The plot: One man's quest to raise a team from the dregs of Italian football and return them to the glory they once had ninety-plus years ago.
The catch: The narrative is entirely born out of a game called Football Manager where instead of actually control the players on the field, you make all the administrative decisions and see how your team performs.
Seriously, though, there's like a hundred entries in this series and I'm completely engrossed (I'm about 3/4 of the way done). Every time I pick up my iPad to read it I realize how totally insane it is (I'm reading an account of a video game which is in itself an account of a real soccer team with fake players in an imaginary future). But really, it's amazing and sometimes funny and sometimes gripping and at the very least it's worth reading because it's definitely different.
Here's a small, almost random sample, from an entry titled "Wolves to the Slaughter:
When you're right on course for a safe mid-table finish, it sometimes feels like there's not a lot of news to report. A win isn't a huge story, but then, a loss isn't a huge story either, and time can slip by pretty fast as you make minor adjustments and chart the weekly ticks in your balance sheet. One game blends into the next, and before you know it, the season turns into a reverie. You're living life like a Middlesbrough fan. If you want to be sharp, you have to fight the glide.
Enjoy.
[Via Metafilter]
Tags: creativity, footballmanager, soccer, writing
Looking for new ways to tell stories.
Over at his Reuters blog Felix Salmon points to today's New York Times story on a waiver AIG signed giving up its right to sue the banks it paid off. While the story is interesting in and of itself, for the purposes of this post I'm going to focus on the source materials (the actual waiver), which the Times posted in a special browsing interface.
Funny enough just two weeks earlier Salmon had written a piece calling the paper out for not posting this sort of stuff, so it's a nice about face. But it also is a really interesting way to tell a story differently. As I see it most of what journalists are doing these days is not a lot different that what they were doing when we weren't all staring at screens for eight hours a day. Of course there are exceptions, whether it's liveblogging Wimbledon or, well, I can't really think of another example right this minute but I'm sure there are more. Journalism, for better or worse, is still mostly the same journalism it always was and we still engage with publications in the same sort of ways (albeit with more lists and slideshows now that they're on the web).
Source materials seems like an incredibly interesting and untapped area of innovation for news organizations. While I understand that posting this sort of stuff is often out of the question, it can't always be and I have to believe there's much fun to be had in telling stories through the documents collected instead of just the paragraphs that boil them all down. I guess some might see this as diminishing the role of the journalist, who has traditionally been tasked with finding the story, I'm not sure I agree. I dont think that there's any less of a need to find the story in a sea of documents, I just think this is a different (and hopefully more compelling) way to tell it.
In a lot of ways it feels like I'm talking about media invention, which Robin Sloan was kind enough to define last week:
Fundamentally, I think, a media inventor is someone who isn't satisfied with the suite of formats that have been handed down to him by his culture (and economy). Novel, novella, short story; album, EP, single; RPG, RTS, FPS--a media inventor doesn't like those choices. It turns out a media inventor feels compelled to make the content and the container.
I think maybe we've all become a little too comfortable with our CMSes (whether they be some big enterprise job or Wordpress or even Tumblr and Twitter). While these do an amazing job getting content out into the world, they also dictate how we present that content. Most CMSes want words, in paragraphs, in stories. Even Tumblr, for it's different approach, now just spawns content that can be scooped up and turned into a 150-page book with pictures.
So as not to end on a down note, though, the whole point of writing this is that I'm pretty excited with the stuff the New York Times is trying in this realm. They're playing with ways to tell stories and lots of others are as well (though most of them are outside the big news organizations). Even MSNBC's new page design seems like a step in a new direction. So please don't take this as some sort of whine about the state of things, but rather as excitement for what's coming.
Update (6/30/10): I should have mentioned the Guardian is doing some really cool stuff as well.
Tags: creativity, design, journalism, news
I'm having a hard time deciding whether I think this quote from Thomas Friedman is total crap or brilliant:
In today's wired world, the most important economic competition is no longer between countries or companies. The most important economic competition is actually between you and your own imagination. Because what your kids imagine, they can now act on farther, faster, cheaper than ever before -- as individuals. Today, just about everything is becoming a commodity, except imagination, except the ability to spark new ideas.
I think it's actually somewhere in the middle of the two. Sure ideas/imagination are worth something and you can't get anything done without them, but if they're not acted on, they don't matter. And while it may be easier and cheaper than ever to act on them, the vast majority of the universe doesn't get around to it. While I certainly believe in encouraging this kind of behavior in children (and adults) as much as possible, I think it's the bringing an idea to life piece that's not been commoditized.
Tags: creativity, ideas, makingstuff
I couldn't quite decide how to connect this to my post about innovations in crayons, so I decided to just split them into two.
This is a more negative take on the innovation that the market forces. Krugman on financial creativity:
At this point, there is no reason to take it on faith that cleverness in the financial industry is a net social good. Unless you can provide some clear evidence of productive innovations since regulation began to unravel -- and ATMs don't count -- the balance of the evidence suggests that smart people have been devising ingenious ways to concentrate risk and direct capital to the wrong uses.
So innovation and creativity certainly drive the markets, as everyone is into growth and if you can't find new things to sell folks it's hard to grow. But I often wonder whether in the end it's really "good" (though I guess that's not really a fair question, since I like living in a prosperous country ... and do work for companies that rely on just this sort of "creativity"). Is this sort of innovation really the best engine for growth? I mean I know there are other models (service pops to mind first), but this seems to be the dominant business strategy. I guess R&D-based companies would be another type, but so many of those get sucked in by this sort of fauxnovation (again, see: five blades).
Tags: business, creativity, innovation
A few weeks ago I wrote about how I'd been thinking of creating a curriculum to teach little kids to make stuff on the web. Over the course of a few emails Robin from Snarkmarket sent me a link to his essay from New Liberal Arts (which I must admit I own but have not read yet). Anyway, I posted this quote over at Tumblr and liked it so much that I felt like I had to post it here as well. (Ah the trials and tribulations of having multiple writing outlets.) Anyway ...
Making things is a circle. You start the arc with an idea about the world: an observation or hunch. Then you sprint around the track, getting to a prototype--a breadboard, a rough draft, a run-through--as fast as you can. Your goal isn't to finish the thing. It's to expose it, no matter how rough or ragged, to the real world. You do that, and you learn: Which of your ideas were right? Which were wrong? What surprised you? What did other people think? Then you plow those findings back into an improved prototype. Around the circle again. Run!
Tags: creativity, internet, makingstuff
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