Playing with the Future

Editor's Notes

• #3: Here’s the New Yorker cover for this month. Imagine seeing this image for the first time – to many, this represents how kids or Gen Z play today. And it’s true -- children have a healthy appetite across “traditional screens”, however their usage of these screens is declining.
• #4: Instead, there’s been an upswing in children’s participation in media through a mobile device whether at home, in the car, at school… wherever.
• #5: And even when they grow up …As big Kids – we continue the pattern of always having a mobile device (or 2) on us to play, connect with others and document the world we live in. So I started to wonder …is this (hold mobile phone) the #1 play object for both kids and adults alike? A good way to think about this is to consider if this mobile device will stand the test of time? Will it still be with us when we look back on our history, 10, 20, even 100 years in our future?
• #6: We think this is mobile today (PHONE). But mobile is an action, not an object. It’s the ability to move freely or easily and a mindset for us to design for that can stand the test of time and embody the 4 play patterns that I’m going to share with you. Play patterns that are not new, but re-envisioned to move with us into the future.
• #7: What is the #1 Play Object that’s mobile and has stood the test of time? It’s a Ball (pull it out).
• #8: And we’ve been playing with balls throughout history. Balls date back to about 1,600 BC …so over 3500 years (and maybe even longer) we’ve been playing with balls. Looking at more recent history, pinball machines combined outdoor games like bocce and indoor games like pool. And I’d be remiss in not mentioning Pong which was one of the first video arcade games. Civilization has been finding ways to be Creative & Resourceful…
• #9: …including seeing the ball as more than what you see at first glance which is at the heart of the first play pattern: Be Creative & Resourceful
• #10: And today’s digital kids want open-ended platforms that are both flexible and encourage exploratory storytelling to build new worlds and create characters. Much like Steve, the builder -- Kids who play Minecraft are doers. In Minecraft, kids have the freedom to be creative and resourceful with the stories and characters from any of their favorite games, movies, books or whatever their imagination cooks up.
• #11: Part of being resourceful is knowing where to go to learn what you need to keep playing and YouTube is the place for kids. Four of the five most popular YouTube channels are aimed at children, racking up more than 2B video views between all of them. In the top 10 at #6 is The Diamond Minecart, Minecraft videos with over 6.7M subscribers. When young people share their interests and connect in purposeful yet fun and engaging activity, learning happens organically as a part of the creative production during play. The Minecraft community that has built up around YouTube is a solid example showcasing the power of peer learning and mentorship in action. https://www.youtube.com/user/TheDiamondMinecart
• #12: And if you’re a parent of a child from the age of 5 through teenage years …most likely Herobrian, Enderman, Redmine, and a flurry of other names and terms are common language in your household. You also are probably very aware of Microsoft purchasing Mojang last year for 2.5 Billion. I’m sure you heard or saw at E3 this month when Microsoft and Mojang shared their live demo using the HoloLens, with Minecraft to make the game an immersive environment. There are two things about this new development that effectively blends the physical and digital world. One HoloLens can be projected on any surface blending digital objects with the real world and two, kids can still play together on any device so the importance of creating and socializing and fostering that peer learning continues no matter the socio-economic differences. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/24/minecraft-hololens-mixed-augmented-reality-microsoft
• #13: Second Play Pattern – Kids want repeated prolonged interactions. Whether you kick it or pitch it, catch it, throw it, dribble it or hit it or use one of these to control it (ie: phone) -- the ball is a common denominator in games today. More fundamental then gaming… the ball is really representative of the nature of play. It transcends the video game, physical game space, or imaginative game space. It’s become part of human practice. It’s related and essential to gaming …but let’s look at the bigger picture of why over time we’ve continued to return to this simple play object.
• #14: And here is a simple object (show Snitch), a token in a story that captured the hearts of everyone, especially Millenials (my students… those who I like to refer to as the Harry Potter Generation). This group and even Gen Z have grown up on Harry Potter -- reading the books, watching the movies, playing the video games, the mobile games, and even going to Hogwarts at Universal Studios to pick up some chocolate frogs.
• #15: No matter where the fan begins their journey, Harry Potter is a magnet. Young people want to inhabit the story world with a desire for repeated, prolonged interaction, and expect to return to this rich play world again and again. I couldn’t walk across the Boston Common without seeing college kids playing Muggle Quidditch running around on their broomsticks trying to catch the snitch, which wasn’t this (hold up the snitch) but rather a tennis ball inside a long sock hanging from the shorts of a referee dressed in yellow.
• #16: And since young people have grown up with Harry Potter, often they return from different perspectives, gaining a deeper awareness of identity and social groups as they “try on” what it means to be at Hogwarts as a Slytherin versus a Gryffindor.
• #17: Inspired by the stories and play experiences they’ve grown up with, young people are becoming narrative citizens to discover their place in society, A good story not only works across media and objects to expand the story world but it also leaves space for fans to add their own stories. JK Rowling said, “We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to Imagine Better.” And that’s just what the HP Alliance does. It changes the world by making activism accessible through the power of story. Since 2005, they’ve engaged millions of fans through work for equality, human rights, and literacy. These young citizens are the most diverse group of kids. My son’s friend are often a mix of ethnicities …back this up with the latest news headlines on gender and race and that American kids have never known a world where the US wasn’t at war and you can guess that kids today just want equality and justice to prevail and for everyone to get along.
• #18: I can sit here and play ball by myself but it gets really interesting when I have a play partner. A majority of team sports center around a ball. The world’s sport is soccer and it’s the universal language of fun, play and collaboration as you can see every 4 years it takes Center Stage with the World Cup.
• #19: Thinking how soccer impacts the world. There are 4 women from Harvard who thought about kids in Africa when inventing the sOccket, a soccer ball that captures energy with every kick. Fifteen minutes of play powers a light for up to 3 hours. After playing with the ball, the child can return home and use the ball to connect a LED lamp to read, study, or illuminate the home. Soccet is an example of collaboration in practice where both perspective-taking, empathy, and acceptance of one’s own and others’ responsibilities within the group is considered. These are all key characteristics in fostering strong collaborations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5gqoYkL8To#t=96
• #20: Through joint media engagement whether it is between kids or parent and child, there are a lot of platforms that offer creative building blocks for kids to build their own games and worlds to share with others, like Mario Maker. I wanted to share with you this one, LUMO because it combines both the digital platform with physical play. It encourages kids to make their own digital projections and LUMO is inventive in turning the projection into a reactive play space. This collaboration takes their non-technical toys and breathes new life into them as the digital projections react to the child and toy. It re-envisions collaboration for today’s digital kids by having play objects and actions become hyper-personalized and customizable.
• #21: And bringing back the cover of this month’s New Yorker… If you look closely at what those 2 girls are doing, they’re on Minecraft so probably collaborating with each other via the screens even though it looks like they are in parallel play, BUT it’s ironic that the dolls are left to their demise on the floor and outside the inviting window is a playground untouched. This has been an ongoing concern for parents, and Nintendo with the Wii was early to the game on blending the physical and digital play space and getting kids up and active while still having kids enjoy their digital lives. But we can do better that keeping our physical play tied to an actual screen. That’s the big challenge today.
• #22: So coming full circle on the play patterns, I’d be remiss in not sharing with you that if I was stranded on an island, a ball (bounce) would be on the top of my list. Especially considering how creative, resourceful, hours of prolonged play I could have with it …which brings me to Wilson from the movie Cast Away with Tom Hanks – Here’s a perfect example of incorporating this play object (hold up ball) into storytelling and making a simple physical object a character itself.
• #23: In entertainment, Disney Infinity is an attempt at bridging this gap. It’s very good at pulling together Disney’s ever-growing library of characters into a sprawling, shared world. But part of blending the digital and physical worlds together is to encourage tangibility where kids actually touch, play and manipulate objects.
• #24: And again, Nintendo did it better with Amiibo. You took what Disney Infiniti and Skylanders had done and expanded on this idea by not requiring a portal for each game and instead allowing each character to work across all the mobile devices. But here’s another big challenge …the notion of tangibility in this type of game is limited as kids see these (pull out toy) as figurines rather than toys.
• #25: Once you put the figurine on the portal to bring him into the game, nothing’s done with that figurine until you need to switch it out with another to advance in the game. Furthermore, in talking with kids about bringing these type of characters into playing with other action figures beyond the game, kids often responded “Why, THIS IS ONLY for the game.” The object doesn’t have a life outside of the games it belongs to and therefore, kids are not making connections to other play experiences. To address this problem, we need to consider affordances of tangibility that will change the story, not just support the story and encourage kids to play with the objects in different ways beyond its original intention. So…In summation, I’d like you to consider 3 areas that need to move forward…
• #26: We move forward on further blending the physical and digital by making more Smart Toys, then we really need to be asking Ethical questions of should we do this.
• #27: Do you recall earlier this year Mattel releasing “Hello Barbie”, a talking doll with speech recognition that records your child's conversations and stores them in the cloud. The goal was trying to let children have realistic conversations with their playthings …which is great, who doesn’t want their toys to come alive and talk back! AND …Many argue that there's no cause for concern, because the conversations being captured are so mundane. But that is not always the case. I don’t know about you, but I played with Barbie as a child and though Ken was sold as Barbie’s Boyfriend, I preferred to have GI Joe as Barbie’s guy and Ken was Barbie’s gay friend. It’s these type of quiet conversations where children play and interact with toys to make sense of society and the culture they live in, than perhaps we don’t want to persist over time. Not to mention the secondary conversations the recorder could capture of Mom and Dad fighting or talking about their banking which has privacy concerns and potential security breaches.
• #28: Like all innovation, its these failures that help push the entire field forward. #2 - Toys shoud NOT just connect to the screen
• #29: And this month Disney stepped forward with a goal similar to Mattel’s – what if toy’s could play back? But this time, it had the advantage of coming on the coat tails of Barbie’s ethical lesson. The Playmation components are intentionally not tethered to an Internet connection during play. Kids wear Iron Man’s repulser on their arm and have action figures to interact with as they run around with the help of Jarvis to guide them in their action. But a few things to consider that could be limiting to Gen Z kids. They do look like this (skylander figurine) though …so I’m curious if the action figures only support the story and play rather than change it. And at first release, Disney Playmation only allows for 2 players to play together and as we’ve seen with Minecraft, kids are use to playing with multiple friends at once, whether they are in person or tele-cocooning. And lastly, they are keeping this a walled garden play experience, so the opportunity for kids to be creative and resourceful might be limited.
• #30: # 3 -- Offer maker opportunities in play – We need to have a way for kids to be part of the DIY movement and deepen these opportunities as part of play.
• #31: At the Annenberg Innovation Lab, we’ve also been exploring how storytelling will evolve in this new connected world. For example, using Winklebeans, little wooden monsters with magnetic interchangeable pieces – we’re playing around with 3 things – 1) Reactive audio, 2) Magnetic sensors to change the story. But #3 area of exploration, Adding opportunities through 3d printing – is the one that moves the future of play forward and offers new types of maker opportunities. 3D printing is on the rise. In this culture of collaboration, offering IP as digital assets to purchase and manipulate would open up new possibilities and potentially new business models. This would also create a new relationship between Nintendo and your fans. Remember, Gen Z kids are creative and resourceful. They are the epitome of the DIY / Maker culture and more than anyone else, they want to customize their play experience.
• #32: With advances in Internet of Things, wearables, and 3D Printing, blending the digital and physical spaces can now be re-envisioned. Our young people want this (SHOW mobile phone) and this (show ball). They don’t see it as separate. Kids see these work together in tandem, whether you have them both in your hand or not. When you understand, design and combine the four play patterns, you foster in today’s kids a sense of independence and ingenuity that labels this group as the kids that “color outside the lines.” It’s these blurred lines that mark the end of clearly defined roles, traditions, and play experiences for children. So mobile is here now …but looking ahead, think about this simple object that has stood the test of time (the ball) and re-consider mobile with the idea that the next new screen is no screen at all.