BUREAU OF FILM & GAMES

User Friendly Cities
Transforming Transportation and the Way We Perceive Our Urban Environments
The Real World as an MMOG

This all started with a simple question I posed to myself during a protracted parking battle in Westwood, California with Michael Dukakis.
What would it take to get me to WANT to ride on public transportation?
The most common answer I’ve received when posing this to others is: “Twenty dollar a gallon gas…
But that dodges the question. The question isn’t ‘what would MAKE me take public transportation,” it is what would make me WANT TO take public transportation in Los Angeles.

Of course, the visionary/futurist answer then starts moving to Buck Rogers things like monorails, mini-zepplins (lighter than air), etc… (See L.A. Times article below: 7/6/08 – Disney’s New Monorail), but that’s not going to happen any time soon, so I imposed another rule. This project (which is desperately in search of a name) can not involve a massive public works project or the invention or manufacture of technologies that don’t exist in some form now.
We have to do this with available resources – most especially, resources within our reach.
Much of what follows is Los Angeles centric, mostly because I live in Los Angeles, but the operational theory is this. If you can make public transportation work in L.A., you can make it work anywhere.

Having posed the question, I’ll paste in a temporary answer. It is this. I would take public transportation if I knew that it was safe, reliable and pleasant – if it enhanced my life experience.

After all, its not like I’m going to be bummed out about giving up a late afternoon bumper-to-bumper bump and grind.

So, how do we get from ‘I wouldn’t consider taking public transportation to ‘I would consider it.’

First, the current system must be de-mystified. I have no idea how to use the mass transit system. I go to a bus stop and I see a bunch of confusing numbers and routes and I’m done. The thought of getting on the wrong bus and ending up God Knows Where is a deterrent. Let’s be frank. This is a dangerous city and there are places I don’t want to go.

So here’s step one. I need Mass Transit Garmen capabilities built into my phone. I’m using the term Garmen here, generically. I could just as easily be saying Magellin or TomTom. I just happen to use a Garmen. I want, not just a GPS (which is already available on some phones), but a system were I input my location and my destination and PRESTO, I’m given a route. It tells me cost, estimated time (updated in real-time) and amount of walking I’ll have to do. I should have plenty of options from ‘integrate bike paths wherever possible’ to ‘no more than ½ mile of walking.’

That gets me over a big hurdle. I don’t get lost and I know when I’m going to get there. I don’t mind saving the money, but for right now, this isn’t about saving money.

Okay… I need to be convinced that the bus is safe and pleasant. I’d pay a premium price to know that I had my own seat and a place to use my laptop. I figure that with Gas, parking and hassle, it’s probably $10 to drive across town. Just rule of thumb. Maybe its more. And I’m not mentioning parking tickets. In short, I’ll pay for a PREMIUM service – either meaning a premium seat on a regular bus or a premium bus.

A big winner would be if I could program other options in. Maybe I want to take a bike path, renting a bike at each end.

Maybe I’m willing to take a cab. Maybe my device can call one for me.

Also, I should be able to create routes to hit multiple destinations.

So far, we’ve gotten rid of some barriers to riding a bus, but we still haven’t made it any more fun, and if it isn’t fun, I’m not going to WANT to do it.

Let’s throw in another readily available item – the buddy list.

ENTER THE TRANPORT BUDDY LIST

As of this writing, I’ve got 170 friends on Facebook and all sorts of buddies on Skype, Linked-In, Plaxo and all the other services. None of this has yet to change my social life in the real world.
They’re just about to.
Now, connect my Buddy List to my travel plans. I wake up in the morning and plot out my destinations for the day. Got a meeting in Hollywood at 2, another in the Valley at 4 and back to Westwood at 5:30.
Whoah… All of the sudden, I see a list of four other people who are doing similar things at similar times.
We can carpool. We can ride the bus together. We can bike together.

Now, all of these social networks make sense in the real world. Instead of sitting in my car alone, calling people on the phone (which is now fraught with peril of ticketing), I’m actually with an actual person. Driving time or commuting time has turned to social time.

The point is that with GPS, Buddy List and Scheduling, you have tied commuting and social life together. Now, rather than being some clunky system where you’re trapped in a car with people you wouldn’t normally want to ride with, carpooling is now a relatively spontaneous social event you’re participating in with people you actually want to be with.

Not to mention the fact that you can share costs with them. More fun and less cost.
Granted, this isn’t mass transit, but it is doing the socially, economically and environmentally right thing.

Once again… All of this is with existing technology. Stuff I either already have or can have in the near future.

Right now, my best friend can be 100 yards away from me in the middle of the day, but if I don’t happen to see him, he might as well be a hundred miles away. Now, with GPS Buddy, I’ll know it when a friend is within any pre-set range. (Of course, we’ll learn how to turn this on and off at will when we don’t want to see people, but that’s like any system that says, ‘show as off-line.’).
With GPS Buddy, not only will I be able to find Josh, but I can ping him. “Starbucks, 5 minutes?”

Now, let’s view the City as an interactive environment. Suppose I’m looking for a specific kind of shoes. I tell that to my ‘want list’ and my GPS will ping me when I’m within two blocks of a place that sells those shoes.

Or suppose I’m going to have an hour of slack time between two meetings. I could kill it in a coffee shop, or I could catch an exhibit at a nearby museum, because my system would know where I am and what’s happening in town.

All of the sudden, we’ve shrunken a city down to a small town and lit it up like an online game.

AM MICROCASTING

Here’s where we can mix in an old tech with new tech. One medium has always been both local and present tense. RADIO. Now, suppose that your local radio station, which has the ability to download local digital information to your phone in real time, also knew where you were. Now, as you ride on the bus, you could be notified of events taking place near you, right now. An impossible restaurant has available seats. It’s happy hour at a place you’ve wanted to go. A mini-concert is starting at the Troubadour… There’s a lecture about the Impressionists at the museum starting in 10 minutes.
In short… The radio can take local ads and insert them into their programming to fit your destination. Even probable location in 10 minutes if it knows you are on the bus. So… You will know what’s happening where you are in real-time.
What are the implications of this? Two breakthroughs with radio.
1) Ads and Announcements aren’t lost in the ether, but are stored in a database to be triggered by GeoTags.
2) Ads can be updated in real-time and downloaded to customers or triggered to play at specific times. “It’s five o’clock and it is happy hour at the Korndogs.”
3) Information, such as ‘ghoul tours of the city’ can be uploaded to the passenger on the fly. Every ride is a tour bus highlighting your local advertisers.
One way to look at this as Time Shift/Present Space. With downloadable tech, I can ‘TiVo’ my favorite radio shows, but the commercials I listen to will be supplemented with geographically sensitive sites.

A lot of worthy, smaller events go unattended, because potential guests are unaware of them. Instead of relegating them to a small ad in an increasingly irrelevant newspaper, they can be GeoTagged in space and time so that potential attendees will hear about them In Time to Attend.

ANOTHER TAKE ON RADIO

Radio: MicroCasting: If Radio can expand it's sense of self to not just being here and now, but GPS-driven archives, I can construct a personalized GPS radio show in which I drive down the street and hear about all of the things near me. I notice and find out about ships and restaurants I never noticed before. Museums. Now that we think of the city as a game board, we change the rules. In REAL-TIME, I find out about a concert happening nearby -- a museum opening, etc. We are turning a city into a theme park.

Hardware: All of this can be done with current technology.

FEEDBACK SYSTEM
Now suppose that we have a system that ‘reacts’ to users in RealTime. If enough people tell the system that they’ll be going to a certain place at a certain time, the system sends an extra bus. If the System Detects that a number of people are going to unexpected places it adds and modifies routes. Systems like ‘rent-a-bike’, ‘Urban Hike’, ‘Flexcar’ can be invisibly added to this system. Skateboard paths can be added to a commuter’s schedule.

Busses can be added to the system in Realtime. Off Duty school busses and Tour Busses can be injected into a crowded schedule. Busses can be ‘Virtually Chartered’ on the fly if enough people ask for them.

In short, with two way communication, a ‘hive mind’ can take over, not only city transit, but also the city itself. Smaller events, such as lectures, concerts, book signings, celebrity chef events could be broadcast in realtime to people in the area, or could be intelligently forwarded to people to scheduled to be in the area.

Suddenly, Los Angeles will come to life with meaning. It won’t be a blur that connects relevant nodes in our life, rather it will be a living, breathing place that talks to us in real-time. A giant theme park, museum revealing its hidden surprises just as we get there, enriching our life in the process.

Some Notes
However, to make it work better, we will need upgrades.
Busses can't be toilets. We need comfortable seating and places for laptops, etc.
Rent-a-bike would be great for certain parts of the city.
Eventually, it would be great to have the transit system 'react' to demand. If there are a lot of people going to a concert, it adds more busses, automatically.
We get rid of the 'just happen to hear about it' factor like us will Hollywood Bowl.

In yesterday’s LA Times was an article about the new monorail at Disneyland which references BUCK ROGERS as its inspiration...

From the Los Angeles Times -- July 6, 2008

Disney's new monorail, its transportation of the future . . . still is
Although the new craft has made appearances, riders will have to wait a little longer.

By David Haldane
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Those yearning to ride Disneyland's long-awaited new monorail found they had to hang on a little longer Saturday. The Mark VII, which had appeared off and on late in the week, never made it out of its shelter, to the dismay of some visitors hoping to step aboard.

"I'm a little disappointed," said Samantha Wakach, a vacationer from Los Angeles, who'd been told by the concierge at her hotel that the new train was operating. "That's why we decided to come over here instead of walking."

The Mark VII, otherwise known as Monorail Red, is the seventh generation of the ride that's been entertaining visitors since 1959 when it made its entry as the nation's first electric train system on a single rail.

Sleek and futuristic, it was promoted as a vision for public transportation.

On Saturday the long-awaited new train, the park's only upgrade of the attraction in 21 years, failed to appear after several hours of on-again, off-again operation over the previous two days.

Disney officials attributed the glitches to the attraction's normal "test and adjust" period, when mechanics and designers work out the bugs.

"We are working on solving them," spokeswoman Betsy Sanchez said of the unspecified problems.

She would not predict when the ride would open full time.

When it does, Disneyland guests will be whisked along the system's 2.5-mile route in even sleeker-looking coaches complete with remodeled nose cones, seats facing outward toward the windows and blue glass with shimmering red, blue or orange stripes.

"This is such an important icon," designer Scott Drake said. "It's the first thing our guests see when they drive up, so we wanted to make sure there's as much color as possible."

The new trains, he said, will also have lighting under and behind the seats "so that at night the interior looks like its glowing the color of the windows."

As for its mechanical aspects, Drake said, it won't be much different from the original Alweg Co. model introduced in 1959.

That was the year after Walt Disney, vacationing in Germany, happened to see one of the company's test vehicles passing on a rail overhead.

Disneyland's founder was so inspired, according to Drake, that he asked one of his transportation specialists, a young designer named Bob Gurr, to work with Alweg engineers on building the park's -- and America's -- first monorail.

"It was one of the first real E-ticket attractions," Drake said. Based in Tomorrowland, the futuristic train "was heavily inspired by the Buck Rogers kind of feel."

Two years later, the route was expanded to loop outside the park, with then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon and his family among its first passengers.

"Walt was a visionary," Drake said. "He wanted to showcase this as a future device for mainstream transportation."

Nearly half a century later, it's a vision that never materialized.

At www.monorails.org ,the official website of the Monorail Society, an organization based in Fremont, Calif., dedicated to promoting single-rail technology as a safe, environmentally friendly and a cost-effective alternative to modern mass transit, lists only 10 monorail systems currently operating in the U.S. Six are in amusement parks, airports or zoos.

Crediting Disneyland with giving "fame to monorails in the 20th century," the website sardonically notes that "while Disney installed the monorail to promote it as a train of the future, the effect it had was just the opposite. Monorails, for many years, would be typecast as amusement park rides."

Brian Taylor, a professor and chairman of urban planning at UCLA and director of the university's Institute of Transportation Studies, blames the failure of monorail systems to proliferate on simple economics.

Although monorails "have sort of captured the popular and journalistic imagination," he said, they are too expensive to build on a large scale.

"It's something that seems intuitively attractive," he said, "but as a widespread alternative either to street and bus systems or conventional fixed rail it has lots of downsides and relatively few upsides."

None of which seemed to matter much to one Disneyland visitor waiting Saturday for a ride.

Jesus Naranjo, a self-described "monorail lover" from Camarillo, was trying to be positive.

"It sounds pretty cool," he said of the new train. "We'll probably be back here in less than a month to take a ride."

This is both an apology and an acknowledgment to two guy who should have been mentioned prominently in the Acknowledgments section of 'The Ultimate Guide...'

These guys are Roger Slifer and Dan Arey. They both should have been in there.

Roger slipped through because he has been involved involved in so many projects with me over the years that I probably thought I had him in there with Sunbow (he was a Transformers producer) and TSR Comics, one of those failures that I still blot out of my mind and most recently Enigma. Roger has an amazing array of talents and conversations with him inspired all sorts of sections of the book.

Dan Arey is one of the best theorists in the game world. We met on a panel at DICE. The cool thing was that we got to sit on stage with Lorne Lanning and Syd Meier. I was mostly intimidated into speechlessness and was forgettable on the panel. Dan was articulate, but we were both overshadowed by 'the gaffe.' His 'first 5 minutes' is one of the most seminal and influential talks anybody has ever given in game world.

Anyway, sorry guys. Now you're acknowledged.

Flint

Attached is a Hollywood Reporter article about writing video games.  http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/features/feature-video-game-writers-seek-recognition/71369/?biz=1

 

There is both mention of the book and a pretty good overview of our game award issues.

Take a look and ping me if you want to talk about it.

Flint

Agent 13 is Back.  Dave Marconi (Enemy of the State and Live Free or Die Harder) and I created him in the mid '80's.  He's being seriallized in Thrilling Tales.  http://stores.lulu.com/adamant

 

I've promised a couple people that I would upload the powerpoint from GDC.  Check out the downloads page to get it, or ping me at flintdille@earthlink.net and I'll be there.

 

Flint