Hugh Garry

Games and Radio

One of the most amazing things about working at the BBC is being privileged enough to be involved in 'firsts' and this weekend's first ever Big Gaming Weekend on Radio 1 ranks highly amongst my favourites.
 
Games have become such a huge part of our audiences' lives and I've been looking at how they can fit into what we do in Audio & Music Interactive. A key thing I found is we need to know more about how to talk about gaming on-air. I'll be honest, it's not been easy. Non-gaming producers have been resistant to the idea of talking about games on-air. Their worries about isolating the non-gaming audience are to some extent understandable.

But the UK gaming community is huge and hugely popular amongst Radio 1's target audience. For me, not talking about games is like not talking about what was on TV last night or what films are on in the cinema. It's a no brainer for Radio 1.

Thankfully recent changes in gaming have allowed DJs to engage the audience in ways that wouldn't have been possible a few years ago. There's been a dramatic changes in the demographics of gamers due to the rise in casual gaming. The growth in online gaming, UGC and the rise of 'self improvement' games offer lots of opportunities.

The Big Gaming Weekend was packed with great moments. On Friday afternoon we witnessed Edith Bowman challenge Steve Coogan to a few verses of 'Knowing Me Knowing You' on SingStar. On Saturday, Vernon got on the Xbox in the Games Lounge and played what seemed like half his listeners online. On Sunday night, Annie Mac and Nick Grimshaw encouraged their audience to download the assets pack from the website and make a 'Switch' level in LittleBIGPlanet. And on Monday, Fearne Cotton brought the nation together for a version of 'Knights of Cydonia' by Muse on Guitar Hero (listeners without Guitar Hero were invited to join in on air guitar).

We ran an online poll to find the Greatest Game Ever; Radio 1 listeners voted Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare their number one. You could check the leaderboard to see how all our DJs and guests were doing in the Games Challenge, then check out the BBC's first ever games blog 'Get Your Game On' written by 1Xtra's Rampage.

The long tail of our Big Gaming Weekend was what excited me most. The weekend was a great opportunity for us to make our mark in the gaming world and reach out to non-listening game players. The ideas were fairly small scale but did allow us to drop bits of Radio 1 into the online world for players to stumble across via their consoles. We did this by introducing our DJs into the homes of many online gameplayers, creating a Radio 1 round in the game Buzz and encouraging our audience to download assets to create their own levels in LittleBIGPlanet or create machinima. All great stuff and all pulled together in less than a fortnight.

So what next for games? Well, rather then looking a head to the next Big Gaming Weekend, my big hope is that productions teams are inspired to introduce games into the everyday language of their shows. The task is no different from the one I faced when I first joined the BBC in 1996 when I had to convince our DJs to talk about the first ever Radio 1 website. "Sorry, we don't want to isolate our non web audience" came the reply.

Virtually Nothing Has Been Invented Yet

I've just stumbled across this great TED Talk from from 2004 by serial inventor Woody Norris in which he demonstrates hypersonic sound technology that directs sound the way a laser beam directs light. Its an incredible talk and given that I work in radio had me thinking a lot about the postives to come from such as unique invention.

It really opens up the possibility for getting radio into public places without it becoming a public nuisance or having to provide headphones like they do on planes. Imagine being able to point directional radio at individual seats on public transport. Woody gives a great example of how this could be used in a car allowing the children in the back to listen to completely different music to what the adults are listing to in the front without either of them being able to hear each others. Sadly, the technology has been used mostly in war.

There's been much debate about the origin of the idea and the actual quality of the sound but that matters little when you consider Woody's comment that relatively speaking "virtually nothing has been invented yet". Taking the light bulb as an example did Edision ever envisage a time when laser technology was correcting poor vision? I doubt it. So the failings that exist now will be corrected and hopefully the uses in wartime will feed innovation in more worthy areas other than war.

...like having dinner with Joe Pesci

Russell Davies is crowd sourcing an analogy library so I thought I'd throw my hat into the ring. Here goes...

Working for the BBC is like having dinner with Joe Pesci. Sometimes it's impossible to know how people will react when things go wrong.

With so many heads rolling over the whole Brand Ross affair one can't but help look back and ask 'How did it all come to this'? If for a moment you can somehow try to erase everything that has gone since from your mind, and bring yourself back to that moment, would anyone predict that what had been said would have had such dramatic consequences. Really? Ultimately it all comes down to a judgment call on whether Andrew Sachs would view such comments as lighthearted or intentionally offensive.

The whole thing reminds me of the scene in Goodfellas when at the end of yet another hilarious anecdote by Tommy (Joe Pesci) somewhere in amongst the riotous laughter Henry (Ray Liotta) is heard to say 'You're funny'. Unfortunately for Henry the comment made in good spirit was not taken that way by Tommy and what followed was very comfortable to watch...pretty much like the news this week.

From this point on it's hard to imagine how Russell Brand or Johnathan Ross will perform given that somewhere in the back of their minds is the fear of a Pesci-like reaction waiting to leap on every comment made about a celebrity. Similarly staff at the BBC will fear a Pesci-like reaction from the public at any content deemed 'risky'. Who wants a bad judgment call on their CV? Calculated risks will be gone forever, replaced by much safer Radio/TV programming at a time when people are calling for the BBC to be more distinctive. I'm not saying insulting people is distinctive, but look beyond the bad language and both were capable of distinctive TV.

Fortunately for Liotta, Pesci was winding him up and it all ends up with laughs and smiles. Sadly for Brand, Ross and Leslie Douglas the only people laughing are the 30,000 who went out of their way to hunt down the audio on Youtube so they could be offended by it. It's a bit like that old Tommy Cooper joke... "Bloke goes to the doctor and says 'Doc, my arm hurts when I do that' (holds arm up in a weird way), so the doctor says 'don't do it then'. That's two analogies in one post.

Ross Brand Visualisation

Here's what the public felt about Sachsgate as seen via Wordle. First visualisation represents comments from readers of the Daily Mail.

This one is from the Guardian

Mobile movie nears completion

I’m sat here in ‘The Shed’ at Radio 1 editing the final part of Shoot The Summer arguing with Pete Roach about which bits to leave in. I want to leave the mistakes in, he’s rather they were taken out. As the editor Pete has had the daunting task of gluing all the clips together in a way that tells some kind of meaningful story. Poor Pete.

Fortunately for him I made a massive editorial decision the day I came up with the idea for a full-length user generated movie. Rather than asking the audience to send in their clips all summer whilst I was tanning myself in Ibiza I wanted to get out there and meet the people first, get to know them a little, then give them a phone to capture their festival experience. I had to be confident that they could film something of value before I’d part with the phone. It’s not easy making that judgment having known someone for such a short time but it seemed to make a lot more sense than wading through thousands of random clips, emailed anonymously by people I’d never met.

We are so used to thinking of UGC as ‘cats on skateboards’ that we often can’t see beyond the youtube experience. I’m pretty happy with the results and my method seems to have produced some nicely shot well thought out pieces from both the audience and the bands. I’ll be honest, part of me really did think I was gonna go through summer trying to make sense of bands board on tour buses and kids off their faces in tents but that certainly isn’t the case.

As I said earlier I’m still editing so I’ve still not watched the film in full. If you were to force me for an early assessment of it I'd say its it pretty bloody good... But I would wouldn't. I’ll know if this whole project has worked in the next few days as it’s being screened on Wednesday at the Electric Proms.  I’ll blog again next week and chat more about my learning’s and the people I met over the summer.

Bored? Stoned? Insomniac?

 

Then you've got to check Upl8 by Poke NY. I stumbled across this courtesy of Russell Davies' great post on Watching The Internet. As a 2-laptop-per-producer kinda guy I'm a shocker for having YouTube running on my mac as I work away on my PC. It's music player of choice these days. As a video player the ambient glance-able nature of Upl8 is what makes it so wonderful. I sent the link around to the team and many emailed my back saying they wished they could twist the knobs or push the buttons. I was shocked. If you want to push buttons try this or this. The real beauty of Upl8 for me is that you can't push the buttons... you just type in the url and let it flow - ambient nonsense till the cows come home. There is some functionality but you'll have to go to Iain Tait's Crackunit.com to find out how to load it with clips of kittens.

As anyone working in radio will tell you glance-able content will play a massive part in the future of radio, but there have been 2 occasions in the last few years that hammered home how important it is already, and has been for sometime. The first occurrence was in 2006 when I asked my teen son to cast an eye over the Radio 1 website and tell me what liked most. Expecting him to talk about the wealth of video, incredible event coverage or superb music content I was stunned when he pointed to the 'track now playing' feed at the top of the homepage. When I asked why he replied 'Because if a tune comes on I like I can switch off the music I'm playing and turn on the radio'. I assumed nobody would choose to listen to radio this way and put it down to him being a lovable crank.

I totally forgot about it until I did a 'meeting the public' session early 2007 where I talked to a couple of Radio 1 lovers about listening to radio via their TV. I was pretty pleased to find out that it was their favourite way of 'listening' to Radio 1 until they explained that listening via TV allowed them to turn off their own music and turn up the radio when they see a track they like appear on the 'track now playing feed' on screen.

I always thought the real value of tracklistings was aligned to music discovery or compiling your own playlists, something that would augment the experience of listening to the radio rather than a reminder to switch the radio on for the next 3 minutes.