“Fluency & Flow: Man and Machine at Play" By Richard Boyd- Serious Play Conference 2012

Fluency & Flow

Man and Machine at Play

My 21st Century Perspective

Digital Natives Rise

Stereoscopic 3D

New Interfaces

My gaming street cred

Simulation

Mobility

Augmented Reality

The Machines Take Over

A New Era

Industrial Age

Discipline and Hard Work

Top Down Authority

Financial Capital Critical

Invisible Hand of the

Market

Private Property

Relations

Information Age

Creative Play

Collaboration

Social Capital

Open Commons

Access to Global

Networks

“The Future is:

Mobile, Aware, Cloudy,

Social, Automated and

Augmented”

-Boyd, Boosman

“Harness Network Intelligence”

“Small pieces loosely joined”

“Rough consensus and running code”

“Compasses rather than maps”

www.metaversial.com for link to video

“In the Information Age, those (individuals and organizations) who gain a comfortable fluency with the digital tools that are remaking the world will not only

prevail over those who don’t, but they will begin to appear super-human”

-Boyd, The Argument for Augmentation, ITEC, London, 2010

The Three Stages of Chess

The Opening

• Predictable

• No Surprises

Middle Game

• Creativity

• Surprise

• Predictive Analytics

The End Game

• A Foregone Conclusion by then?

The Three Stages of the Information Age

The Opening

• Copied existing interfaces

• We adapt to machines on their terms

• Tethered

• 1965--2008

Middle Game

• Mobile

• Machines adapt to us

• The Interface becomes ambient

• 2008-?

The End Game

• Ubiquitous AI

• Singularity?

• Moravec vs Vinge?

Flow State Achieving Super-Proprioception

Flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990)

Flow

“The satisfying, exhilarating feeling of creative accomplishment and heightened functioning”

-Mihály Csíkszentmihályi 1972

“Intense, optimistic engagement with the world around us.”

-Jane McGonigal, “Reality is Broken, Why Games Make us Better and How They Can Change the World”

The Era of Augmentation

Photo courtesy of Dr. Julian Goldman (CIMIT)

Images by Andrei State, University of North Carolina

Achieve the Perfect Balance Between Humans and Automation

To Optimize Outcomes

[email protected]

The 21st Century Imperative

Do Less

The Zen of Zynga

Friction

Interoperability

Cost and Time

Reusability

T

he

DO

D

Vir

tua

l W

orl

d F

ram

eW

ork

Experimentation

and Innovation

What if we could field a massively multi-user collaborative virtual training environment that was…

• Scalable • Interoperable • Future-proof • Secure

– with 0 client install • With an incentive-aligned business model that

encourages ecosystem growth (Like iTunes) • That provides a consistent user interface

– from 2D to 3D – From handheld, to tablet, to laptop, to desktop, to the fully immersive holodeck

The Web is the Future of Gaming

• The next generation of

browsers incorporating

WebGL coupled with HTML 5

will become the de facto

foundation for the next

generation of gaming and

shared virtual worlds

• The next big 3D platform is

simply the current WWW with

additional capabilities.

Browser

+

WebGL

+

HTML 5

+

JavaScript

+

Jabber

+

Collada

www.virtualworldframework.com

The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stone.

Someone came up with a better idea

Conclusion

“Homo ludens et machina”

Man and Machine need to learn to play nice together

The interfaces between us are melting away, becoming more ambient

We need better software tools to continue to reduce the friction and increase fluency

[email protected]

Digital tool fluency will become as important as learning algebra

Additional

Thoughts

New Users

Digital Natives

Twitch speed

Parallel processing

Graphics first

Random access

Connected

Active

Play

Payoff

Fantasy

Technology-as-friend

Digital Immigrants

Conventional speed

Linear processing

Text first

Step-by-step

Stand-alone

Passive

Work

Patience

Reality

Technology-as-foe

Source: Marc Prensky (See also Don Tapscott’s “Grown Up Digital”)

How many baby boomers have this at home?

Gamification of the Future

Time Permitting Robot Talk

Foxconn building a robot army

Of one million

Autonomy

Metaversial.com/amberwood.html

pikaboodesign.com/fantafairies/

DearDylan.com

Taking “Serious Play” seriously at home