Advising programme makers about how they can exploit the programmes the BBC makes: "360 degree commissioning". Television is where all the budget is, then radio, then games and interactivity.

Early on in FictionLab, Tom Dolan said "all interactive fiction is indistinguishable from a game". What sort of games is it appropriate for the BBC to be making? Games at the BBC have mainly been spin-offs from TV shows. Now they want to develop original IP.

Jamie Kane - an alternative reality game about a missing, presumed dead, pop star. Through the game you talk to folks online, find web sites with clues as to what happened to Jamie. 40,000 people played that online so far.

It's hard to advocate this stuff to people.

Shows off Wannabes (worked on with Illumina), where you build relationships with individual characters, as the show progresses your choices affect what the individual characters think of you. It's about co-opting tiny slices of time that folks have during the day (very "casual television").

What worries the BBC? Spoofing stuff (e.g. in the Jamie Kane case, they were pretending not to be the BBC); legality (copyright etc); age suitability.

Talked about Spooks, Celebdaq, etc. What is a public service game? Is this something the BBC should be doing? How does this affect their relationships with the commercial sector? They don't have a free way to get onto platforms like PS3, etc. - though now these consoles are getting networked this may change.

They've done some stuff on mobile, "more or less successfully", for Spooks. You might see a LARP from the BBC - events in a physical space. Mentions Cruel to be Kind at the Come out and Play festival.

Question: "Some people argue that there aren't any true interactive narratives, that they're all really predetermined. Are the BBC playing with formats where the player contributes to the structure of the game?"

Answer: "No. What we're trying to do is very simple and appeal to the 'casual' market".

Introduction from Tim Wright. Tim wants to go to the moon to play golf with David Bowie. Today he wants to plan the mission. "We may need to simulate David Bowie in some way".

We're here to talk about other types of play.

Pat Kane takes the podium. Pat has written a book called "Play Ethic: A manifesto for a different way of living". "There's been a playful response to capitalist industrial change for quite some time". We're moving beyond the work ethic as a society; the values that sustained consumerism were puritan ones: work is worth doing because it integrates you into society.

What are the themes of a post-worth-ethic, quality-of-life society? Play, idleness, slowness, softness. This talk has a happy-clappy neo-Californian feel to it. Pat discovered that play is a weird human behaviour. Play is "adaptive potentiation" (William Sutton-Smith). i.e. as complex mammals, we need to rehearse our relationships with other creatures.

3 "ancient rhetorics of play": play as power (contests), play as community (being social: festivals, carnivals, symbolic rituals), play as "feint or chaos" (the idea that we are "the sport of the gods". These ancient forms of play aren't that free - there's an element of coercion to them.

It's more complex than "are video games good or bad".

Pat's been obsessing about the dark side of play and games. He now thinks an ethics of play is vital: playing games makes the world less stable, more open, less predictable, more risky. e.g. Rumsfeld, Cheney using the language of games to articulate their positions: "it's about changing the rules of the game". Look at game theory - early articulaters were cold war theorists.

We have entire publishing industries devoted to organised play: it's sport.

"The same platform that enables Katamari Damacy also enables Americas Army"

"Surveillance as well as sousveillance".

Scaling is for later: "Quit sweating the problems that give you a mental stiffy, and work on the problem that are truly hard: ease-of-use, process, transparency, discoverability and the whole use experience."

This used to be exactly the attitude that I took until about 2-3 years ago: developer team is expensive, disk, memory and processor are cheap, and so scaling shouldn't be tackled until it needs to be. But I realised (with some gentle prodding) that it's necessary to consider (or at least measure) things like database load and memory usage in applications early on - particularly in large, complex systems or those where you're using frameworks or toolkits (like Hibernate) which help you forget about what's going on "under the hood".

Now these tools are absolutely great... but if you don't understand how they're talking to, say, the underlying database then you need to at least measure how they're doing this. Otherwise those single-user tests you were doing which were working fine start breaking down when you hit a couple of hundred simultaneous users and the database load goes through the roof... and suddenly you either need to worry about how you're going to afford lots more servers to scale across (and get your app to do so), or you need to revisit your application logic.

Granted, perhaps this is less of a problem for pure web applications - but in these AJAXy days where servers are handling requests not just at page-load time but all the way through an application, I suspect it'll become more of an issue.

And none of the above implies that the user experience is in any way less important. At FP we're firm believers that you need rock-solid technology *and* delightful design.

Nokia touts low-cost, low-power wireless tech: "Nokia today invited hardware and software makers to join it and implement a new wireless data transfer technology designed to operate over very short distances. Yet the Finnish phone giant insisted the technology, dubbed Wibree, is complementary to Bluetooth."

More on our Nabaztag CC plugin: "when a user checks in code, Cruise Control will tell your rabbit to droop his ears in shame if the code fails unit tests and will even announce the name of the culprit ! But when the code is added successfully, your Nab will let you know in his naturally jubilant (aka crazy party dude) fashion"