This week I gave a talk at the FIPP Congress where there is now an international push to ingrain the slogan, "Magazines Make Things Happen." The magazine publishing industry is faced with the difficult task of re-inventing itself in the new reality of the Web. Why would someone travel through the rain to get to a newstand or bookstore to pay $3 to $7 for a stack of paper when you can just sit at your computer and visit the online version for $0? The MPA has a variety of statistics that support a reality where people still like magazines. Are these statistics true? Well, yes. I still read magazines. I still buy them too. And if I have a chance to pick them up for free, I'm there.
At the conference I met a publisher in Hong Kong named Robby Yung. One thing that particularly struck me we was how Robby said that the "killer app" in China on mobile phones has nothing to do with full-motion and full-color 3G-style content, but instead it is SMS-based text adventures. Text adventures. Wow, that brings me back to the days of early computing. One of the first programs I typed into the computer was a text-based adventure game. You didn't buy software back then -- you'd go to the bookstore and buy one of three or so books/magazines with program source code in them to manually enter into your computer. If you aren't aware of the genre, it's quite spare but brilliant in its own way.
Instead of a GUI (Graphical User-Interface) you use a TUI (Textual User-Interface) to type in commands like, Go West or Pick up box. Often times the computer would say something back to you like, Huh? What do you mean? Of course it couldn't understand everything you were trying to say. The king of the text adventures was probably Zork. I'm surprised to find that you can actually download and play these games for free now.
I'm glad to know that the Chinese are playing in this entirely civilized genre of gaming. No sound, no texture-mapping, no fast-action button-pushing. They are living within the imaginative space of their mind, instead of what they see as a direct representation. Sounds healthy for the mind. Wait a second, isn't that what is called, "reading"?
Regarding of my use of the TUI term, that was a slight pun on something we have here at the Media Lab called Tangible User Interface for something that should have been rightfully called CLI (Command-Line Interface) as pointed out by Paul Waite in the UK, "I'm sure I'm sounding a bit silly now for telling you something you already know, but I do like the way 'Command-Line Interface' reminds us of a time when we just told computers what to do - commanded them to do our bidding. There is a certain simplicity in a machine that will only do exactly what you tell it to, regardless of how arcane or incomprehensible the method of telling it is." On this topic, here's a funny book by Neal Stephenson called, In the Beginning There Was the Command Line.
Jeremy Lehrer, Editor at Print Magazine in NYC, writes, "Referencing Zork brought back memories. Indeed, when my girlfriend visited my parents' house back in Cincinnati for the first time, I got my mom's 80s-era IBM computer running and showed her what it was like to play Zork III. I still remember the solutions to some of the puzzles, even today." Clearly Jeremy is more intelligent than I as I recall never being able get very far in Zork (or any game for that matter).
Posted by maeda at May 27, 2005 12:02 PM