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Microblogging and recycling information

Monday, May 19, 2008
I have to admit, I really enjoy thinking about the experience of a consumer with all this new media we have available to us today. It’s a sort of weird hobby, but I have always enjoyed the challenge of the whole ’step in someone elses shoes’ mindset that goes into recreating and living that experience.

One of the things I love to do to train this muscle is just messing around on the internet, letting my interests take me where they will. Its really useful to sit back and experience the things as a regular user does, except listening to yourself and what you’re feeling when you’re in this process. It always feels like a personal psychology experiment - you must reflect on the dataset of your motivations and actions while browsing, and come to some research-y conclusion of what triggered what emotion/motivation/action, and whether satisfaction was found with the products that were used. Research stops when you get an interesting conclusion.

Finding something cool
My experience tonight shed some light for me on micro-blogging and what place it serves, after having finally gotten bored of my latest obsession/analysis of hulu (*). This led to memes with the introduction of a confounding variable (my housemate), which very quickly led to lolcats. I found two recent ones I loved, and finally hit the snag - what the hell do I do with these?

Yeah.. not an easy question to answer. Laugh, obviously. Laugh quite a bit. Seriously, the one below is just great:

But now what?
This reached a level of significance to me that I could not ignore. *I’m not going to leave this behind, it means too much* (i think). Pseudosignificance. How do I deal with this?

Save it? Nah, hard drive too cluttered. Stopped saving stuff years ago - that’s what the internet is for!

Bookmark it? Well, my history of bookmarks suggest that I never look at them again and they only clutter things up.

Social bookmark it? I use delicious enough, that’s for sure. But that’s more reference-y, nobody tracks my bookmarks but me (that I know of), and I rarely look at mine again.

Sign up on lolcats forums and chat about it? Well… I don’t really know those people, I prefer not to write in lolcat (see the comments section in the link of the picture), and after comment 200 who is really reading?

Vote it up on lolcats? I never pay attention to their voting system (from 0-5 cheeseburgers) because a) it’s ratings haven’t been the most accurate predictors of humor, b) nothing gets below a 3 anyways, and c) why do I care about casting one of a few thousand votes on something so non-personal to me?

Oh! Facebook it! Well, except not really. With such a wide a variety of things showing up in the facebook feed nowadays, the random a process of selection, and the ambiguous group of friends / acquaintances / business contacts all mashed into one, if a lolcat is the only thing people see of my activity they probably get the wrong idea about me. Nix ‘posted items’

Finally, I remembered twitter. Media like this image, plus maybe a quick comment, is perfect for micro-blogging (and to a lesser extent for micro-blogging aggregation). What is it I want to do with this pseudosignificance I’ve discovered? I want to convert the immediate happiness and feeling of significance into long term satisfaction. Twitter is it.

Wait, so twitter earned the escalation of commitment, while neither the content provider (ichc) nor my social life aggregator/distributor (facebook) nor my persona life aggregator (PC) did? Unexpected.

Using microblogging to throw important stuff away
What is it that microblogging tools like twitter have over identical functionality on facebook? Expectations first, commitment second. Unlike facebook’s posted items, there are no social concerns for me to post because a) the reader expects this type of content (based on the constraints of the service and the type of material other members post) and b) the reader has asked for it (by explicitly subscribing to your twitter feed). In addition, I feel satisfaction that I have a place to ‘keep’ this, and have the potential opportunity to turn that ‘keeping’ into something more - implicit ‘i’m sure one or two of my friends saw that’ to explicit social interactions around the topic. Right there is the escalation of commitment I was looking for.

What is microblogging used for then exactly? Too important to be kept to myself. Not important enough to inspire breaking new social ground. Might or might not elicit other responses. Expected type of media by those that happen upon it, though few expected to happen upon it. Semi-public. The place where these pseudosignifiant pieces of information go to make us feel satisfied we’ve given them a proper place so we can move on. But maybe not, if they, you know, really hit a nerve and create a shared experience. Then we’re open to staying around, before moving on.

Until this point, I thought of microblogging as a niche product - one that certainly had it’s place as another method of journalism, for those few that strive to be journalist-connectors or happen to be at the scene of a natural disaster or breaking news story… but not for everyday use by everyday people. The internet though looks more like that lolcats picture than a breaking twitter news story, as defined by the slicing and dicing and re-packaging of information into new formats that has happened thus far. So why not - micro-blogging as a sort-of bookmark, sort-of public, definitely opt-in with clear expectations, means of getting stuff that sort of matters off your chest and out of your mind. I can see that as mainstream.

In conclusion, my personal realization is that microblogging is like a recycling bin of information you’ve already found useful and used, that you want to live on in some way, that you gain ease of mind discarding. Everything we do creates ‘waste’ that must be discarded in some fashion, and internet browsing is no exception.

–
* My hulu insights: lacking more full eps is really a buzzkill, ads are great and
i watch them, and !!i want to know more about the shows, their casts,
and all that crap!! - bring in imdb-like data and more please!)

Filed in culture, online communities, product design, psychology, socnet | Comments (0)

Free Running Game - Mirror’s Edge

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Back about 8 years ago when I was in the industry, I really wanted to make a game based on the concept of running around, a race game on your feet with a ton of obstacles. I saw it as a mix of Crazy Taxi (especially the bright colored arcadey look), the movie Run, Lola, Run, and my own experiences nearby at Venice Beach when I had to navigate through a thick crowd to get somewhere fast. The goal would be to race through crowds, ducking and diving, occasionally picking up skateboards or bikes or whatever, in order to meet up with your friends on time.

Although there were shades of it in my design, I never explicitly thought about adding Parkour (free running) to the mix, mainly because it wasn’t really well known at the time. After the awesome chase scene at the beginning of Casino Royale, apparently someone in the industry got on this track.

The gameplay in Mirror’s Edge looks *phenomenal*, running and jumping and using the environment in a realistic way. I love the need to think creatively about your environment in this - in most games the environment is just a set of simple constraints and does not inspire you to pay close attention to it (think about all those invisible walls you’ve encountered in games - ‘why can’t I go there?’ scenarios). Check it out:

In my game, I had thought of navigating in the third person, which would afford you the opportunity to scan the environment and see the cool ducks and dives of your character. However, I’m really impressed with this first person mode - much more visceral and adrenaline pumping.

As a nitpick, it seems like they had to play the usual teenage angst card and make it an action game with guns and some faceless government to rebel against. I would have much preferred an espionage game, because you can layer in some more nuanced plots there.

A preview is available here (thanks Digg).

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community opinion

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

I’ve been waiting for a while for more research to come out like this, describing how thought, ideas, or (in this case) opinions travel between people. I’ve had a project I’ve wanted to create based on these concepts for about a year now and one of the things that has held me back was the lack of research we have in this area. Understanding this kind of transfer of knowledge is incredibly fundamental to community design and education, as much of our learning and motivation to learn is the result of how we organize ourselves around the social environment.

One of my favorite thought experiments is what level of free will, versus environmental condition, make for the integration and acceptance of knowledge one has been exposed to. Why do we reject some ideas and accept others, and is there something completely independent of the idea itself that is driving that process? This question has both an explicit community aspect and an implicit one. Explicitly, we always have our place in the community on our mind - we naturally desire social harmony, and seek to minimize time and energy spent correcting others (as it is a waste of our energy, and we are cognitive misers). Implicitly, we have our super-ego, the internalization of our community experience, as a throttle on how much we entertain ideas in our minds. The super-ego makes sure we do not stray too far in our thinking, which in turn makes sure we do not stray too far from our community.

Another way to put this is the question I ask myself whenever I wonder why people come to conclusions: What is the easiest conclusion one can come to in this situation? These easy conclusions are what sustain us in the short term. Yet, I think it’s the few times that we come to challenging conclusions that we are expressing our free will, which in turn allows us to progress. This process, in the face of more valid opinion, is somewhat akin to the age old question of ‘do you do what’s right, or do what’s easy?’. If you plotted all the different possibilities of opinion v community you would probably find a host of similar axioms.

Another analog can be derived from evolution: gradual change versus punctuated equilibrium. Communities may make the choice to let the larger meta-community affect them as it will (gradual change, external determination), or some members may choose to build islands from the rest and engage in a more punctuated, self-driven change. Some of this probably sounds like regular old decision making, but it’s not a well explored area in the context of communities of learning.

In my opinion, there’s no question we need better metacognitive education: metacognition frames, motivates, and strengthens our learning, and this power of reflection is perhaps one of the few truly human pursuits. It is the best, and only, tool we have to overcome our natural cognitive flaws. In the context of opinion and idea dissemination and adoption, we need to understand how we pick our battles about what divergent information we choose to accept. Now the design challenge: how do we teach people to identify and overcome community bias?

Filed in online communities, psychology, socnet | Comments (0)

Mimicry

Sunday, March 30, 2008

The act of mimicking something is interesting. It’s one part empathy, another part motivation.

Empathy is of course feeling what someone else feels, often because we have similar personal experiences. Part of our brain is dedicated to this function, and it helps make us the social creatures we are. One side-effect of this is how we anthropomorphize non-human things, such as animals - essentially we bring the feelings we have of empathy and apply them to other objects or creatures that often have certain features we identify with (big sad eyes, non-scary shapes). We then craft our own little story around them - they’re humans, just stuck in a cat’s body, with all the trappings therein (see my lolcats post below).

Mimicry, on the other hand, is about motivation and action. We see an action that looks fun, something that we want to feel in physical form. Where empathy generates automatic feeling (barring any built-up tolerance) in one part of our mind, mimicry generates the automatic compulsion for a different type of feeling in another.

The motivation that induces mimicry is something about an action we’re perceiving that is alluring to us. Some possibilities:

  • We question whether we can do that action ourselves (desire to learn)
  • We like the external outcome of that action (sights, sounds, etc)
  • We like the internal outcome of that action (desire to feel something)
  • The action reminds us of our capability and we have an audience (desire to perform)

What’s most fascinating is that mimicry is not interactive, yet it feels like it is. Much like certain online communities where participation isn’t really (I will explore this in another post).

The impetus for this post is a cute little thing called the Yellow Drum Machine… a robot that exudes a ton of toddler-like personality. When I saw it, I said to myself ‘this thing really nails the essence of fun’, yet it was totally non-interactive. Since I had just read the Theory of Fun again, I had ludemes on my mind… so why not ludemes of mimicry? The attitude could be broken down into just two key systems:

1. move the eyes left and right, and
2. bang on things.

What a simple, elegant system.

Note: Of course it needs locomotion, but it’s not strutting around, so there’s no attitude / mimicry there yet.

Checkkit:

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The end of an era

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Arthur C Clarke died today, the last of the big 3. We have him to thank for the idea of telecom satellites, and we’ll still be singing his praises when we finally develop space elevators. In the mean time, people can occupy themselves reading his books, such as 2001 and the Rama series.

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New MMOGs coming out

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

We’re now definitely in a new era of game development. No longer is the games industry languishing in perpetual geekdom - it’s going mainstream in a big way. Investment dollars are pouring in, and the hype dial is cranked up very high. A lot of this money is going into massively multiplayer games, for better or worse, and most of these are fairly undifferentiated clones are coming out. Their failures will help set more realistic expectations, and investors will realizing going after the same users (WoW players) with the same gameplay (Dikumud) and probably worse technology is not a recipe for success. I speak mainly of PC-based 3d MMOGs here, as differentiation along tech (e.g. browser-based) and system (platforms) unlock different users and necessitate different gameplay.

Okay, enough history and predictions - there are enough people who do that on the net more eloquently than I do. My personal touch here is my excitement about two properties in particular:

1. Lego Universe. It’s interesting to read this little piece on kotaku on the development choices behind LU. Two big design challenges in making kids games are stereotypes and conflict. In modern mainstream media, it’s easier to perpetuate stereotypes and memes than challenge them, but for kids there are higher expectations (as there should be). As for conflict, violence is the easiest way to communicate, participate in, and overcome conflict in games, yet again we have higher expectations for kids media.

I’m excited about LU because the IP is very unique and can deal with problems in a very unique way. I grew up with Lego, as so many kids did, and what this IP has come to mean is Lego is a way to interpret the world and change it’s rules. We’ve seen this in previous Lego titles (like Lego Star Wars) as well as the variety of Lego sets (Castles, Town, Space, etc). Lego is about Lego-izing things we know and love, applying a uniform look, allowing mixing and matching, and sterilizing their meaning for interpretation by kids. There is no death in the Lego world, there’s merely the parts bin. There is no improper merger of ideas in the assembly of Lego pieces, anything goes because everything fits. These are how violence and stereotype can be overcome with the Lego IP - what fits together is acceptable together (girly lego-heads can be put on top of any uniform), and anything that is taken apart is just part of creative destruction, not real destruction, and it can always be put back together. Cognitively, Lego just occupies a different space in our mind than other toys and other properties.

I’m not sure if any other IP is about this reinterpretation of things, versus just being things. Leveraging offline products and building connections between the two is a very smart thing, and in the kids MMOG space, toy companies will be the ones that beat out others (WebKinz being the first example). Lego has the added advantage of having a unique brand that is well-suited for online worlds, and therefore if they don’t mess up execution, I think Lego is in for a very bright future.

Unrelated side note: I have this visual of how re-spawns (a staple MMOG action, whereby a previously killed enemy comes back after a certain time interval so that other players may fight them) will work in LU, kind of like Terminator 2’s liquid metal terminator. The bad knight is ‘killed’ and his pieces scatter to the wind. But after 10 minutes… those pieces slowly move back together until BAM! The knight is reassembled and glows and cries out with his arms high, ready to challenge a new adventurer! I hope they do something like this :)

2. PMOG (or at least the concept it demonstrates). This one’s still under the radar, their public beta just started yesterday. This is a toolbar addition for Firefox that lets players drop quests and level up while they’re going about their normal web browsing. Essentially, it’s using game mechanics to force discovery of new web properties, an extremely smart move if you consider advertising implications (the game essentially holds the players hands and takes them from one property to another, like a guided tour in a museum). It’s also a sign of a much larger concept, which is the expansion and diffusion of game mechanics across daily activities. BF Skinner is rolling in his grave at the concept of being able to enforce behavioral reward structures to daily life - what implications! The game isn’t exactly designed as a psychologists research tool, but functions a bit like it whether or not the authors realize it.

I think this class of applications is likely to grow rapidly in the near future - it’s easy to make, has a huge playing field built in, relies on user-user interaction, and could be damn fun.

Specific mechanics I like about this title are that to level up, you must participate in the creation of content. This UGC angle really sells it for me (along with star ratings), because I’m particularly interested in creation software and inducing people to create. Participation is essential to society, yet the last few generations have grown up used to and demanding passive experiences; an ‘entertain me’ mentality. What’s funny about PMOG (which stands for Passively Multiplayer Online Game) is that while it is passive from the perspective of occupying your attention, it is active in the demands for your participation. Very cool.

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The Switch

Sunday, March 9, 2008
I just made the switch to Apple this past week, with the acquisition of a shiny new Macbook Pro.

As an experienced PC guy who’s built his own computers since he was 12 and has run everything from DOS to Vista, with dabbling in OS9, BeOS, and OS/2, I have to say this is by far the best computing experience I’ve had.

The impetus for this was, of course, the complete and utter failure of Vista to even match XP’s usability. Files were unable to copy, wireless took forever to connect, basic browsing around the UI was unnecessarily slow, and UI elements were different, though not better, and almost always inconsistent. I was left feeling frustrated as a user, disappointed as a designer, and cheated as a customer.

Onto happy things though, OSX is quite a charm. My productivity has increased and at the same time my frustration and uneasiness have decreased.

Update: Shortly after this post Vista SP1 came out, which seemed to rectify some of the most basic issues I had. Also, now that I’ve used the Mac for a few weeks, a few smallish issues have come up. Overall, though, I am very happy with my purchase. Now if Microsoft would just release the *real* Office (2007) on Mac, I would be happy as a clam.

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Lolcats

Sunday, January 27, 2008

I have to admit, Lolcats are pretty much the funniest and most endearing things on the net. The whole childish language makes the anthropomorphization so much more believable and that believability really adds to the humor. But what I’m most impressed about is the level of wit the caption writers have - what they see in the photos, and what obscure references and narratives they craft with so few words.

Best ones I saw this week:

Funniest

a reference to this guy on mythbusters:


I couldn’t stop laughing on this one.

Best Reference

Best Story

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Getting better all the time

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

One of the few big annoyances in games has always been the rendering of shorelines. No matter what, they’ve always felt really artificial - a hard intersection of the water plane and a solid surface. Take a look at the latest Lord of the Rings Online update for DirectX 10, courtesy of games site HardOCP:


WOW! What a difference.


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Constraints

Thursday, November 1, 2007

This post over at juice analytics is rather descriptive of my latest project, one which I hope I can launch in January or February. The gist is that constraints really help you focus your thinking, unleash your creativity, and generally make better stuff. I’ve ascribed to this process a lot in my creative work, and with my latest project I’ve taken a more extreme stance by forcing myself to think around many basic things we take for granted.

Constraints are a workout. They require us to use more energy, something we are biologically averse to. We are ‘cognitive misers’, to borrow a term from psychology, as a full 20% of our energy expenditure is devoted to our brain. Constraints are also one of these paradoxes of the human condition – we strive to succeed to remove the constraints in our lives, yet without constraint we have partially undermined our drive to set goals in the first place. In comparisons between stress and performance, psychologists have found that a moderate amount of stress is actually where we achieve optimal performance – not without stress, or overloaded with it. It’s this hunger and uneasiness that moves us forward.

If we were to apply constraints to the world of video games, we’d see a similar pattern. Sony – a company riding off of the massive success of the Playstation 2 – had the least constraints when developing the Playstation 3. The needs of developers, the cost of the system, the desires of gamers for things like online support, and whether the system would be a success were all non-issues to Sony corporate. On the other hand, Microsoft could not afford to dismiss these issues, and consequently made a better product. Nintendo went even further, with a lower price point, less computing power, and most importantly, the least idea of what games would eventually look like on its very unique DS and Wii. The same constraints apply in the casual games market on the web, where the constraint of Adobe Flash has driven some great innovation, while traditional PC games with access to an increasing amount of power languish in the same old gameplay.

Assuming you can stay true to the course of solving your customer’s needs, the constraints theory can break down if you truly do have too few options to explore. Most constraints we would consider extreme still afford a huge amount of possibility, but if it breaks down to a few choices, your creative landscape is compromised. This may be analogous to the over-stressed condition described above.

Constraints are fascinating, and definitely worthy of closer consideration. Stay tuned, I’ll probably do that soon.

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