No guessing, no lockouts, no death - games design and learning design

(Updated 21 April 2014 - see postscript at end)

Over the past few months, I've been converting my 1986 computer game Bestiary to run in a web browser. (The alpha version is now playable online here, with forum for comments here.) The conversion has made me think about how computer games have changed since the days of 8-bit machines like the Sinclair Spectrum, the BBC Model B, and the Amstrad CPC. Most obviously, today's games usually have stupendous graphics, professionally commissioned music and top-notch voice acting. These days, even "adventure" games such as Bestiary, which are more about narrative and intellectual challenges than rapid hand-eye coordination, usually conform to this model of high production values. (See for example the winners of the 2013 Adventure Gamer awards.)

But technical innovations aside - which not everyone sees as progress (text-only adventure games still have their devotees, though they tend to call them "interactive fiction") - there have also been changes to the basic rules of adventure games, to eliminate frustration which is not a necessary and intended part of the game's challenge. Games design, in other words, has moved on, to give players a better experience. And since I see an analogy between games design and learning design (both being about setting up an environment to create an experience for an unknown person or people whose actions you cannot control directly), at the same time as I've been bringing Bestiary into the world of 2014, I've been thinking what lessons each of these changes may have for the way we teach and how we can improve the experience of our learners.

No guessing

Text adventure games were the original virtual reality, following the model set in Crowther and Woods' 1975 Colossal Cave Adventure: text description of a location ("You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building") and text input of commands ("Enter building", "Get lamp"). The player experience was one of exploring a virtual environment, encountering problems and challenges, and overcoming them by using objects found in the course of the adventure. (For example, a hostile snake blocking the path could be driven away by releasing a bird to attack it - but you had to catch the bird first.) [1]

When it worked, the text interface of adventure games worked beautifully and immersively, but there were two regular frustrations. The first was the experience of knowing exactly what you needed to do but being unable to find the right verbal command to make it happen. For example, lighting the lamp to pass through a dark corridor is easy enough (LIGHT LAMP), but if it started attracting unwanted creatures what command would you use to put it out? You might find that PUT OUT LAMP was interpreted as equivalent to PUT DOWN LAMP, because the parser could only deal with commands of the verb-noun form. You might wonder about OUT LAMP, which is hardly usual English outside of Macbeth, or EXTINGUISH LAMP, which isn't usual either though at least not odd, or perhaps DOWSE LAMP, although you'd probably need a source of water for that to work. Imagine trying and failing with all of those, and then finding that what you were supposed to type was LAMP OFF: your next utterance (outside the game) might well be a different two-word phrase ending in OFF.

Text commands in CP/M and DOS - which you needed to operate computers before the mid-1980s - brought the same frustration of knowing what you wanted to do but being unable to find the right words to bring it about. After the Apple Macintosh introduced ordinary computer users to mouse-based operation, game designers started producing graphical adventure games with point-and-click interfaces; for example, The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) had the player select their command verbs from a menu and then click on the appropriate object or location in an animated scene. Later games such as Broken Sword (1996) and The Longest Journey (1999) did away with the need for command verbs totally, by having the pointer's effect changing according to context, or by providing a right-click menu for the player to choose an action on a selected object. Such point-and-click interfaces make it easier for the player to communicate their desired actions to the game, eliminating the need to guess command words.

Graphical interfaces also removed the second frustration of text adventure games: the lack of distinction between scenery (which you can only look at) and objects (with which you can actually do something). In the original Colossal Cave Adventure, for example, one of the locations had a long piece of text describing a spectacular view of a volcano, which mentions lava, rocks, glare, ash and brimstone in the air, alabaster formations in the cave roof overhead, rocks in a gorge, a bottomless pit, a geyser of blistering steam, a barren island in the middle of a sulphurous lake, and an incandescent wall.[2] However, all these things were just scenery to be admired; if you tried to do something with any of them, even examine them, you just got the default responses YOU SEE NOTHING SPECIAL or YOU CAN'T DO THAT. The authors clearly wanted to give the player has a sense of immersion in the virtual environment, but at the same time could not program responses for every possible interaction with everything in it. The general problem with text adventures is that the longer and more detailed the descriptions, the greater the risk of players becoming frustrated by trying and failing to do things with the scenery.

A graphical interface allows an escape from this dilemma: the scenery can be as detailed as the designer wishes, but as long as an actionable object is signalled by a change in the mouse pointer (typically, a magnifying glass for something you can examine, a hand for something you can pick up, a speech bubble for someone to whom you can talk) you need never be in any doubt as to which objects are actionable. Without being unfair to the player, the game designer can hide a tiny object on a cluttered workbench, or have a new object become findable in a place you've already searched - especially if, as in many contemporary games, you can toggle on a view which highlights objects that are actionable.

What are the lessons for learning design? That learners should never be in a position where they have to guess what to do with our learning materials; we should always provide them with enough signs and cues to make it obvious what it's possible to do and how they can do it if they wish. Too often we are lazy in our labelling and information architecture; in my own university, for example, we are only just starting to eliminate from our teaching websites the many unclear and unhelpful labels, such as "Module resources" (surely everything on a module website is a module resource?), "Module materials" (how is this different from "Module resources"?), or "Useful resources" (does this mean that the others aren't useful?). Too often as teachers we burden learners with too much information and too many links, making no differentiation between what's essential, what we recommend, what's optional, and what's there simply for credibility or atmosphere rather than actual use, such as references, copyright acknowledgements, and legal notices. Learners have enough of a challenge with the subject matter of their learning; they do not need any additional challenge in trying to find a resource because they don't know what we've called it, nor should they have to guess how to do meaningful work with a resource which we've put in front of them.

No lockouts (no blind alleys)

Going down blind alleys and having to retrace your steps is a necessary part of exploration, whether in an adventure game or in a learning environment. However, in classic text adventure games, it was quite possible to go down a blind alley which would effectively lock you out of all further progress. For example, in Sphinx, at one point you would fall down a deep hole, out of which you could not climb, but which contained a car jack. When I played the game I wasted a lot of time trying to use the jack to get out of the hole - reasonably enough, I thought, since a jack is a device for elevation. It was only after I'd given up the game in disgust that I learned that getting out of the hole requires another object, which you need to have already picked up before you fall down the hole (which you need to do to get the jack, because the jack is needed elsewhere in the game). My own game Bestiary requires the player to cross an ocean and return, which they can do either by boat (but they're shipwrecked, so they can't use the boat for the return trip) or by using a magic talisman which transports them through the air (but it falls from their hand as they fly, so again it's a single-use object). In the original version, if you used the talisman to cross the ocean for the outward trip, or if you sailed over in your boat without having first obtained the talisman, you would be stuck on the distant continent with no means of return.

Designers of the early adventure games (including me) thought lockouts were acceptable, because we counted them as part of the challenge: you not only had to do the right things to complete the game, you had to do them in the right order. We assumed that players would be willing to replay the game until they got it right and also that they would save their position regularly, making it relatively simple for them to return to a state of the game prior to their bad move. But we underestimated the frustration caused by lockouts and players' sense of being punished for something which was no fault of their own and which they could not have anticipated. These days, as a matter of course, games avoid lockouts: they're designed so that it's impossible for the player to leave an area irrevocably without having collected all the objects and spoken to all the people they'll need to advance the narrative and complete the game. My ocean-crossing puzzle in Bestiary would be unacceptable to players today, so when I converted it for the web I modified the game so that it's now impossible for the player to cross the ocean in the wrong way.

What are the lessons for learning design? That we should not allow or encourage learners to get into a situation where they find that they’ve gone a long way down a blind alley and have to throw their work away. True lockouts are rare in education, except perhaps in badly-designed qualifications where innocuous-seeming module choices can rule out the pathway a student later wants to take; but we still often create situations in which it’s possible for students to waste precious time and effort in ways which could have been avoided. For example, we present students with long and crabbedly-written guidance documents, which they have to read practically to the end to find out that it’s not relevant to their situation and that they didn't need to read it at all; or we ask students to work with a case example from their own experience but provide them with no way of telling whether their chosen example is going to be suitable for the tasks ahead of them except by actually doing those tasks. We need to provide learners with quick feedback on their study choices: confirmation that they’re on the right road or warning if they’re going wrong or have failed to do something essential. Saying that learners can learn from the experience of a dead end is like saying that a lockout in a game is just another challenge, and we shouldn’t allow ourselves that excuse. If we don’t respect the value of learners’ time and effort, we can expect them to feel badly treated.

No death

In old-style adventure games, death could come suddenly and without warning: if you tried to move in a dark location without a source of light, if you did the wrong thing with a dangerous object, if you angered a violent character by choosing a bad option in a dialogue tree. Death was often a necessary part of the game; there might be no way of discovering the dangers in the game world other than by running into them and dying. The assumption was that a player could reload a saved game to return to a point before they encountered the danger and either avoid it or try to deal with it in a different way. Some games even included an OOPS command, which like the Cmnd-Z or Ctrl-Z keystroke today had the effect of undoing your last fatal move; other games automatically saved your progress at key points in case you forgot to do so for yourself.

Despite such efforts to make death palatable by minimising its inconvenience, there has been a great deal less of it in adventure games since the late 1990s. I think this has been a result of adventure games becoming more focused on narrative, rather than just exploration of a virtual world: forcing the player to go back to an earlier stage in the game breaks their sense of an on-going storyline. Those games which do include the possibility of player-character death, such as the Broken Sword games or Cognition, are normally ones which include a thriller element, so it's a requirement of the plot that there should be moments of tension when the character is in some kind of jeopardy. Other games create danger and tension without actually allowing the player character to die; for example, in The Longest Journey, there are two points where April Ryan is threatened by some kind of monster, but in both cases she cannot actually die: the monster simply chases her around the room (while tense music plays on the soundtrack) until the player works out the move she needs to make to escape. But on the whole the absence of death has become so much of a norm that The Book of Unwritten Tales (2011) includes the character of Death sitting gloomily unemployed on a derelict boat because no one ever dies in adventure games anymore.

What are the lessons for learning design? That we should not underestimate the impact of failure on learners, and not create situations in which there’s a good chance that they will fail totally and irrevocably. We cannot, and should not, remove the risk of failure entirely, because experimentation and therefore risk-taking are a necessary part of learning and growth; but we can and should make sure that learners have every chance to avoid disaster. We can provide them with warnings, we can provide them with opportunities to try again and learn from their mistakes, and we can provide them with the possibility of failing in small ways, so that they can learn not to fear mistakes and find that recovery is possible.

In learning design, just as in games design, what we are striving for is that the learner / player should always be able to continue learning / playing, without the burden of an unintuitive interface or the fear of lockout or death. Game on, as they say.

Postscript

Since writing this post, I've had confirmation from an unexpected quarter of my view that text commands interpreted by a parser present irredeemable usability difficulties for adventure games. Emily Short is probably the leading figure in the UK community for authors of interactive fiction (IF), which is what they themselves call text adventures. And yet she writes:

“I can tell you why I write a lot less parser IF (as a proportion of my overall output) than I used to: accessibility. I’ve put a lot of effort over the years to making parser games that would be friendlier and more inviting. I’ve spent many many hours watching people play them, and reading responses from novice players, and showing off IF in classrooms and at conferences. I’ve experimented with different UI approaches, with adding graphical feedback, with buttons and menus and status windows. A good proportion of my messing around never saw the light of day because it was self-evidently ugly or inadequate. And I’ve finally, about fifteen years on, accepted that there is nothing I know how to do that will make a parser-based game a sufficiently inviting prospect for the majority of players. Tutorial text, external help materials, more synonyms, better error messages, attempts to highlight key nouns and list key verbs for the player — you can spend hundreds of hours on those sorts of helps and still not manage to make a parser-based game that is as immediately comprehensible as a choice-based game is by default.”

References

[1] The history of adventure games is told in (1) the film Get Lamp, which features interviews with many of the game creators (watch it here, the film starts at 7'30", ends at 1:38:12; (2) a Wikipedia article; (3) a series of videos starting here; (4) a web article here. 

[2] The complete text of the original Colossal Cave Adventure is here.

Seen and heard: January 2014

Articles and postings

• Five minutes with Sir Ken Robinson – extract from interview by Graham Brown-Martin for Learning Without Frontiers. On how we can stimulate creativity in our teaching and our students’ learning. “Teaching is an art form, it’s not a delivery system. I don’t know when we started confusing teaching with FedEx.”
• noob-2-133t [newb to elite] – reference in MindHacks blog to journal article reporting large-scale research on patterns of learning to play an online game which requires rapid perception, decision making, and motor responding. “We showed that lawful relations exist between practice amount and subsequent performance, and between practice spacing and subsequent performance. Our methodology allowed an in situ confirmation of results long established in the experimental literature on skill acquisition. Additionally, we showed that greater initial variation in performance is linked to higher subsequent performance, a result we link to the exploration/exploitation trade-off from the computational framework of reinforcement learning.”
• No, but you could have made it legible, Virgin Media – post by Rob Waller, The Simplification Centre blog. “My cable TV contract arrived from Virgin Media, accompanied by the traditional terms and conditions in unreadable type, complete with jokey cover…. Buried on page 4 is the rather alarming clause that, although I’ve signed a contract for a year, they can put the price up at any time….I ploughed through more tiny type and found that there is actually a separate section on how the agreement might be ended – and here it does state that I can leave if they put the price up. Fair enough. Except why did they not explain that more clearly?... The problem is that legal documents are not, and perhaps cannot be, conversational in structure. A normal explanation anticipates the reader’s questions [for example, in the Situation-Problem-Solution-Evaluation pattern]…. But to a lawyer it may more logical to see a contract structured with separate sections for the ways in which a contract can change, and for the ways in which it can end. There are plenty of ways to resolve issues like this, of multiple audiences and multiple uses. But they cost money and effort to do well.”
• Geeks on the Google bus create giant social problem in San Francisco – Observer article by John Naughton (referenced in his blog Memex 1.1). “Just under a year ago, Rebecca Solnit, a writer living in San Francisco, wrote a sobering piece in the London Review of Books about the Google Bus, which she viewed as a proxy for the technology industry just down the peninsula in Palo Alto, Mountain View and Cupertino. ‘The buses roll up to San Francisco’s bus stops in the morning and evening,” she wrote, “but they are unmarked, or nearly so, and not for the public. They have no signs or have discreet acronyms on the front windshield, and because they also have no rear doors they ingest and disgorge their passengers slowly, while the brightly lit funky orange public buses wait behind them. The luxury coach passengers ride for free and many take out their laptops and begin their work day on board; there is of course Wi-Fi. Most of them are gleaming white, with dark-tinted windows, like limousines, and some days I think of them as the spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us.’
• Has the self-driving car at last arrived? - New Yorker article by Burkhard Bilger (referenced in Memex 1.1 blog). “Four-way stops were a good example [of the driving knowledge the programers find it necessary to include]. Most drivers don’t just sit and wait their turn. They nose into the intersection, nudging ahead while the previous car is still passing through. The Google car didn’t do that. Being a law-abiding robot, it waited until the crossing was completely clear—and promptly lost its place in line. “The nudging is a kind of communication,” Thrun told me. “It tells people that it’s your turn. The same thing with lane changes: if you start to pull into a gap and the driver in that lane moves forward, he’s giving you a clear no. If he pulls back, it’s a yes. The car has to learn that language.” 
• Reading and hypothesis - post by Emily Short, in her Interactive Storytelling blog. "There’s ... an argument to be made that the backstory mystery is one of the most natural possible shapes for interactive literature. When it sets up questions and allows the player to look for answers, it engages the reader directly with the substance of the story rather than with extraneous tasks and challenges. It encourages reading hypothetically, making guesses about what really happened that are then affirmed or disproven as one goes." 

Shows and events, books and games

Alice in Wonderland - striking stage presentation, with very impressive puppetry, from experimental theatre company Proteus. This was the kid's Christmas show at The Stables: a nice alternative to the mainstream pantomime, and certainly gave our grand-daughter plenty to think about.

Sherlock, series 3 - still (for my money) maintaining its winning formula of cracking storylines, snappy dialogue and vivid sense of place, animated by top notch performances especially of course Cummerbatch and Freeman. Nice character points explored in these episodes include Sherlock Holmes growing up thinking he was thick, because the only other standard of reference he had was his smarter elder brother, and Watson having a post-Afghanistan need for adrenaline and stress making him unable to settle into a routine life.

Sacred Wonders of Britain - lovely and moving series presented by Neil Oliver, blending archaeology with the (necessarily reconstructive and speculative) spirituality which gave rise to the sites.

Ursula Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind - collection of her talks and essays "on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination". Particularly interesting to me were the pieces about rhythm and metre in prose (as distinct from poetry), which is an important determiner of how far written text reads like speech. Her own writing reads aloud beautifully: one of her stylistic features I've tried to imitate, even in my academic writing. The book is prefaced with a quote from Virginia Woolf: "Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words."

High stakes tutorials

Most computer games start with some kind of tutorial, in which you as a novice player learn how to play the game. Game tutorials used to be somewhat bland: being afterthoughts, planned only once the rest of the game was largely complete, nothing of significance could happen in them. You were introduced to the controls and given the chance to find out what kind of moves you could make - and that was it.

But the two most recent games I've played have tutorials which both work as tutorials - technically simple and offering extra support to the player - AND advance the plot, indeed start it off with a bang.



"Cognition" starts with FBI agent Erica Reed racing to the cemetery where the serial killer whom she's been pursuing has taken her kid brother. Dialogue with her partner ramps up the tension and increases the urgency: she has to find Scott before the killer does something awful to him. Arriving at the cemetery, checking the gates and finding them locked teaches you how to examine and manipulate objects; having Erica draw her gun and shoot off the padlock teaches you how to use objects from your inventory - as well as increasing the tension still further. Inside the cemetery, the tutorial shows you how to use Erica's psychic powers - the "cognition" of the title - to find where Scott is and to enter the vault where he's been taken. Inside, you discover him strapped to a table beneath a machine which is clearly going to kill him if you tamper with it. This is your summative assessment: as a timer ticks down from ten minutes, you need to use everything you've learned in the tutorial to deactivate the machine; if you take too long, or cut the wrong wire, Scott will die. (He's going to die shortly anyway, but that's part of the story.)



The tutorial in "Ghost Trick" is similarly founded on jeopardy: you start by seeing a woman about to be shot by a hit man. Your character's ability to do anything about this is restricted by the fact that you're dead yourself; you are in fact a ghost. A disembodied voice (you find out whose it is later) instructs you how to use your "ghost tricks" to inhabit and move between objects and manipulate them to produce physical effects - which you then use to distract the hit man and make him miss his target. The woman is saved, but only briefly, because when she runs away the hit man catches up with her and this time he does not miss. The disembodied voice then introduces you to your most powerful ghost trick: to rewind time to four minutes before a death and prevent it from happening. Working against the clock, you need to figure out how to get around the junkyard in which the events are taking place and move objects into a position from which you can save the woman's life. When you release the wrecking ball above the head of the hit man just before he pulls the trigger, it's an enormously satisfying moment.

Educational courses too have traditionally been rather bland and boring in their opening sections. As with old-fashioned game tutorials, the thinking has been that you can't present too much of a challenge while your learners are still finding out how things work. This has been compounded by well-meaning pedagogical ideas about the proper way to start a course - for example, with an academic overview of the subject, or a discussion of its principles, or a reflective exercise to get the learner to find out what they know about it already - which tend to produce teaching which is general and abstract, and hence boring, or which relies on learners to supply the content, and hence is dull and bland unless they put in a lot of effort. I think this is a problem: we know how difficult it is for learners to keep finding the time to stay with a distance learning course, whether in print or online, which is why the biggest challenge for all learning designers is arousing and sustaining learner motivation.

Is it possible to design course openings which are not bland and boring? These two game tutorials suggest to me that it is. I've previously blogged about the principle of starting with your best and most exciting material, instead of saving it for later, in order to remind learners of why they're doing your course. To that, I'm now adding the principle of high stakes: giving them something to achieve which they can feel is really meaningful and important. Of course it still needs to be sufficiently simple for them to accomplish, no matter what their previous skill and knowledge. But that doesn't mean that it needs to be bland or boring.

When I say that course openings should be more like these two games tutorials, I don't mean that they need to have action and violence. Excitement, in an educational context, has different roots, but we still need to tap into it. What gives a learner the biggest buzz? It's finding they can do something they couldn't do before and which is really meaningful and important to them. Get that at the start of your course, and you'll have your learners as thoroughly hooked as they can be.

Seen and heard: December 2013

Posts and articles

• Why do children believe in Santa but not Harry Potter? (from Headquarters blog). Children's understanding of the difference between pretend and real comes earlier and is more sophisticated than we usually think. 
• Meet the Robot Telemarketer Who Denies She’s A Robot (from MindHacks blog, and on iO9, located through Memex 1.1 blog). A real-life Stepford Wives experience, when Michael Scherer, Washington Bureau Chief of TIME magazine, was phoned by what sounded like a brightly-voiced woman offering a deal on health insurance. Something made him suspicious. "When Scherer asked point blank if she was a real person, or a computer-operated robot voice, she replied enthusiastically that she was real, with a charming laugh. But then she failed several other tests. When asked “What vegetable is found in tomato soup?” she said she did not understand the question. When asked multiple times what day of the week it was yesterday, she complained repeatedly of a bad connection." The article includes audio extracts from the call. 
• Review of Anita Elberse, So Much for the Long Tail, by Steven Poole. "In 2006, the then editor of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson, [claimed in 'The Long Tail' that] thanks to new digital distribution methods ... the blockbuster was on the way out, and most profits would henceforth come from niche products. It didn't work out that way, as Elberse now demonstrates.... A remarkable statistic: 74% of all individual MP3s purchased online in 2011 sold fewer than 10 copies each, while 0.00001% of songs made up 15% of total revenues."
• Here's how data thieves have captured our lives on the internet, John Naughton article in The Observer 29.12.13 The historian of the internet reflects on the implications of Snowdon's revelations of the extent to which "the most liberating communications technology since printing has been captured" by the security services, with the complicity of the major technology companies.

Shows and events, books and games

The Secret Life of Mary Poppins - Culture Show documentary about P.L Travers, the creator of Mary Poppins, intelligently presented by Victoria Coren. Her point was that Hollywood films require tidy stories and happy endings - in Saving Mister Banks no less than Mary Poppins - and that one can find these films powerful and enjoyable on their own terms, even if one also simultaneously loves the darker and very different original books or appreciates the complexity of the real life story of Travers and Disney.

Last Tango in Halifax, second series - still more beautiful writing and great performances, swinging from comedy to tragedy and back again. (Fun also to compare Derek Jacobi's solid Yorkshireman here with his camp actor in Vicious.) A lovely touch to build up to the wedding on Christmas Eve - in both story time and real time. Plenty of potential remaining for a third series, I think.

A Bridge Over You - Christmas single by Lewisham and Greenwich Hospital choir, mashing up Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" and Coldplay's "Fix You", with a video produced by my sister. (See earlier post.) The singing is pretty good, but it's not just family pride for me to say that I think it's the video which makes this single: by linking the songs to the singers' working lives, it gives them added poignancy - no surprise that many of the online comments talk about how moving it is. The release didn't displace the X Factor winner as the official Christmas Number 1, but I'm told it did get to Number 15 in the indie charts and Number 8 in Amazon downloads, which is pretty good and some kind of vindication of compassion and good taste.

The Everlasting Flame: Zoroastrianism in History and Imagination - exhibition at SOAS, London. Beautifully curated and arranged, starting with two chambers showcasing geographically-located artefacts and extracts from key texts and finishing with a reconstructed fire temple. Good to see some prominence given to this lesser-known faith: the precursor to the great monotheistic religions and the religion of the Christmas magi.

Cunninghamfest - day-conference celebrating the career of my old friend and colleague Andrew Cunningham on the occasion of his retirement. Having left the History of Science / Medicine field in 1993, it was very pleasing to see how the marginal views for which he and I contended have now become orthodoxy, so that Jim Secord called our "Big Picture" paper a citation classic and an analytical classic. (A summary of our paper by David Gilad is here.) That wasn't what people said at the conference where we first presented it; I remember the comments being equally divided into "This is obviously untrue" and "We know this already" - which as I said to Andrew at the time is a sign of a transformation in thinking about to occur and an inevitable consequence of working at a discipline's cutting edge. His main worry was that these things would go from "obviously untrue" to "known already" without there ever having been a time at which they were said by us. The Cunninghamfest was proof that that had not happened, and that all the work which he and I put in had not gone to waste. Cheers, Andrew; they were great years.

Death Comes to Pemberley - BBC dramatisation of P.D. James' homage to Jane Austen. So many beautiful things: Matthew Rhys as Darcy, played mercurially nice and nasty like his character in The Americans; Anna Maxwell Martin as Elizabeth, a skilled manager of a large household and a true match for him; Rebecca Front as Mrs Bennett, played not melodramatically (as Alison Steadman did in the BBC Pride and Prejudice), just saying absolutely the wrong thing at the wrong time; and a cameo from (Dame) Penelope Keith as Lady Catherine de Burgh.

The Book of Pages - unusual graphic novel by David Whitehead, essentially a Buddhist meditation on technology as the story follows a monk in his journey through a modern metropolis. The book is now out of print, but the website reproduces some of its sections, my favourites of these being: Flight, Mind Dragons, Button.

ColAR - iPad app demonstrating a new level of "augmented reality" (which is presumably what "AR" stands for). You print out a line drawing, colour it in, and the app, viewing the picture through the iPad's camera, animates it in 3D, as in this video. Jaw-droppingly amazing; my six-year-old grand-daughter was quite blown away by it, and she's not easily impressed.

Toca Hair Salon Me - another great app for kids. Take a photo of yourself, or one of your friends, then cut, grow and restyle their hair using the wide range of tools available. You can even save a picture of your finished results. Great fun - an important part of which comes from the way the photo is animated in the hair salon. (See this video.)

The Beiderbecke Affair - box set of the 1984 Alan Plater series, with James Bolam and Barbara Flynn, a Christmas present from my wife (thank you, dearest). Wonderful to watch again, and amazingly topical given its theme of social misfits being under surveillance on the outside chance that some of them might one day break a law. Unfortunately today's real life spooks aren't as humorously bumbling as D.S. Hobson, any more than you and I speak wittily laconic lines of Alan Plater dialogue.

Boring messages: how to make them interesting?

If you've ever fantasised about making a boring message more interesting by setting it to music, then you should see what Virgin America have done with their in-flight safety video.

It's great fun, of course, but this just confirms my doubts how much of a solution this is to the problem of a boring message. How much attention would you pay this video on the second or third in-flight viewing, let alone the tenth or the fiftieth?

But there are some nice touches. I particularly like how they deal with the problem of soundng like a prat when compelled by legislation to say things which pretty much everyone knows. Their approach is to acknowledge the problem and become arch. ("For the 0.001% of you who have never operated a seat belt before - really?....") It's one way of retaining dignity and credibility under impossible requirements.

Seen and heard: November 2013

Articles and postings

Review of Writing on the Wall: Social Media: The First 2000 Years by Tom Standage. "Standage's central argument [is] that mass media, the means of distributing information that we have become so used to, are an aberration, closely linked to the industrial phase of history. Now centralised industrial processes have given way to distributed, technological ones, with individuals at the controls, we are settling back into old ways of doing things." (David Shariatmadari in The Guardian)

The Dunning-Kruger effect - in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average . So for example about 80-90% of drivers think they have above-average ability. (Guardian Headquarters blog and Mind Hacks blog)

Top nine things you need to know about 'listicles' - a listicle being an article in the form of a list: an increasingly popular form because they're easy both to write and to read. (Steven Poole in The Guardian)

How’s your creativity coming along? (Dilbert cartoon)

Shows and events, books and games

Heavenly Spaces - concert by Polymnia (in which I sing) in the beautiful resonant space of the Milton Keynes City Church of Christ the Cornerstone. Highlight for some of the audience was our rendition of Monteverdi madrigals; highlight for me was the solo cello playing of the stupendously talented Gemma Rosefield.

Philomena - film of the true story of the journalist Martin Sixsmith helping an elderly Irish woman trace the infant son she was forced to give up for adoption when she was a girl. Judi Dench as excellent as one would expect as Philomena, but Steve Coogan as Sixsmith was a revelation: he can do serious, and do it very well. A tremendous film; you may start thinking that it's going to be a gently sentimental story - what Sixsmith calls disparagingly a "human interest story", the kind of journalism he doesn't do - but gradually and insidiously the film gets you in its grip, so that when the story proceeds to its final shocking revelations, the impact is colossal.

Cheek by Jowl - beautiful collection of articles and talks by Ursula Le Guin on the theme of the human-animal relationship in fiction, though actually the piece which resonated me most was one in which she talked about the origins and development of her Earthsea cycle.

The Choir: Sing while you Work - second TV series, in which Gareth Malone forms and trains workplace choirs in organisations such as a city council, a fire service, and a city bank. There are probably many other choirmasters who could do what he does in terms of getting a choir going; but what he has uniquely is the ability to make this work on television: to let us get to know the people and their jobs and to make us care about them and what the singing means to them. (As I've blogged elsewhere, "it's not so much the song or the singing which makes its impact on us: it's who the singers are.")

The Coronation of Poppea, performed by English Touring Opera - I could have done without the Russian Revolutionary staging, with Poppea dressed like Grayson Perry in his transvestite persona, but most of the singing was really great, especially Helen Sherman singing Nero.

Richard II - the Royal Shakespeare Company production, broadcast to cinemas, with David Tennant in the title role. A good production (though not a great one, says my wife, who's favourite Shakespeare play it is), and wholly immersive, with excellent camera work, moving between close-up and whole-stage view largely seamlessly. David Tennant was excellent as Richard, of course, but Bollingbrooke felt shallow by comparison; as Richard says, they're like twin buckets in a well: when one rises the other goes down, so it should be possible to see them as counterparts or equals.

An Adventure in Space and Time - nostalgic (for me) TV drama about the creation of Dr Who, focusing on the roles of Sydney Newman, the head of drama whose idea it was; Verity Lambert, the producer who made it happen; and Bill Hartnell, the fading actor who was chosen to play the first doctor.

Gravity - astonishing new space film, largely carried by Sandra Bullock (George Clooney being in a support role), with echoes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, and (how embarrassing to admit knowledge of this) Barbarella. Unexpectedly intense; the tension never really lets up for all of the 90 mins, until she take her first shaky steps back on Earth. I'm still not sure what it was all about, though.

Setting boundaries: psychotherapy and spirituality workshop at Turvey Abbey. A day well-spent in the company of spiritual directors and therapists, provoking troubling reflections on what happens when boundaries break down - or are compulsively defended.

The Odyssey: a soldier's road home - article by Charlotte Higgins in Guardian Review. Penetrating interpretation of the return of Odysseus, bringing out aspects of the story which were wholly new to me - setting it alongside the contemporary experience of returning war veterans.

The singers and the song

One of the lovely things about Gareth Malone's TV series Sing While You Work is that he makes putting together a workplace choir not just about getting people to sing but about finding their voice. The bits of the programmes where he learns about the singers and their jobs, and what really moves them about their work, are the mose unique and usually the most moving parts. And one of the things he does is to find a song which sums up what they do and which they can really sing and mean it. As with The Zimmers performing My Generation, it's not so much the song or the singing which makes the impact: it's who the singers are.

So here's the Lewisham and Greenwich choir from Series 1, performing Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water, mashed up with Coldplay's Fix You. Have a tissue ready; this one goes to the heart.



Even though not on sale until 9 December (£1.98 from the iTunes store), the bookies have this as joint fourth favourite to be Christmas Number 1 - which would be a welcome change!

Disclosure: the video was produced by my sister's company London Video Productions.