Information Architecture, User Experience & Other Obsessions
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I had a blast presenting Clues to the Future as an IA Institute redux session today via phone, gatherplace.com and campfirenow.com. It was a little awkward, honestly, because I haven’t done a presentation that way before. But people were very accomodating.
And some of them had some very cool suggestions about some relevant articles and such, so I’m sharing a couple of them here.
Putting the Fun in Functional: applying game mechanics to functional software
Take a digital game world, throw it in a blender, add some information and research skills, sift out the word educational and maybe, just maybe, we have a new and effective way to teach our students bibliographic instruction.
As I was working on my article for the Bulletin, I saw this from the latest issue. Excellent article by Christy Branston, who is starting a blog on the issues: http://bibliogaming.blogspot.com/
Much of the research was gathered from this conference: http://gaminginlibraries.org which has a link to a pretty busy related blog: http://libgaming.blogspot.com/
At CommunityWalk – 3pointD there’s a hack for Google Maps that maps Second Life virtual spaces.
Mark Wallace’s blog, 3pointD, explains his hack here:
http://www.3pointd.com/20060405/take-a-community-walk-to-second-life/
One of the cool Google Maps hacks on display at South by Southwest this year was Community Walk, a site that lets users create collaboratively tagged maps of real locations. But with the Second Life map API being open as well (see the SLurlPane at the top of the right sidebar here), I figured it couldn’t be a bad thing to hack a Second Life location into a Community Walk community. Not that the current incarnation is much of a hack, but if you dial into this Community Walk map, zoom out and look for the mint-green, upside-down teardrops, you’ll find links to the virtual version of two real-world locations: a Hawaiian island, and a coffee shop in Washington DC.
The R&B Coffee Shop in Washington was the site of an event in February called The Happening, which was for the most part a gathering of local artists and musicians. But there was also a “mixed reality†component to it, arranged by the Electric Sheep, whereby video of the live event was streamed into Second Life, and video of the virtual location in SL was projected on a screen at the real-life Happening. All it took was for someone (SL resident Hiro Pendragon) to build a scale model of the coffee shop in Second Life. That’s what I’m linking to in the Community Walk map, via a secondlife:// URL that launches the SL application when clicked. (The SLurlPane was slightly more complex, but still pretty simple.)
Jonkichi is Joi Ito’s blog about his dealings in World of Warcraft. How someone who does as much as he does still manages to be a guild leader in WoW is beyond me.
But he makes an interesting point in this blog post about the way WoW is designed. It points out that even at the hardware architecture level there is a profound effect on the shape of social interaction (and therefore collaboration, culture, and everything) in the game world. Much like in “real life.”
… this is one of the fatal design problems with World of Warcraft. In Second Life, each island has a server and they try to get people to scatter out across the world. In Second Life it is one world with each region connected. In Warcraft, we have over a hundred servers on various continents and “instances” in areas of each server making many many copies of the same game. This gives you a very very small chance of actually being able to meet people that you know in WoW even though you both play. I realize that it’s a fundamental difference, but from a social perspective the results of this “sharded” system that WoW uses are devastating.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger had a A Stimulating Lunch at Oxford University where he discussed new medical device technologies and other uses of IT at Oxford:
During our lunch, we discussed the potential of leveraging the highly visual and interactive capabilities of the new generation of game technologies now coming to the market in order to provide physicians with extremely high quality, detailed visual images that they can rotate, zoom in or out and manipulate in a variety of ways to help them better see and analyze the information embedded in the image – however small.
… Professor Brady also mentioned that at Oxford researchers in the humanities were increasingly using IT in their work, to provide, for example, online access to a variety of original materials that are scattered across many different locations around the world or that may be hard to examine directly because of their fragility. This led to a very interesting discussion of how the kinds of interactive virtual world platforms and tools that have become increasingly popular in online games like Second Life and World of Warcraft could be used to teach subjects like history or literature.
Vernor Vinge (his importance is described nicely here) has a nice article on the Internet as the ultimate “Creativity Machine” — and the place of MMOGs in it.
http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060320/full/440411a.html
The possibilities do not end there. Even online games are attracting academic interest. Some games have millions of players. MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games), such as World of Warcraft and EverQuest, feature vivid three-dimensional action involving both cooperation and combat. Another genre of MMORPGs lack a significant combat or quest element and are more often called ‘virtual worlds’. For example, the virtual world Second Life has the visual realism of many MMORPGs, but it exists as a venue for the participants rather than as a pre-designed adventure. Second Life provides a range of software tools, including a programming language, that gives participants the power to create artefacts according to their own designs. Thus the game depends on the skill and creativity of its participants to generate content. Such virtual worlds have already been used for educational projects, and are worthy of psychological and social research.
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.
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
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/
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
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.
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.
I just presented at the IA Summit, and it seemed to go ok.
I’m keeping a page about the presentation here.
It’ll take me a few days to get the presentation shaped up with notes to upload it if anyone wants to see it. For now, if you want to contact me about the topic, I made a handy topical email address: gamelayer at inkblurt dot com.
For those who made it, thanks for coming and listening!
Ok, it could be that my current obsessions are just warping my otherwise good sense (cough), but I couldn’t help but comment on Lou Rosenfeld’s recent post (Developing a Participation Economy) that the participation economy among IAI volunteers he envisions sounds an awful lot like game-thinking.
That is, motivating people to create innovative stuff and work on it to completion — the two places where that seems to happen naturally are in Open Source Development communities and Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games. (MMORPGs) Otherwise known as MMOs or MMOGs.
In the Open Source movement, the incentive seems to be building one’s reputation and authority in a distributed meritocracy of developers. Being a part of that community is very powerful, and so is knowing that you created a tool that thousands of others use every day and think you’re amazing for making and maintaining it… or even being just one of thousands of people contributing to something so big (FireFox, etc) that being part of a combined effort on something that affects millions of users is, again, a huge incentive.
Lou brings up the point that for the IAI, the above incentives don’t seem to be quite enough. I suspect they could be if IAs were making things like software, but it’s much harder with the sorts of things we make. Curricula, methodologies, etc.
Still, the bottom-up mechanisms for allowing collective intelligence to more freely make things would be helpful. IAI doesn’t currently have anything as sophisticated as Source Forge, for example.
But anyway, Lou mentions another way to do this (which is actually not incompatible with the open source approach), a “participation economy” where people actually get a sort of currency for doing things in the community — currency they can then cash in for things they may need later on.
This sounds very much like what happens in MMORPGs like EverQuest and SecondLife.
So it made me wonder if we could learn anything by looking at communities like those and applying the lessons to making a sort of economy-driven community of practice?
Not that I have time to really dig into that right now… but it’s something to think about.
In discussing some weird policies in the World of Warcraft online game, Cory Doctorow nicely articulates an important insight about environments like WoW:
Online games are incredibly, deeply moving social software that have hit on a perfect formula for getting players to devote themselves to play: make play into a set of social grooming negotiations. Big chunks of our brains are devoted to figuring out how to socialize with one another — it’s how our primate ancestors enabled the cooperation that turned them into evolutionary winners.
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/27/world_of_warcraft_do.html
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).
Virtual worlds can have a deep emotional impact on people. This is as true of an old-fashioned BBS or discussion forum like The Well, as well as for MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) like the recently deceased Asheron’s Call 2.
Unfortunately, the more resources it takes to run a particular world, the more money it has to make. If it doesn’t keep in the black, it dies. Someone posted a sad little log of the last moments with their friends in this world here.
Things like this intrigue me to no end. I realize that this wasn’t a truly real world that disappeared. That is, the people behind the avatars/characters they played are still alive, sitting at their screens. They had plenty of time to contact one another and make sure they could all meet again in some other game, so it wasn’t necessarily like a tragic sudden diaspora (though some people do go through such an experience if the world they’ve counted on has suddenly had the plug pulled).
Still, the human mind (and heart?) only needs a few things to make a virtual place feel emotionally significant, if not ‘real.’ Reading the log linked above, you see that the participants do have perspective on their reality, even if you think their pining is a little ren-faire cheesy. But they can’t help being attached to the places they formed friendships in, played and talked in, for so long. It seems a little like leaving college — if you made meaningful friendships there, you can never really go back to that context again, even if you keep up with friends afterward. Except instead of graduation, you stand in the quad and part of you “dies” along with the whole campus.
I think the discussion linked above about the Well articulates pretty well just what these kinds of communities can mean to people. Further discussion and inquiry goes on all over the ‘net, including a site called “Project Daedalus” about the “psychology of mmorpgs”. (Edited to add: I also found a new publication called “Games & Culture” with at least one article specific to serious academic study of MMOGs. And I’m sure there are plenty more at places like Academic Gamers and Gamasutra.)
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