bbc – Page 15 – Cubicgarden.com…

How I roll at work

I recently filled in a group of people at work about how I work, and I thought it might be interesting to readers of my blog…

I have the Thinkpad X220 which is a BBC R&D laptop and running Ubuntu 11.10 (as of this week, but its going back due to hardware problems).

I switch between the BBC R&D network and the BBC R&D wireless network when I want raw (un-proxyed) internet access. This actually works well because I don’t need to use my BBC desktop machine unless I need to accept a calendar request and send it to my gmail (which is pain, more details about this soon).

I’d hoped to get Gnome Evolution working with the socks5 proxy as it should be able to deal with my Calendar as it has Exchange support but currently no Socks5 support (why I have no bloody idea!). So I’m trying out sockisfy and Tsocks… But right now I’m using Mozilla Thunderbird 7.1 with the IMAP interface to get emails when I switch to the R&D network.

This also means it limits the time I’m in my email and means I get more done… (Something I know from using Rescuetime in the past and tracking my usage at work) I tend to switch to the R&D network about 3-5x a day for about 20mins each time but most of the time I’m on the non proxied wireless network.

This means I automatically get disconnected from IRC, Tweetdeck, Gtalk, etc when changing to the R&D network but I do have the essential things like Twitter and Gtalk on my mobile phone which is always connected to the Wireless network. I could change the proxy settings but I kind prefer it that way, although I did add foxyproxy to Firefox because it was a pain not being able to browse a site someone sent via a BBC email without digging around the preferences.

It does seem a bit of crazy way to do things but I quite like it and means I’m not watching and replying to emails all the time. Now I just have to wait for the Thinkpad X220 to be fixed…

BarCampMediaCity the after thoughts

Its Monday evening and BarCampMediaCity is still deep in my thoughts for many reasons.

It was a classic BarCamp with lots of incredible talks mixed in with a feeling of something new was happening.

As we opened the door on BarCampMediaCity, people started to making there way into the Quay house space and were impressed by what they were seeing. Everything was running smoothly with security plus registration and people were slowly spreading out through the 5th floor complex. By the time of the welcome talk we had just under 200 people in the room.

The make up of the 200 was a mix of new and old faces, but what was remarkable was the percentage of woman. Compared to other BarCamps I’ve been to, this one ranks up there with the likes of BarCampLondon in gender equality maybe. Quite fitting that we had the geeks of London (the people now running barcamplondon) producing this barcamp. BarCampManchester have always been slanted towards male but with the help of the Geeks girls in residence, BBC hosting it and lots of thought from the barcamp team, the results were incredible.

Not only that, the age range of BarCampers incredible! I had only seen such a diverse age range at BarCampLiverpool, now thats something BarCampMediaCity certainly beats even BarCampLondon on…

We had roughly 225 confirmed for the BarCamp after the original waves of about 300 public tickets over all. On the day we had just over 200 people come along over the course of the weekend.

During the welcome talk one of the team jumped in with a clarification on the overnight stay. This caused a disturbance, with people wondering exactly what the situation was. This came back to bite in a major way later in the night.

The event shifted along well during the day as the sessions kicked off.

I thought I’d put in my talk early in the schedule, in the end I decided to bring up the paper I’m about to start reading titled piracy is the future of television. I used trakt.tv as example of whats possible when you look at what the cutting edge/darknet/early adopters are doing. It was a nice session but I picked the wrong space for a good talk. I should have picked one of the spaces with a more intimate feel. Anyway a nice discussion kicked off with the diverse crowd, which included content producers, artists, early adopters, etc.

There was a nice, chilled vibe throughout the event which was great. Everything seemed to be going to plan. The talks were all really interesting and so diverse which was excellent. I went to talks on dynamic Bayesian networks for working out real smiles vs fake smiles (something I’m sure BBC R&D will be interested in), How to rob a bank, evil overlord’s guide to security, The culture of the dj, the true dubstep, a demo of future iplayer development, how to get a job at the BBC, hacking the kinect, What you don’t know about American TV shows, would you take your clothes off in public, mixing cocktails, etc, etc…

Another series of talks centred around inspiring the next generation into the tech sector. Computing in schools was a theme for sure with at least 3 different talks around the subject. The most surprising was the code lab one, which was presented as an BBC initiative. In that talk I turned and looked at Simon and gave him the look of, “what on earth, do you know about this?” to which he replied with a blank look on his face saying… “I know nothing, do you?” By the end we had tweeted about it and it had been re-tweeted to death.

It turns out, but we didn’t know at the time, it was a proposal rather than a commissioned thing. It was a little cheeky but you got to hand it to Alan O’Donohoe who was behind it and brought some amazing cookies to BarCampMediaCity from the kitchen of the school he works at. Actually its maybe worth giving the school a little plug on Alan’s behalf, Our Lady’s Catholic High School in Preston

Its actually worth noting most of the talks at BarCampMediaCity were amazing, its well worth going into some details about some of the better ones. Here’s my favorite ones…

How to Rob a Bank

I can’t explain how amazing this talk really was. Tim’s energy drives you through the different problems you would encounter if you were going to rob a bank. Want to know what the answer is? Well Tim points out that a large percentage of robberies are inside jobs, so getting a job at a bank is maybe a very good start.

A little known fact about US TV (or, Why you don’t exist)

Katie one of the girl geeks in residence, gave a great talk an area of Fandom which I had never really seen before. She put up the talk notes on our lanyrd page thankful, so you can read the notes there and check out this massive interlinked map.

Since American TV shows love doing crossover episodes, it becomes apparent that if St. Elsewhere and Homicide: Life on the Street both exist in the same TV universe, so do many other TV programs. Nerds on the internet have established a network of over 280 shows (and counting) which all coexist, implied by crossovers, cameos or references – and when we delve deeper, some interesting facts can be deduced…

Mixing Free Cocktails

Following one of the most famous BarCamp talks ever – How to mix the perfect Margarita at BarCampLondon3 by Andy Budd

Chris Garrett decided to bring cocktails to BarCamp. He even went as far as creating a special version of El Presidente and named it the Ian Forrester *blush*

If you want to make your own Ian Forrester, have a read of Chris’s blog post…

This would be my go-to drink when I lived in Bristol and spent far too much time in Haus Bar. A heady brew of White Rum (double measure, preferably of Diplomatico’s very good blanco reserva), a measure of triple sec (or Cointreau depending on preference), a measure of Vermouth and a dash of grenadine. Stir (don’t shake) with ice, strain in a cocktail glass and sip, slowly…

I actually forgot to take any Vermouth with me to BarCamp, so ended up using Slow Gin in the El Presidente. I added in a dash of Mint Bitters too, and thus the “Ian Forrester” was invented, named after the Presidente of BarCamp.

Would you strip naked in public if I asked you?

This session was one of the funnest I’d ever been to… It was a Art project by a guy who wanted to see if woman would take there clothes off in public if he asked them. Yes you heard me right… When I heard about it, I thought it was a wind up but the guy seemed deadly serious. Listening to him talk about the project, I instantly thought about the end sequence of A complete history of my sexual failings.

Things started to unravel when a lot of people asked many questions about his art project. The main line of questions seemed centre around what kind type of person does he ask? For example does he ask Men? does he ask older woman? etc, etc… He said he only asks woman who he found physically attractive…! I think everyone laughed out loud at that moment. His justification was even more funny, comparing taking pictures of beautiful objects and landscapes with only asking attractive woman. “You only take pictures of things you find attractive or beautiful…”

I honestly hadn’t laughed so much recently!

What is happiness talk

Its another one of those interesting talks which you would only get by running an open event like Barcamp. Alistair kicked it off and a whole bunch of theories were thrown around about helping people understand happiness but no conclusion was hit.

There was plenty of food but not a wasteful amount, everything which was put out was eaten and lunch, dinner, etc all went down well. Unforgeable I had to drive to a Chinese takeaway near Manchester to have dinner at 11pm because the curry had coconut in it and the veggie curry had chickpeas… I didn’t fancy eating even more carbs, specially if I was going to survive all night.

There was plenty to do for night time entertainment, including a massive gaming rig complete with xboxes and kinects. We had planned to set up the virtual maestro but with help from others, we still couldn’t get it to run correctly. Simon Lumb played a dj set in the cafe area, which set up the mood for the night. Unluckily I didn’t get a chance to play because I didn’t really have much chilled stuff and I had to make the trip out to the Chinese. Andy Mace, who was instrumental in helping us setup the Intenet connection for Will of Nexus Globalnet to setup the Wifi on top of. And frankly the wifi was flawless all weekend once it was setup and running late Friday night.

About 2330 we did an announcement to tell people who planned to stay late that the last tram will be leaving soon after midnight. What we should have done was made it clear what the situation was, and that might have been ending the event for the day.

Officially we could have people stay over if they don’t fall a sleep but unofficially if people fell a sleep security would give them a little nudge and ask them to have a coffee, redbull or go get some air. They would also have preferred people to stay together with active people, meaning people can keep an eye on each other, while they did close there eyes. Unforgettably this wasn’t communicated well and so a terrible rough night of trying to stay awake, finding hotels, sleeping on other peoples floors was had by about 30+ people.

I can say personally I am deeply sorry to everyone who had a terrible experience on the night, it was never meant to be that way and even I had brought my sleeping bag, indoor tent, change of clothes and towel to take advantage of the showers. I can’t put my finger on exactly what happened but its being taken very seriously and we are contacting everyone affected.

It did cast a shadow on a excellent event and I totally understand some of the questions people have been asking about the organisation of the barcamp. The Geeks of London are not to blame for this error of judgment, they delivered an excellent event, our job working as the hoster was to supply a canvas they could work on.

I always said the event will be a one time deal, I’m hoping next year Salford University become the hosters? But this is the end of my running barcamp experience. I had always wanted run one at the BBC and maybe 5 years of trying had warped my perception of risks and potential problems to the detriment of friends and participations. 5 years is a long time and like BBC Backstage maybe its that time…

So looking back, at the event. I will always remember Sunday morning and seeing the tired, angry and disappointed looks on friends faces. But I also remember Lalita D’Cruze’s face when she saw herself on a internal BBC flyer and when she took to the stage to replace the hired comedian and did a excellent job. Turning to Nicola and saying “Wow she’s really really good!” Seeing Katie Steckles present the total inside baseball Fandom which goes into tracking references to other TV shows inside of TV shows, (didn’t write down the site!) Feeling very proud of the massive audience Matt from BBC R&D got to his talk on Saturday. Loosing one of my werewolf cards on Sunday morning only to later have Mick give me his entire werewolf set because he enjoyed barcampmediacity so much. Slightly nervous why we didn’t know about BBC Code lab, specially with all the work Ant Miller had done in this exact area?

I did enjoy the event even with the Sunday morning problems. It was a great event and serves as a great introduction for a lot of people into the BarCamp/Unconference field. If we got more people interested in BarCamps, then great stuff. Hopefully some of them will go to other Barcamps and tell there friends, maybe a couple will even consider setting up there own?

Without the great sponsors the event would never go ahead…

Bytemark BigV hosting platform, Open Labs at Liverpool John Moores University, Indigo clothing who supplied the Tshirts which I didn’t get before they were all gone, Techsmith who supply the excellent screen capture software Camtasia Studio and TEK systems a recruiter of tech people globally

Great event which will go down for its excellent talks, fantastic location, great atmosphere along with the lack of clear signs about staying over.

Google coming to MCUK?

I have a theory… and it was fully baked in my mind but now I got it

Google is launching Google TV to the UK and Europe in 2012 and it needs content from companies such as the BBC.

The logical place to have a presence is (of course I would argue is) MediaCityUK.

Doesn’t seem that baked now…

How I work…

A survey went around R&D today and after answering all the questions there was a blank area for other comments…

I’m sure I haven’t thought of all the weird software/network combinations that are in use. Please use this box to add any info you think I need to know.

To which I wrote

I have machines on multiple networks…

One on the R&D network,
One on the BBC internal network
One on the plain Internet.

I tend to keep the BBC internal one (running Windows 7 – which I have Admin rights) at work because its useless outside the BBC due to the constraints placed on it.
The R&D one has two profiles on it. One profile is setup for the R&D network and the other is setup to use the plain internet wifi. This means I don’t need to carry around multiple machines just one and user switch profile on Ubuntu 11.04.

The software I use is Thunderbird for email mainly on the R&D network because Evolution (my usual mail client) doesn’t support Socks5 proxies. I tried to get Evolution working because I really wanted to get the BBC network/Exchange calendar working in Evolution but it wouldn’t work without root access!

Its important to have a plain internet connection because I tend to work at home and from different places. The Webmail without the SecureID pass has made life a lot easier but I really would like to have some kind of 2 step authentication. I’ve enabled it for my Google Mail account for example.

I tend to send emails for calendar requests to my gmail, just so I can sync my Google Calendar with my BBC calendar. Google Calendar Sync seems to fail maybe because I have too many items or it might be the two step authentication? End of the day its not as reliable as send it to my gmail.

Its interesting because things are really starting to change and it starts with the change of outlook on the systems people use and work with everyday. Gone are the days of strict control of the employees machines… This surely has to be a good thing?

Unofficial BarCampMediaCity interview

I’m interviewed on the unofficial MediaCityblog today for BarCampMediaCity.

Here’s a slice of the action…

Next month will see Media City host it’s first ‘Bar Camp’ – an informal conference with discussions, demos and activities all organised by the attendees.

BarCampMediaCityUK will take place at BBC North on the 17th and 18th September, and is the brainchild of Ian Forrester, Senior Producer at BBC R&D.

We caught up with Ian to find out exactly what a Bar Camp is, and what people can expect from BarCampMediaCityUK….

Q. In a nutshell, what is a ‘Bar Camp’?
A: BarCamp is an international set of user-created conferences (or also known as unconferences). They are open, participatory events and the content of is provided by the people who make the event. Everyone helps shape the event and make it a special event.

Q. What kind of activities and sessions do you expect will be taking place at BarCampMediaCityUK?
A: The nature of BarCamp is that anything can be discussed. People can give a presentation, lead an open talk, give a workshop or tutorial, almost anything goes within the allocated session time.

In the past there has been talks about how to mix the perfect cocktail, how to ride a segway, what is openness, how to inspire your employees to more practical things like a debate different modern programming languages, making use of twitter for marketing, working from home more effectively, etc, etc.

You can read more at the unofficial mediacityblog…

A few months into media city…

Its been about 2 months since we moved into Media City. Brendan created a video which give a nice overview of the great new space we have.

A couple of months ago BBC Research and Development’s North Lab moved into its new home at MediaCity UK in Salford. The old base at Oxford Road in Manchester had been home for a good few years for some so, while excited about our shiny new facilities, it was with fondness and some sadness that we bid the Outside Broadcast building, ‘round the back, in the carpark, goodbye. Above is a short film about the last days of Oxford Road and the start of our new working lives in Salford.

There’s no doubt, its great being in Media City. Specially when the sun is shining.

There are some downsides like the lack of a BBC Club but on the upside there’s a massive sense of anything can and will happen if we want it to. And to be fair the work I’m on, reflects that (more on this in the near future).

For example, BarCampMediaCityUK. After 5 years of trying to do a BBC hosted barcamp by multiple people, we finally got the ecstatic yes from BBC Workplace, who to be fair has been nothing but great with there lovely floor walkers and generally useful security guards. We hit them with the concept of the stay over they took it all in there stride. I swear if we said we want to run a barcamp for 7 days they would have considered it. The barcamp is just getting off the ground but there will be more details coming along soon enough…

Back to MediaCity, the downside of having no BBC Club has meant we’ve had to entertain ourselves. Its still early days but we regularly have Tuesday evening drinks in the canteen/cafe/restaurant, which is a great chance to meet new faces. Not quite sure how it will scale but we’ll iterate I guess.

I’ve started a circus skills event outside on the grassy areas when its sunshine and there’s also the Salford cinema club. Others events and things are a foot including curry nights, yoga, the last friday club, etc… And thats just the start…

More shops are coming and Salford University is going to open right next door so its going to be quite a hotspot.

Getting to MediaCityUK has been pretty easy for me to date. I walk down to Picadilly Station and jump on a tram directly to mediacityuk if I’m in no rush or maybe a tram to Bury if in a rush. It takes about 35mins door to door and should get slightly quicker when the SportsCity/Ashton tram extension opens. I’ll be able to jump on a tram at New Islington and change at Picadilly. Its maybe quicker to walk down but with a yearly travel card and not in rush, I might as well make use of it. The line is believed to open in time for the new football season, but thats just hear-say, although its worth noting there running tests every night right now.

New ways of working isn’t just a saying, we’re really trying out new ways of working. I personally work from the Northern Quarter quite a bit. Not only that there’s a whole bunch of changes happening with regards to our machines. We already upgraded to Windows 7 a while back but dear I say it, Ubuntu and other gnu/linux operating systems are being somewhat tolerated. Of course in R&D, it has been for quite sometime.

My only complaints right now are, the lack of a cash machine in mediacity as the restaurant only accept cash (although they are going to put in place a credit system soon) and when it does rain, the run across the Piazza can be very cold and wet. Right now its amazing in the sunshine…

The move to Media City was a good move and I’m very glad I made the jump when I did. Now I look forward to do some amazing things in our new home and break all the rules with collaborations all over the world.

Dyslexia the advantages…

People sometimes ask me, why do you put on your blog that your dyslexic?

Well I believe its got a lot of advantages… and of course disadvantages…

One of the strange advantages is the dyslexic-dar (modifying the gay-dar term). You seem to get a sense of when someone might also be even slightly dyslexic. There’s certain things people do and say which triggers the radar in my mind. Usually there’s a strange kind of infinity, and it might be down to familiarity of communication and habits.

Tom Pellereau, is one of the final 5 on this years UK apprentice, and I kind of warmed to him a bit. But I kept thinking theres something different about him, something familiar. It wasn’t till I watched the final 5 apprentice show, that it all clicked (clipped a piece from the show under fair use).

I do personally think I have the ability to think differently from other people

Tom and his mum are right, being dyslexic is an advantage when problem solving for example. You just think very differently about problems and don’t get hung up on the same issues. The way you view the world is very different and in a world where thinking outside the box is valued highly this is a precious way to view and model the world.

I can imagine even 30 years ago, this wouldn’t be an advantage but right now, it certainly is… I refer back to Bill Thompsons talk at Future Everything… Designing the future, this is certainly what I feel I’m doing. A world where my strengths are an advantage. Its somewhat empowering to see others dyslexic people embracing it and using it for there own advantage.

A while ago, after my bleed on the brain, the doctors looked at my dyslexia report from 2000. They said, I had been outpacing my projected overview by a long way and maybe the bleed might have set me back to how I was projected back then. If you know anything about me, you would read the report and say nahhh thats someone totally different, maybe they got the reports mixed up? But I think what the report doesn’t account for is the massive change in technology. Maybe without the technology things for me would be very different.

Thankfully I live in a world which somewhat values logic, abstract/intangible concepts and openness.

This is why the BBC faces a massive change

This is going around the Social media circles right now…

Jeremy Clarkson has blasted the BBC’s move to Salford – branding the city a ‘small suburb’ and saying he would quit rather than relocate.

The Top Gear presenter used his Sunday newspaper column today to take a swipe at the corporation’s decision to move a string of departments to MediaCityUK.

He described Salford ‘a small suburb with a Starbucks and a canal with ducks on it’ and said that he would resign if the motoring programme was moved north.

Clarkson – who reportedly receives a £2m-a-year salary from the BBC – claimed the decision to move five departments to brand new buildings at Salford Quays was based on politics, saying ‘it was a box that has been ticked’.

Clarkson, you can take or leave him. I’m not exactly a petrol head, so I’m only loosely aware of what he does on top gear… But some of his comments are just stupid and well ignorant

Some people simply have no vision and frankly need to roll over and let someone in who does have the vision and maybe the guts to give it a shot. This big head stand in the way of the people who will ultimately save the BBC. In actual fact if you read the whole thing, even with publication bias and all that out the way, its maybe the swan song of a long over-due industry on its very last legs.

Grassroots Innovation & Creativity

People have been wondering what am I up to since Backstage closed down.

Well its kind of hard to describe but generally I’ve become the resident troublemaker, breaking all types of rules and really etching a new kind of path for myself. If I was going to explain it in a buzz word compliant way, it would be something like… Senior Emerging and Disruptive Grassroots Specialist for BBC R&D.

Yeah feel free to be sick all over your screens.

But one aspect I certainly want to focus on is new types disruption and innovation from the edges or grassroots.

So part of my new job will be seeking the seeds of disruption and innovation before they get to the point of broad adoption.

I come with examples…

Most of the people reading this have been on Twitter at least 4 years, and we could see something interesting was going on with Microblogging but no one really knew what? About 4.5 years ago I met the guys from Twitter (Ev and Biz) and I did talk about what we (BBC) could do with Twitter. Unfortunately I working on Backstage, meant my focus was on data. Although we did talk about what the opportunities Twitter might give the BBC. Of course most of that went up in smoke and Twitter marched on to establish a business model (ok not a very good one but its still something) and a certain amount of dominance in the microblogging and social fields.

Just imagine what would have happened if things turned out different. The point is there was something there and with a good trial someone else could have identified it as something interesting that the BBC should look deeper into.

How I find interesting stuff?

I mostly rely on the people around me for pointers. Thats why I tend to only follow a small number of people on twitter. But I also look at what certain people are up to. In actual fact, its this aspect which bough me to the BBC. Seeing what Tom Coates, Paul Hammond, Matt Patterson, Ben Metcalfe etc were up to really got me going. I had no idea who they were originally but most of them were pretty accessible in person, which really helped.

But as I’ve noticed and you would expect the list of innovators changes all the time. Not that I’m not saying these guys are not doing anything interesting. Actually they may be but new people come along all the time.

I’ve ping’ed a few people about the idea of what I’ll be doing into the future and had various comments back. Some positive, some quite negative but all a great help with lots of ideas and thoughts. One of the most provoking has to be the idea of it being an inbreed network. It really got me thinking… How do you have a network of trusted people but not make it your friends and keep the signal strong?

The obvious example seems to be keep it open… But with openness comes the trouble of keeping the noise out. Its a challenge but I’m hoping to tackle it in a social sciency kind of way.

I really like what Mozilla has done with there Drumbeat projects. But there is a theme which means people are rally around an idea or concept at least. But its wide open, which means you can get right to the edge, no messing. The best way to get stuff from very left-field. Actually I’ve been thinking instead of copying Mozilla, maybe there’s a way to leverage or even work with Mozilla for the benefit of both organisations?

Documenting stuff no matter what

Theres lot of things BBC R&D does which it classes as a throw away experiment and then years later I see something which resembles the original concept or idea. Its critically important to document and I would say share the successes as well as the failures. In R&D right now, we tend to bury this in obscure papers which don’t get to see the light of day. I always wanted to get away from writing papers but have fallen into the trap of writing papers too.

There are better ways, be it prototypes, a series of detailed blog entries, whatever works to document experiments and projects. I don’t doubt a properly authored paper with many citations are a better that a blog post. But if the paper becomes the reason why documentation isn’t done, then maybe its a problem? Right?

I’ve noticed a whole bunch of new ways to document stuff, most of them are simply prototypes filmed and put on youtube. It won’t stand up to much scrutiny but at the point it needs to, then thats when the paper can be written. Its like that all too familiar innovation funnel. Things are cheaper at the start than the end. Maybe you don’t want to commit to writing a lengthy paper when a series of blog post will aid writing the paper at a later date. The blog post can also function as prior art too.

What I have to recognize is that I work in the Emergence stage of innovation.

Emergence – (also known as embryonic stage) shows little improvement in key performance characteristic. Technology operates far below its potential. Neither the characteristics of technology nor its applicability to market needs may be well understood. A long gestation period exists before attempts are made to produce a technology. This new invention period is characterized by a period of slow initial growth. This is the time when experimentation and initial bugs are worked out of the system.

Its ok to be wrong

its ok to be haphazard

Its ok to not have all the answers

its ok to bounce from one thing to another.

Just as long as the experiments are cheap, documented and understanding is formed and shared internally and sometimes externally.

So with all that, spilled out across the this blog entry… I’m coming around to something which is I think very impressive and fundamentally what the BBC really needs now and for the future.

I guess its exactly what the guys behind Backstage were thinking before backstage was formed in 2004.

Wish me luck…

TV show and a MMO in one universe

I like the idea of Defiance…

Defiance is a number of things. It’s a third-person shooter, but it’s also an MMO. It’s a PC game, but it’s also coming to consoles. It’s a video game, but it’s also a television show. A multimedia collaboration between Trion Worlds—the developer behind the MMORPG Rift, launched earlier this year—and the SyFy network, Defiance is nothing if not ambitious; events from the game will have an impact on the show, and vice versa.

Although not a totally new concept, its a good tie up and certainly something which more TV companies and maybe broadcasters will/should follow suit. The worry is that SyFy/Trion won’t get the tone right and it won’t be a success in broadcast terms or even in gaming terms. It needs to be very strong and each one should be great experiences in themselves.

However, Hill was quick to point out that even though the game and show work best in tandem, both Trion and SyFy are working hard to ensure that they also stand on their own as pieces of entertainment. “To get the full experience, though, you’re going to want to do both.”

One of the obvious ones I was thinking about when you think of this concept is The Sims. On the TV show, you could get people who play characters and interact as virtual characters in the game. The best interactions become storylines on the show… But there is the notion of who’s leading who?

How would the BBC be able to pull off such a project? Well with BBC Childrens and BBC Games Grid based in MediaCityUK, I don’t think it will be too long before it starts to naturally happen… You can certainly imagine a Radio Drama based around a live playscape.

Intriguing…