The excellent Neuroanthropology blog offers up a terrific list of links to recent research & articles covering topics like Design, Research, Addiction and Art Criticism. Check it out!
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Julian Dibbell has a marvelous post about how game realities are symptoms — sort of concentrated, more-obvious outcroppings — of a general shift in economic and cultural reality itself. The game’s the thing …
Online Games, Virtual Economies … Distinction between Play and Production
And I’m arguing, finally, that that relationship is one of convergence; that in the strange new world of immateriality toward which the engines of production have long been driving us, we can now at last make out the contours of a more familiar realm of the insubstantial—the realm of games and make-believe. In short, I’m saying that Marx had it almost right: Solidity is not melting into air. Production is melting into play.
I only just heard about the Google Image Labeler via the IAI mailing list.
Here’s a description:
You’ll be randomly paired with a partner who’s online and using the feature. Over a two-minute period, you and your partner will be shown the same set of images and asked to provide as many labels as possible to describe each image you see. When your label matches your partner’s label, you’ll earn points depending on how specific your label is. You’ll be shown more images until time runs out. After time expires, you can explore the images you’ve seen and the websites where those images were found. And we’ll show you the points you’ve earned throughout the session.
So, Google didn’t just assume people would tag images for the heck of it. They build in a points system. I have no idea if the points even mean anything ouside of this context, but it’s interesting to see a game mechanic of points incentive, in a contest-like format, being used to jump-start the collective intelligence gathering.
POSTSCRIPT:
Later in the day, I hear from James Boekbinder that this system was invented (if he has it right) by a mathematician named Louis Ahn, and Google bought it. He points to a great presentation Ahn has on Google Video about his approach.
Ahn’s description says that people sometimes play the game 40 hours a week, while I’m hearing from other sources that research showed users putting a lot of effort into it for a short time, then dropping and not coming back (possibly because there’s no persistent or tranferable value to the ‘points’ given in the game?).
My obsession with what I call the “game layer” aside, it’s interesting that the mainstream press are now reporting on how using “game mechanics” in business software can create more engaging & useful ways of working with data, collaborating, and getting work done.
Why Work Is Looking More Like a Video Game – New York Times
Rave adapts a variety of gaming techniques. For instance, you can build a dossier of your clients and sales prospects that includes photographs and lists of their likes, dislikes and buying interests, much like the character descriptions in many video games. Prospects are given ratings, not by how new they are — common in C.R.M. programs — but by how likely they are to buy something. All prospects are also tracked on a timeline, another gamelike feature.
(Thanks, Casey, for the link!)
This is delightful. A sort of logo for hacker culture. Not hackers as in criminals (hacker culture calls those people ‘crackers’ among other things) but hackers as in lateral-thinking technology heads.
The graphic … is called a glider. It’s a pattern from a mathematical simulation called the Game of Life. In this simulation, very simple rules about the behavior of dots on a grid give rise to wonderfully complex emergent phenomena. The glider is the simplest Life pattern that moves, and the most instantly recognizable of all Life patterns.
I love this emblem because it really does reference so many things I adore about the internet, what’s happening on it, and the culture that I believe to be the beating heart of it.
Here’s some of the explanation from Frequently Asked Questions about the Glider Emblem
The glider is an appropriate emblem on many levels. Start with history: the Game of Life was first publicly described in Scientific American in 1970. It was born at almost the same time as the Internet and Unix. It has fascinated hackers ever since.
In the Game of Life, simple rules of cooperation with what’s nearby lead to unexpected, even startling complexities that you could not have predicted from the rules (emergent phenomena). This is a neat parallel to the way that startling and unexpected phenomena like open-source development emerge in the hacker community… The glider fulfils the criteria for a good logo. It’s simple, bold, hard to mistake for anything else, and easy to print on a mug or T-shirt. It could be varied, combined with other emblems, or modified and infinitely repeated for use as a background
I’ve been going on and on about how the internet has given rise to a “game layer” to the world we live in: a sort of subcutaenous skin of data that connects everything, and mirrors the logic of our world. (Hence the number of friends you have on MySpace; the location you’re twittering from in Twitter; which songs you listen to the most on your iPod; the ability to track a UPS package at every turn; and on and on). Everything we attach to the network becomes more data, and if it’s data, it’s game-able.
Hacking itself is a kind of game, and the culture is very playful. I can’t get enough of this idea that “play” and “game,” once expanded some in their meaning and context, show us entirely new frames of reference that help explain what’s happening in the world.
Excellent article on JM’s ideas about how game situations can unlock incredible problem-solving potential in groups of people, and can be applied to anything from medicine to politics.
San Francisco – News – Future Games – sfweekly.com
McGonigal designs games for a living, and she believes they point the way toward civilization’s next step forward. Her games are sprawling extravaganzas that suck in thousands of players and force them to pool their talents to become, essentially, one big networked brain. In the young and burgeoning genre of alternate reality games, otherwise known as ARGs, the players’ collective intelligence is applied to cracking codes, solving puzzles, and completing complex tasks doled out by almighty “puppetmasters.” McGonigal is one of the people who pulls the strings.
I recently did a presentation at the very excellent DigitalNow conference, in Orlando. It’s a conference for leaders of professional associations, who have a vested interest in virtual community building and keeping their constituents engaged, even in the splintered information-saturated “Web 2.0” world.
I combined a couple of previous years’ IASummit presentations and added a few new things to try and create an interesting picture that tries to re-frame the situation in several ways, hopefully adding some clarity and helping spark some new ideas for them.
Here’s a pdf of the deck: The Rise of Letting Go: How the Net Generation can teach us to lose control and like it. (Warning: it’s about a 20MB file!)
SnoopyBrown Zamboni at Electric Sheep Company has started a geek-roots initiative to bridge the somewhat divergent virtual world experiences at World of Warcraft and Second Life.
Second Life of Warcraft Wiki Is Up
Check it out, lend your thoughts, and if you’re excited please get involved! This can be as big as we all make it. Looking for more WoW guilds and Second Life builders to throw in their hats.
This sounds right up my alley … I’m fascinated with how various things in ‘real’ life behave with game-like logic and rules.
Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds
Half-Real is an attempt at creating a basic theory of video games: In the book I discuss what video games are and how they relate to non-digital games, how players learn to use a game, how players imagine the world of a game, and why video games are fun.
I ran across a post by Nat Torkington on the excellent O’Reilly Radar blog echoing (more articulately) some of what I was trying to say in the podcast I posted about earlier today.
O’Reilly Radar > Second Life and the Future of Prototyping
The biggest appeal of Second Life from a creator’s point of view has been generous 3D building tools and the embedded event driven scripting language to control and manipulate avatars and objects. Cory is now adding the ultimate feature to the toolbox — Firefox embedded in Second Life.
Combine this with the aforementioned scripting language and you have a wonderful prototyping environment for real life gadgets, objects and experiences. Ever wonder how users would react to your new context-sensitive location-based social application? Don’t scratch your head for 12 months learning J2ME and phone intricacies, but power up Second Life and hook it to the web service you’ll be building anyhow.
I played a small role in starting the IA Institute five years (and 30 lbs) ago, but I can’t take credit for the success it’s had since. Lots of dedicated people have worked very hard on it during that time.
Recently I became a little more involved, when Stacy Surla gently prodded me into helping with an initiative around Second Life. The IAI has purchased an island there, close to a cluster of info-science/education themed islands called the “Information Archipelago.” It may seem like putting the cart before the horse, but the challenge with something as radically new as Second Life is that you don’t really know how you’re going to use it until you start using it.
At any rate, someone in the area (in the ‘game’) saw what we were up to and asked if he could interview us for a podcast. He and Stacy graciously put up with my rambling answers — I think he said initially it was to be a 15 minute podcast, but it turned out to be a half hour — and posted the finished product. Here’s a link, and the intro from the site.
Who’s On Second Podcast 17: The New Architects of Information
I first met information architects Stacy Surla and Andrew Hinton as they were hammering the first planks together for their new island for the Information Architecture Institute. The space is just offshore from Cafe Fireball, so I got curious about what was going on over on the new plot of land. What I discovered was that the IAI is keenly interested in creating real world, online and Second Life experiences that let users get work done, find there way around and find the information they need easily and sensibly.
It’s an interesting experience being interviewed about this stuff, because it creates a bit of pressure to actually formulate an articulate answer about things that you can normally fudge on in your own head or in quick conversations with others.
In a nutshell, the reason why I think Second Life is a worthy laboratory for the IAI is this: Increasingly our physical environment is going to turn into a hybrid of semantic and concrete, with the rise of ubicomp. Why not experiment, get our feet wet and learn valuable lessons, in an environment that is already a three-dimensional semantic space?
I may jot more thoughts about this later here … it’ll also be relevant for a panel Stacy Surla is planning for the IA Summit.
Hope to see you there!
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