Douglas Rushkoff on Mobile Entertainment
Thursday Dec 14, 2006
The Big Mashup Participant Douglas Rushkoff talks here about mobile entertainment. Check it out and comment . . .
That’s Inter-tainment
By Douglas Rushkoff
How mobile can -- and should -- change the way we
think about entertaining ourselves and each other.
Conventional wisdom has it that entertainment applications will be the
key to unleashing the next great wave of handheld mobile activity. If only
handset manufacturers and mobile operators could figure out just what games
people want to play, music they want to listen to or content they want to
access, the industry will get through its current doldrums and escalate to the
next level. Everybody who needs a cell phone already has one, now it's time to
get the people who don't need one. And in a world where we're either working or
playing, the only other avenue is entertainment.
But what is entertainment, really? The roots of the word may surprise
you. To entertain literally means "to hold within" (tain, as in
"container," and enter, as in, well, "enter"
. And for manycenturies, this idea of produced fun being forms of entertainment has held.
In Ancient Greece, the epic storyteller stood in the village square and
attempted to hold the street audience within his spell of words. The great
theater piece is called "captivating" for its ability to hold our
attention long enough to watch the hero succeed or fail. Film, which has for
all intents replaced theater, has the advantage of a tremendous screen and
special effects, making it all the more easier for its craftspeople to hold us
within the worlds they depict. Most movie trailers now begin with the phrase
"in a world where...," only underscoring cinema's potential to bring
us into another place, and keep us there.
Even television -- "the idiot box" or "the boob
tube" -- induces us to be "couch potatoes," so entrapped by its
hypnotic spell that we may not move for hours. All of our
"entertainments" throughout history, from peep shows and carnival
acts to NASCAR races and religious revival meetings, strive to keep us captive
to the content, eyes open, jaws lax and passive to the story. Though we may be
at the edge of our seats, the only place we have to fall is further into the
world of the entertainment.
That's why "interactive entertainment" has always seemed to me
something of an oxymoron. The moment a person truly interacts, she is brought
out of that spell. And even if we decide that the kid playing Doom is just as
captivated by the world of her game as someone else is watching Jaws in a movie
theater, what about when that kid begins playing a networked game with some
other kid? Is she captivated? Yes. Is she held within a particular world? Not
necessarily.
Handheld devices, in particular, have trouble holding our attention in
quite the same way as IMAX screens and immersive environments, but they weren't
really meant to. I mean, how long can you stare at your watch? And even though
a Gameboy can hook a 14-year-old into its Liliputian reality for hours at a
time, and an iPod can envelop us (via earplugs) in its musical swirl, is the
"entertainment" model of captivation appropriate for wireless mobile
devices? I don't think so.
These kinds of devices differ from mobile in that they are
self-contained. The data on them is generally fixed for the length of the
performance or game. The "entertainment" is a matter of exploring the
databases or, at best, opening data structures in a new order, as in a computer
game. Networked play, via mobile devices, occurring anywhere and at anytime,
might actually comprise the opposite experience. Not captivation, at all, but
liberation.
A playful mobile device need not entrap its owner within its own RAM.
Rather, it can connect the owner with other people, the environment, or the
temporal reality in new ways. Who is available? What is around me? What's going
on right now? Instead of enter-taining, these devices might do better to
inter-tain us -- that is, hold our connection to other people, places and
things.
The mobile intertainment device depends not on captivation, but on
introduction, orientation, and interconnection. Although very few companies are
conceiving of mobile fun in this way, the early interest in services from UPOC
and Dodgeball prove that people are seeking a different sort of fun through
their phones -- a fun that involves experiences with other subscribers rather
than some company's content.
Even information portals like Vindigo and Avantgo base their success
less on what they provide themselves and more on how these pointers direct
users to things in the real world that they want or need. A restaurant or movie
recommendation is not the entertainment itself. It's intertainment to
entertainment.
Finally, self-publishing services like Phlog.net, which allow people to
post moblogs and cell phone photos, promise a lot more than entrancement --
they allow expression and connectivity. Indeed, there are a range of ways to
have fun that may not involve what is traditionally known as entertainment.
While it may be more challenging to develop business models for
user-generated social, artistic and self-expressive experiences, I think we
have to accept this dilemma of our own making. After all, here we are declaring
that mobile really is something new: a tide change worthy of massive
investment, speculation, consumer interest and cultural attention. Are we ready
to accept the fact that the interactive communication devices we've been
celebrating may actually be worthy of the pitches we've been making for them?
I think so. And this means developing new approaches to mobile
experiences, and finally evolving a two-thousand-year-old understanding of
showing people a good time. The new rule of thumb, so to speak, may be to
create experiences that do not contain the user but rather give the user a way
out. Landlines are not radios, and cell phones are not Gameboys.
Wireless intertainment doesn't involve people interacting with data;
it's about people interacting with the world or, at best, with one another.
It's time for the entertainer to end his song and dance, and make room for the
next era of players. The industry winners will be the ones who stop thinking
about creating the whole show, and learn simply to set the stage.
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