture was all the things from my previous message -- the "Numa Numa" guy, "Star Wars Kid", William Shatner singing "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds", "All Your Base Are Belong To Us", and so on. For everything on that list, half the group or more had read or seen it -- but none of them had been seen by everyone. (Except for the South Park show about the Wii -- interestingly nobody saw the original TV broadcast, everyone saw it either by YouTube, BitTorrent, or TiVo -- that in itself is a Sign O The Times).

So this is our new common, shared culture: These whacky, off-the wall bits like "Numa Numa" and "All Your Base Are Belong To Us".

I know what you're thinking ... what? this is our new shared culture? The Numa Numa dance?? All your base are belong to us? Star Wars Kid? Stick Figure Death Scenes? Movies in 30 seconds re-enacted by bunnies???

Yeah, I know, I didn't expect it either! This was the huge surprise for me that came out of the meeting. That is a very strange thing, if you stop and think about it. It's not surprising that nutty things exist in the world. It is surprising that they become part of the common culture so readily. Why is that?

Ok so here's my theory (and my prediction for the future of entertainment is based on it). My theory is that in order for something to become part of the common culture, it must be forwarded around in email by everybody to everybody.

The operative word there is "everybody" and here's why. In order for something to be worth forwarding to your friends, it must contain some genuinely new information that they don't already know. In other words, it must have a big "surprise factor". At the same time, though, if the new information is to esoteric -- if it requires the other person to already have a lot of pre-existing knowledge in, say, physics or some other area, it will be forwarded by physicists to all their physicist friends, but will never "break out" and become part of the *common* culture.

So this is a pretty stringent filter: provide a genuine surprise that everybody can understand and forward to everybody else.

So my prediction for the future is: Expect the Unexpected! Because the entertainment of the future will be the entertainment that passes this filter, and it will, pretty much by definition, be weird, whacky, and surprising -- yet at the same time, something instantly recognizable and understandable to everybody.

Another thing you notice about those clips is that they are mostly non-commercial. Some of them like "Star Wars Kid" and "Numa Numa", have taken on lives of their own, with endless spinoffs and variations. (E.g. see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZHE3h5eT_M http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9qv97HC168 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77uXMLBUDGY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7So533gTA4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfIY60MmJYg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egmG0zG3f6g -- I got these just by clicking the links alongside the original Numa Numa).

Your assignment, after you get done reading this message, is to make your own Numa Numa video and upload it to YouTube. I'll be happy to link to them all from the boulderfuture.org website. We should do this instead of traditional photos & bios. It'll be a great way to show people what kind of people we have in our group.

You can see that "distributors" like YouTube are well-positioned to take advantage of this -- they don't have to figure out what's popular, or try to produce popular content themselves -- they can take advantage of "anything" out there that becomes popular, and run advertising. Yet advertising for YouTube won't be easy. The WIRED article describes some of the difficulties YouTube faces:

You Tube vs. Boob Tube
TV advertising is broken, putting $67 billion up for grabs. Which explains why google spent a billion and change on an online video startup.

At any rate, this selection of items suggests that it will be rather difficult for an advertiser to produce something *on*purpose* that spreads "virally" -- which is every marketer's dream. It's difficult because people don't appear particularly inclined to forward around something blatantly commercial (though it is possible -- it happened with the Honda "Rube Goldberg" commercial, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkzr0naZnZ0 ). Instead, everything comes across as spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment discovery or combination of ideas. "Hey, let's photoshop 'All your base' into a million images and see what comes out..."

And if you think about it, advertisers have another difficulty: Producing something with a genuine "surprise" factor means taking a risk -- people might react negatively to the "surprise" and backlash back at the advertiser. So this is the paradox: how do you produce something with the maximum "surprise" factor, so people will forward it all over the place, yet without risk?

Especially when you consider that the nature of the "surprise" can be something very subtle. What is the "surprise" in the Numa Numa video, for example? It isn't that a guy sits in front of a computer singing and dancing to a song. It's the strange facial expressions he makes, and the funny way he moves his head around as he sings the song -- it's the little details. In fact what makes "Numa Numa" appealing is so subtle that the Numa Numa guy himself couldn't repeat it -- he tried to make a new "Numa Numa" video but it was utterly boring. (You can find it on YouTube if you want, but don't bother -- it's boring).

YouTube and sites like it are just the very beginning of video on the internet. We've seen the tip of the iceberg of what is to come. Video on the internet will revolutionize entertainment. One thing it will do for sure is crank up the "whackyness" factor to full blast. Many cats have yet to come out of their bags.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-708218345413567790

So that's my prediction. And along with the prediction, I'd like to offer a bit of advice. Just relax and be entertained by it all. In our earlier meeting on Randomness, we talked about Taleb's idea of how randomness can cause enjoyment in some settings (his examples were literature and poetry) and harm in others (like medical diagnosis). While we worry about the rapid pace of change and unpredictability in our professional lives, we need not have any worry in our entertainment lives. There is going to be a ton of weird and whacky entertainment coming down the pike in the years to come. Don't stress over it or try to "stay on top of it". Just kick back and enjoy it.

That's my $0.02. For my closing thought... I figured I had to think of something clever, so here's something that somehow managed to escape mention at the meeting: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's great sense of humor, except for people in Nebraska...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvbWLfr-Z4s

Specal thanks to John Bray for suggesting this topic. It was very... entertaining ...

Some links to some of the topics we discussed:

South Park - Cartman's obsessed with Nintendo Wii (video)

Numa Numa

Star Wars Kid
more
more

All Your Base Are Belong To Us

The 30-Second Bunnies Theatre Library

Stick Figure Death Scenes

Star Wars in Ascimation

http://webpages.mr.net/bobz/ttyquake/ss/
(see also)

Kirk/Spock

Bollywood Othello

William Shatner Sings Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

Shatner Singing to Lucas

The Internet Is For Porn

Red vs Blue - Real Life vs The Internet

419 Eater

The Daily Show

Bush uses the Google

Bloggers ogle at Google Earth's topless sunbathers

Flying Car? Not Really

Huangyangtan Mystery -- a 900x700m scale model of a mountainous landscape

Here is a picture of the 419 Eater net scammed Commodore 64 keyboard carving

Here's the link re the red wine substance that starts with 'R', and supposedly boosts endurance 2x in mice

The BBC reports the most popular viral videos online. Star Wars Kid has 900m viewings, Numa Numa 700m, and the exploding whale that what the first thing I downloaded with broadband, 350m

And there are a series of links from that article to new discussion about the future of online TV

Special Thanks to: John Bray, Melanie Swan, and Ben Burdette for finding all these links.