Over the last two years, I have circled the landscape surrounding the art and business of film in this blog. It was my way of thinking through a transition in the future of a medium I had spent nine years of my life learning, pursuing, loving, hating and finally understanding.

I had moved to Los Angeles like many people, to make films. I was living in New York before that, and like most New Yorkers, hated Los Angeles as a point of pride. I admit I grudgingly saw that everyone who wanted to make it in “the biz” worked extraordinarily hard. Sure, you might not consider buttering up an established producer or director hard work but actually it is, take it from me. Humiliation is hard work.

There was a kind of “dream contract” that everyone signed when they arrived in Los Angeles. And it was indeed beautiful to be part of a world of people who worked hard and had a shot at the dream. Dreaming is after all, what we ALL came to do. Some of us did it with a camera lens, or a pen and paper, and others, with their hands and a can of paint, and many countless people with their bodies and faces.

The dream is seductive, and brave in its true American-ness. Everyone knew someone who suddenly went from waiting tables to starring in a movie. Guys like Jon Hamm, who was still working crappy jobs to pay the bills past his prime, until someone invented a show he was born to lead–were more common in the biz than you would think. Sure, there are many more who never get their Mad Men but that promise is the stuff of dreams. And those of us who dream in Technicolor are seduced, and all desperately want a piece of that promise.

The perfume of that desire was strong in the room of students at a prestigious film school in New York where I spoke some months ago. I felt cruel inserting some truth into their hopeful twenty year old minds, but it had to be done. I started by telling them I graduated from film school in 2004 and asked them what important event marked that year. They scratched their heads for a few minutes, and slightly skeptically came up with the correct answer: Facebook. “That was a very unfortunate year to be launching a film career”, I told them. Why? Because once the currency of content hinged on engagement, however casual/social, and film as we knew it died. A raise of hands in that very room revealed that this next generation spent two-thirds less time engaging with film than they did with other media, particularly of the immersive variety.

This generation – the millenials, are not quite social-digital natives who will inherit a world in which trees and ipads are learned as equal inevitabilities of life, but they themselves describe their younger siblings as precisely those people. Given that, we can assume there is roughly a 10-15 year maturity gap before the entire focus of entertainment will shift to serve their needs. Right now, I told my stunned new young friends, we are operating on the cache stored from another era – all those film dreams are artifacts of a bygone era. And as powerful as the facade may feel to them standing on the outside looking in, it is worth considering that even for institutional legends like Louis B. Mayer (once the highest paid man in the US), once the time comes one can be humbled by changing times.

I know, you’re thinking: blah, blah everyone’s been writing film’s epitaph since television was created and it’s still here. Well, it is, and it isn’t. For the first time this year, we saw box office numbers decline despite the best efforts of studio marketers; I myself saw fewer than 10% of the films on most top 10 lists of the year and the ones I did see were filled with audiences of mostly middle-aged people. That, is what I think of as the nostalgia factor – filmgoing is a tradition we love, and there will hopefully always be a place for that good feeling. But I can no longer see what the “future of film” is. In my mind, it is a dream passed, a brilliant and grand one which, like opera has seen its day.

Without making any grand proclamations of what the future holds, I can say I know after the two years of writing this blog that it has a whole lot less to do with film than I could have imagined. I have been watching the zeitgeist – both anecdotally and statistically – and what I see is a future in which the gorgeous seductive artifice once traditionally the domain of film can be anywhere. My dream to make films was only a heightened extension of the audience experience of dreaming in a dark room. But the dreaming space is no longer in one place, whether we like it or not. Our job as professional dreamers, is to keep dreaming for collective enjoyment and though we are still muddling through the forms, visions will emerge, clear as they were when the magic of film materialized through the flickering light of a projector.

Without knowing where on earth the most fertile visions will take hold, I can only say it will be unexpected, and will not follow the rules we all memorized when entering into the well-established world of film art and business. I myself decided to root in New York because the soil here is full of raw promise and the farmers are eager experimenters in the business of the future. For my part, I have planted my company AINA MEDIA, and founded STORYCODE a nonprofit to support immersive/crossmedia storytellers. Needless to say, 2011 has been a rather busy planting season. I look forward to the crop of goodness that the coming years will bring to storytelling, the future of visual entertainment and most importantly to dreaming. In my mind “Hollywood” remains at its purest, a standard of rare openness, possibility and the vastness of mind it takes to dream.

I will soon launch a new blog related to new endeavors. In the time being, you can follow my real time musings at @ainaabiodun.

After I wrote my last post about the dearth of innovation in film, I happened to read Anthony Lane’s New Yorker piece on Pixar, “The Fun Factory”. It made me slap my forehead in an “of course!” way. Lane starts out as a skeptic, ready to debunk the myth of Pixar as the den of awesomeness that everyone says it is. After a tour of the mind-blowingly fun facilities that comprise the Pixar campus (including a pool and beach volleyball courts), Lane asks: “Is there not, in short, a dark underbelly to the Pixar state of bliss?” By the end, he has totally drunk the kool aid.  He quotes Pixar head John Lasseter: “The people at Pixar are my best friends. Not only do I want to see them every day–I can’t wait to see them everyday…when my wife, Nancy and I make a list of whom we are going to take on vacation, the top group is Pixar.”

I’m a pretty cynical bastard myself. I don’t believe in workplaces where people hold hands and sing kumbaya because well, mainly I’ve never had one. But as I re-watched Finding Nemo this past weekend, I couldn’t help but think that this utopian multiple hit-making machine is the real deal. The secret sauce? The founders and original artists fought for innovation in the early days of the company. Now they are the standard in animation that thrills children and thoroughly engages adults. Before Pixar, mainstream animation (mostly proffered by pre-Pixar Disney) was the stuff of facile kid fantasies, and not anything I could stand to look at for more than a minute. While the perfection of 3D animation lies at the core of Pixar’s creative approach, there is also an approach to story that soars sometimes sadly, sometimes sweetly but always smartly.

Put simply, these guys are masters of story.

Lane takes a stab at what makes Pixar stories great:

The key to Pixar, I came to realize, is that what it seeks to enact, as corporate policy, and what it strives to dramatize, in its art, spring from a common purpose and a single clarion call: You’ve got a friend in me.

In cinema, as in fiction, friendship is a more durable substance that we give credit for, and often more resilient than love. Indeed, it may be the hardiest strain of love that we possess, untroubled by erotic fragrance; once Huck Finn and Jim–to take the most obvious ancestors of Woody and Buzz–meet on Jackson’s Island, they don’t declare their friendship to one another, or let it disturb their sleep. They just get on with it. That practical momentum, conservative in its emotions but radical in its taste for adventure, runs through Westerns, Andy Hardy movies, “The Flinstones,” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” before landing in the land of Pixar.

I would add that because we live in an era of extreme disintermediation as a result technology and other social forces, the narrative of friendship becomes an even more vital mythological pull, one which will be studied for some time to come. And I am sure that when history judges this era in American film,  Pixar films will emerge as the thematic and aesthetic masters of our day.

In the mean time, why aren’t we tinkering away at more models like Pixar?

Most of the younger folks in the biz express frustration that the “system” is resistant to change, particularly the type of change that might render some people’s entire professions obsolete. And I get it – the fear of change is natural in every entrenched industry. No one wants to be faced with the possibility that large amounts of human and cash capital investments might be lost.

But I think what saddened me the most is that the creative people – writers, directors, producers – people shaping the content are so terrified of the forces of the market (and audiences) that they seem to be more conservative than ever in their creative choices. I’m sure the same was true of the artists who worked in silent films, when talkies came along, and of the unrivaled film industry when television came along, and on and on…

When I consider what has driven change in entertainment over the years, I see seismic shifts due to technology or social disruption that the industry then hobbles to catch up to. Very rarely do I see an instance of the business innovating from the inside. And I’m not talking about 3D technology either. I’m talking about creative shifts – experimentation WITHIN the medium of film.

The French New Wave changed film in a very radical way; it was a push within the medium that spoke to the era. And it changed the way in which storytelling in film had functioned until that point. This is an example of artistic innovation within the medium – introducing new ideas into the lexicon and pushing the possibilities of film further. I acknowledge that the movement came from outside the “establishment” and only slowly seeped into the way mainstream films were later made and viewed; BUT the movement was a real, working consideration of film as a process and a form, as art that evolves.

We are in a very different predicament today.  Filmmaking itself as we know it may be approaching obsolescence and there is little happening inside the medium that is a direct response to this issue. The fact that blockbuster movies are looking and sounding a lot more like videogames is a strong indication that without meaning to, the medium will experience inevitable, perhaps accidental change. However, without the minds of artists whose job it is to think these ideas through and experiment with what film *could* be in the future, we will accept a mishmash that is little more than the residue of innovation in other kinds of creative endeavors like gaming and interactive play.

As those who follow me know, I am a huge proponent of platform agnostic storytelling – I am after all, a transmedia storyteller. But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate and respect the specificity and art of each individual medium. I love reading books and I adamantly believe that the experience is like no other. I don’t read because there’s nothing to watch. I read because I love *to read*. I play games when I want that experience. I go to concerts when I feel like I want to be surrounded by the energy and life of the audience and band.  So while I am fully committed to working with connective storytelling, I am still a filmmaker who would like to find a space in which filmmaking as an art can grow deeper, more meaningful and expansive as a medium.

If film is to survive, we need to aggressively experiment creatively with the medium. That is our job as artists, and for the folks who make money off the work, they too must understand that innovation is not a choice – it’s that, or perish.

Yet every time I hear the “TV Everywhere” chorus, I wonder who made this “the moment”. Because it most certainly does NOT seem to be any kind of definitive moment for me. I still watch the shows I like, exchange the content I dig up online, no matter whether the cable is connected, wrapped, cut or hanging out behind my TV. Perhaps TV Everywhere is a song based on the agenda of cable providers desperately trying to figure out how to keep subscribers, and big content providers trying to make sure they keep their prized demographics.

But seriously, is cutting the cord and watching content across various platforms/devices really the issue when considering what comes through to whatever screen? Do platforms really matter in that context? Does the fact that Google TV wants to offer an all-you-can-eat content buffet really alter my tastes in any profound way? I think not.

As audiences, we care about whatever our interests are at the moment, not so much about the gear, or the platform. Although certain platforms make the experience of entertainment smoother and more convenient to our lifestyles, the truth remains that we follow that which moves us. And sometimes those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about technology and content in a slightly abstract way forget this. Yet, ask any TV programming executive and you will hear them say they are looking for content that audiences are drawn to. This is not to say these guys get a pass – after all, their blind spot has been their unwillingness to experiment with content that doesn’t look like old-school TV. That makes me wonder really HOW committed they are to meeting the demands of a sophisticated and fast-changing viewership. But I digress.

Let’s go to the watercooler for a second — that famed watercooler which has become extension of the shared entertainment experience we have alone or with personal friends in our private spaces – our home, or their homes. Then we seek to share and/or relive the “best of” moments when we engage with our work colleagues in a not so intimate environment called the workplace. Now with social networking in the workplace (and all the gear to make it possible even if the bosses don’t like it), the act of sharing entertainment is an activity that can be experienced not just with the folks you physically SEE in your office, but perhaps your buddies on the other floors, or a that rival company, or “friends” you added on Facebook one drunken night at a bar and now trade viral videos with. The range is wide and features feathers of every color: From long popular lo-fi gag photos LOLcats to Josh Groban singing Kanye West tweets and the occasional political moment that grabs the country’s attention such as the indefatigable Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ 8 1/2 hour speech, these exchanges connect us virtually and physically in laughter, outrage, mockery, sadness, wistfulness and all manner of diversionary emotion.

One thing is constant: every content creator wants a piece of the watercooler Holy Grail – the sticky phenomenon…the thing that gets people talking. Surely that’s why advertising, after suffering the fate of the mouse-click strove hard in 2010 to legitimately become part of that rainbow of emotion that is a valuable commodity in the marketplace. Occasionally it succeeded with campaigns like the Old Spice Guy. And it is perhaps what Hollywood tries to invent when it births a new franchise (or re-hashes an ancient one). But 2010 was also the year in which that fountain of “real entertainment” notoriously failed to create a marquee entertainment brand that had folks gathering around the water cooler.

So what exactly is it that we as a voraciously media consumptive society (at least in North America) are engaged by? A quick cobble-together yields a picture it that looks something like this: zombies (The Walking Dead), cats doing anything, famous people making fun of other famous people (Josh Groban/Kanye West), old people telling dirty jokes (Betty White), politics served with jokes (Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert), regular people saying what everyone thinks but doesn’t say (The Rent Is Too Damn High Party’s Jimmy McMillan). All these people engage us in ways that entertain and/or inform, often provoking or titillating the senses.

With so much competing for our eyeballs and minds, we are now in the habit of curating viscerally and without regard for the classification of content. Invariably, hybrids emerge, and a blurring between content forms begins to take hold. For example, the blurring of the line between so called “information” and “entertainment” is increasingly evident. Certainly, to some this signals the death of “real news” and journalism. Some others, like the very tabloid styled Huffington Post lose no sleep over this distinction and move forward into a future that seeks to engage, at any cost.

While I’m not arguing for the tabloid-ization of everything, and I value ideas and engagement that push the brain beyond titillation, there must be a way in which cross-pollination becomes an opportunity to re-think the way we see form. Forget about TV being on my Android. Who cares? We MUST think beyond platform and medium into content itself, and the audience that seeks out all the things we as media creators bring them – news, jokes, social change, stories in any and all forms.

We’ve already seen the result of a powerful hybrid news-entertainment personality in “fake news” guy Jon Stewart, whose laudable actions on behalf of the 9-11 Responders yielded real political and practical impact. I’m not sure Jon Stewart as a figure could have been considered America’s “most trusted newsman” in a pre-digital, pre-social media world. Of course there are some who consider comparisons between Stewart and Cronkite a travesty of epic proportions. While I myself might wait a few more years to crown Stewart, I think the reach of his work speaks for itself.

Onward, sans-idea boundaries, into 2011!

The result of my video messaging experiment at the time was perhaps predictable: while I was able to build a lot of content based on the immediacy of the tools (I walked around with my video-capable smartphone everywhere we went and documented as much as possible), it was difficult to maintain any level of engagement with the audience, unless we advertised a specific time and topic for online discussion. My idea had been to do a project-cast, something that would be the project equivalent of a life-cast where and audience could be privy to all the goings on behind the scenes of our very small DIY style marketing and distribution operation.

But as one quickly learns about multi-platform marketing for a small project, you can spend as much time promoting ancillary events and content as you do actually promoting the product itself, which in our case was the feature film. What became evident is that all the tools we were using needed to be consolidated on a single platform with engagement capabilities–that is to say, if there was a site that could do what Facebook does in terms of relatively easy audience aggregation, and which made engagement an easy proposition for regular folks, it would be a better bet for a small production like ours than trying to be everywhere.

Given how small these teams usually are, seamless integrations like that are what artists/projects really need to be effective. I do wonder if that kind of functionality could reasonably exist on Facebook, given how little depth you can have on a broad network like that. It seems to me that while Facebook has a very wide wingspan, and amazing horizontality, there is little room for verticality that allows digging down into ideas, projects, or for that matter people.

When the experiment has been successful, I’ve found that video can provide some serious depth in conversation when deployed well to promote a project. For example, the recently launched video conversation site vYou, is a slightly varied video experience from say, the immediacy and ephemeral nature of a chatroulette. Because vYou’s conversations are not live (you ask a question and the person answers via video when they can), it could serve a project that wants to encourage engagement with an audience without the constraints of live video. And if that function could be integrated into my fantasy Facebook-esque site, the media trove for a given project could be richer and deeper.

But until that site magically emerges, I would still select one or two of these platforms when working on audience building – as long as there is a mechanism for engagement, it’s a useful experiment. As I launch into a new project and continue my experimentation, I will report back on the results.

And if you didn’t see the movie, all you need to know is that Facebook was created as an extension of real-life social networks, in which you “friend” people whose acquaintance with you either reflects your status – ie: popular (you have 1500 friends), or smart (your grad school or work “group” that everyone sees on your page) or achievements (your marathon photos, or new baby pics). So when Zuckerberg took the STATUS game online, it was a natural human fit– an extension of one’s local friends, a chance to show off your status to more people – your high school friends, extended family members and maybe even future work collaborators.

When one asks, as I have, why Facebook became so popular so quickly, the answer is simply that its primary function gives us an identical payoff to joining that country club or enrolling your child in that exclusive school gives us – STATUS. You belong to a club – granted, it is of your own making – but a closed group nonetheless. No matter your culture, class or race, this is a fundamental human desire that drives much more of our lives than we are often willing to admit. I’m sure if Foursquare gave a badge called “Snake” instead of “Mayor”, the mobile geo-location based game would be a lot less popular. Even as the Mayor of my corner deli, I get status. That status means something. If it didn’t, Foursquare wouldn’t exist.

And this is why Michel Reilhac’s talk on the “Gamification of Life” at the recent Power to the Pixel Conference struck me as very interesting. In his view, the trend towards “gamification”–a term which (at its most benign) describes real life behavior that incorporates the mechanics of game play such as competition and rewards–suggests a desire to experience game-like emotions in the “real” world.

In an example game designer and gamification theorist Jesse Schell often uses, some very simple daily functions are already being gamified when Ford Fusion installs a digital “tree” on your hybrid car dashboard that “grows” as your fuel efficiency increases.

Nice, right? A very cute visual incentive for those green-minded folks out there. And as most people who drive hybrids can attest to, the game is always on: who can get the most MPG from their hybrid. Within those circles, that ability wins points….and STATUS. It’s easy to forget that these are all subtle indicators of where we are in the food chain of our social lives but from the prolification of even the most mindless of games – Farmville, with its 85 million players, it is so clear that winning does mean something to us. Otherwise, why would social gaming, especially those proliferating on social networking sites be more popular across ages and demographics than we’ve ever seen before?

While technology has certainly enabled more casual gaming behavior, it’s nothing new. We see offline corollaries everywhere – Ebay, a site where you get to bid for an item is a very clear version of the traditional auction. Auctions are games with the objective to beat one or more individuals in procuring an item. Some people call that particular kind of gaming gambling, and certainly at its most compulsive it can be. Just like the stock market. But TED FellowJane McGonigal, whose endless optimism about our collective skill and potential as gamers, sees a silver lining in gamification – and it is that we can take our rewards based mentality and put it to use for global change. Her argument is persuasive – she suggests that if we game for conservation as in the Ford Fusion example and have fun doing it, then isn’t all we need better games that have real life results?

McGonigal has a point – her approach is to harness the power of the gamification trend in that Clay Shirky Cognitive Surplus way and use it for good. And perhaps this has promise: the idea that we can essentially encourage people to transform this primal need for status that our gaming fulfills into important productivity. I won’t go into the less benign forms that this kind of “encouragement” can spawn, especially from marketers (watch the last half of Jesse Schell’s talk below) but I will say that we are in some very slippery territory here.

Do we create incentive-based participatory entertainment such as games, stories as a way to “trick” people into our narrative – whether that is selling toothpaste or even a blockbuster movie? But since companies like Zynga, the creators of Farmville and Mafia Wars are unstoppable (recent valuation puts it at $5.5 billion), it certainly puts strong evidence in the worlds of commerce and art that we ARE buying the kool-aid. We DO want to be gamified.

While acknowledging the force of gamification, Reilhac also critiques it as a “caricature of the American cultural utopia” in which we need the black and white questions and answers that gaming provides. Maybe so. But as long as that’s the prevailing ethos, the gamification model will be the only way to stay in the fray.

One need only look at history to see that ideas germinate and proliferate where history allows it – so when affluence abounds and it has recently to an unprecedented degree – we look for ways to pass time, engage our minds, and of course, improve our social status. And make no mistake, we always play to win.

I do in fact use Twitter as an information network. Breaking news comes down the Twitter tree faster than on any conventional news outlet and I find myself hearing most information there first. Certainly, as a profit proposition, I can see why that positioning makes sense for Twitter’s business, thus the ad. But, I do wonder if in fact Twitter falls into some sort of interstice between information and entertainment–kind of like…well, cooking shows.

How much information/technique do I actually acquire by watching a very skilled chef demonstrate something I barely have the tools to attempt in my own kitchen? Flambe? Sous Vide? Whaaa? I get confused. But I sure love watching the magic come together in a kind of vague info-tainment sort of way.

Twitter is like that for me. I get a lot of searing hot news off the feeds when I zone in to see what’s happening…but what makes it fun isn’t just being in the virtual newsroom of the world. It’s the characters that inhabit it.

There are a handful of people I follow for no good reason at all – that is to say: we have absolutely nothing in common personally or professionally. Generally they are the over-sharing, lifecasting sort, and yikes, sorry to say this, but they are mostly women–who tweet everything from the quality of the cab ride to the annoyances of their bosses or the ladies room at work.

And why-oh-why do I care? I think it’s because it’s more interesting to watch my Twitter girls play out their life’s narrative in a very matter-of-fact way that I can catch whenever I feel like, and tune out when I can’t be bothered than it is for me to read US, or People or OK Magazine, and follow the less believable celebrity drama.

So that begs the question: what role is Twitter playing if it replaces the casual magazine for me? (I even find myself more interested in reading my Twitter feed at the hair salon than reading the usual mags) It may bill itself as “information” (as those mags do), but really, part of the Twitter experience feeds a taste for narrative, for a unique point of view from a character, which in my case are a handful of people with interesting voices that are constantly refreshing.

I don’t see Twitter being in the space that the WSJ or NYT occupy anytime soon. But damn, it might be time for a Twitter Drama iPad app that you can take to the salon with you.

It seems one such incarnation of Internet Evil made its way to the Toronto Film Festival, in the shape of Trust, directed by the actor David Schwimmer. I only viewed the trailer as I am not at Toronto but from what I can surmise, it’s a Facebook predator story with a good cast, but less-than-promising B-movie premise which simply replaces the neighborhood predator with online predator – which cleverly and tastelessly allows the victim to be older and more sexually appealing to an audience. (See first trailer below)

Then my keyboard travels took me to the controversial and potentially less tacky Catfish, the Sundance sensation of last year which is a documentary that the distributor Universal calls “A reality thriller that is a shocking product of our times…a riveting story of love, deception and grace within a labyrinth of online intrigue.” Again, I haven’t seen it either, and it sure sounds like the “shocking product” of our times they are pitching is basically the old adage “if it seems too good to be true, then it is”… with the added extension: “on the internet”. Ever get those offers for free money in your email that sound too good to be true? This isn’t much different, in my opinion. It’s an elaborate blind date that probably turns out to be as disappointing as blind dates tend to be, on or offline. (See second trailer below)

And then the giant spaceship landed–the REALLY BIG KAHUNA, evil so pleasantly benign that it comes in the form of the baby-faced Jesse Eisenberg, playing the “real life” story of Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. I will admit a certain glee at the prospect of watching this one (which again, I have yet to set my eyes on) simply because the story contains a certain level of intrigue that defines the way the internet and its attendant “evils” truly manifest themselves in these times. Is it a big Boogeyman? No. But depending on how you view this kind of social network and other products of the closed web age, the potential evil is exponentially more terrifying than an online predator. And watching the ruthlessness of its beginnings is dramatic, even if the danger seems less horrific, or thrilling to the viewer. As I am a futurist, it remains my duty to remind: Lest we forget, many great and devastating world events began with a person, usually persuasive, highly intelligent and supremely capable of a kind of logic that seems measured in their time. Incidentally, that’s how great stories also begin.

TRUST

CATFISH

THE SOCIAL NETWORK

I know those of us who came of age in an era when gaming was entirely console based, simplistic in the “kill or be killed” bloodbath sort of way, the appeal has been limited. But I see that changing in creative and completely engaging ways. For instance, this week saw the launch of Armchair Revolutionary, a non-profit that uses money generated from their games to support innovative science and technology projects attempting to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems.

According to the Geek Gestalt blog, the games available to play on ArmRev are also lessons in social change. The article reports that among the first games are a “videogame called “Make Waves” that is designed to provide users with real-life social activism tools while they manage part of the ocean in a virtual environment modeled on the real-world. Second, “Hack Your Body,” a three-part effort designed around the “fast approaching genomics revolution” that includes the Personal Genome Project; the development of commercial software that will allow users to analyze their own DNA; and a full-length commercial documentary film about genomics. And “End of Darkness,” a publicly financed company that aims to build clean energy infrastructure for the poor.”

For anyone thinking about social change, it has become imperative to consider the impact of interactive play as active learning. Its power cannot be underestimated, especially among younger players for whom interactivity is a way of being, and not merely a time consuming pastime. Nowhere is this more of a priority than Games For Change, a hub for innovators and artists in this space to share their games with the public. In a quick peruse through the games, I immediately noticed how youth-focused the play was, and rightly so, as that is the audience we need to be innovating for.

I believe that the need to educate on social issues is pressing and to do it artfully and beautifully is an enormous but exciting challenge. I’m glad gaming is starting to fulfill its potential across the board and I’m looking forward to delving more deeply into specific games in coming posts — looking at them in terms of their design, content and social impact.

There was MySpace, then YouTube, then Facebook, Twitter followed by every other niched and slightly varied social network. I love the idea of social media for a number of reasons, aesthetic, personal and political. Nothing warms my heart more than the idea that someone behind a firewall in Iran could connect with me sitting in my apartment in Los Angeles during the controversial political situation that arose from the 2009 Iranian election. I also enjoy the casual exchange of interesting ideas and happenings that is the stuff of Facebook friendships.

So here we are, in 2010 with so many ways to connect, form communities and find kindred spirits online. Yet for all the fun we have watching viral videos, getting recommendations from friends on what movies to watch, or playing Mafia Wars with them on Facebook, are we really accessing the best and brightest of what’s in that enormous web-o-sphere?

Let’s imagine for a second that the web is like a frontier, say, how most of America was before the 19th century. And suddenly, from literally a few hundred thousand settlers, 100 million people showed up and populated the land. You’d have something akin to the chaos that happens when people are displaced after massive disasters or wars. Nobody would what the rules were, how to find anything and the one guy who had the map of the entire land might be the most valuable person around.

I’m going to call the Mr. Wise Sage Google. So Google comes in and says: ask me a question, any question. You need to know where the nearest river is so you can access water? I can tell you? You need to know where you can find lumber to build your houses? Here, I’ll show you. Then slowly but surely, this massive number of people settle down, with the help of Mr. W.S. Google. A few years goes by, Mr. Google teaches a few classes, and people learn more about their world, how to find things and they come up with their own maps and books and ideas.

Then, another few years go by, and as people get when they are well fed and comfortable, they get bored, restless. They have a few books and games and songs they brought from the old country which they’ve read over and over again. The kids want something new, different so soon you get some young whippersnapper called Mr. Hot Stuff Youtube who invents a new, novel idea: anyone can come up with a brand new game, or story and share it with the rest of their community. Wow! The kids go wild. They love it. They tell stories of birds falling from trees; babies laughing, dancing, talking in funny ways. And everyone laughs heartily. A few of these kids become really well known all over the land and everyone agrees: the new age is upon us.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the adults are thinking: hmm, these babies dancing, are they really that interesting? They’ve seen babies do all kinds of extraordinary things in their lives and so this just doesn’t seem that exciting. But every once in a while, they see something beautiful, a performance that makes them think and look a little harder. But in between working, eating and sleeping, it’s hard to find those beautiful interesting ideas. So they just give up because mostly it looks like rubbish to them.

Then suddenly, riding on a gorgeous, shiny black horse, a familiar face from the old world appears, but he looks very different from what they remember, and his name is Mr. Slick Interface Hulu. He brings fantastic entertainment and beautiful packaging and everyone is happy, young and old because it gives the old folks what they want and does it just how the kids like it. For a while, everyone is happy. But as humans are inclined, they get bored with Mr. S.I. Hulu’s offerings and the rumblings for more entertainment begin.

At this point, the kids, who are still playing with Mr. H.S. Youtube’s ideas have grown up a little. They’re talking about politics, and music and art, and real stories, not just babies and animals and farting. Even the old folks notice that they are drawn to the new wave of inventions. But now, there’s a problem: there’s so much of this stuff that no one can find what they like. Even the kids are starting to get frustrated because there’s so much out there.

Enter a new-old character: Ms. Smart Thinking Curator. Ms. Curator was once a kid who played with H.S. Youtube ideas. Now she has traveled, been educated by curators of from the old country and developed some tastes of her own. The old folks love her because she understands their language, and the kids like her because she’s one of them. Ms. S.T. Curator suggests a simple new idea: How about if I figure out what everyone’s into: so the people who love puppies and babies can have as much as their hearts desire and the best of the Shiba Inus in the universe. Then those political rabble-rousers, who want to hear and participate in arguments all day long can have their own little corner. And same with the people who love food, clothes, horses and so on. And because Ms. S.T. Curator knows that people want to taste the product before they sign up, she spends a little time explaining why those puppies she selected are the best puppies in the entire world. And Voila! The curation of entertainment is born.

So now I ask, is it not time to trust some new voices and tastes to curate entertainment for us? I don’t discount the voices of the masses, nor am I unaware of the significant challenges in aggregating and distributing video/film in a meaningful way online. BUT, with the advent of interfaces like Boxee and to some extent Roku (and other such devices) which make it possible to combine many entertainment sources this is imminently possible. I see that Clicker is attempting some such organization although my argument about them is that they are still quite neutral in their aggregation and not aggressively curatorial.

I believe we are entering the age of the Curator. There is plenty of entertainment being created that is difficult to access or find. What we need are assured voices who understand contemporary tastes and can do a better and more effective job than the crusty and outmoded TV and film studio executives of bringing relevant content to the attention of interested audiences.

So while technology inventions and killer apps are amazing, can somebody please invent the Human Curator – that would be killer.