Articles by Andrew

Owner of inkblurt.com

Neuroscience and investing choices

October 4, 2006 by Andrew | No comments

It’s pretty obvious to most people who watch users act and react that they do a lot of what they do based on somewhat primal and/or emotionally driven impulses. And I’m sure there’s a lot of neuroscience stuff out there that explains how this works, but I haven’t encountered any until I read the article Mind Games in last week’s New Yorker.

Here are a couple of salient bits:

The first scenario [in the MRI study] corresponds to the theoretical ideal: investors facing a set of known risks. The second setup was more like the real world: the players knew something about what might happen, but not very much. As the researchers expected, the players’ brains reacted to the two scenarios differently. With less information to go on, the players exhibited substantially more activity in the amygdala and in the orbitofrontal cortex, which is believed to modulate activity in the amygdala. “The brain doesn’t like ambiguous situations,” Camerer said to me. “When it can’t figure out what is happening, the amygdala transmits fear to the orbitofrontal cortex.”

The results of the experiment suggested that when people are confronted with ambiguity their emotions can overpower their reasoning, leading them to reject risky propositions. This raises the intriguing possibility that people who are less fearful than others might make better investors . . .

…

Today, most economists agree that, left alone, people will act in their own best interest, and that the market will coördinate their actions to produce outcomes beneficial to all.

Neuroeconomics potentially challenges both parts of this argument. If emotional responses often trump reason, there can be no presumption that people act in their own best interest. And if markets reflect the decisions that people make when their limbic structures are particularly active, there is little reason to suppose that market outcomes can’t be improved upon.

Part of the article also describes how the researchers used oxytocin (a hormone generated during pleasurable and intimate activities) via nasal inhalers. I have to quote this too because it’s so fascinating.

Trust plays a key role in many economic transactions, from buying a secondhand car to choosing a college. In the simplest version of the trust game, one player gives some money to another player, who invests it on his behalf and then decides how much to return to him and how much to keep. The more the first player invests, the more he stands to gain, but the more he has to trust the second player. If the players trust each other, both will do well. If they don’t, neither will end up with much money.

Fehr and his collaborators divided a group of student volunteers into two groups. The members of one group were each given six puffs of the nasal spray Syntocinon, which contains oxytocin, a hormone that the brain produces during breast-feeding, sexual intercourse, and other intimate types of social bonding. The members of the other group were given a placebo spray.

Scientists believe that oxytocin is connected to stress reduction, enhanced sociability, and, possibly, falling in love. The researchers hypothesized that oxytocin would make people more trusting, and their results appear to support this claim. Of the twenty-nine students who were given oxytocin, thirteen invested the maximum money allowed, compared with just six out of twenty-nine in the control group. “That’s a pretty remarkable finding,” Camerer told me. “If you asked most economists how they would produce more trust in a game, they would say change the payoffs or get the participants to play the game repeatedly: those are the standard tools. If you said, ‘Try spraying oxytocin in the nostrils,’ they would say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ You’re tricking the brain, and it seems to work.”

I wonder what this tells us about the focus we should be placing on the emotional response people have to what we’ve designed? Especially when it comes to systems they use to make important decisions about which they may have anxieties or confusion.

Also, I wonder what this means for information architecture specifically, since so much of our most basic daily work is about reducing semantic ambiguity — to what degree does the user’s emotional context affect their ability to reason through what we’re giving them? And, in a Heisenbergian twist, to what degree does the ambiguity of choice within the designed experience exacerbate the user’s context?

Foley business and petard hoisting

October 3, 2006 by Andrew | Permalink

First of all, I have to admit, it’s kind of fun to watch the Republican House chewing away at its own extremeties trying to free itself from the bear (elephant?) traps it’s found itself in since the weekend. Schadenfreude indeed.

But this story (here’s a bit of it, but pieces of it keep coming out and it’s everywhere) worries me too.

To some degree, the fact that Foley is gay is delicious irony that has short-circuited a huge piece of the Republican power to get people to the polls… although it’s arguable that their Gay-Scare tactics were starting to lose steam in the face of Iraq and other debacles. Still… even for lots of people who might quibble with the administration’s foreign policy and whatnot, if you just remind them that Democrats luuuuuv “the gays” and that being gay is essentially the same as being a pedophile and/or bestiality fan, it gets their people to the polls like nobody’s business. (I am, of course, parroting their bigotry, not agreeing with it … just to make that clear… it’s godawful ignorance at best but more likely just plain evil bigotry.)

The fact that Foley is gay, then, could just be used by his Republican bretheren as an excuse to excommunicate him and say they knew nothing of it and are ejecting a bad apple. But they can’t, because evidently tons of them knew about his antics. Because of their coverups, the GOP is in for a real sh**storm and probably a loss of power (unless Diebold can win the elections for the GOP again). Basically, they’re being hoist by their own petard — the petard, in this case, is their homophobia.

Great, right? But I wonder if all this press about Foley going after 16 yr old boys is only furthering popular misconceptions about homosexuality? You can hear it in the voices of the conservatives who are calling for his ouster — especially people like Bay Buchanan — who see this as nothing less than confirmation of their beliefs that homosexuals are out to “convert” and/or molest their perfect little churchgoing children. In fact, this backlash has already begun.

So I hope that the media makes a clear distinction between “gay” and “inappropriately stalking/wooing teenagers.” Not that the media are known for their grasp of logical nuance.

Still… my god the fireworks are fun to watch.

(Edited to add: I don’t want to sound like I getting sadistic pleasure from seeing individuals in personally wrenching, life-destroying situations. I don’t wish that on anyone … it’s the neo-puritanical hypocrisy being brought to light that I’m celebrating.)

The Pro-Torture President

September 22, 2006 by Andrew | No comments

Why on earth are more people not completely gobstoppered over the fact that we have an administration that is PRO-TORTURE.

Let me say that again … “Pro-Torture”…

If this were a movie, it’d be a very very dark political satire. Imagine the storyline if a political party got into power and continued (as everything else was falling down around their ears) to fight for the right to murder? Or to steal? “Hi. I’m Candidate Whatsis and you should vote for me because I’m in favor of murder. *big smile*”

But we’re living it now. With the incredible incompetence of this administration, and all the positive things they could possibly still do to pull this travesty of a foreign policy out of the muck, they focus their will almost completely on preserving the President’s right to torture other human beings, even though many in their own party are against it, all five former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have come out against it, and nobody has a convincing case that torture even produces trustworthy intelligence.

In spite of all of that, Bush & Co. can’t seem to stop thinking about doing awful things to other people’s bodies. (If intelligence were that important to our administration, you’d think they wouldn’t be firing so many Arabic translators from the military because of sexual preference … but I digress.)

The amazing thing is that this President claims to be a committed Christian. I wish someone would ask him outright how he squares his faith with torture — this bizarre, sick commitment to something that, even if it wasn’t completely destructive to the moral fabric of our country and our moral authority in the world (the little we have left), isn’t even a trustworthy method for learning facts.

Anyway, Andrew Sullivan put it better than I’ve seen it anywhere so far:

Andrew Sullivan | The Daily Dish

And yet so many seem to. Why? Torture is not a hard issue for any Christian. It is an unmitigated moral evil. There is no theology on earth which can make it a less grave moral matter than, say, gay marriage. And yet it has been enforced by this president for five years and where is the outrage? You would imagine that James Dobson would have organized a massive phone-in or email blitz to Capitol Hill on the detainee legislation. You would imagine that every theocon from Ponnuru to Neuhaus would be writing about this every day and night. But nah. Gays getting married in one state out of 49? Massive, coordinated outrage, sermon after sermon, direct mail blitz after direct mail blitz, and a threatened constitutional amendment. The president authorizing torture? You can hear a pin drop on the religious right. Tells you something, no?

Add this to the ‘great quotes’ list somewhere

September 21, 2006 by Andrew | Permalink

I ran across the story about Bill Gates watching YouTube and ‘admitting to watching pirated content’ just now, even though it came out in June, but the bit that really got me was this quote:

“This social-networking thing takes you to crazy places.”

Mitch Kapor on the ‘disruptive’ nature of hybrid worlds

September 19, 2006 by Andrew | Permalink

Just ran across this quote from Mitch Kapor on 3pointD.com —

3pointD.com

Kapor gave great insights into Second Life’s early history, and a nice vision of what the future might hold. 3pointD took as many notes as we could, which we’ll present here essentially unalloyed. The upshot, however, was this: to Mitch, Second Life is a disruptive technology on the level of the personal computer or the Internet. “Everything we can imagine and things that we can’t imagine from the real world will have their in-world counterparts, and it’s a wonderful thing because there are many fewer constraints in Second Life than in real life, and it is, potentially at least, extraordinarily empowering.”

I like hearing stuff like this because it makes me feel a little less like I’m in la-la land with my own thoughts about this stuff.

Harvard’s CyberOne Course in Second Life

September 15, 2006 by Andrew | Permalink

But if the sim crashes and green cubes rain from the sky, do you get a refund on tuition?

CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion
“Enrollment to the Harvard Extension School is open to the public. Extension students will experience portions of the class through a virtual world, known as Second Life. Videos, discussions, lectures, and office hours will all take place on Berkman Island. Students from anywhere in the world will be able to interact with one another, in real time.”

World of Warcraft: Is It a Game?

September 13, 2006 by Andrew | Permalink

Steven Levy, author of the fabulous book Hackers, writes this excellent column about WoW.
World of Warcraft: Is It a Game? – Newsweek Technology – MSNBC.com

What distinguishes Warcraft from previous blockbuster games is its immersive nature and compelling social dynamics. It’s a rich, persistent alternative world, a medieval Matrix with lush graphics and even a seductive soundtrack (Blizzard has two full-time in-house composers). Blizzard improved on previous MMOs like Sony’s Everquest by cleverly crafting its game so that newbies could build up characters at their own pace, shielded from predators who would casually “gank” them—while experienced players continually face more and more daunting challenges. The company mantra, says lead designer Rob Pardo, is “easy to learn, difficult to master.” After months of play, when you reach the ultimate level (60), you join with other players for intricately planned raids on dungeons, or engage in massive rumbles against other guilds.

“Ninety percent of what I do is never finished—parenting, teaching, doing the laundry,” says Elizabeth Lawley (Level 60, Troll Priest), a Rochester, N.Y., college professor. “In WOW, I can cross things off a list—I’ve finished a quest, I’ve reached a new level.”

For the record, I tried WoW and just didn’t find it to my liking. The ‘grind’ to level up was to much work for me and not enough entertainment payoff — that and the lack of creative leeway. But I do see the appeal … if I had a group of friends to play with on a regular basis, and maybe a little more patience, I would probably be donig it every night. Possibly it’s a good thing it didn’t work out ;-)

Still, I think Levy’s column does a great job of exploring the deeper social issues that make something like WoW work for upwards of over 6 million people all over the (real) world.

Anyway, the column ends with this: “Yes, it’s just a game,” says Joi Ito. “The way that the real world is a game.”

I don’t have the presence of mind to go into my issues with this statement at the moment, but I’ll just say that I do think there are things about games that, especially with the increasing digitization of all human experience, are making the physical world more and more gamelike. But I don’t think that’s what Ito means. Or maybe it is?

Flavia nicely disses the 9/11 movie.

September 13, 2006 by Andrew | Permalink

Philadelphia Daily News | 09/12/2006 | Flavia Monteiro Colgan | ABC’s ‘9/11’: Clinton was right

The tragic events of 9/11 are not something to be trifled with. Putting words into people’s mouths and showing them doing things they never did is not acceptable.

The docudrama portrayed Clinton as a president who didn’t care about terrorism, but his record tells a different story. He had daily briefings on al Qaeda and meetings three times a week. Compare that to a president who couldn’t break away from clearing brush to read a memo that said, “Bin Laden Determined to Attack America.”

The fact is that Clinton proposed an additional $1.1 billion in anti-terror efforts. Clinton was acutely aware of the financial aspects of terror and wanted us not to do business with international banks that held al Qaeda money. A bill that would have mandated that was called totalitarian by some Republicans – and they gutted it.

It’s incredible to me how blatantly people can manipulate the record in the public mind and get away with it. I’d like to think that all the voices that have said this movie is wrong will keep most people from being affected much by it, but I’m not that optimistic. Narrative storytelling is always more powerful than logical exposition. Always. I even find myself sometimes believing a particular ‘fact’ that my intellect should know better than to think only because the story was so compelling.

Presentation: Clues to the Future

April 1, 2006 by Andrew | No comments

IA Summit 2006 Presentation

I presented on the topic “Clues to the Future” at the 2006 IA Summit.

Here is the link to the presentation, in pdf format with notes. It’s 12.8 MB. https://www.inkblurt.com/media/hinton_iasummit06.pdf

It’s also available at the conference site.

If you download the presentation, could you leave me a comment HERE? Just to satisfy my curiosity. Thanks!

————————————————————–
And, here’s the messy list of stuff I’ve been reading from:

Working “Bibliography” Links:

These are most of the sources for research I did when getting thoughts and ideas together for the presentation. I’ll finalize and categorize the list once the Summit is over.

From here to the CD-ROM list are new links I’m possibly referring to as I work further.

Another blog on MMOGs (one post in Oct questions Castranova’s Norrath GDP calculations — but it’s still a pretty high $450 or so)
This is the original one, which continues to be his casual blog
http://www.walkering.com/walkerings/
This is the new “virtual worlds” focused one:
http://3pointd.com/

Can’t believe I missed this: Jane McGonigal’s AvantGame
http://www.avantgame.com/

A new-media wiki page with a great bibliography
http://wiki.media-culture.org.au/index.php?title=User:Paul_Fitzpatrick

Philip Bell Associate Professor of Cognition & Technology
“learning scientist” / teaching science in internet environments
http://faculty.washington.edu/pbell/
his syllabus on “everyday technologies in youth culture”

Playgrounds of the Self: Christine Rosen
excellent article on how people form identities and evolve/experiment with them over time — and how that now plays out online
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/9/rosen.htm

Click to access EDCI505-Winter2005-syllabus.pdf

Radio Open Source entry on “Living in Game Space” and a lot of great links in a sidebar

Living in Game Space

Alternate Reality: The history of massively multiplayer online games.
http://archive.gamespy.com/amdmmog/week1/

First Monday article: The Impact of Digital Games in Education
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_7/xyzgros/index.html

Constance Steinkuehler’s site
http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/

Selection of presentations and papers given at the “Com Work” Conference
including one by Richard Bartle, the guy who invented MUD in ’78, as well as Julian Dibbel!
http://game.itu.dk/comwork/itu_program.html

Richard Bartle’s site
http://mud.co.uk/dvw/

A nice discussion of Alexander’s “A City is Not a Tree” and concepts of semi-lattice vs. hierarchy, etc.
http://ming.tv/flemming2.php/__show_day/_w2004-05-23
and Shirkey’s mention of it http://many.corante.com/archives/2004/04/26/a_city_is_not_a_tree.php

Article on the legal / tax implications of virtual bartering & “income”
http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/January-February-2006/feature_dibbell_janfeb06.msp

Terra Nova — a blog on virtual worlds
http://terranova.blogs.com/

Mostly solid overview of Sherry Turkle’s work on identity (ends up a little judgmental and oversimplified)
http://www.transparencynow.com/turkle.htm
and an interview: http://www.priory.com/ital/turkleeng.htm
and an article: http://www.prospect.org/print/V7/24/turkle-s.html

A Testbed for Evaluating Human Interaction with Ubiquitous Computing
(looks at how Quake and other multiplayer environments tell us things about how people behave in ubiq. computing )
Environmentshttps://www.cs.tcd.ie/Dave.Lewis/files/05a.pdf

The Xerox PARC research landing page (esp embedded collab computing, community knowledge sharing, and game ethnography sections are of interest)
http://www.parc.xerox.com/research/csl/default.html

PlayOn — the PARC blog on game research
http://blogs.parc.com/playon/

The “Serious Games Summit”
http://www.seriousgamessummit.com/home.html

Ludology.org
http://www.ludology.org/

A Ludicrous Discipline?
“The information age has, under our noses, become the gaming age. It appears likely that gaming and its associated notion of play may become a master metaphor for a range of human social relations…”
http://gac.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/1/1/29

Game Culture From the Bottom Up (“Productive Play”)
http://gac.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/1/1/17

The Labor of Fun: How Video Games Blur the Boundaries of Work and Play / Nick Yee
“Using well-known behavior conditioning principles, video games are inherentlywork platforms that train us to become better gameworkers. And thework that is being performed in video games is increasingly similar to the work performed in business corporations. The microcosm of these online games may reveal larger social trends in the blurring boundaries between work and play.”
http://gac.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/1/1/68

Social Impact Games
http://www.socialimpactgames.com/

Game Resources Links (a lot of them are already on this list)
http://www.aaim.org/game_resources.htm

From PlayStation to PC
http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech/wtr_12770,294,p1.html

Game Mechanic Wikipedia entry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_mechanic

Communication Technologies as Symbolic Form: Cognitive Transformations Generated by the Internet http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&se=gglsc&d=5001893777

Internet, Emerging Culture and Design
http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/archive/newsletters/v97n2/computers/culture.asp

Kierkegaard on the Information Highway
http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/lecs/kierkegaard.html

Ludicorp (creators of Flickr)
http://www.ludicorp.com/about.php

From Computing Machinery to Interaction Design
http://pcd.stanford.edu/winograd/acm97.html

Wikipedia entry on Ludology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludology

Eternal Gamer – weblog
http://www.eternalgamer.com/play/

Grand Text Auto: Georgia Tech’s blog on Game Studies
http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/

Games * Design * Art * Culture (blog)
http://www.costik.com/weblog/

Below here, added on the CD-ROM file already

John Seely Brown (homepage and article trove)
http://www.johnseelybrown.com/

Gamasutra
http://www.gamasutra.com/

Nick Yee’s Research on Sociology, etc, of games
http://www.nickyee.com/

Nick Yee’s “Project Daedalus” on “The Psychology of MMPORGs”
http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/

Institute of Computer Science of the Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH)
http://www.ics.forth.gr/hci/activities_outcomes.html

Jeff Dyck Homepage
http://hci.usask.ca/people/jeff/index.shtml

Interaction Lab: University of Saskatchewan: Publications
http://hci.usask.ca/publications/??.xml

Learning from Games: HCI Design Innovations in Entertainment Software (pdf)

Click to access games-gi03.pdf

Building and Experiencing Community in Internet-Based Multiplayer Computer Games (Whitepaper)
http://industries.bnet.com/whitepaper.aspx?scname=Software+and+Games&docid=128802

On Integrating First Person Shooter Games and Ubiquitous Environments (Paper)
Find it here

Game Research site
http://www.game-research.com/

Hybrid Worlds: Social Cyberspace, Imagination and Identity
http://www.dlese.org/cms/qdl/jcdl05/11_Shumar/document_view

Changing Technologies, Changing Literacy Communities?
http://llt.msu.edu/vol4num2/murray/

Digital Games Research Conference 2003 — Presentations
http://www.gamesconference.org/digra2003/2003/index.php

DiGRA Games Conference 2005 Papers
http://www.gamesconference.org/digra2005/papers.php

DiGRA Site

Home

Academic Gamers
http://www.academic-gamers.org/

Marketing to Teens (not complete article)
http://www.emarketer.com/eStatDatabase/ArticlePreview.aspx?1003750

Games & Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media (New journal — excellent resource)
http://gac.sagepub.com/content/vol1/issue1/

Pew Internet & American Life Project Report: Pew Internet: Teens and Technology
(See also all the work at pewinternet.org)
http://www.pewinternet.org/report_display.asp?r=162

Microsoft Research Gives Glimpse of the Future (article)
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1033970,00.asp

Microsoft Social Computing Group
http://research.microsoft.com/scg/

Wallop
http://mywallop.com/

The Coming Age of Calm Technology
http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/acmfuture2endnote.htm

Mourning Asheron’s Call
http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2005/08/asherons_call_2.html

Business Whitepapers, etc.
http://industries.bnet.com/ENTERTAINMENT+and+LEISURE/Video+Games/Software+and+Games/

Information Technology and the Institution of Identity (paper)
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/ViewContentServlet?Filename=Published/EmeraldFullTextArticle/Articles/1610110406.html

Here is the proposal final version.

Proposal/Description

Clues to the Future: What the users of tomorrow are teaching us today.

What might Wikipedia have in common with World of Warcraft? And how might that affect design and business strategy today?

According recent academic and business research, there is an enormous wave of people on its way to adulthood that may very well take us by surprise. And while many designers may be aware of this, we still face the challenge of making it clear to our clients and stake-holders.

Beyond the hype and more obvious implications of the “net generation” are key questions that affect how business and design plan for the future. For example: the shift from hierarchical to nodal paradigms; the rise of new kinds of literacy (and authority); the blurring boundaries between ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ economies; the splintering of identity; and users who, frankly, expect your web environment to be as well designed as the best games on their X-Boxes.

It’s important not to focus on the surface gadgetry, but to understand what is different about how these users think, how they solve problems and manage resources, how they socialize and organize, and how vastly different it may be from the assumed conventions of most business and design decision-makers (i.e. people born before 1985).

This presentation will:

1. Survey some of the current research and insights on the issue;
2. Explore some of the more challenging theoretical questions raised;
3. Discuss the practical business and design implications of those questions; and
4. Suggest how those implications might help make stronger cases for innovative design.

Oldest .com’s

October 18, 2005 by Andrew | Permalink

Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing shares a link to the 100 oldest .COM names in the registry, and wonders about the “visionaries” who might’ve realized they needed a “.com” domain in 1985.

But many of those companies likely weren’t thinking about commercial Internet possibilities. They just happened to be involved in the academic, scientific and defense contracting fields, either directly or tangentially, and according to the rules in the registry, they had to be “.com” to show they were commercial enterprises, unlike the majority of the Internet nodes at the time, which were .edu or .gov (and a few .orgs I guess, might’ve been the minority? Hm. )

Anyway, I mention this not just to be persnickety, but because I think it’s interesting how easy it is to forget what the context was 20 or hell even 12 years ago. I’m fascinated at how quickly the ‘net became a “land of opportunity” as opposed to an under-the-radar propeller-head network, and how to some degree we’re all coming back to the ‘net’s DNA of community (which has always been prevalant, it’s just not gotten the press because the ‘real’ community happening online isn’t necessarily connected to any IPO’s).

The market isn’t using the net for its own ends. People are using the market to utilize the net for their own ends… and as always, people are mainly interested in connecting with, sharing with, creating with other people.

That’s Dedication

July 23, 2005 by Andrew | Permalink




That’s Dedication

Originally uploaded by inkblurt.

I posted a few more BlobFest pics to Flickr. Why? Because I know y’all can’t get enough, that’s why!
This whole thing was a blast to me. It had all the home-towniness of a real American town festival, but without being whitebread-bland. I may have to live here the rest of my life.
This guy’s costume won the contest, by the way. I couldn’t believe that the people in costumes managed not to pass out in the heat — it was about 94 with incredibly thick jungle-style humidity.

BlobFest 2005

July 19, 2005 by Andrew | Permalink




DSC01079

Originally uploaded by inkblurt.

Blobfest was big fun this weekend. I have a few pictures up from it in my Flickr stream.

This was everybody milling around in the heat and humidity, but still in good spirits.

We did the “running out and screaming” thing twice with the crowd, then went across the street to Bridge Street Bookshop for the Harry Potter party.

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