Go ahead. You try wiggling your ears without help. It’s tough.

Two weeks ago I had opportunity to present a research game called Scoop! at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (What a mouthful. Everybody just calls it “CHI 2012”.).

One project was the singlularly most delightful of everything I saw. From the PINOKY abstract:

PINOKY is a wireless ring-like device that can be externally attached to any plush toy as an accessory that animates the toy, such as by moving its limbs. A user is thus able to instantly convert any plush toy into a soft robot. The user can control the toy remotely or input the movement desired by moving the plush toy and having the data recorded and played back. Unlike other methods for animating plush toys, PINOKY is non-intrusive, so alterations to the toy are not required.

Trust me. You want to watch the video. Not only does the device allow you to animate parts of essentially any plush toy, it’s also able to wirelessly communicate with other actuators and even record and playback simple motions. This means one can cause a fuzzy octopus to dance.

It was remarkable to experience the reaction of the audience. Despite their probing questions, hard core researchers and sensibly minded professionals alike were all charmed by this very playful technology. I was gratified that the team that developed PINOKY did not attempt to use this concept to somehow gamify plush toys. This was play — pure and simple.

For more, including a photo gallery, see this Wired article (from which the photo at the beginning of this post comes).

GRAND RAPIDS, MI – In line for a possible $15,000 grant from Sprite, city parks also could get up to $30,000 from Dr Pepper.

Grand Rapids is one of 213 Playful City USA communities being recognized this year by the Washington, D.C. non-profit KaBOOM! for efforts to increase play opportunities for kids.

This is the second time that Grand Rapids has been named a Playful City since the program started in 2007. The honor stems from several factors including the city’s overall commitment to building new playgrounds and improving existing ones, KaBOOM! spokesman Mike Vietti said.

(via Friends of Grand Rapids Parks)

And there’s even cooler nerdtastic digital signage on the inside of the newest model trains.

I’ve been living in New York City for just over half a year now. Apart from my official computer science graduate studies in play+tech, one of my favorite topics of study is the subway system and the behaviors surrounding its use.

First of all, what you need to understand is that the trains run fairly reliably, but there’s not much in the way of communicating arrival times when the trains are off schedule (and schedules are not usually posted in the stations to begin with). So, people anxiously look down the tunnels for hints of headlights in the distance. Keep in mind that the tunnels often curve away from the stations so there’s not much to see. Some stations have digital signs for arrival information, but they aren’t always accurate. Reportedly, because of old signalling equipment and concerns about terrorism, the city isn’t terrifically motivated to deliver accurate arrival times.

I found this behavior of impatiently and habitually peeking down the subway tunnel rather fascinating. It’s an unintended user interaction model afforded by the subway’s design. It seemed something really interesting could be done with the tunnel entranceway or that moment when the train appears there.

For an HCI (Human Computer Interaction) class with my advisor, we were recently given the assignment to anthropomorphize an everyday item and to depict our concept as a storyboard. Inspiration struck. My storyboards are embedded in this post.

Storyboard #1 — Click to embiggen.

Since more robust arrival information isn’t available, perhaps the digital signage of the newest model trains could be reconfigured to transform the train itself into a character. In this way we could communicate something valuable about the train’s status while simultaneously engendering empathy with the riding public. Something like a real life Thomas the Tank Engine. The approach of creating a face has the added benefit of cross-cultural communication — by and large facial expressions are universal.

One of my team members suggested that we go further by incorporating sound into the mix. So we envisioned changing the familiar bing-bong of the doors opening to speed up when the train is on time and chipper and slow down when it’s behind schedule and melancholy. We even talked about adding a child’s voice to the automated messages talking about how the train is feeling (no storyboards for these ideas).

Storyboard #2 — Click to embiggen.

The second thing you need to understand about the trains is that there’s an understood etiquette of sorts. When a train is at a station, it’s about to leave any moment. If you run to it and the conductor sees you, they will generally hold the doors so you can jump on. This works fairly well. Except for when the trains are stalled at the station due to construction or dispatch tie ups. At which point the train will sit at a station for an extended period of time with its doors open. For the average subway rider, seeing this is cause to rush to the train; they have no way to know how long the train has been there. Cars closest to the stairways fill to capacity while others remain relatively empty. And riders dash to the cars only to realize that they ran like an idiot for no reason.

So why not anthropomorphize the train to communicate when it’s sleeping? Or for that matter, there’s several facial expressions that could deliver valuable information on the train’s status all along the subway platform.

While technically this constitutes anthropomorphic design, I say these ideas are also a fine example of the potential for injecting playfulness into everyday technological systems.

As I have been reflecting on everyone’s responses, I first had a moment of second guessing, wondering if I had asked the wrong question. Perhaps asking about your favorite toys would have been a better approach. I quickly realized that this question could easily introduce all sorts of factors beyond the essence of playfulness — sentimental associations that muddy the waters, as it were. I truly hope you all have toys that you love because of who gave them to you. But this wasn’t our purpose presently. I’m satisfied with my original question and very much so with the comments that came in response. Thank you everyone for sharing your thoughts.

In reviewing the responses, I wasn’t surprised by them. I was surprised at their consistency. The same few toys or sorts of toys dominated. Building blocks, toy cars, dolls, even crayons. I assumed going in that there would be unusual gadgets or doodads making surprise appearances. Not the case. Even the Slinky that was listed shares a certain similitude with the other toys.

According to psychiatrist Peter Gray, “Activity oriented toward intrinsic goals, almost by definition, is play.” The “classic” toys that made so many appearances in the comments and reddit thread all share a central trait. They facilitate an engagement with the world that is intrinsically rewarding — building, exploring, pretending, creating. The process is as much as or even more rewarding than the end goal. In a sense, building the castle is more playful than playing with the castle.

Most digital toys are extrinsically oriented. That is, there’s an end experience in mind that is the “reward.” That reward generally amounts to variations on sensory stimulation. The human sensory system adapts to stimulation quickly; thus, pressing buttons and watching blinking lights are novel experiences that taper off in their ability to stimulate. Video games have a similar arc; however, they stretch the time of engagement considerably by straddling powerful extrinsic rewards (points, status, rich sensory stimulation) as well as an intrinsic reward (discovering the rules of the system). Through the power of computation, video games are able to change up each of these components to remain comparatively fresh for a long while.

On the other hand, however, building, exploring, pretending, and creating are all rewards unto themselves all throughout. These are playful all throughout. Hence, the toys that are endlessly playful are those that facilitate these intrinsically rewarding, playful experiences. So this brings me right back to the question I have been wrestling with for several years now: how do we use the power that technology affords us to facilitate, enhance, and even supercharge the intrinsically playful? That said, I think I’m making progress.

To all five of my regular readers, this post is an experiment in data collection and participation and not the sometimes mildly semi-interesting articles and links I usually put up. In fact, if you could spread this particular post around, that would be seriously awesome.

If you’re new here, hi there. My name is Mike Karlesky. I’m a computer science Ph.D. student. More on me here. My topic of interest is playful technologies (or also what I call playful media). What’s that you ask? Well. I’m not talking about video games. Shoot. This is a long story. It’s probably easiest if you read this post and maybe look at this page or possibly skim this list of articles.

Please help me out by sharing your experiences with toys

I’ve been thinking a great deal about toys and what constitutes the “toyness” of toys — what is it that makes them playful towards embodying those properties in more complex technologies? My thoughts have recently landed on the idea of emergence (see post previously referenced), and I hope to explore this notion through your experiences.

This is where I hope you come in. I’ve disabled the normal comments for this post and replaced them with Disqus because Disqus allows comments to be commented upon and voted up and down. I’m conducting a completely non-scientific survey towards informing my future research — all by way of the comments on this post.

Here’s my question: What toy could you play with for hours on end & why?

Childhood toys or a toy you play with as an adult. Solo play or play with others by way of a given toy. I’m really interested to know:

1. What toys crystallize the play experience for you in that they are endlessly playable?
2. Why do you feel that is?

Feel free to post links and photos (especially for toys with which a white American Midwesterner such as myself might not be familiar). Please comment on others’ comments and please vote up any comments that echo your feelings on particular toys. If this works well, I hope the most popular comments will be the most informative. Remember, the question is for toys that you once found or still find repeatedly and consistently engaging in play at length. One comment per toy but feel free to comment multiple times.

My conjecture is that many modern digital toys do not embody playfulness as much as consumption (e.g. educational goals or entertainment/amusement). Consequently, one can be “done” with these sorts of toys quickly in that they have a limited scope of experience. Hence, because of this, we have the aphorism about cardboard boxes being better toys than that which comes in them. Consider, however, as a counter example that toy blocks seem to be endlessly playable. The definition of a toy is tricky. Many American children love playing with those spring-like door stops. Is that a toy? Do your best. I’m not considering any sort of game, video or otherwise, to be a toy — though perhaps there are objects within the games that you treated as toys (everybody plays with the mousetrap but rarely actually plays the game that contains it). And, yes, there is Minecraft; we can go with that.

What will happen with the comments collected?

Great question. I’m really not entirely sure. For certain, if enough comments come in (fingers crossed), I will synthesize and summarize what we have collectively learned in another post at a later date. And please feel free to do the same. I can’t promise anything more immediate than this as my actual thesis work will not begin for a while yet and then take quite some time to complete. Nevertheless, I hope this Internet study will inform that research towards building something of immense awesomosity that will contribute to how we play together in the future.

Thank you so much for your help. I hope you find this as enjoyable as I am excited to see what unfolds.

*The title of this post is, of course, a movie quote.

UPDATE (Feb. 13, 2012): The 5 Best Toys of All Time — it’s tongue-in-cheek but also kinda not. {via @mvandervoord}

UPDATE (Feb. 16, 2012): Gave same questions to AskReddit.

Shepard and a few colleagues have developed a mobile application for the iPhone and iPad that helps its users stumble onto something new or see a familiar place in a different light.

Their Serendipitor app uses Google Maps to provide a route to a requested or random destination, but with a set of whimsical instructions to follow.

Walk behind a dog until it notices you. Find the nearest tree and sit under it for one minute. Locate a dark alley and walk down it, and if you can’t find one just close your eyes.

“The applications that I write are trying to get us to stop doing this,” Shepard said, holding his face close to his phone, “and start looking outward again.”

We enter this world a wondrous bundle, 100 billion neurons strong and bearing more synapses — those flashpoints of memory and sensation — than the adults we will become… when we are born we’re more aware and learning faster than we ever will again. Researchers, comparing the brain scans of babies to adults, have found that the only grown-up experience that even approaches this awe-inspiring awareness that we feel as infants is when we watch a really, really good movie or play certain video games. Only then is the back of our mind lit up like a child’s. Only then are we so fully immersed in a world that isn’t really real.

The article chronicles attempts by game designers wrestling with the challenges of engaging children in real play beyond mere media consumption of video games as well as returning adults to child-like play states. The science involved and the motivations of these designers and technologists are compelling.

Near the end of his presentation Takahashi gets to the heart of what he wishes to create — a return to a child-like, exploratory mind. A return to pure play.

Takahashi’s creation may be a valiant attempt at returning adult gamers to a childlike mind, but this is a nearly impossible thing. Scientists and academics who study small children, who know better than anyone the intricate mysteries of the very young, often talk about how much they would give to experience the world as their subjects do. Some say they’d give back all the awards and accolades they’ve ever received to be able to be three-years-old for just one hour.

Ultimately the people and projects in the article move on or fall short of their goals. As I read, I found myself cocking my head to one side and thinking there was an obvious problem. Though everyone in the article is speaking about creating true play and crafting playful experiences like none other, it’s always in the context of video games. Perhaps they are mistakenly conflating playful with game and are trapped in game-like thinking. What I believe they actually seek is a technology-enhanced creativity and exploration rooted in free play (think playing with blocks) that is not central to games (jumping over mushrooms to save princesses). Of course, I’m always trying to see the world in terms of playful technology. So there is that.

Let me paraphrase a quote I cannot seem to find (if you know of it, please drop me a note). I recall someone once expressing a thought along this line: A new idea does not come so much as a eureka moment but as a series of small discoveries.

What I wrestle with in writing this blog is the process of hanging thoughts on a feeling — a kind of sense I have that there is an unexplored, significant, uniquely playful direction in which to take technology. At present, I can barely draw the boundaries of this notion and yet I can still feel its edges even as I struggle to put words to it. So recent days have been exciting as I’ve experienced several small discoveries in just what this idea of playful technology might mean.

The word playful is distinct from game and even from play.

For a long time I’ve made the natural association of the word playful with the word play. On its surface, it seems rather obvious. I’m beginning to think more deeply about this and seem to be moving to a richer understanding of these words. Play encompasses many expressions of the term, encompassing games and non-games alike. What if something that is a type of play is not necessarily playful?

English being both a language wonderfully descriptive but also at times quite ambiguous, let me get at this distinction with some simple questions. Can you imagine describing a game as playful? I bet you can. Can you also imagine describing a very different game without the word playful ever entering your mind? I know I can. Isn’t that interesting? If a game is a kind of play then how can one game be thought of as playful and another as something that’s not particularly playful? I posit this is because the semantics of playful and play are not nearly as related as we may think.

When I introduce the phrase “playful technologies”, the people to whom I’m speaking will invariably ask me to explain. For the last few months this is how I’ve started that conversation…

Me: “You know video games?”
Them: “Yeah?” (They say with a certain expectant, upward lilt of recognition.)
Me: “Okay. Not that.”

Slowly it’s begun to sink in that this is a more profound distinction than my pithy, if confounding, way of starting conversations might first seem. In fact, not realizing it, I began to get at this very notion a few months ago when I wrote about gaminess and ungames.

Playfulness embodies a sort of organic emergence.

In general, games are goal oriented. Their structure leads the player down a sometimes lengthy path bounded by a variety of rules to achieve some aim. The whole experience involves many layers of long-form design towards that end. Playful experiences are much different than this. At the core of something playful, there exists an emergence — a capacity to spark behaviors or experiences that very well may not have been designed or even intended, a complexity that arises from a multiplicity of simple interactions.

I recently read a transcript of a presentation given by Brian Eno entitled Composers as Gardeners that helped me see this. Eno’s central point is this:

My topic is the shift from “architect” to “gardener”, where “architect” stands for “someone who carries a full picture of the work before it is made”, to “gardener” standing for “someone who plants seeds and waits to see exactly what will come up”.

A game is architected. Something that is playful is “grown”. Grown in the sense that seeds are planted and at each interaction with a player those seeds instantaneously grow into forms and combinations not necessarily envisioned by the gardener. But just as elaborate architecture can include garden terraces, this distinction between games and playfulness does not preclude a game from including playfulness — hence the possibility of both games that are playful and games that are not. With its block-based world construction, Minecraft is a great example of a video game that is also very playful (and very popular because of it).

And now onto this business about cardboard boxes.

How many times have you heard the well worn trope about kids playing more with the box a toy came in than with the toy itself? Isn’t it interesting that something about this statement rings true however exaggerated it may be.

Blocks (and many other playful objects) have this emergent quality. There’s just enough there to play with but the experience has not been mapped out to a distinct endpoint as in a game. There exists just enough properties and interactions to allow combinations of simple interactions without end. In the very best kind of playfulness, there’s hints and suggestions as to how to play but nothing guiding or constricting that freeform expression. The player explores and combines what is already there. In my opinion, this is why so many technology-laden toys fall flat (see The Zen of Toy Blocks). The technology has been incorporated and a few specific interactions designed in such a way as to map out how to arrive at an endpoint. This is not the essence of playfulness, let alone much fun.

Technology added to games has opened an amazing new world. The same has not yet happened in playfulness. I’m certain I have not expressed my notions here with perfect clarity. And, of course, I’m still working these ideas out. That said, I believe the way forward is to explore playfulness as emergence through technology — using technology to imbue objects, spaces, and experiences with the seeds of many simple but emergent interactions. With technology, what has been limited by physical constraints in space or time can be made vastly more intricate. The goal is to not create something more complex. Rather, I’m proposing that playful technology involves the interweaving of a tremendous number of simple interactions that can be combined in compelling, enthralling, and very new ways only possible through technology.

(Image by Paul Lim under Creative Commons Licence)

From Gary’s Eskimo Kisser series

Gary creates small kinetic sculptures with a certain whimsy and playfulness. Though certainly not of the high-tech of my interests, Gary’s work succinctly captures both the essence of playul design and the connection of play to intimacy. Whether it’s millions of transistors or three gears, playful technology is wondrous.

View a short documentary on Gary’s work [Vimeo].

(via Colossal)

My grad school funding at present is connected to an interdisciplinary program focused on security research. That may sound far removed from the direction I’m supposed to be taking developing the ideas of playful technology and all that. But hold on. Let me throw some knowledge at you.

Security is essential. Or rather, being able to trust our fancypants computer systems is essential. Security also tends to be seen at odds with usability. Certain design principles can alleviate much of that tension. That said, certain security interactions remain a pain and inspire frustration at best and outright circumvention at worst. The intent of my funding is to look at security from a very broad perspective — including Human Computer Interaction. My advisor and I are exploring how we might use playful interactions to offset certain necessary usability costs in security systems — a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down (and, yes, that’s stuck in your head for the rest of the day now).

Some security-related interactions (particularly authentication) are just no fun. Passwords expire at seemingly inopportune moments. They’re hard to remember, and there’s so many to remember. Rules for creating them cause you to grumble @&#%! (hey, that’s a good password right there). A notion we discussed at length is the nature of passwords and security as part of an ecosystem. That is, that security is something you tend like a garden. Katherine even drew the parallel of viewing passwords as having a lifecycle towards asking how a compost heap of old passwords might help fertilize a new crop of digital certificates.

All this lead me to certain ideas (that we’re not at present pursuing) about creating a kind of tangibility to passwords or security tokens or simply security itself. These things in and of themselves are quite ethereal and very unreal, though the implications of compromised security are very real. There’s an inherent misalignment in how humans view and interact with security. How might we address this?

It occurs to me that we have passwords that are tangible in some sense already. Two-factor authentication systems often make use of pocket-size hardware tokens. It also occurs to me that the form factor and smarts in these tokens is not that far removed from the likes of Tamagotchi digital pets. So, what if all the techno mumbo jumbo of your digital security profile was crafted into the character of a digital pet? There’s something hardwired into us that enjoys the act of nurturing. Tamagotchi demonstrate just how compelling that interest to nurture can be — even if virtual. Actions like walking, feeding, and taking to the veterinarian your digital pet could map to updating your passwords, reviewing privacy settings, responding to policy changes, and maybe even acting socially/communally in the digital equivalent of a dog park. Heck — old passwords and credentials could even be subject to a pooper scooper.

This is the sort of application of playful technologies I have in mind. And, now, I get to work on such things fulltime. My actual, current research project is quite a bit broader in scope; we’re yet working to flesh out the concepts. More on that in the months to come.

(Image: SecurID by Purple Slog under Creative Commons license)
(Image: Tamagotchi by quimby under Creative Commons license)