Session 3 (session 2 for me) was the Entertainment one outlined in this post. The discussion about games was actually rather interesting – it can be very illuminating when you get people to think outside of their chosen specialism, throw in some friction and see what comes out. I was scribe for the first part, but handed over to the very lovely Phil Campbell to talk a bit about the social aspect of games that Sleepydog are involved in, and some of the advances in technology that they are working with to make the world of games less insular (sleepydog are the developers and inventors of the ‘Buzz’ games – quiz-show type group games. About the only things I can ever imagine playing on a games console.)
We talked a fair bit about what makes up ‘a game’
- the competition,
- the chance,
- the risk,
- the skill,
- the rewards,
- the adrenalin edge
…and how those manifest themselves in a lot of our other online interactions. How many of us use social media platforms in a very game-ish way. So we looked at how we can mash-up gaming and social interaction… Someone (possibly Rob Evans? not sure…) talked about some really interesting stuff to do with using ‘games’ of a sort to ‘teach’ computers to recognise certain things – labelling and tagging-based games, with a social payoff in that you get matched up with people with whom you share a lot of results… (one of the recurring themes was that the dating side of social media – from the gentile to the deepy seedy – was clearly one of the avenues where money could be made.)
The last question posed to us in the session was about coming up with new business models where money could be made, but we really didn’t give it much thought… it seemed like an out of place question, given the kind of discussion we’d had. So we left it.
Meanwhile, as mentioned before, a whole discussion was going on about the music industry that I missed out on. One of the interesting things about the weekend was the degree to which just being in at atmosphere of ‘thinking about mobile’ helped me to pull a whole load of thoughts together about how independent musicians can use mobile technology. I’ll report back on all that later
Til then, if you feel like commenting, do chip in on what you think are the ‘game aspects’ to the indie music biz, as it pertains to recording, marketing, selling music, doing gigs, entertaining people, maintaining integrity/autonomy, networking with other musicians, dipping into the ‘mainstream’ to our advantage?