Saturday 6 September 2014

The Good Morning Project

The Good Morning Project

Waving at strangers and the gamification of social contact



"A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know, is bad, or amoral, at least."
- Something Wicked This Way Comes (Ray Bradbury)



A little over a month ago I started a little social experiment. I decided to see if I could slowly and insidiously reprogram a group of strangers and gradually mould them to my will. As it happens I'm pretty sure I've created a revolution that will ultimately change the world and lead to world peace.


You're welcome.



The Background


As with many great scientific breakthroughs, and crimes, the idea for my experiment began with a conjunction of motive and opportunity. About two months ago my wife and I moved to a small town on the outskirts of London (surfing the inflation wave out from the centre, caused by the Hurry-Up Monster). As lifetime Londoners, used to the studied anonymity, we were initially taken aback by how quickly our neighbours sought us out to introduce themselves and make conversation. Within days of moving in I knew more of my neighbours by name than I've consciously known at any of my addresses since living in halls at university.

The town itself has a sort of village-y feel, with everything in pottering distance (although not village-y enough to have an actual pottery), but our overwhelmed London nerves were initially somewhat soothed to find that, once out and about, most of the locals didn't habitually stroll around waving and declaring the fine-ness of the day, and in fact, reassuringly, mostly just ignored each other with that distinctive, if somewhat diluted, within-the-M25 hunched scowl that reaches its zenith somewhere around London Bridge tube station at 8am.


Your Village
[Image: The Prisoner - ATV/ITV]

Safe in the knowledge that we weren't entirely strangers in a strange land, we got about getting to know the area and getting on with the usual wave of home-move DIY. With the start of the school summer holidays in July, however, as a teacher I was free! Free as a bird (with a very long To Do list gripped in its beak). As such, and with the fresh summer breeze in my metaphorical wings, I began a diligent program of gentle gardening, light DIY, moderate procrastination and heavy computer gaming. However, my wife, being a normal human with a normal human job, remained tied to the working week, so with literally nothing better to do (apart from the various important bits of admin that I'd been delaying all year) and in the spirit of camaraderie and moral support (and sparing her the further insult of sleepily waving her off to work while I went back to bed) I started walking down to the train station with her in the mornings. This ten minutes, denied to us the rest of the year, when we get different trains at different times, afforded us the opportunity to walk and talk together in the mornings (or at least run for trains in company) and also, it turned out, gave me the opportunity to meet my experimental subjects.

Walking back up the hill from the station on the first morning, with birdsong in my ears and the warm July sun on my face, I saw a man in a suit striding down towards me and presumably the station. "Here is another neighbour," I thought, "separated from our other recent neighbourly introductions by his awkward commuting schedule. I too can be friendly! Look!"

"Good... morning?" I ventured with an awkward smile/grimace; the words feeling complicated in my socially numbed London-commuter lips.


“What am I working on? Uhh... I'm working on something that will change the world, and human life as we know it.”
[Image: The Fly, 20th Century Fox]

In absolute silence, and with a look of stunned horror, as if a wet turd had just reared up from the pavement and declared in a loud voice that it was coming to give him a kiss, the man strode straight past me and away. In an instant I was flung back to a time when, as a child of perhaps eight years old, I had decided to start greeting people in the street like they seemed to do in Dad's Army or other such shows filled with jolly past-os. My youthful enthusiasm, open smile and desire to warm the hearts of a cold world had shattered within minutes when, of the first three people I greeted, two ignored me and the third, a lady of very senior years, had regarded me with the same horrified expression returned to me by this besuited man all these decades later. I hadn't bothered asking a fourth, reasoning that these things probably just didn't work in the present day (or at least only worked in the countryside, which is a bit like the past anyway). From that day, long ago, I'd continued to maintain a policy of issuing a cheery hello to strangers when surrounded by the timeless wilderness, but keeping a respectful silence amidst the anonymous bustle of modern city life. As for me, so for most of us.


Don't talk, just walk.
[Image: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images, via Guardian.com]


But now, standing at the bottom of my road, watching the dust literally settle in the wake of the Dour Man, I was struck by the motive to go with an increasingly obvious opportunity. Looking up the road at the sleep-addled, work-stressed faces walking down to meet me in ones and twos, I realised that here was the perfect chance to begin a little experiment in behaviour modification, and in so doing begin to make reparations to the disappointed boy who still huddled in the corner of my mind asking when a cheery greeting had become an attack to be repulsed. And with a daily 10-minute walk along a single road at the same time each morning, I had as close as I could hope to get to a controlled population on which to experiment.


One at a time please
[image: Lemmings, DMA design]


The Experiment


Coming home that first morning I passed a total of sixteen people and greeted each with the most cheery (although restrained and non-threatening) "Good morning" I could muster. Of that sixteen, only two replied. Of those who didn't, three looked disgusted (including the Dour Man), three looked frightened and eight simply strode straight past me as though I wasn't there. My ten year-old self would have felt crushed (although possibly vindicated in having been perceptive enough to give up after only asking three), but I was now fuelled by my growing vision for the experiment forming in my mind.

A twelve percent success rate wasn't a failure... it was a baseline.


Not the best start, but a start nonetheless.
[The Good Morning Project - Day 1 - Lez Laig]

Thanks to one of the little computers that we all now have in our pockets, I was able to knock together a quick table during that first walk home and use it to take notes on the journey back and those that followed. For a month and a half I made my daily return walk to the station and updated the results in my increasingly detailed spreadsheet; mining my interactions for valuable data between the smiles and greetings. It's strange to think that while mobile phones are often blamed for turning people into oblivious "iPhone zombies", the ubiquity of people tapping away at tiny mobile phone screens made it easy for me to collect these detailed statistics on the people I passed in the street every day in a way that scribbling in a notepad as they passed most certainly would not have. 

The Perfect Disguise
[Images: Lez Laig /  Dan Kitwood/Getty Images, via Guardian.com]


[image: lab-coated scientist keeping a low profile (sketch)]


On the second day of the experiment my past self would have wilted still further at the identical pair of greetings reciprocated, but the social scientist in me instead chose to focus on the fact that I'd received one fewer of each of the snarls, recoils and blankings than on the first day (although the mathematicians among you may have decided that it was just that I simply saw fewer people on the Tuesday and may have just lost a couple of grumpy ones, who were probably so grumpy or afraid at the thought of being greeted again that they chose to stay at home fuming or attempting to avoid me). Most importantly, however, on that second day I saw a smile! From a previous recoiler!

The first sparkle of gold glittered at me from the gravel in my social sieve.

[There’s gold in them thar interpersonal interactions.
[Image: www.jerrysgold.com]

 Over the rest of the week the numbers gradually began to ramp up; perhaps as familiarity allowed the flightier commuters to deem me relatively safe to interact with, in the same way that elephants get used to a camera disguised as a log or dolphins were able to cope with the psychological onslaught of being filmed by an auton. Whatever the cause, by Thursday I was up to eleven good mornings, three smiles and one good morning accompanied by a smile and wave (I had to create a new column for that!). And best of all, this last and most emphatic display of greeting had come from the lady who had withdrawn as if stung on Monday, smiled on Tuesday and muttered a reply on the Wednesday. Even the Dour Man had begun to reply!

Sure, it’s creepy, but we can get used to it.
[Images from BBC]


But on Friday I suddenly found myself back where I started. The suits, dresses and jeans were all walking towards me were the same, but the faces were different and the smiles were gone; the looks of fear and alarm sliding into place like Greek tragic masks. My familiar street had become a foreign land or, worse, some grim parallel reality with the same physical features but populated by a completely different cast of characters. Had Hitler won the war in this reality? Were these people secretly lizards? Or psychic robots?


And suddenly we’re strangers
[Image: Social Paranoiac / The Drowned Man - Punchdrunk Theatre Company]


While I couldn't rule these the worries out, I swiftly (although really not swiftly enough when you consider the alternatives) worked out that my quick trip to the shops before I had begun my return journey had led me to return against the flow of commuters for the next train. My goodwill, it seems, had begun to convert my old friends on my usual walk, but had not had the effect of psychic social osmosis that I might have hoped for. Realising that choosing a different set of commuters would introduce unnecessary variation into my data, I resolved to try to stick to the same time and set of commuters where possible, with a gradual and pleasing improvement in results (although with more individual walks down to the shops to make up for it, for which I'm sure my heart was also grateful).

Here are some of the notes that I took to flesh out my stats during my leisurely experimental walks:

Monday 14th July:
What if one of them wants to be my friend? I don't have time for a commuter friend. Oh, well now I sound like a monster. My mum has a "bus friend", who she met because they both get the bus from the same stop and gradually moved up from the odd hello to being vague friends. They talk pretty much every day, all the way to work and have met up for the odd tea or shopping trip. While this is lovely, I cherish my train journeys as time to read, write or think (and occasionally work) and while I'll happily chat to somebody from time to time on the way to or from work, I fear the "positive spiral" that leads to talking to each other all the way to work every day, so then you can't then do reading, or work without being rude, or having to make an apologetic excuse, and it' all so awkward, and I don't talk to my existing friends enough as it is… So ultimately I want to get to know people just enough to make me feel good by smiling and waving, but not enough to stop and actually become acquainted. I am a monster, aren't I? I should probably spend less time thinking alone on the train.

Friday 18th July:
What happens when I go back to my usual time/direction at the end of the experiment? Going "against the flow" means meeting people head on but what about when I'm walking towards the station as well? Is it weird to greet someone as you overtake them?

Monday 21st July:
It takes a few repeats to establish you're not a crazy (or at least not bad crazy). Some people have progressed from fear to wave/smile/hello gradually over the week!

Tuesday 22nd July:
Middle-aged Scooter Lady is in the Zone. Stoically ignoring me as she zooms by, headphones in and eyes glazed. She is the wind.

Friday 25th July:
Hardly any people today. Do they know something I don't?

Monday 28th July:
Scooter Lady waved back! Waving seemed to catch her peripheral vision. One to try with joggers? Do desperate-looking sprinting people count? Should I just let them get on with it?

Tuesday 29th July:
What will they do when I go back to work? Will they wonder what happened to that weird guy, or feel relieved or just slip back into the bubble without a thought? I seem to think about this a lot. Must remember that they’ll be fine without me.

Tuesday 12th Aug:
Pace vs politeness? Are old people polite because their generation? Physical age? Lower speed? Fewer commuter worries? Are slow people/animals just more friendly? Tortoises are lovely, which probably makes the whole theory sound. Snails are neutral.

Wednesday 13th Aug:
Dour man and Waver talking to each other! Both said morning, then laughed about it as they continued walking. Wonder if they discussed it? "Hey, you know that guy too? The weird 'Good Morning' guy? Yeah, he's completely changed my outlook on life too! Let's get married or something and raise some polite, slightly dour-looking children!"

I didn't see them talk again.

Wednesday 20th Aug:
Dead fox trauma! Poor thing is lying right in the middle of the pavement for everyone to pass in their own individual horror-bubble.

Oddly it seems that people don't seem that concerned, although I just had my first conversation, in trying to warn Waver just before she got to it. Must try to avoid interacting with the lab rats, lest they become Friends. Curse you, fox!

Thursday 28th Aug:
Exchange of pleasantries with a cabbie watching a video of his mate doing the Ice Bucket Challenge. Maybe I should launch the Say Hello To Some People Challenge.


The Results


A lot of good mornings, but have we grown out of waving?
[The Good Morning Project - Detailed Totals - Lez Laig]

Over the course of my six week experiment I saw the numbers steadily grow and improve and the ratio of positive to negative responses gradually change to the point that the others dwindled to insignificance (see the Appendices at the end for more detailed stats if you can face them). Looking at it in a graph as I am now for the first time it’s hard not to feel that any negative responses were a trifling blip. So why did they loom so much larger than that in my mind, both in the past and more recently? Why do we dwell on the little negatives that we encounter rather than taking more encouragement from the positives? Maybe for the same reason that a few falls can end a childhood love of climbing trees or rollerskating. And perhaps, as we grow older, it’s not even the falls themselves so much as the fear of falling that keeps us from trying.


Put like this, the negatives don’t look so scary. So why do they throw such a shadow?
[The Good Morning Project - Positive vs. Negative - Lez Laig]


The Conclusions

So what do I feel that I discovered, informally, as a result of my experiment (for more detailed statistics and some of the stranger facts that I noted, please see the appendices at the end)?

·         That people travel in a bubble, but sometimes they like to be knocked out of it. We travel in a bubble to have a bit of “me-time”, but sometimes that time isn't really “me-time” or even “nothing-time” but NON-time. We don't even remember the journey.
·         That we can't judge people by their armour. The besuited Dour Man scowled along the road and managed somehow to arch his entire face in horror when I greeted him the first time, but by a week or two in he had become, and then remained, one of the most enthusiastic greeting-returners (and easily the best on average) for the remainder of the study. In fact, his "Mo-or-ning!" took on a sort of musical quality which slid (somewhat oleaginously if one were to nitpick) up and over the top of a scale before drifting back down an entire octave (impressive in a single word), all topped off with a beaming smile.
·         That we can change our behaviour with just a little nudge, then pass that nudge on. Dour Man and Waver were both deeply alarmed by my greeting on the first day but not only became enthusiastic greeters but seemed generally smilier (or less frowny) in their walks along the road as time went by. The fact that they ended up chatting amicably to each other at one point, even if it was the only occasion that I noticed (and I hope that as time goes by there will be more), gives me hope that stepping out of their bubble and experimenting with social interaction on their individual commutes may have contributed to this in some way. Even if they were just talking about the possibility of me being a possibly-dangerous weirdo.
·         That I may have some Messianic delusions that I need to get under control. I'm sure my people will be fine without me.


The Impact

Looking back to myself of more than twenty years ago, I'd like to think that he would be reassured. Although I wouldn't really expect or want my past self, armed with this knowledge, to launch himself into a society-galvanising quest to make strangers communicate, I hope he'd at least feel justified in his original hope that most people were actually pretty friendly underneath their armour, even if it emerges that some armour can take some breaking into. Do I really think that I've made any real impact on the lives of any of the people I counted as my experimental subjects (yes, and "road friends", if I'm honest) over the last two months? No, probably not in any significant way. But I reckon there's a good chance (possibly even demonstrated mid-experiment by Dour Man and Waver), that sometimes making a little gap in that social armour can allow the occasional bit of risk-taking that might be the difference between waving or walking by. If just one person who I've passed on my walk went on to say hi to a fellow traveller, whether walking by or even on a train, I'll be content that the whole thing was worth it and the experiment a success. Well, actually if it's just one I'd probably be a bit grumpy, but two or three would be great. My wife has also begun to get into the habit of saying good morning to the people we see together on our walk down to the station, even when I'm not there, having inevitably had to run back home to retrieve something important that I've forgotten. Over the course of the experiment I found that I was more inclined to risk the odd random greeting myself, even when not "on the clock" with my experiment. Interestingly I've noticed that this gregariousness is gradually squeezed out of me the closer I get in to London or just large populations. What might start as a cheery greeting in the suburbs gradually slides down through muttered greetings and nods down to good old blank-faced-ignoring-everybody.

Could this socially poisonous effect of cities be purely down to population? Does the knowledge that most of the people who pass us are strangers who we will never see again dilute or drain our social and emotional resources with the fear that any social effort extended to them is wasted, as it will never be returned; disappearing like a piece of bread dropped into a torrent of rushing mountain water, possibly to nourish some distant fish in a river we will never see. No, it's obviously much more complicated than that, as things in the real world inevitably are. But could there one day be something we could do about it?


Social tracking and the gamification of good manners

I was recently given a FitBit by my wife (who knows I'm a sucker for anything with little lights that does stuff) and have been using it to track my activity and sleep patterns for the last few weeks. What I love about it (and loved about the mobile phone app I use to track actual exercise on the too-rare occasions that I do enough to merit it) is that it uses all of the information it collects to put together live statistics and daily reports on all the steps taken, miles travelled, calories burned (which must be a very wide ballpark guess), restful sleep taken etc. and presents them on little graphs and progress bars with targets. There are also numerous "achievements" (which even come with little virtual badges) and little messages that accompany these, which pop up to (somewhat patronisingly) praise success and ask gentle, nurturing questions to help get on top of failures. My phone app will occasionally send me a (slightly passive-aggressive) email asking me if I've done any cycling or other activities that I might have forgotten to log and offering tips for quick little activities that one can do to keep active even during a busy day; reminding me of how well I've done at certain points in the recent past and encouraging me to do so again. Essentially these apps and activity trackers turn being healthy into a game. A game that you play every day, with a gentle learning curve, no end point, but the tantalising prospect of "winning" each day by reaching personalised goals.

Virtual badges are like stickers, but for grown-ups or medals, but for peaceniks. Yay me!
[image: Fitbit]

What I realised one morning though, as I looked down at my phone to check my progress towards my daily "step goal", was that there seems to be little in the way of "social activity" tracking. Of course there are doubtless any number of apps that one can document one's social life in, and as was recently revealed to no great surprise, it's very easy for Facebook to keep very detailed statistics on, and even influence [link], our friendships and interactions, but this isn't what I'm talking about. We are at a stage now at which it is suddenly becoming feasible to track and "gamify" our social interactions. With cameras recognising faces and smiles, phones becoming increasingly able to recognise natural language, devices such as the Kinect or Leap Motion identifying physical gestures and finally devices such as smart watches and Google Glass making such tech wearable, we are now in a position to start bringing these things together in the field of "social gamification".

Imagine being able to fire up an app that connects to your various devices and tracks your daily steps and various vital signs, rewarding you for going on that bike ride before gently saying "Hey there!" (keeping it light as apps do, much as Douglas Adams predicted so well with his smarmy lifts, doors and other assorted technologies) "Did you know you've only said hello to three people today? Only four more to go to hit your daily target! Go get 'em, tiger! (cutesy emoji)".

Ford Prefect: I wouldn't trust that computer to speak my weight.
Eddie the Computer: I can do that for you, sure.
Ford Prefect: No, thank you.
Eddie the Computer: I can even work out your personality problems to ten decimal places if it'll help.
[The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams / BBC]


It's a horrific image, I know.

But for all the millions of people who struggle with social interaction, are depressed into isolation or simply get through life without smiling enough, this could be the equivalent of my Fitbit. Many people are quite capable of being active for the sake of it, but people like me really benefit from having little targets (with bars that go from red to green and are accompanied by a smiley face on completion) and the odd nudge to turn it into a game. I've lost count of the number of times I've jogged on the spot for several minutes just to hit my steps goal before going to bed. Social isolation can become a spiral, with people, whether through old age, mental health issues, bad experiences or just bad luck, becoming housebound or just alone in a crowded room simply because making social contact seems like such a barrier and a risk. Obvious and patronising as it sounds, positive social contact can usually help with these problems, with smiles even physically boosting our mood but, like drawing from an empty well, lack of contact can make attempting it seem difficult and unrewarding. As my infant experiment showed me, it's difficult to get started when you get nothing back. And empty bucket is harder work and more upsetting than not trying in the first place. But the thirst is the real danger and all it takes is a little bit in the bucket to make all the effort worth it.



A social tracker that can monitor our interactions can give that little bit of encouragement that might sometimes make all the difference. Of course it matters if the people we greet slide on past us like we'd never spoken, but what if our app could give us a little bleep and say "Well done! You just set a personal best! Here's your 'Meeter & Greeter' badge! Keep it up!"? Might that be enough to tide someone over for the day or two it took to have that smile reciprocated or that greeting returned? What if a gentle reminder to smile at somebody today is the thing that gets somebody to leave the house for a walk to the shops. Each point on that slowly-greening graph is a sip in the bucket that would otherwise be empty.


Alright! You're right on track buddy!
[A Musement Arcade Social Tracker (Patent Pending) - Lez Laig]


Of course for many of us the prospect of this makes the mind recoil like the Dour Man did from my friendly greeting on that first day. We're already monitored enough without a server in the basement of some Palo Alto tech start-up analysing our mental health and giving us intrusive pointers from across the sea. What if we want to be alone sometimes? Of course it won't be for everyone. But if it helped one person to make a connection that they might otherwise never have made, or put a smile on someone's face for the first time in days, it would all be worth it (again, possibly not financially). But if it caught on and people actually started smiling at each other, even if just because the app in their pocket told them to, how long would it be before they started doing it all by themselves, just because they felt like it? To return to a familiar analogy, like Dumbo's feather, or that weird sword-thing in Krull, the power was within us all along, but sometimes we need a little device to give us the confidence to try.


A magical Frisbee thing is a powerful motivator for the socially-awkward conqueror of evil
This metaphor just keeps on giving.
[Image: Impawards.com / Columbia Pictures]
















And if you’re still reading, here are some other bits…


Appendix 1: The Stats


The Good Morning Project:
  • Experiment length: 24 days
  • 317 greetings proffered
  • Passed a mean of 13 people per day.
    • Very few of them were actually mean.
  • Was ignored a total of 59 times.
  • People recoiled in fear or disgust 15 times.
  • In total, 243 people responded positively, with 214 of those being returned greetings.
  • That said, only 3 ever actually initiated the greeting (pre-emptively, rather than as a response or at the same time).
  • On a single route, on a single road, between largely set times there was still a variation of 24 in how many people actually passed me on a given walk.
    • I would have given this as a percentage, but given that on one occasion I passed literally nobody on my way home, which rather messed with my calculations.



Appendix 2 – Trends identified



  • Mondays and Fridays seemed to be the least friendly days in any given week (and the least populous too, for reasons that one is free to speculate on).
  • Parents with children, couples or in fact any groups were far less likely to reply to a friendly greeting (and far more likely to regard friendliness with suspicion). Whether this was because they were unsure which of them I was talking to, that their companions would think them odd for replying or because being part of a group of any size ringfences our desire to act as social individuals is moot. It was probably all three.
  •  Joggers and people listening to headphones, and to a surprisingly lesser extent people using phones (possibly due to the need to be vaguely alert to peripheral danger) really do tend to be "in the zone", although it's really more like a tunnel.
  • Politeness isn’t really a generational thing. All ages seemed equally capable of friendliness or mistrust (although I decided at an early stage that it would be creepy to approach children, or even young-looking teens to be on the safe side, with greetings, so they were out of this experiment).
  • That said, slightly more elderly people tended to reply, although that might be to do with being slow, as discussed.
  • Weather is a tipping point. Sunshine in the morning can put a smile on nearly any face whereas cold rain can carve a scowl into just as many.
  • Passing large dead mammals (possibly barring humans) doesn't seem to have the negative impact that I'd expected.
  • In fact, it led to more social contact than expected, although that was probably an outlier.
  • People are very unpredictable, with their individual lives and other inconveniences. Sociable rats (naked mole rats? Or are they already too sociable?) would definitely have made more reliable experimental participants, but it would have made greeting them all in passing every day (perhaps on some sort of conveyor with a randomising cage-selection arm) much weirder. Although I have to say that the idea sounds quite interesting, now that I think about it...




Monday 24 February 2014

Whither the Hurry-Up Monster?

Sitting at an airport departure gate last week, waiting for our budget flight to board, I found myself discussing with Mrs Laig the timing of when we should decide to guzzle our scalding tea, wolf down our overpriced sandwiches and take our places in the growing queue.
"There's no rush," I breezily commented. "They haven't deployed the Hurry Up Monster yet."
"The what?" came the cautious reply, knowing that the question might be the opener for another over-large can of explanatory worms. And indeed, it was during my over-long explanation of this particular pop-culture artefact to Mrs Laig that I came to think about its gradual disappearance from the computer game culture that spawned it and then to the manner in which it has gradually migrated further and further into our everyday lives.

So first to the history lesson that Mrs Laig was mostly spared:

The Hurry Up Monster (I won't abbreviate it to HUM) is a device that can be traced back to the days of the (relatively) early platform computer games. In the earliest days of gaming, when one's opponent was almost invariably sitting in the next seat, the impetus to maintain a good pace of play was as complicated as showing a scoreline at the top of the screen and letting competition (and elbows) do the rest. One friend of mine became so adept at competitive multiplayer subterfuge that he was able to unplug an opponent's controller using his toes in the middle of a game, giving rise to an unusual stipulation that only allowed him to play when wearing shoes. 

Hi Scores: The pressure comes from that douche who just knocked you off the #1 spot. Curse you, AAA!
Image: DonkeyKongBlog

As graphics, computer processors and the gaming industry itself began to grow however, single-player platform games began to proliferate widely, offering a frenetic challenge to the lone gamer. One-player games allowed for competition to spill out of the confines of one's living room and into the wider world, with high scores and leaderboards that put gamers into competition with rivals across the world and spawned a profusion of tournaments and sometimes tempestuous rivalries. However, without an elbow-flinging, insult-spewing opponent to pile on the pressure, how to keep the solo gamer challenged and safely in the sweet-spot between comfort and frustration? Whilst PacMan and other such arcade titles were able to take advantage of early "artificial intelligence" to pursue the player around a fixed arena and others, such as Jet-Set Willy and Donkey Kong, placed the focus on careful planning and precisely-judged joystick-nudging, many other titles relied upon our age-old enemy: time. Space Invaders managed to cement itself as one of the most successful games in history by substituting even the most basic AI with the simple mechanic of "moving one row down and getting a bit faster", imbuing that last stupid alien spaceship with the seemingly supernatural skills of a lateral ninja as it zipped across the screen with the fatal and invulnerable inevitability of a shark in a swimming pool full of pigs. 

A Simple Plan
Image: Threadless.com / Design: NGee

As games continued to evolve, players found themselves offered more choice in how to compete or progress, with multiple routes available, more complex enemies to outwit or score-boosting items to collect. How then to maintain the urgency? Some games adopted a ticking timer in which to complete a task or level, whilst others, most notably the Super Mario Bros. franchise, dispensed with the headlong rush or, in the case of Sonic the Hedgehog, continued to encourage it, but prevented undue dawdling throught the use of the "Invisible Wall", which followed the player through the world like the End of History, ensuring the the past (or at least the path so far trodden), once left behind, lay permanently sealed and inaccessible.

Hurry up already! You only have a few seconds until your frog...starves?
Image: Retrogames.com

I have always been a little bit of an explorer. Not so much a bold adventurer into new lands, but a delver into corners and little secret places, both in games and in places I happen to visit. For me, then, the Invisible Wall always felt like something of a cop-out. In blocking the way back it did nothing to demand more urgent play but merely served to frustrate my instinct to investigate the increasingly complex worlds that computer games began to inhabit. Walked past that cave? Want to know what was in it? Sorry pal, history's dead; maybe you can have a look next time you play this game through from the beginning. Now go chase some more coins.

So what was the alternative to a ticking clock or ninja aliens in a game that also allowed for some strategy or freedom of exploration? In my opinion, the device that did the best job of injecting truly primal urgency back into gaming, without the arbitrary nature of the Death Clock or the Invisible Wall was the Hurry Up Monster. My limited trawl of the internet for articles about this illustrious beast has come up inexplicably short. Inexplicably, given that mention of such a creature, albeit with gamers of a certain vintage, seems to bring instant recognition, regardless of what individuals may, or may not, have called it themselves.

It comes for us all.
Image: badsneaker.net/

For me, my earliest brush with this noble enemy was in the single-screen bird-combat-based lunacy of Joust. For the uninitiated, Joust was an arcade (and later console) game in which the player (a lance-toting knight sitting atop an ostrich, blessed with limited powers of button-bashing-granted flight) spawned on a screen populated by similarly-attired, vulture-mounted adversaries, who could, by means of being hit from above (although rarely with the lance), be unseated and transformed into brightly-coloured eggs, which could then be collected in return for points. As the game progressed, these enemies would gradually improve in their tactics and speed, and the levels themselves would gradually become more hostile, as floors were gradually replaced by pits of lava that, in turn, eventually hosted bird-seizing infernal hands. Despite this gradual ramping up of difficulty, the game sought to challenge the player with more than just the prospect of carefully-waged mounted aerial medieval warfare. For behind the scenes a far deadlier foe lurked, awoken by that twisted hybrid of Mario's wall and Frogger's timer: the secret invisible alarm clock.

This sinister device would tick quietly away as the player(s) (for this was a game open to (semi)cooperative play) went about their wing-flapping, egg-collecting business until, with a screen-spanning HURRY UP! message, the Monster would be awoken. Unlike the flapping foes of the main game, this beast, unnamed in the game but known variously by gamers (as yielded from the few internet resources that I could find) as the "Dragon", "Pterodactyl", or just "Skel" would erupt onto the scene with all the supernatural speed of a final-row Space Invader, but also with the targeted malice of a vengeful hunter woken from its slumber with only YOU in mind. The effect of the Hurry Up Monster's heralding and imminent arrival (there was always a panic-window of a few seconds after the announcement) can be likened to players, locked in deuce at a tennis match, being told that "in 30 seconds the wolves will be released". Imagine how much more fun Wimbledon would become.

Panic! When you're there, it's actually very threatening...
Image: MobyGames / Contributed by Servo (55902) / Credit: Williams
Link to video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO0AlvOlWUw

At this point strategy would go out of the window and reflexes became all. Unlike the passive stolidity of the wall or the hopeless inevitability of the time-limit, the genius of the Hurry Up Monster was that beneath the panic there was the gossamer thread of hope that blazed into a fuse wire with every successfully-evaded pass. Because unlike the sands of the Death Clock, the monster could be cheated. Before each pass across the screen the beast would announce itself with a roar, then fling itself across the screen like a furious missile before leaving from the other side. Although winged death was almost a certainty as pass followed pass, with luck and skill escape was possible. There were even rumours that, if timed just right, it was possible to slay the beast, though I never met anybody able to claim that they'd succeeded.

Joust was not alone in invoking a roaring, unconquerable foe to harry the dawdling adventurer. Platformers such as Rainbow Islands (sequel to Bubble Bobble) and The New Zealand Story also encouraged exploration, strategy and thoroughness but ensured that dallying came with an adrenalin-hungry pricetag. This furious enemy brought to mind the terrible swooping beasts of legend, from Tolkien's Smaug to the great dragon of Beowulf; incalculably powerful weapons of flesh and scale defeated only through the ingenuity and charmed lives of the vulnerable heroes they sought to destroy. Here was urgency not as arbitrary line but as heroism. Not a death-knell but a gong of war. Not an end to history or a wound-down clock but a winged challenge to life. This was the Hurry Up Monster - if you want to keep playing, you'll have to fight or run.

If you can see this, you're too slow
Image: Redbubble.com / Design: VortexDesigns

I'm sorry, where was I?

Ah yes. Airport waiting rooms.

As I trawled the internet with a cursory search for an image or description to match my rambling on the subject of the Hurry Up Monster I found myself confronted by page after page of people expressing their frustrations or worrying about the timings of their important life decisions. As the landscape of computer gaming technology has developed and changed, computer games have diverged into processor-hungry worlds for players to explore at their leisure (the Grand Theft Auto franchise, MMOs such as World of Warcraft or beautiful "explore-em-ups", such as Gone Home, without points, enemies or even, some would suggest, any point at all) or else into throw-away apps that return us to the days of the high score board and the frantic headlong dash (Temple Run and Flappy Bird being prime examples). Whence, then, the Hurry Up Monster? It seems to have fallen between two stools; a relic of the joystick age in an age explored by mouse & keyboard or tackled by taps on a portable screen. 

Or perhaps not. Perhaps the greatest trick the Hurry Up Monster ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

During my brief hunt for information I tried searching for the specific phrase and found myself looking at the title of an article reading something along the lines of "How I beat the Hurry Up Monster". At first I took this to be some sort of play-through guide to Joust (possibly even detailing a strategy for achieving the fabled dragon-kill), until I read the first line of the summary and found that it was an article by a woman who felt that she had overcome the biological and societal pressures placed upon her to have a baby (ultimately by not having a baby - sorry for the spoiler). But this got me thinking: perhaps that metaphor, whether intended by the author or not, is a rather more apt one than it seems. We often speak about a "biological clock" ticking down as women age, but the whole problem with it is that there is no timer for us to see and race against. An invisible wall? Perhaps. But perhaps what we face is more like a slumbering monster, waiting to be awakened by a call that we won't hear, and this is what makes such decisions such a gamble and such a threat. Not to labour this particular metaphor too much further but the "biological clock" strikes me more as a "Hurry Up Monster" whose coming is inevitable, whose attacks we may evade, through skill and luck, but to whom eventual defeat is inevitable if we don't get on with it.

It comes for some of us. In a way. Maybe?
Image: bigkingken

Where else, then, do these societal and biological monsters lurk?

In a modern society we are surrounded by barriers that limit, guide and cajole us through our lives. Many of the stages of our early lives are defined by invisible walls that push us onwards and close the way behind us: from schooling to the period of general "neural plasticity" that creates polyglots, virtuosos and sports prodigies, and the biological staging posts of peak growth, vitality and general fitness that we pass in one direction, never to access so easily again. Time and entropy are the ultimate in Invisible Walls. In our adult lives we are constantly hemmed and harried by ticking timers that guide our priorities and shape our working days and our leisure: from deadlines to train times, holidays to TV timetables (although thanks to the rise of PVRs and on-demand viewing, this last one is coming back under our control). But it is in the personal decisions that shape our lives as a whole that the Hurry Up Monster lurks.

The Hurry Up Monsters of our real lives begin to appear, grow and proliferate as we reach and journey through adulthood; flexing their invisible wings and checking their alarm clocks from time to time as we more through our different life stages. Unlike the monsters in Joust et al, these monsters can't be seen and are clear to us only when we eventually fall prey to them. The first great beasts rear their heads even before we leave school, with choices that we must make about the subjects we study or where we do so that will determine the course of our higher education and later job prospects. From then on the Career Monster watches us carefully, diving across the screen as we choose qualifications, apply for jobs and pursue promotions in a bid to outwit it, always knowing that a misstep could leave us trapped in the wrong position or, worse, the wrong career, with little chance of escape. When is the time to choose? The point of no return? There is no counting timer or obvious wall, only the fear that dogs each decision, the exhilaration of a temporary escape and almost always the knowledge that the monster will return a year or two down the line to challenge us again.

The Pterodactyl even turns up in the data for I/O latency in operating systems
Image: Brendan Gregg

I'm currently going through the experience of trying to buy a house and have noticed how strong the Home Buying Monster has grown in recent years. In selling our current flat we were confronted repeatedly by vulture-riding estate agents who proffered access to hordes of gold and talked about the various strategies that they would use to "create the urgency": from arranging "open days" to pit buyers directly against each other at the viewings stage (the actual agents then able to act more as door staff than sales people; the competition doing their job for them) to encouraging sellers to continuing to book new potential buyers in for viewings after accepting an offer, "just to keep the pressure up". And of course it works. Each pursued by their own Hurry Up Monster, prospective home-buyers will offer whatever it takes in order to clear the sale before the beast strikes and it's too late; our flat was sold in less than a week. But now, with the Sold sign up and our buyer waiting, a huge "Hurry Up" has appeared in front of us and our own monster stirs as we are chased from property to property, with each disappearing as quickly as our own. Just yesterday a property we liked was sold the day before the Open Day, to somebody desperate to beat the Monster, even if it meant committing to spending the next 35 years paying for a house they hadn't yet visited. On we must run to the next viewing, flapping our little wings and hoping that we can find a place to land in time.

"Creating the Urgency"
Image: SMH.com.au

So, having identified this monster, can we ever be free of it? Aldous Huxley famously imagined a Brave New World, in which fear, instability and unpredictability had been bred, trained and medicated into insignificance. The price for this comfortable predictability is, of course, the very pursuits of true happiness that spur us on to face such beasts in the first place. Confronted by an outsider horrified by the bland existence lived by the citizens of the World State, one of the World Controllers explains matter-of-factly that: “Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand... In fact... you're claiming the right to be unhappy. Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer, the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." So what are we all afraid of? If, rather that pursuing our various life goals we are instead fleeing from a vague yet oppressive fear of being "too late" in jobs, in houses, in children, in health, in life itself, do we know exactly what it is that we're running from? All around us are people happy with circumstances and lives that we would consider failures if our own. Yet our own lives are littered with goals and deadlines that we failed to meet and that, instead of to a final GAME OVER, have simply led us down different paths. For every decision that that we ever-after lament there are those for which we latterly thank our stars for leading us obliquely to.

Of course there are always those in life who are free from the beast. Those people who, whether by lifestyle choice or by circumstances beyond their control, have simply stopped 'playing the game'. If you are not on, or have fallen off, the career or housing 'ladders' (perhaps a familiar metaphor for lovers of Doodle Jump etc.), they present no monster to run from. Those people who find their 'niche' in a job that pays peanuts but makes them happy every day, who live light and who don't want, or know they can't have, children, are to some extend free from the urgent daily pressures of working towards them, or running from the imagined consequences of 'not being ready', or doing things 'too late'. Many of us envy these people in their freedom, but when it comes to decisions that could set us similarly free, we choose to continue playing. Because jobs, families and almost all of the life-consuming pursuits that our existences throw at us are ultimately choices. Just as for Mario, Frogger, Donkey Kong and Joust, they are games that we choose to play. Because for all the grief and anxiety it brings us, the Hurry Up Monster exists for a reason.

I never met anybody who claimed to have completed Joust. Nor Frogger, Space Invaders or PacMan. I've never met a person who has finished Flappy Bird, Doodle Jump or Candy Crush Saga (don't get me started on my feeling about that), although plenty of them have given up in frustration. And anybody who's completed a Super Mario game has just ended up getting bored anyway. But does it stop us playing, or recommending them (constantly, in some cases) to our friends? The draw of these things is in the thrill of the endeavour and possibility of advancement and reward, but also the constant fear of failure that pushes us ever on and keep us vitally focused on the present moment, with the bigger picture, all fangs and teeth, waiting on the horizon. Similarly in life, if we stopped to think about how few people play the various 'games' that we tie ourselves to and can ultimately claim to have 'won', we'd.... Oh, now I've started to get depressed.... So we don't stop to think. We keep on playing, advancing from one 'life-level' to the next, pursued through each by the various monsters at our backs.

In our pursuit of happiness, or our never-ending flight from disappointment, we are always striving to stay one step ahead of the Hurry Up Monster that chases us from one hurdle to the next. Perhaps he is our career, our fitness, our boss or our biological clock. Perhaps he is a pixellated pterodactyl on a static screen. Or perhaps, like Dumbo's feather, or that swordy-frisbee thing in Krull, the Hurry Up Monster was inside us all along. But just like Dumbo, Luke Skywalker, that dude with the beard in Krull, or the little knight-guy in Joust, we could turn our little ostriches around and go home if we chose to. If we really wanted to. But secretly, for all that we hate the monster and the grind of nearly identical levels that we must face, we all want to play the game and see what comes next. 

Hurry Up!
Image: Impawards.com




P.S.- And for a couple of really odd endings to games, check out these perplexing doozies:

Monster Party (NES, 1989)
Via: k-thor-jensen / Credit: Bandai


MDK (Commodore Amiga, 1997)
Via: Degan Veran/Cracked.com / Credit: Shiny Entertainment