[VideoGames] 'Other Player': a conference on multiplayer games

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Other Players is a conference about the multiplayer phenomenon (December 6 - 8, 2004, in Copenhagen).

Combining technical and interface issues to create compelling digital entertainment is in itself a daunting task. In the past years, however, it has become increasingly clear that game designers must also deal with issues formerly thought to belong to fields such as sociology, political science, and architecture. While many early games - think only of Spacewar! - were multiplayer games, more complex game designs have exponentially increased the challenge of handling social dynamics and understanding the many issues arising when players interact on more ambitious scales.The Other Players conference addresses multiplayer issues - massive, large, and small.

The possible list of topics includes but is not limited to:

• Multiplayer game design • Multiplayer/collective aesthetics • Social issues in multiplayer gaming • Multiplayer interface issues • Cheating and grief play • History and development of multiplayer games

[MyResearch] CatchBob Data Visualization

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I finally computed old data drawn from CatchBob. The first picture shows our path on the campus. The second depicts the number of area visited (Patrick and I worked on a php file to parse the raw data, then we used R to compute the visualization). As we can see on the second figure, we drew a bounding box that just took into acocunt the area where the players went (this is an issue, we should reconsiderate this because it will not be possible to compare all the groups if we keep this). The third figure shows where player A (above the x axis) and player B (below the x axis) sent their messages.

[TheWorld] Casual Surveillance

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It is the second time, I got this message on my cell phone: "Hi! I found your phone number, could you call ma back?". This reminds me an old txt Watching the Watcher Watching You (1984-85 NPI/Appa Teleworks I):

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN THIS ON YOUR FAVE RAVE PHREAK BOARD: "LEAVE ME A PHONE NUMBER AND I WILL GET IN TOUCH WITH YOU..WE CAN TRADE SOMECODEZ..."

THIS PERSON IS OBVIOUSLY BLOTTED OUT OF HIS GOURD, OR HE IS TRYING TO GET SOME INFO ON YOU! FEDS WANT TO KNOW PEOPLE AND KNOW AS MUCH ABOUT THEM AS THEY CAN WITHOUT GETTING FOUND OUT. SO, DONT MESS WITH THESE KINDS OF PEOPLE.

[Space and Place] Ubicomp: no expansion of the smut industry?

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fredshouse questions the fact that the very field of Ubiquitous Computing have no sex-related applications...

Museum guides, elder care, memory prosthetics and ornithology, for sure. But how about teledildonics?

- Maybe ubicomp isn’t the right kind of medium... - Maybe it’s too early. There are almost no commercial ubi-products, and thus no real channel exists yet for delivering the goods and taking money in return - maybe we haven’t reached the right level of sophistication in our thinking about ubicomp’s potential imprint on the sensual fabric of society.

[Research] A blurry statistical guide reminder

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This is my ultimate statistical guide. It is just a snapshot of a stat summary... It is about how to select statistical tests. Test1: test if the distribution are normal

shapiro.test(score) If p-value > 0.05 the distribution is not normal

(If not normal, try with the log(score) or with the sqrt(score) : shapiro.test(log(mm)), data are transformed and the normality test is performed another time. If still not normal, try a non-parametric test : kruskall or wilcox)

Test2: variance homosedasticity (to see if variances are equals) If 2 groups: var.test If more thant 2 groups: bartlett

Here: 2 groups (with at and without): var.test(score ~ awareness) The first (score) is the quantitative indicator and the second (awareness) is the factor. Here p-value = 0.492 > 0.10 then variances are equals. That's what we want to perform the variance analysis

(If the homosedasticity test says that the variances are not equals or if the distributions are not normal: wilcox test (2 modalities) or kruskall test (more than 2)

Now we want to test the impacts of the awareness tool on score Since we have ONE factor with TWO modalities, we can perform a STUDENT TEST (if more than 1 factor: ANOVA)

t.test(score ~ awareness, var.equal=T) p.value= 0.04276 . H0 (equals means) is rejected then there is an effect of awareness on score

anova(lm(score ~ awareness)) (if F< 1 we reject in any case of pvalue)

[Cognition] Can a concept exist without words to describe it?

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Can a concept exist without words to describe it? as stated by The Economist. It is indeed a nice topic.

The Pirahã, a group of hunter-gatherers who live along the banks of the Maici River in Brazil, use a system of counting called “one-two-many”. In this, the word for “one” translates to “roughly one” (similar to “one or two” in English), the word for “two” means “a slightly larger amount than one” (similar to “a few” in English), and the word for “many” means “a much larger amount”. In a paper just published in Science, Peter Gordon of Columbia University uses his study of the Pirahã and their counting system to try to answer a tricky linguistic question.

This question was posed by Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s. Whorf studied Hopi, an Amerindian language very different from the Eurasian languages that had hitherto been the subject of academic linguistics. His work led him to suggest that language not only influences thought but, more strongly, that it determines thought.

[Prospective] SciFi and the future of social organization

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I have always been amazed by the different social/economic/political forms or organizations in science fiction novel, especially in:- Greenhouse Summer by Norman Spinrad: multinationals are replace by kibboutz-like syndicate. - Distraction by Bruce Sterling: not a true economy, ruled by ex blue-collar workers who were entirely marginalized because they had no skills of any value. Operatives who operate for the sake of nothing. - Neuromancer by William Gibson: big multinational companies with their own privatozed army (the nations are dead). - Snowcrash by Neal Steaphenson: franchise franchise franchise - ...

It seems that in lots of those novel, the authors draw their inspiration from collective structures like kibboutz (or kampong), this is an intersting track I would like to follow.

[Prospective] Sterling and Rheingold connections

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Two interesting take: Howard Rheingold's latest connection by Rheingold (in Business WeeK) and When Blobjects Rule the Earth by Sterling.Howard Rheingold:

Some kind of collective action...in which the individuals aren't consciously cooperating. A market is a great example as a mechanism for determining price based on demand. People aren't saying, "I'm contributing to the market," [they say they're] just selling something. But it adds up. (...) Google is based on the emergent choices of people who link. Nobody is really thinking, "I'm now contributing to Google's page rank." What they're thinking is, "This link is something my readers would really be interested in." They're making an individual judgment that, in the aggregate, turns out to be a pretty good indicator of what's the best source.

Then there's open source [software]. Steve Weber, a political economist at UC Berkeley, sees open source as an economic means of production that turns the free-rider problem to its advantage. All the people who use the resource but don't contribute to it just build up a larger user base. And if a very tiny percentage of them do anything at all -- like report a bug -- then those free riders suddenly become an asset.

Bruce Sterling:

The next stage is an object that does not exist yet. It needs a noun, so that we can think about it. We can call it a "Spime," which is a neologism for an imaginary object that is still speculative. (...) The most important thing to know about Spimes is that they are precisely located in space and time. They have histories. They are recorded, tracked, inventoried, and always associated with a story.(...) The people who make Spimes want you to do as much of the work for them as possible. They can data-mine your uses of the spime, and use that to improve their Spime and gain market share. This would have been called "customer relations management," in an earlier era, but in a Spime world, it's more intimate. It's collaborative, and better understood as something like open-source manufacturing. It's all about excellence. Passion. Integrity. Cross-disciplinary action. And volunteerism.

When you shop for Amazon, you're already adding value to everything you look at on an Amazon screen. You don't get paid for it, but your shopping is unpaid work for them. Imagine this blown to huge proportions and attached to all your physical possessions. Whenever you use a spime, you're rubbing up against everybody else who has that same kind of spime. A spime is a users group first, and a physical object second.

I thought there was a connection between the two: a new conception of how users cooperate to add value to a service.

[Locative Media] Locative Media Event at Amsterdam New Media Institute

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Locative Media at SMCS.11, 25.08.04, Stedelijk Museum CS on the 11th storey of the Post CS building, and in connection with the Summer School of the Amsterdam New Media Institute. Participants (smart people :): Pete Gomes, Esther Polak, Jo Walsh, Schuyler Erle, Ben Russell, Wilfried Hou Je Bek.

The various aspects of locative media will also be further examined in SMCS on 11. Artists make use of it or take advantage of it; there are clear possibilities for locative media in cartography and its public use, and they play a role in the ideology of the semantic web.

[MyResearch] Tracking football players

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Found his phd thesis: Tracking and Modelling of Team Game Interactions. The author proposes a methodology to analyse the positional data in the context of football game. His motivation is due to:

1. With regard to computer vision, the tracking of sports players from video presents a challenging domain in which many people interact, occlude, make sudden body movements, and move in a non-linear fashion covering a large area of ground. 2. The analysis of positional data from such a system to identify team game interactions is a fascinating research area. Sports games that involve two teams of players provide a rich environment for modelling cooperative, collaborative and adversarial actions of individuals and for modelling the behaviour of the teams as a whole.

Graphic of Beckham's trajectory during a game.:

In addition, the author explains in a entire section what he can do with his methodology:

Capturing the behaviour of a set of sports players would allow many exciting activities to be performed; identifying tactics, predicting future movements, recognising set-plays, identifying teams, and evaluating teamwork.