Transparent Tigers - Towers of Blood

Free Rice

2010-05-31T21:31:00.000-07:00

I'm in love with the concept site FREE RICE that uses game mechanics to promote both eduction and charity. The idea is simple: users answer multiple choice questions and earn 10 grains of rice for every correct answer. The rice is donated by advertisers, who also get some banner ad space. While 10 grains is hardly anything, the "bowls" add up quickly. I've personally been using the site to brush up on my Italian (it needs a lot of brushing).

The game mechanics really start to hook you after a while - For most subjects you advance to a new level after 4 correct answers, and drop back a level after one mistake. When you drop two levels in a "simple" subject like vocab (as seen above), you are suddenly motivated to get back to the top. Eventually they start counting your rice donation by bundles of 1,000 - then you know you're hooked. But for once, it's a good thing.

So check it out, and do something positive while you waste time. Now if somebody could just figure out how to make browsing Reddit charitable I would be up for canonization.

Ideas for the Final

2010-05-09T14:43:00.000-07:00

Our final presentation is tomorrow evening, and I'm still trying to pick an idea for a business proposal. Here are some favorites that didn't make the final cut...

1) Mobile Math Blaster. Remember Math Blaster? If you went to middle school in the 90's you should. I've been thinking about games that might translate into the mobile era, and I'm wondering if math and other simple problems like puzzles and so forth could be of use. The basic concept runs something like this: You sign up to play The Game (insert your own title here) and are automatically placed on one of 4 teams. Lets call them Red, Blue, Green, Yellow. To play, you turn the application on in your phone and go about your day. Around your city there will be embedded challenges that you can participate in if you want to. There would be longer "quests" and short, simple puzzles that are unique to certain locations. Complete quests and solve puzzles to gain experience points (xp) towards higher levels.

So far, pretty basic. But what if we add an RPG element? Now when you are completing a quest, or just walking around (while the game is turned on) you can be attacked by team members of another color. Instead of attacking you with imaginary swords, rival plays could "attack" you with timed math problems commensurate with their experience level. That is, as players gain more experience and higher levels, they get the ability to send you more difficult problems. How do you defend? Simple, solve the problem with enough time to spare to fend of the attack. Lose the battle? then you lose hit points, just like in a traditional game like WarCraft. Lose all your HP? can't play for 10 minutes (or whatever).

So players would have 3 ways to play: "practice" and gain xp by solving problems/ puzzles; complete "quests" or challenges; or try to attack other players.

a few notes - So it isn't creepy, players can attack each other from distances of 100 yards (to be shortened if it becomes popular) so that it is difficult to notice who is attacking you. The idea is that 2 people could be battling in the same starbucks and not be able to tell who their "real life" adversary is.
Also, I believe any smart location based game will provide enough to do when there are no other players in sight, and will have fun ways to play form the comfort of your home.

2)

I believe bar code scanning Apps are about to explode on the mobile scene. Looking 5 years ahead, it seems almost spooky: you will be able to scan any bar code and then order the item delivered to your house. This will change the concept of "window shopping" in a big way. I originally wanted to do a "food scanning" app to help people make nutritional and eco-friendly purchases, but then I stumbled upon this: http://dailyburn.com/foodscanner Oh well.

NYtimes also had an interesting article about this non-mobile version, the Ikan Scan

there are also several apps out there like CompareEverywhere that compare prices and allow you to tag items with metadata
(and lets not forget StickyBits!)

My app? A consumer advocacy app that lets you scan an item and it ranks the company that produces it in terms of human rights, environmentalism, and general corporate responsibility. It would alert you to any red-flags like current boycotts against a company or major lawsuits against them. I would charge for the app.

either way, this field is about to get weird.

3) Holiday Shopping Portal
- Combines web shopping with wiki like collaboration tools designed to encourage conversation. Aimed at siblings. Why? Young people today are the most mobile in america's history, and many nuclear families are spread across the country. This app makes holiday shopping easy to coordinate remotely.
I would go on but this one is best left up to diagrams.

Geocaching

2010-04-19T15:10:00.000-07:00

I found this NY Times article via Reddit, and was pleased to see that the concept of digital games being overlaid onto physical space is moving along at a steady clip.

It seems that the Boy Scouts have added a new badge called "Geocaching", which is a service that allows scouts (and the rest of us) to participate in "high tech treasure hunts"

The basic concept is that scouts are given a set of geographical coordinates and a GPS device (like a smart phone), and asked to locate the treasure. The fun part, besides encouraging the youngsters to get out in the wilderness, is that the coordinates are intentionally imprecise (to the degree of a few feet). This means that the Scouts must use their eyes to find the hidden Geocache. The "treasure" is apparently usually just a log book. Why don't you just watch the video...

I'm glad to see this as it gives credence to my theory/ obsession that there is great potential for overlaying digital games onto the real world. How cool would an adult version of geocaching be? Some mystery game like the old Myst series that would require some real thinking... Imagine playing a video game and feeling good about yourself for walking around all day...

Yes, you've heard it from me before. But now there is some evidence to back me up...

Stroome Promo

2010-04-19T14:55:00.000-07:00

Here is a rough cut of a promotional video I recently did for Stroome. Very, very frustrating to do without Final Cut. Apple's imovie is a joke - opting out of the "Ken Burns" effect for photos is rather confusing (you must turn it off before any pictures are added), which is pretty bizarre. The Ken Burns Effect, commonly seen in documentaries, occurs when one incorporates still imagery into video by "slowly zooming in on subjects of interest and panning from one subject to another". If you had the privilege of watching the History Channel when it actually ran documentaries about history, then you will be familiar with the technique. While the effect certainly has its place in Civil War documentaries and the like, I cannot believe that opting out of this function takes more than a click, and that imovie's help page doesn't even cover the phenomenon. Honestly, imovie : final cut :: microsoft paint : photoshop. Thank God the era of externally hosted video editing is upon us!

Kudos to whoever uploaded this video to the "Ken Burns Effect" Wikipedia page, which shows the Ken Burns Effect applied to a photo of Ken Burns. Outstanding.

Additionally, I should credit Ben Petty with writing and performing the background music in the Stroome Video.

I finally get it: The Movie (an xtranormal production)

2010-04-08T02:33:00.000-07:00

So I says to myself, I says, "If @shitmydadsays is going to become a TV show, then I can damn well adapt blog posts into minute long movies"

Here is the original post I stole from Claire: I finally Get It

and without further ado, here is "Twitter. A Revelation" (working title):

How was this made, you ask?

Like a cat, I was curious tonight at the little movie our guest showed in class. It seemed a little too good to be true. In fact it seemed like it was tailored specifically to a presentation about the life and times of an internet Ad man. It was Mad Men for nerds, set in the abstract future of japan when everyone looks like a video game character (2012?). I submit to you, dear reader, that our guest actually made this tiny film himself, and tried to pass it off as the work of another. What cunning! And here I thought Tech class could be dry...

In any event, whoever made the video used a website called Xtranormal . This site lets you construct an animated movie with simple drag and drop functionality. As you may have noticed, this site supports the trend of websites hosting functionality in "the cloud". Indeed, the online editing is not unlike that of Stroome (where I happily intern).

Go try it out for yourself. Just remember to save your work...

Sunday Satire

2010-04-05T15:12:00.000-07:00

Do I love the Internet? I'm not sure. I haven't actually used those words yet. I mean I don't want to be clingy or anything like that. I suppose we've been seeing each other off and on for years. We knew each other in high school, but things never really got serious until college. Sure, I had a fling with Playstation 3, and that was a lot of fun. We were young, and back then we would play for hours. I'll confess I still think about PS3 occasionally, and the thought of other guys playing with Playstation does get me a little jealous. Not that I would mention that to the Internet, of course, but it does feel good to get that off my chest.

The Internet knows I had a thing with PS3 back then, and I hope there isn't any jealousy. PS3 was fun, sure, but you cant really get serious with a playstation, right? The Internet just has so much more depth. I actually learn things when I hang out with The Internet, and that makes me feel more fulfilled as a person. I'm not just some graphics obsessed kid that hangs around GameStop - I have other needs.

Not that sometimes it doesn't cross my mind that Online gaming isn't the same as playing with PS3. Of course, every system is different, and maybe it isn't fair to compare different platforms. But between you and me, PS3 was just a little more viscerally exciting . It had a real "fight or flight" thing about it, for sure.

That said, I'm happy with The Internet. We have fun, and it isn't all about games. I can share all my interests openly, and The Internet always finds a way to make me feel, well, connected. I used to just hang with The Internet around the house, but now we go everywhere together - dinner, shopping, whatever. At this point I've probably shared everything with the Internet: photo albums, home movies, my favorite books, even private medical issues. We talk a lot about cooking, too. Whenever I'm in the kitchen thinking about what to make, my first thought is always "The Internet would have a great recipe for this." No matter how mundane or trivial any tidbit of my life is, the internet always makes me feel like it matters a bit more. I'll admit that sometimes I feel a bit exposed when I share everything with the Internet, a bit vulnerable. Maybe that's why I'm afraid to commit totally... I know that if things went poorly The Internet could make my life miserable. It was a bit frightening to realize that I might depend on the internet. Depending on anything is dangerous. But if the cannon of romance movies tells us anything, its that love makes us vulnerable.

TL/DR: So yes. I think I do love the internet.

God help me if the Internet finds out I still watch TV when I'm out of town.

2 Videos Pertaining to 'Exodus to the Virtual World'

2010-03-23T15:50:00.000-07:00

Tired of listening to me yet? If you're an APOC'er you will be soon as I'm presenting on both Wednesday and Thursday evenings this week.

That said, lets let some others do the speaking for me...

First, a TED talk on gaming:

and finally, a very simple experiment that demonstrates how easy it can be to change behavior with "fun". Kudos to VW.

While Ms McGonigal is a tad optimistic for my tastes, I think her basic concept is spot on. Games and competition are powerful tools for unlocking human potential.

See you all next week for a short recent history of social media and health-care (hopefully).

RDIF, Stickbits and Geo- integration

2010-03-09T17:50:00.000-08:00

Thanks to K.M. for pointing this out...

Last night Gregory Markel of Infuse Creative dropped by our APOC class to talk about SEO and his life as a singer - songwriter/ online entrepreneur. At the very end of the talk he veered off topic to discuss an old project involving RFID tags.

As Mr. Markel glazed over this term rather quickly, lets take a moment to go over RFID tags and how they could be used to "beat google," so to speak. RFID stands for Radio-Frequency identification, and is typically used as a tag or a chip that transmits information via radio waves. These tags and chips are used for a great variety of reasons, and I personally am most familiar with them as the funky little squares you find in new books:

Those of you who didn't grow up with these wacky socialist "free-ways" might be more familiar with RFID tags as the driving force behind EZ pass toll payers:

In any event, RFID tags are used all over the place: to identify live stock, to track packages, and to beef up security in passports. They can even be inserted directly under the skin, as we have all seen in action movies.

Basically, the reason these tags could be used to usurp google's role as Big Brother is that if you somehow collected all the pertinent information about these tags (and if you put them in enough things) you could use a search engine to locate where things are in physical space. You would also need enough devices to pick up the radio waves, but smartphones could potentially perform this service.

At the moment, any search for an object is often like searching for its platonic ideal: just look at this search for "chair" However, the general trend has been towards identifying those things closest to the user. Search for "movie theater", and you don't have to sift through every theater in the world; just the ones within 10 miles of your zip code. The new "social search" function in Google follows a similar idea: google assumes that the most pertinent information about people will be the info about people "closest" to you in your network of friends. "Network" proximity and physical proximity are closely related in this sense. So if all chairs were tagged with RDIF and you searched for "chair", a search engine 2 years from now (?) might tell you not only info about chairs and where to buy chairs, but also where the closest chairs are for your immediate sitting pleasure.

Science Fiction, you say? Well by now we all know that geo-location is the latest tech craze and that SXSW will be lousy with techies digitally locating things via semacodes and GPS. But a new start-up suggests that we might not need RDIF tags (or semacodes for that matter).

The latest company to jump into the mix is Stickybits, and I think they are opening a whole new door in the geo-integration space. The concept is similar to the big project Markel spoke about, but instead of RDIF tags, Stickybits uses bar codes. Genius, really, because almost every product out there has a bar code on it already, and "organic" things without them can be Bar-coded with a simple sticker. The concept is that Stickybits users can go around adding metatags to anything with a barcode, and other Stickybits users can later scan the barcode on a smartphone (by taking a picture of it) and then unlock the meta-tag. Meta tags can be links to websites, pictures, or simply comments. The Stickybits website suggests tagging your business card, which I really like.

The main difference between bar codes and RDIF tags, of course, is that you can get the info from an RDIF tag from a distance whereas a barcode must be visible. It seems as though eventually most products will have RDIF tags (walmart seems to be leading on this one), and then the game will change a bit for Stickybits. I suppose using bar-codes for geo-integration is taking one step back but 2 forward...

Stickybits works in two ways: a user can tag a pre-existing bar code, or they can print out their own bar-codes and attach them to individual items. I am fairly certain that every box of "Honey Nut Cheerios" has an identical bar code, so I believe that tagging a box of hn cheerios will mean tagging all HN cheerios, but I am not positive.

This second use will certainly prove interesting in light of social protests like the slow food movement. Imagine if scanning a package of hamburger patties brought up not only pricing and basic nutritional info, but pictures of the slaughter house and passionate notes about the dangers of eating meats laced with antibiotics. Perhaps we will literally be shown how "the sausage is made". Expect lawsuits... I bet the guys at Monsanto and the Hudson group are already turning red. Obviously, under the inevitable pressure from manufactures Stickybits will let people "lock" barcodes so that nobody else can tag them, allowing people to protect their brand images. However, it will only be a matter of time before another company makes an app that lets anyone tag any barcode. I cannot seem to find information on whether or not Barcodes themselves are copyrighted, but here is the wikipedia for barcodes.

The first use I mentioned is a bit more straightforward and in some cases will certainly be considered graffiti. By printing out bar codes and posting them on, say, a public bench, I will be able to tag the bench with a personal note about the bench or perhaps a picture of me sitting on the bench. With my shirt off. Yeah, these might not be too straightforward either.

TechCrunch titled their article about Stickybits "The Secret Lives of Objects: StickyBits Turn Barcodes into Personal Messageboards" and suggested that these barcodes could be used to identify an object's "secret past". How poetic. Something tells me the "secret" is going to be that some creepy dude was hanging around, tagging barcodes with examples of "delayed digital exhibitionism". Rule 34, people.

Tech crunch commenter Everfalling makes this point a bit less delicately: as neat as this sounds i hope they have a way of managing what’s being attached to what barcodes, esp ones that are the same across an entire line of products. it’ll only be a matter of time before someone canvases your supermarket with pictures of dicks on everything from lighter fluid to baby formula.

Indeed.

The comments of the techcrunch article also point out that the service is powered by SimpleGeo, a service I will be looking into...

If you liked this blog post, try clicking on the "semacodes" tag in my tag-cloud in the upper right or your screen...

Exodus to the Virtual World

2010-03-08T15:41:00.000-08:00

Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality, a work of "speculative nonfiction" about the future with regard to video games, is a rather frustrating read. The author, Edward Castronova, is an economics professor with the University of Arizona and has a real talent for explaining the significance of video games in their current state. His previous book, "Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games," restricted itself to observations about the present and was well received (at least by Amazon's standards), and I cant help but get the impression that this little book would have been helped by a bit more restraint. Castronova gets a bit carried away: the central idea that the second half of the book is built around is that gamers will start to demand that actual public policy should reflect the "better" experience of playing games. If Castronova had limited himself to explaining that game creators have become in some senses experts in public policy and city planning, his suggestion that virtual world experience could or should be used to affect real public policy might hold some water. But Castronova is not willing to be so modest, and instead predicts that the experience of playing video games will somehow cause a revolutionary shift in government, and he sketches out a ridiculous image of future government that is quite literally based on Everquest and World of Warcraft.
I write that "Exodus" is a frustrating read because the book does contain some thought provoking material, and much of what Castronova says is in line with Shirkey's "Here Comes Everybody" and Dan Ariely's newly popular "Predictably Irrational". It is frustrating because I cant help feeling that this book is much less than the sum of its parts: tons of great and interesting source material all cobbled together to construct some bizarre fantasy instead of a useful text. That said, I suppose that writing about the future is difficult and that history may just prove Castronova right after all. But I doubt it.

Here are some of the main points of "Exodus" boiled down into something useful...

1) Digital games are a natural progression of entertainment media, and from a neurological/ psychological perspective they offer much more pleasure than "one way" media like television and movies. When we add interactivity to exciting media (think sex and violence) and involve our frontal cortex in problem solving, we give our brains less of a chance to process the "this isn't real" aspect of the medium. When developers introduced a social element to video games (which happened as early as 1978 with MUD but perhaps wasn't seen in anything resembling what we think of as a video game until 1999 with Everquest), there was a sort of paradigm shift in gaming, as now a major part of the human condition could be assuaged within the games. Moving past socializing, Castronova points to many existing technologies that have yet to be fully integrated into games, but that have the potential to make gaming an even more compelling experience. He argues that exercising (already seen in Wii and Dance Dance revolution) and sensitive touch controls to aid in shall we say "human" contact, are inevitable.

Castronova points to the theory that "the truely scarce resource in the Information Age is... attention", and if this is so then digital games are a force to be reckoned with.

2) With large amounts of people playing online games (30 million in this country), the game environments take on a level of significance not seen previously in any "games" outside of perhaps professional sports. It is well known that the games have their own economies that an effect real ones, but Castronova also makes the case that gamers are developing their own language and culture.

3) Gaming is big business. Hardware and Software sales come to about ten billion dollars annually (Castronova writes before "social" gaming like farmville took off). The most recent ESA survey (2008) indicates that 65% of US households play videogames, and 38% own a console. 40% of gamers are female, and the average age of gamers is 35.

4) Happiness and Fun are not well understood by psychologists. A new field, hedonic psychology (the study of what makes experience and life pleasant or unpleasant) has emerged relatively recently (the first major work was published in '99)

Happiness is fickle, but we know there are certain things we can do to increase the amount of positive emotion we feel. For instance, physical exercise is one activity that gives most people a sense of pleasure.

As this field applies to digital games, the most important finding has been something called "flow" : "the individual appears utterly immersed, and skills are deployed at the highest level of mastery, " which can be induced by balancing the ease and difficulty of a set of tasks. The interesting thing is that video game designers have been experimenting in this area for years, and the most popular games seem to be able to give rise to a feeling of "flow" (or being "in the zone"). The feeling is not uncommon in athletic sports, and the link there seems to be the game element. What follows is that by re-designing the way people approach tasks (by making them more like a video game) a crafty employer might be able to induce "flow". If this was achieved, workers would both be happier and do their best work.

you can count on the fact that video games will get more fun as time goes on

5) the remainder of the book is rather bizarre.

Mechanical Turk and Offerpal Tasks

2010-03-03T00:14:00.000-08:00

Apparently I missed the boat on this one, since today I was surprised to learn that Amazon has been running a micro-outsourcing service called Mechanical Turk for the last 5 years. The service connects workers to employers looking for very menial tasks completed, like confirming that a CD covers are labeled correctly. Amazon then takes a small cut of the very small payment, and hopes that the worker (or "turker") will spend some of that digital cash they just earned on some Amazon goods.

Here is what Mashable and Salon.com had to say about the service when it launched... (the salon article is particularly interesting)

A few years later, Mashable reported that the service was used during the search effort to find Steve Fossett. In this case, "Turkers" were used to scan satellite images of the search area and report anything suspicious. This service, like transcription, is perfectly suited for Mechanical Turk since humans are still much better at scanning images and deciphering spoken words than computers are. So perhaps micro-outsourcing can be used for something useful after all (still menial, but useful)

The Turk plot has thickened recently, as Offerpal just announced in February that it will now be using Mechanical Turk to launch "Offerpal Tasks" (check it out). For those of you not in the know, Offerpal is the leader in the new market of trading virtual currency for ads. Here's how it works: Offerpal has a simple plug-in that game designers (including Zenga Games) add to their code. Gamers who want more tokens (or whatever) have the option to either add real money to their accounts or to sign up for services (famously netflix) in exchange for "in game" currency. Offerpal and their competitors (like gWallet) act as brokers between the advertisers and the gaming platforms, making sure that gamers get the money and advertisers get their eyeballs, feedback, and often paid subscriptions.

Offerpal has come under criticism for brokering shady deals to teenagers who simply want to grow digital farms and sell internet cakes to their tweener friends. This video taken at the Virtual Goods conference this summer is a must watch - it set the Sphere of Blogs on fire...

[On a personal note, I have never heard the phrase "double-shit" before watching this clip, and am slightly enamored with it. Double-shit just sounds a bit classier. Its like shit has a doppleganger that drinks martinis and solves mysteries...]

Anyway, Offerpal Tasks is fascinating from a gaming perspective. Most games that contain a virtual economy have some way for its players, especially new ones, to gain easy cash. In WOW, new players can simply walk around and kill small animals to receive money. A lot of games are like that. It is well known now that "gold farming," the process of completing these menial in-game tasks and trading the rewards for real money, has become popular in certain countries in Asia. There are already millions of people who occasionally complete boring tasks in the context of a virtual world, and a select few who make it their profession. It is only a matter of time until a business like Offerpal figures out how to integrate REAL LIFE micro-outsourcing tasks into MMO games that fall outside of the "social gaming" sphere.

Of course, Zynga and the rest of the gaming companies do everything they can to keep Offerpal cash locked into the game. In fact, Zynga does not allow customers to cash out at all. Ever. But from the player's perspective, imagine if tasks you completed in game could actually earn you some money. I'm just pulling this out of nowhere, but theoretically a crafty designer could add a bonus level that featured your character trapped in a building during a fire. The catch would be that the building design plans could be real, and by asking you to get your character out of the building in the least amount of time and recording your path, the game could start collecting potential fire escape plans. Something tells me that an aggregated response of the fastest times would actually yield a usable result.

Ultimately, people are wasting an insane amount of time playing video games. But playing video games is not an idle pursuit - often we are doing very complex tasks that involve tons of visual analysis. Playing Call of Duty isn't exactly like staring a wall and scratching your belly (thats called watching TV). If somebody can figure out how to translate some of that "play" into "work," then that somebody is going to make some money.

Shirky, tech, Lloydo

2010-02-28T23:33:00.000-08:00

The internet is my soapbox, my water cooler chat, my locker-room gossip. It is my rolodex and my phone book. The internet is my encyclopedia, my dictionary, and my library. Sometimes I see the internet instead of a doctor. The internet is where I buy my socks. To me, the internet is everything and nothing, for it is infinite and yet I came before it. To my son, should I have one, the internet will be everything: the alpha and omega, the godhead in the cloud.

- taken from "Lloyd-o," a play by Ruby Zhang based on the hit blog Lloyd-o.com
_______________________________________________________

I am currently a 3rd of the way into Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody (With an updated Epilogue!) and despite being put off by the cheesy cover art I am definitely enjoying the book. For those of you who are not in APOC, Shirky is a New Media scholar that teaches at NYU and writes books - mostly about things and stuff.

In a passage called Revolution and Coevolution, Shirky cleverly uses the story of his parents' first date to demonstrate the ways in which technology effects our lives in non-obvious ways. To make a short story shorter, Shirky's folks went on a date at a drive in movie and his mom-to-be vomited (sweet, sweet romance). Shirky writes, "Now what part of that story is about the internal combustion engine? None of it, in any obvious way, but all of it, in another way" (pg 104). He goes on to explain that the automobile has permeated culture so effectively that we hardly notice it at all. Importantly, the essential function of the automobile has remained the same since the first Model T's rolled out. Sure, there have been improvements, but I don't see any flying cars just yet. But the catch is that when the Model T came out people simply used cars and tractors to replace horses. But as the technology was adopted it gradually began to change the behavior of people who used it, and after 40 years the automobile can be said to have radically altered society - so much so that Mr. Shirky might not be here without it.

It is important to understand that the Internet is the automobile. It is the printing press, the telephone, and the light bulb. The internet is the spinning jenny. We can certainly marvel at the internet today, but ultimately, the real change will be seen in a generation or two, when people can hardly conceptualize a world without it. I feel this viscerally with cellphones. I simply do not understand how people of my parents' generation organized parties when they were young. I've asked them before, and their answers were satisfactory in a boring way: "we just called each other before we went out and made plans to meet". I suppose. But just yesterday I met a friend for a movie and it took about 6 text messages to coordinate our meeting (it turns out we were in different parking garages all along). The real point, though, is that while I can accept a land-line world (I still remember the land-line numbers of my oldest friends), any attempt at understanding a pre-telephone world is an exercise in imagination. Set a movie in the pre-telephone era and it might as well take place in Narnia.

To return to Shirky's words: "It's when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen...and invisible is coming"(105). One fundamental change, the "revolutionary" aspect of the internet that puts it on the same plane as the printing press, is the fact that the same tool is now used for broadcasting and simply communicating. Perhaps 5 people will read this blog entry, and at least one will be paid to do so, but theoretically these words could reach millions. How will this change society? I have no idea, but I bet my children wont even notice.

Facebookistan

2010-02-21T23:46:00.001-08:00

So Ive been collecting information for an upcoming blog post that has kept me distracted, but I thought another quick post was in order before my long, long diatribe about how LIMITING CHOICES is going to become a major function of online storefronts. In fact, you probably should skip my next post all together.

Anyway

My sister sent me this interesting article by some guy who has been plotting out maps of Facebook friends.

If you like this guy's work, check out the facebook app TouchGraph - it might just blow your mind.
Sociology is certainly entering a new phase in its development - in the old days, researchers had to ask study participants to "name your 10 best friends" and then have the participant show which ones knew each other. Now I can plot the relationships between all 400 or so FB friends I have and see how groups have naturally clustered around different hubs - the most striking being high school, college, and lake tahoe for me. And I'm not even a sociologist.

The implications of new sociology info for the marketing we are seeing today is huge - why buy an expensive national tv spot when you could do heavy advertising in a linked- up city? Warden explains that "Almost everywhere in California and Nevada has links to both LA and SF, but LA is usually first" So, theoretically, if you plastered LA and SF with billboards about a product, that info might naturally spread all over California and Nevada on its own (especially if your ad has some killer memes) - not that I especially recommend billboards, but you know what I mean.

It sounds crazy, but by limiting the advertisements to key social centers retailers might be doing themselves a big favor. The huge body of information on who interacts with who will let advertisers manipulate the flow of information for their benefit. By seeding info at crucial nodes within a community, advertisers can insure that the info still gets out while gaining two important benefits: 1) lower cost; and 2) changing the source so that people are more likely to respond to the info (ie if a friend mentions how tasty Arby's is its way better than if I just see a commercial with stupid red hats)

to demonstrate the point, if you wanted to spread a rumor, you wouldn't have to tell everyone you know the juicy gossip - you can simply tell a few people you know who gossip the most in your various groups of friends. Obviously ads are typically much more boring than gossip, but perhaps thats something your marketing team needs to work on...

I'll admit that the concept of selling influential people on your product is nothing new, but now people can quantify just how influential you are based on your position within various networks. I'm sure madison ave is going to have a field day with combining newly available social network info with concepts like the one explained below:

for more info check out the book Connected (from dimitri's class)

Nike and Corporate Transparency

2010-02-21T21:28:00.000-08:00

Both the Starbucks article and the Owyang post made me think of this recent New Yorker Cartoon:

I hope that this trend towards transparency continues as it is certainly a great way to keep companies honest. But I'm curious to see how organizations are going to participate if they actually DO have something to hide. For instance, I went to nike.com and searched for "sweatshops". Guess what? nothing came up at all. But a search for "sweatshops"in Google pulls up this image:

Oops! The first google result for "Sweatshops", this wikipedia page, mentions Nike directly. Lets face it: Nike and Sweatshops go hand in hand. Interestingly, its only a one way street - when you think of sweatshops Nike might be the first brand that comes to mind, but when you think of Nike you tend to think of sneakers and basketballs. So Nike's brand image is pretty solid, despite their image problem maybe 15 years ago when good people like Naomi Klein blew up the sweatshop situation.

Now I know Nike went to great lengths to cover its ass on this issue in the pre- social media era (can anyone say Greenwash?) and probably does not want to discuss the issue anymore. So what to do if they open up an online community type website - the kind so highly praised by these articles (the hw) - and people want to talk about the skeletons in the closet? If you are Nike, do you censor posts or engage them openly?

If you censor them, then you might as well have the old "irrelevant corporate website". But if you meet the criticism head on you risk a very, very bad PR problem.

Something tells me questions about labor rights are gonna make Nike nervous. I'm gonna email them some simple questions and see what they say...

Gladwell vs Anderson

2010-02-09T01:36:00.000-08:00

Over the summer Malcolm Gladwell, the "pop sociologist" known for his goofy hair (and some books too, I guess), reviewed Chris Anderson's latest book Free for The New Yorker Magazine

I found this picture next to some good old fashioned Gladwell bashing from the Village Voice

Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired (or so says wikipedia), became well known in non techie circles for his earlier book The Long Tail, which described how the economics of online retail is changing the market place. Retailers can now pursue the "long tail" strategy of "selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities" (wikipedia). In Free, Anderson makes the case that everything bits (as opposed to atoms) will soon be totally free.

Although The Long Tail was quite well received, Gladwell is rather critical of Anderson's predictions inFree, and I am inclined to agree with him (but I haven't read the book, so Anderson isn't really getting his fair shakes.(( In other news, I much prefer reviews to actual full length books, as popular reviewers tend to have a knack for pulling out the salient points of a book and then discussing them all smart like. Unless we're talking Amazon reviews, in which case I enjoy reading the reviews after I have read the book. It's like joining a book club, but you don't have to lie to your friends about where you go every thursday.))).

Some of Gladwell's better points:

" Broadcast television—the original practitioner of Free—is struggling. But premium cable, with its stiff monthly charges for specialty content, is doing just fine"
- - While I disagree with Gladwell on how "fine" cable is doing, it is true that broadcast is almost dead, and the HBO model seems to be going strong.

"Anderson is forced to admit that one of his main case studies, YouTube, 'has so far failed to make any money for Google.'"
- he also mentions that youtube's strategy at the moment includes paying for traditional content.

Also, Gladwell reminds us that a subscription model seems to be working for the Wall Street Journal's online newspaper, even though the New York Times, a main competitor, offers their info for free (or they used to).

But even if Anderson missed the mark a bit with Free, he is right about one thing: the times they are a changin

Educational Gaming

2010-02-08T14:17:00.000-08:00

Earlier today steffipintauro retweeted this mashable article on How Social Gaming is Improving Education. The article was a timely supplement to the subject I was reading about in Edward Castronova's book Exodus to the Virtual World . Castronova explains that "play" is a fundamental part of the way we learn from a young age, and that play developed as an evolutionary response to the need to understand the vast amount of stimuli humans are presented with. During play, we practice survival techniques like escaping from danger and acquiring resources (think tag and hide the thimble). Anyone who has taught young children will know that about 95% of your time involves teaching through play or story telling (perhaps another way we cope with too much info).

anyone remember this ^^^ one?

Castronova takes the discussion a step further by introducing the field of Hedonic Psychology (or simply hedonics), which is the "study of what makes experience and life pleasant or unpleasant". The field is relatively new and unexplored, but they have unearthed some simple findings, like that we can "induce positive emotions by engaging in simple tasks that easily offer a sense of success"

Playing your little sister at Tic Tac Toe isn' t the cure for depression, though, since if the game or task is too easy we feel bored. On the other hand if the task is too hard we feel frustrated. The tough part is designing a game that will leave us somewhere in the middle, which can lead to a sense of "flow" - the holy grail of fun.

Anyone who plays decent games will know the experience: you're in "the zone". Its the 15 person kill streak in Call of Duty, or perhaps returning a kick-off for a touchdown (lets pretend I've done that). The point is that you are engaged in a complex task, your mind is clear, and you seem to operate without even thinking.

Mastery of a complex task is apparently one of the most pleasurable experiences out there, which has huge implications for education. Playing Call of Duty is an incredibly complex task with a steep learning curve - have you ever seen someone try to handle a dual - axis controlled game for the first time? Its not easy. Have you ever tried to have a catch with lacrosse equipment with someone who is inexperienced? My point (well, Castronova's point) is that when they are framed in the right way, we can derive pleasure from learning complex tasks.

However, its not as though people haven't tried educational games before. My personal education was littered with game - show type class periods and hours of math-blaster. Indeed, a google search for "educational games" brings up 53,100,000 results. The obvious problem here is that educational games have always been met with eye rolling from kids because, well, they typically suck. But the crucial lesson is that they shouldn't have to.
Castronova's real point is that serious research has been done at video game companies on what makes things fun, and if we take a page out of their book and apply those lessons elsewhere, we might be able to make great strides in education and other social fields.

Augmented Reality

2010-02-03T23:57:00.000-08:00

I must confess that while I was reading the “Social Marketing Playbook” for our Tech class, I was bored to tears. Wait a second... Sports as a metaphor for other parts of Life!?

Behold: a business document of staggering genius!

Tired metaphors aside, I did find the very brief section on “augmented reality” captivating. According to the Playbook, augmented reality refers to “any way that digital information is overlaid on the physical world”

I wrote earlier about the potential for the field of gaming that augmented reality provides (although I had yet to hear the term), but I now realize that I was being a little shortsighted. Augmented Reality is a completely new frontier for almost everything on the internet.

The ridiculous popularity of the iPhone App store should suffice to demonstrate how the addition of mobility can enhance almost anything online: “More than one billion iPhone applications have been downloaded (Apple, May 2009); 45% of iPhone owners have downloaded 16 or more applications (Compete, April 2009)” . And I think it is sage to say that the trend is growing - just wait until the Google App store gets going.

The “Playbook” listed some interesting new applications like foursquare, Whrrl, and Brightkite, which I urge you (dear reader) to investigate. My personal favorite, Wikitude, connects wikipedia entries to specific locations when a user scans a camera phone over a point of interest (like this wacky European Techno Dance-castle).

((Curiously, the people responsible for making this stunning new technology cannot seem to grasp basic video editing. Believe me, I've spared you "part 1". Lucky for me they do manage to combine my two great loves: Sight Seeing and inappropriate Techno music. Just slam some Redbull and really get into it. In fact I'm pretty sure techno was invented during a walking tour, so this music makes sense if you think about it. ))

Twiistup 7 participants will recall that show-off winner Geodelic was involved in augmented reality as well: they created an application that lets users access various product information based on their physical location. During his speech the founder Rahul Sonnad explained the name: Geo means world; Delic means to reveal. Their website reveals that with the Geodelic app "the location carousel automatically aggregates locations and information around you, based on distance, relevance and interest" However, with big names corporate names already signing up, there is little question as to whose interests will come first.

But Geodelic has put its finger on one way to monetize Augmented Reality apps: entice users with the relevance and quickness of location based information, and then sell the opportunity to "inform" the customer to local businesses.

Another method might be to drive physical traffic based on a compelling game, and then apply web based models of selling "directed foot traffic" to local retail centers.

In any event, Google should be given credit as the true visionaries here, as Google maps and Google Earth have laid the framework for much of the technical part of making these applications viable. Plus, they have put money into the start up Scvngr, which enables location based programming.

Finally, check out this Mashable Article on the top 10 Augmented Reality iPhone Apps. Some of these will blow your socks right back on (I assume the sweet walking-tour techno in the wikitude video has already blown them off).

And for the truly curious, feel free to browse this curiously low- tech-blog-for-people-obsessed-with-the-future blog Augmented Planet. (thats a thing, right?)

PS - I have left out a link to the aforementioned "Playbook" because I'm not sure if I have the right to share it.

Cell Phone Suicide

2010-02-01T15:35:00.000-08:00

A recent article on the dangers of cellphone use from GQ makes some pretty frightening claims about cellphone usage and brain cancer. Unfortunately for us in the social media business, the prospects are even worse for wireless internet. While I don't have time to write a summary of the article right now (because I just wasted my time on that JV photoshop job), I suggest you read the article in full, at GQ.com

(Online Reviews Part 3) Lunch Misses the Point

2010-01-31T23:54:00.000-08:00

Despite the Payperpost situation, I think it is safe to say that online reviews are here to stay. Whether its on Yelp or IMDB, people are still clamoring to be heard, and consumer reviews give people a voice. But even with the supposition that the online reviewer hasn’t been paid to write his review, why should we trust the opinions of strangers? I mean a good 50% of them vote for the other party...
In comes Lunch.

The internet startup Lunch (a recent showoff at Twiistup 7) is stepping into the online review world with a new service that determines how similar a stranger’s opinions are to your own, in order to give you a frame of reference for their review. In theory, the idea is golden (or so I thought earlier). Its one part Yelp and one part Match.com. (check mediawire's take on them here)
But I’m not so sure if the company is heading in the right direction. Instead of a no nonsense service that allows its users to simply judge the relevancy of reviews (is location enough?) Lunch is pushing their site as some kind of “community building” service that helps bring people together by highlighting how alike we all are (Yawn). What is this? A middle school tolerance seminar?

The bottom line is that an anonymous review actually serves the purpose of “togetherness” better than a review connected to a person. Why? check out this portion of a paper by Joseph Walther, explaining the SIDE theory:

“SIDE, or the social identification model of deindividuation effects (see for review Postmes, Spears, Lea, & Reicher, 2000) is derived from the social identificationtself- categorization theory (see Hogg Abrams, 1988), which holds that people often identify on the basis of common group membership, or ingroup and outgroup identifications, and that certain contextual factors encourage or discourage these forms of identification. s I D ~ theorists argue that the process of CMC interaction often facilitates group identification: There may be a salient group or social category associated with an online interaction event, and, most important with respect to nonverbal cues, communicators operate under visual anonymity and are therefore deindividuated. Because they do not see that they differ from one another idiosyncratically, as would be apparent FtF, they are more likely to experience their partners and interpret others' behavior as reflecting group norms, which they value and to which they themselves then adhere. Both SIDE and the lack of social context cues approaches argue that the reintroduction of visual cues ameliorates deindividuation.”

In plain english the above means that WITHOUT knowing anything about a stranger online, we assume that their behavior (or in this case opinion) reflects the behavior of everybody. In our everyday experience with user reviews the theory holds true - when is the last time you read a product review and thought "hmm... this is a pretty solid review of the iPad, but seriously, does this person recycle?" or " I don't know if I trust him to give me advice on anything if he thinks its OK to wear socks with sandals...?"

The theory is perhaps better demonstrated with the difference between star ratings and written ones. We never question the person behind the 3 star rating, but we question the person behind the review with terrible English. The review that reads "the Ipad aint good for shit" raises raise some eyebrows. The more clues we have about what "group" a person represents, the more we wonder if we fall into that group. **

Realistically, if we start to add identifiers, like “this guy who wrote a bad review for 'The Passion of the Christ' is Muslim” we start to judge people (and their opinions) pretty quickly. In this light, it is easy to see that a website that matched an reviewer with a “relevant to your opinions” score and a photo, which is what Lunch proposes, stands a pretty good chance of promoting social divide instead of cohesion. Despite the founders’ intentions, Lunch might quickly become the type of review site that is popular with skinheads if they aren’t careful.

This does not mean that the idea is worthless, though. In essence, when we attempt to filter reviews based on relevance we are engaging in a form of judging other people, or at least their opinions. But lets be honest - different people have different opinions and tastes, which is why its usually better to read a couple of reviews. Its also why the phrase “chick - flick” continues to be relevant. But that is why the Lunch idea is so powerful...

For instance, the movie Legally Blonde gets a 67% score on Rotten Tomatoes, which is pretty solid. But I haven’t seen the movie yet because I assume it was given that score by 10,000 8th grade girls high on some bizarre combination of female empowerment and Barbie Fumes. But what if the site told me that 67% of people liked it, and that surprisingly, 80% of those reviewers were men. That would be interesting.

I bet I could filter out reviewers irrelevant to my tastes pretty easily. You like the comedy of Carlos Mencia? Then I don’t want to hear about your opinions on comedy. Were you born after 1995? nothing you say is going to sway my opinion on the movie “An Education” . Are you Ted Kaczynski? Keep it to yourself.

You get the idea.

What the people behind Lunch don’t seem to understand is that they are in the business of DIVIDING people’s opinions into groups. Demographics are real. As we learned in one of our first Social Dynamics class - in order to define a community, we need to place some people outside of it. Sorry Lunch, thats just the way it goes. Go sing kumbaya somewhere else.

That said, I think I will join Lunch.

Also, It should be noted that this 3 part series on online reviews neglects to discuss the mega review site Epinions, but seriously, I've been writing this for hours and I'm falling asleep. So maybe next time.

(** there IS evidence to suggest that "name calling" and "swearing" is increased during non face to face communication. The hypothesis is called the THE LACK OF SOCIAL CONTEXT CUES HYPOTHESIS. So perhaps more information would tone down a lot of internet banter. You win this one Lunch)

(Online Reviews # 2) Vine Voice, PayPerPost, and the corruption of the Blog

2010-01-31T23:20:00.000-08:00

In his discussion of the Vine Voice program Mr. Bischke brings up some good points, the most salient of which is that
“we’ve come a long way from the pre-Internet days when we as consumers had very little visibility into whether a product was actually good. Then along came all sorts of awesome enablers of connected consumption like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Last.fm and yes, Amazon. Those services have made the world much better. And it’s up to us to take a stand against the erosion of all the gains we’ve realized.”

The “connected consumption” Bischke refers to essentially boils down to user- generated reviews, which have become ubiquitous on the internet in the past few years. And as Bischke notes, this is a good thing. The reviews offer modern consumers invaluable information regarding products and services, and they are especially useful for preventing major rip-offs. Indeed, this is a case where the wisdom of the phrase “sunlight is the best disinfectant” is easily demonstrated.

Of course, user reviews are nothing new, and many publications in the paper age made it their business to review various products. The major difference with the internet is that these reviews are available at all times and exist for almost every product on the market.

At a garage sale and want to find out if people liked the game Paperboy for N64? Don’t worry, 13 people thought it was worth their time to review that game for you on Amazon. Apparently it sucks, so you can toss it back in the bin with Turok: Dinosaur Hunter.

We have effectively entered into the “long tail” phase of reviews - if you can think of it, somebody has reviewed it, and you can find that review in seconds (typically for free).

Another difference, perhaps equally revolutionary (in the review world, anyway), is that in this era the masses are given a seat at the table with professional reviewers. So when you are looking into new dishwashers, you can head from the guys in the white lab coats down at Consumer Reports, but you can also hear about how the dishwasher works day to day for Joe Briefcase and his wife Yoga Mat Jane. The origins of this trend date back to the rise of the Zagat restaurant reviews way back in 1979, when Nina and Tim Zagat decided that they were tired of all those haughty critics with their tweed and their Michelin stars and whatnot.
(I stole that from Esquire. Sorry)

These two types of reviews, Professional and “Man on the Street,” are currently the yin and yang of reviews: each type exists as the other’s antithesis, but ultimately they provide balance and meaning for each other (perhaps a little deep for a conversation about Yelp, I admit). That is, on one hand professional reviews are desirable because the reviewer is very knowledgeable in the field and has the time and resources to collect all pertinent information (we hope), but their objectivity and motivation is sometimes questionable. It is not hard to see that many “review” sections of magazines are thinly veiled advertisements (especially during the holidays). On the other hand, man on the street reviews are seemingly without questionable motives, as the typically anonymous person has no way to gain from giving a beefed up review. That said, most people are tasteless idiots (or so I’m told).
Mr. Bischke points out that if Amazon starts offering people incentives to encourage reviewing, then they are removing an important part of the checks and balances that the online reviews offer consumers. People tend not to bite the hand that feeds them. That free Kindle? 5 stars!

While looking into this Vines situation I learned that media blogs were incensed (here is tech crunch’s take on it) at the thought of PayPerPost.com’s business model of paying bloggers to include specific products in their blogs (the blogger does not have to reveal that they were paid). (((Heading deeper into the rabbit hole (and word count) I found that PayPerPost is a member of the Word of Mouth Markerting Association, which is “the premier nonprofit organization which advances the discipline of credible word of mouth marketing both offline and online” according to their website, and which also has a strict ethics policy. . So... Payperpost is covered? This makes me think Womma is BS )))

Again, Bischke is correct to point out that the lack of inquiry into the Vines program is somewhat unsettling. To Amazon’s credit, though, the effort is visible inasmuch as the “vine member” tag is shown near the reviewer’s name. But who wastes all their time looking into that?

Now, people solved the Credibility issue back in the paper age. The solution was the method favored by Consumer Reports and the Michelin Guide: adhere to a strict policy of anonymity for the reviewers, do not accept payments or favors from the people you review, and stake the reputation of your organization on your credibility. Then you sell your reviews. It turns out that this model is still working for Consumer reports in the digital age, and wikipedia reports that CR “claims more paid subscribers than any other publication-based Web site” but who knows if thats true.

But something tells me that the Consumer Reports model is merely occupying a niche in the internet, especially considering that nobody wants to pay for something they can get for free. Also, CR can't possibly hope to get out to the farther reaches of the Long Tail...

All of this begs the question of internet credibility to be addressed. I think some further reading is in order.

(Online Reviews. A Blog entry in 3 parts) Part 1: Vine Voice on Amazon?

2010-01-31T23:02:00.000-08:00

On Amazon Vine Voice:

Just moments ago I was browsing through some reviews on Amazon and noticed these curious little tags:

This being the internet, I naturally let my curiosity distract me from the task at hand (selecting a book for class), and I clicked on the “Vine Voice” tag. The link currently leads to this very unhelpful help page

It turns out that a “Vine Voice” review is written by an Amazon customer reviewer who has been selected by Amazon to receive free merchandise in exchange for reviews. (more on this concept in Part 2)

In this particular instance the book selling giant was caught with its proverbial pants down when it over-looked the small detail of EXPLAINING WHAT ANY OF THE TAGS MEAN in real terms. When I googled the phrase “vine voice on amazon?” I was surprised to find that this relatively humble “blogger” blog (called slog) is occupying the top spot on the list (Now thats some serious SEO action. Kudos to you, Slog guy).
My “vine voice” experience is a telling example of what happens when a company neglects to think through their website. In this case, Amazon drove traffic to the Slog website, where the comments reveal that several people have had this exact problem (and had the time to comment about it). Readers of the Slog blog are treated to a little taste of Amazon bashing, as the author suggests that Amazon’s claim that the company does not “influence the opinions of Amazon Vine™ members” is total bullshit. Which it is.

Amazon had the opportunity to deliver the information to me on their own terms, but they screwed up and forced me to find out about the Vines program through a critical and suspicious third party. And this guy IS A VINE VOICE MEMBER, meaning he uses Amazon reviews enough to warrant getting free merchandise. So if HE is suspicious, then Amazon must me up to something. Had I heard about the program through Amazon, I probably would have thought something like “Hey! I like free shit! Maybe I should get in on this action” and that would be that. Instead, I read the top 3 hits on google, which included this wikipedia article and this highly critical and thought provoking Blog entry by some dude named Jon Bischke.

I couldn't help myself

2010-01-26T14:56:00.001-08:00

I'm clearly not a Photoshop savant, but I hope it gets the point across anyway

quick thoughts

2010-01-25T23:39:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed the speakers this evening and especially appreciated the advice to "never build a business on a platform you can't control" (to paraphrase Mr. Spector). This is one of those concepts that seems so obvious once you hear it - in fact it sounds axiomatic - but I'm not so sure I would have realized that on my own.

The discussion on how to monetize your website was also interesting and I am looking forward to the class on that subject. I think that an interesting direction to go in might be cross promotion (I may be using the wrong term here) through embedded information. Imagine if Heineken put a semacode on the back of every beer bottle that led to a short, funny Heineken ad (or unrelated content for that matter - even music). Customers could simply download the Heineken reader app for their mobile device and then take a quick snapshot of the back of the bottle to access some unique content. Good for Heineken, good for the content provider.

has anyone ever had any Lionshead beer? people love the little puzzles on the caps... And they end up saving them and talking about them all night.

my point is that mobile devices + semacodes = interactive EVERYTHING

maybe quirky sites like 5secondfilms (which is pretty funny, btw) could profit from distributing content in other ways. I'll call this my "Fortune Cookie Theory"- if there was a website that just put up a list of fortunes, it would be pretty boring. But when you get just one fortune inside a bad cookie, you love it.

Flannel Fever

2010-01-25T15:07:00.000-08:00

A few months ago I woke up to find I had come down with something.

I couldn't tell if I wanted to cut down trees and watch consecutive seasons of Ax Men, or if I wanted to head to Brooklyn and join an ironic hipster band. But why did I look like this...? It was a medical mystery.

"Ahh Ha!" said I, "'tis Flannel Fever! perhaps the cause is twelve months of living in a cabin in the mountains"
It all made sense! Too much granola and organic food. Too many people wearing overalls. Too much fresh air, and far too many beards. These things can have adverse effects on a person from New Jersey. So I decided to watch a full season of MTV's Jersey Shore, shave my beard, and move down to the healthy smog of Los Angeles. Great Decision. I love pollution.

See ya next time!

(this was a test post to see if my twitterfeed and feedburner accounts are working. No, it has nothing to do with APOC or social media. )

A Paradigm Shift in Gaming

2010-01-23T18:46:00.000-08:00

In 2007 Edward Castronova, an economics Ph.D., published a book entitled “Exodus to the Virtual World” in which he predicts the effects that online gaming will have on society once more people adopt the practice. I have read less then 20 pages thus far, but I can already tell that Castronova has taken some wild leaps of faith in this book. For instance, the good doctor tells us that “in the future” 40% of our economic production will be in the virtual world (while this may turn out to be true, how exactly Castronova arrived at this conclusion is a mystery).

When I finish the book I will write more extensively on it, but I was compelled to interrupt my reading to note that I disagree with one of Castronova’s basic premises: that time spent gaming will be time spent outside of the “real world”. While players of current video games do seem to drop out of real life, so much so that an FCC commissioner felt compelled to warn the nation’s parents about World of Warcraft, I don’t think that this will remain the case forever.

At the moment, the popular Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) that have captured the attention of millions all rely on the same basic functionality. That is, a player sits down at a computer or gaming system, logs onto the internet, and competes against other players who have chosen to play at that time. The field of play is a virtual world where each player’s virtual character, known as an avatar, can travel around (bound only by the rules of whatever game they are playing). For instance, players of World of Warcraft all compete in a world called Azeroth.

However, several recent technological advances are allowing a new era of gaming to develop. Specifically, the proliferation of wireless internet (and the various devices that receive it) will drive the greatest shift in gaming in recent memory. With GPS, wireless, google maps and Semacodes, game designers can now take the monumental step of overlaying the virtual field of play over the real, physical world. Instead of traveling virtually, players could now theoretically travel physically in order to engage in play.

Although this concept could be applied equally well to many different varieties of games, let us take a WoW style fantasy RPG game to demonstrate how this might work. A gaming company would take a physical geographic area and overlay a virtual environment on top of its map. The company would then embed special items and mobs ((mob (short for mobile or mobile object) is a generic term for any non-player entity whose primary purpose is to be killed for experience, quest objective, or loot.)) in the virtual map, which a player could only engage by physically traveling to the location. When traveling, if a player encounters another player (in the physical world) then they can both stop and battle each other. This would happen in exactly the same manner it does on a computer screen, with the exception that the players are using a tablet or other wireless device (like an ipod) to control the action.

I would imagine that at least 1 of the 2 people who bother to read this are thinking “but wait! people play video games to relax, and they don’t want to move around. They want to be lazy and eat cheeseburgers whilst they do virtual battle.” This, dear imaginary reader, is a fine point. It is true that not all video game players will enjoy this style of play, and certainly the old styles of play will persist. Plenty of people still play chess with a chessboard even though computer chess exists. But, consider the idea that hard core gamer types will enjoy gathering at gaming cafes (to some extent they already do) where upon entering they gain access to a unique playing space that unfolds beyond the physical boundaries of the cafe. In Mario terms entering into a gaming cafe would be like going down a big green pipe, or, a world unto itself. The world will only be as challenging as the people in the cafe.

The thing about wireless is that a gaming room doesn’t have to be something like this:

Instead, it could be an old pizza place or a local bar. Any restaurant owner could buy a few bits of code and hope to attract a clientele who will undoubtedly stay a while and have a couple drinks. Its the modern version of putting in a couple of pool tables.
I will cut myself short here because this post is turning into a novel, but let me hammer down the last point. Much is made of the “virtual economy,” and people correctly question the validity of paying actual money for virtual trinkets. However, if shopping centers figure out how to use virtual incentives to get customers into or near their shops, then the REAL economy will be boosted do to the increased traffic. The trick is to create a game enticing enough to get gamers off the couch and out into the world.

If anything, drinking games have shown us that social interaction + casual gaming can be a blast.

If anyone is interested in looking into this further before my next post on the subject, check out: http://www.scvngr.com/, http://www.pacmanhattan.com/, and http://homepages.nyu.edu/~dc788/conqwest/about.html

Web Based Applications

2010-01-20T16:50:00.000-08:00

It is amazing that Paul Graham was able to predict the rise of web based applications in his essay The Other Road Ahead, considering it came out in 2001.

2001? I feel like most people back then were simply glad that the Y2K situation didn't pan out... but Mr. Paul Graham was hanging out and predicting the future: "If someone just sold a nice-looking box with a web browser that you could use to connect through any ISP, every technophobe in the country would buy one." Well maybe every technophile would, but still.

In any event, this afternoon John L introduced me to MockingBird today as we were discussing some website ideas online. Since he lives in DC it would be largely impossible for us to get together to collaborate, and thankfully mockingbird and some other sites, like Creately, have stepped in to let people exchange layout ideas with ease.

Mockingbird was so intuitive that I didn't even think about reading the directions, and I had created a whole mockup before I went ahead and registered a username.

Here is what I came up with in maybe 10 minutes:

a link for a bigger window might be needed

I suppose the real test is to see if anyone can understand my little chart without a long explanation. So here is the simplest explanation I can think of: its new take on the Blippy concept, with the distinction of letting people discuss something before you buy it...

It is important to note that the mockup was made for somebody who already understood the idea, but I still wonder if it communicates the concept effectively.

Also - John couldn't seem to open MockingBird in Internet Explorer. Go figure.

In conclusion, I agree wholeheartedly with the idea that web based applications will quickly surpass home software. Of course, it doesnt take Nostradamus to say this with confidence in 2010.

In fact I'm sure Miss Cleo could handle it...