The Butt Ugly Weblog

Tapestry

One of the reasons that I like role-playing games - even when played on the computer - is that they feel creative. Even when the game has three dialogue options that all lead to the same response, it lets me choose and create my own story, guaranteed to be different from everyone else's stories.

And not only that; it happens on games like Clash of Clans, where epic stories of combat are told every day, even though the sandbox is small compared to story-oriented games. But it's still me and my story and what happened to my village.

Looking back on the TV series I have enjoyed the most, I can always relate them to a story: Babylon 5 we watched on smuggled tapes from the USA and accidentally started a huge SciFi-club on the side. Deep Space Nine we watched with the wife when she was pregnant with our first child. Old Finnish comedy was the talk of the school yard back when we only had two TV channels in the entire country. I don't remember much about the shows, but I do remember the emotions of sharing these stories with others, and the story of watching something is, to me, more important than the story itself. The metastory of entertainment, if you will.

It even touches my work - the best jobs I've ever had were those where we were creating something together. It does not matter so much what it was, but building it was an experience that created a powerful story.

So one thing I'm always trying to do when confronted with new technology or opportunity is - what is the story that this is trying to convey? Can we help you tell more stories? Considering the things being hyped right now - VR _definitely_ lets you tell stories and once tools mature, we'll see an explosion of stories in that area. The AIs will write their own stories, and they will eventually be more beautiful and incomprehensible than anything humans have ever written. Internet of Things... Not sure. I don't care what my fridge tells my watch. It's not an interesting story. It's not even a good joke: "Hey, did you hear what the chair said to the table? { "position": "below", "color": "beige", "speed": 0.002 }."

One of the things that drew me to NFC was its storytelling ability - tagging any object would let people read its story. Rearranging things might change its story. Much of the same idea was continued at Thinglink, which has grown nicely to be a comprehensive VR/360/video/image storytelling platform, used by millions of students, teachers, publishers and advertisers around the world. I'm still having trouble grasping what are the stories of the IoT-connected world, and why should I really care. (Caveat: I'm expecting great things out of Thington, if they don't lose their way :-). I'm also enjoying Pasi Hurri's stories about his IoT connected sauna - though it's definitely on the geekier side of things. And yes, I know, there's great promise in reducing cost in industrial applications yadda yadda.)

Of course, this could just be my inability to understand the greatness that is IoT and that it's supposed to be invisible and Things That Just Work In The Background And Make My Life Easier. But until then it's just an Expensive Thing That Gets Broken In Mysterious Ways.