BBC Mixital

» see mixital.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

On Wednesday 24 April 2019 at 9:27 in the morning, Martin Wilson, the BBC's Head of Digital Creativity, put a post on the corporation's technology blog under the title Mixital to close. It runs a few hundred words, it is warm about the thing it is closing, and it gives no closing date at all, only that it would happen over the next year.

Mixital had launched in 2015 under Make It Digital, the campaign that also put a micro:bit into the hands of every year seven child in the country. The site handed people roughly between eleven and eighteen a set of maker tools and a set of BBC brands to aim them at. You could build a game using Doctor Who characters, write and submit a script, make an animation, or program a robot in Strictly Come Dancing costume to dance using basic HTML.

By the end it had taken more than one million creations. Doctor Who accounted for nearly 100,000 original games on its own, submitted through the game maker kit, a figure the show's digital producer Matt Rogers quoted in the closure post as proof of how much the fans turned up even when the show was off air. Mixital won or was nominated for six national awards, one of them a Children's Bafta.

~ the case file ~

~ the funny part ~

This is a BBC product in the strict sense, which means it existed because of the license fee and was built for the households that pay it. I was thirty-one when it launched and living in Ankara, which is the wrong age and the wrong country. There is no version of my 2015 in which I am making a Doctor Who game on a BBC site, and no version in which I would have been allowed to.

What is worth noticing from any distance is what the BBC was actually handing over. A public broadcaster gave children its own intellectual property as raw material, officially, with tools it had paid to build, and then hosted whatever came back. Twenty-six channels of it, twenty still running on the last day. Almost nobody else who owns characters worth that much has ever been willing to do the same.

~ the wind-down ~

The closure ran in two stages a year apart. From April 2019 you could no longer publish a new creation and could no longer register an account, while everything already made stayed up and readable. The site's own FAQ said the content would remain until April 2020, at which point it would no longer be publicly available.

It went overnight. Somebody watching from the ArchiveTeam channel recorded that the site was online on the morning of 1 April 2020 and offline on the morning of 2 April, British summer time, which is about as precise as a time of death gets for a site nobody was reporting on.

ArchiveTeam saved part of it. The written channels came through, and the archivebot jobs covering the Young Reporter sections are still listed with their WARC files. The games are the hard part and most of them are gone, because a Mixital game was JavaScript assembled on the server by a tool that no longer exists, and saving the page does not save the thing the page was for. A million creations, and what survives in bulk is the portion that happened to be text.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »