Talks and Writings

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We Live Here

August 15, 2006 by AndrewH | No comments

The article I wrote for the August/September 2006 ASIS&T Bulletin is up. Thanks to Stacy Surla and the gang at the Bulletin for helping me get it into shape. I’m pleased to say it’s sharing space with a lot of really excellent writing.

It’s weird to read it now, in a way. It’s a snapshot of where my head was 2-3 months ago, and now I my thoughts about the topic have changed somewhat. Not drastically, but just natural drift (hopefully some evolution?). If I can get my wits about me I’ll write about it here.

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!

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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.

IA Summit 2006 – “Clues to the Future”

January 23, 2006 by AndrewH | No comments

Evidently, my proposal to this year’s IA Summit has been accepted. Now comes the tough part of actually having a presentation.

I have plenty of stuff to present on … that’s just the problem. The challenge is getting it all winnowed down into something coherent and useful.

The conference organizers say I need to have my presentation materials to them by 2/1 so they can go onto the CD-ROM. But my PP decks usually have a lot of filler that only makes sense with the verbal narrative — so it may make more sense to provide an abstract, an outline, bibliography/links to research, and a link to a page here where people can download the latest-greatest if they so please.

Here’s the final version of the proposal/description (which I’m not sure if I got in on time, so this may not be identical to the actual conference info):

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.

Hopefully this won’t just be a retread of stuff people already know. The basic theme is that by studying how the net generation uses things like social networks and multiplayer game environments, we can see what their mental models are going to be like when they’re full-fledged adult users.

This theme may sound obvious to many… but I haven’t heard much of a call for looking to these sources for planning business and design strategy for the near term.

If it takes most coporations about five years to get any truly ambitious technology shift into a mature state (and that’s if they’re in the quick crowd), why not go ahead and think about what that mature state should be once seventeen-year-olds are starting their careers? There’s amazing research and theory-making going on about online games, especially. They seem to me to be perfect laboratories, e-petri dishes, for seeing how an electronically mediated community (and that specialized community — the market economy) functions.

Here’s a separate page where I’ll be keeping info about it, links to related articles and research, and the final version of the presentation (eventually).

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