Water Cooler Games served as the web's primary forum for "videogames with an agenda" — coverage of the uses of video games in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment.
The site was maintained at watercoolergames.org from 2003-2009, where it was edited by myself and Gonzalo Frasca. It is now archived here in full.
Today, Apple announced the iPod Photo. iPod Photo is available in 40- and 60GB configurations, and comes with a new color LCD display capable of displaying 65,000 colors. You can view your image library on iPod photo, 25 thumbnails per page, and you can connect the iPod Photo to a TV to show slideshows with music.
I'm a dedicated Apple user. I have a PowerBook G4 in my lap, a G5 and Cinema Display on my desk, and an iPod 3G in my backpack. But the iPod Photo is easily the dumbest piece of consumer electronics I've seen all year.
Why? Because it's technology for technology's sake. There is no meaningful use value to be gained from carting around one's entire photo collection on an iPod. Compare iPod/iTunes with iPod/iPhoto. Getting all my music on the iPod allowed me to experience my library in a way I couldn't possibly experience it before. Music is a kind of accessory for me now; I can use it to enhance or amend my daily experience, not to mention the changes sparked by the iTunes Music Store. But we don't consume photos in an ambient fashion like we do music.
I've seen some reasonable arguments in favor of iPod Photo. Cconsumers may see it as a way to carry their photo collections to show other people, like a picture in a wallet. Others argue that its an entré into a new kind of portable video market -- download movies onto your iPod and dock it with your TV to view (the iPod Photo can't do video; this is just a projection). Still others argue that iPod Photo ups the fashion ante on the now-pedestrian iPod, breathing new life into iPod snobbery. Sure, there are probably other uses I am missing. I imagine iPorn will follow shortly, now that it's possible to take your entire dirty picture collection on the train or to work.
But how do we use the iPod Photo? What advice does Apple give to would-be users of the iPod Photo? Here's the best CEO Steve Jobs could muster:
Go ahead, go to your local Apple Store and ask how iPod Photo will change the way you live. See if you don't get a feature dump.
At its core, there's no human experience driving this innovation save Apple's hope to connect more "i" products to more Apple devices in order to get more Apple consumers to buy more Apple products. Just as cameras were thrown into phones because it was technically possible to put a camera in a phone, now photos are going on iPods because it is technically possible to view photos on iPods. We still haven't really figured out how to use camera phones, but still the carriers sell them to us in the hopes that we'll push more data through their networks. The real question to ask is -- how does this device change my experience of the world? I'm working on a new project that takes on this issue vis-à-vis camera phones right now. Surprisingly, it's not a commonly asked question. This is the same problem that's plagued Sony for years: their products are organized around the number of features and functions engineers who haven't left their labs in 5 years can pack into the smallest device possible.
Of course there are the niches, like professional photographers, for whom iPod Photo will be immediately useful (see the comments for why I struck this). For that matter, iPod Deposition would be useful for attorneys, wouldn't it?
Arguably the most useful feature of iPod Photo is its color screen, which allows users to see the album covers for their music. I'm not sure if most iPod users still consume music on an album-by-album basis, but if the new software allows you to browse the library by album cover, that could be an interesting information design innovation, depending on how the software organizes the images (by hue? luminosity?)
Ok, but this is a website about games. What does this have to do with games?
Quite simply, the iPod Photo is the Half-Life 2 of the consumer electronics world. It is the equivalent of a game engine whose major innovations include improved volumetric shading, fresnel effects, and 3D parallax. Nowhere outside of independent visionaries and academics do we see research pumped into the broad question of how game technology can underwrite new representations of human experience -- unless human experience means better water refraction, fog, rag-doll physics, or hovercraft support.
We need to fight against feature-dumping, that practice of offering functionality as an end in itself. Communities of practice can help -- people sharing their own experiences and techniques. As designers, we can certainly throw our own muscle into this problem. But seeing the iPod Photo made me realize that the problems of innovation in game design is actually tied to the problems of technology innovation in general. As consumers we have to interrogate these devices and show industries that it's important to us that they answer questions about how we live, what's important to us, and how we can experience and reflect on those things in fundamentally new ways.
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