Different types of sociality in MMORPG

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At the last CSCW conference (that I miserably missed), there was a paper about collaboration in MMORPG that I ran across rencetly: Strangers and Friends: Collaborative Play in World of Warcraft by Bonnie Nardi and Justin Harris.

The authors conducted an "ethnographic study to describe how the social organization of the game and player culture affect players’ enjoyment and learning of the game. The paper describes the results, which are about the variety of collaboration types they isolated: "Strangers in the Fight", "Structured Collaborations with Friends and Strangers" with (1) "Parties, raids, and the friends list", (2) Guilds, (3) Battlegrounds and (4) Duels/trades. They also document impromptu and less structured collaborations such as "flirt, dance, drink, hug, joke, smile, laugh, and cheer". They also interestingly describe how offline social connections work, how friendships outside the game is maintained. Their stance is that this rich variety makes the game entertaining:

We can analyze the collaborations in three categories: (1) communities: (...) a community involves “common ties” and “social interactions” . Common ties include a shared interest, bonds, commitment, a set of shared values, a culture, history, and shared identity (...) (2) “knots”: (...) Engeström et al. defined “knots” as unique groups that form to complete a task of relatively short duration. Knots may also bring together strangers who spontaneously voluntarily agree to collaborate (...) (3) pairwise collaborations with friends. We will argue that two key game activities—having fun and learning the game—are enhanced by actions carried out in these arenas of collaboration, each with its own advantages. Having multiple arenas of collaboration, rather than just one, such as a community, provides a versatile, robust environment for play and learning. (...) These interleaved collaborations create a richly textured space in which play flows between community-based and lighter weight collaborations.

Why do I blog this? First because it is interesting that the CSCW community now more and more include gaming as a potential collaboration activity, meaning that the community acknowledge the collaborative aspects of gaming. This is absolutely not taken for granted in some research circles: I remember a presentation I made last year I which I described how I used a pervasive game to study collaborative processes; after my presentation one of the comment of a researcher was "here we do similar things but we study collaboration, not games" as if gaming was this damned dumb kid-oriented activity in which there was no collaboration.

A second reason I liked the paper was that it provided an interesting description of the different bonds that occur in MMORPG, with some potential actionable ideas for game design.

Having mobile presence or not?

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Location-awareness of others, also expressed as a way to afford "mobile presence" has been supported by various interfaces. I did an tentative review in my phd dissertation with some categories of the types of interfaces and metaphors that are used to do so. The coming of applications such as Jaiku, Twitter (not to mention Dodgeball, Loopt or Wayn...) are examples of such. While I am interested in this and acknowledge that some systems are better and more interesting than others (Jaiku being my favorite for its very simple interface and the way location is captured/displayed), some people expressed criticisms over them. For instance, Janne Jalkanen says that:

There's just not enough benefit in telling everyone where I are and what I am doing so that I would actively use it. I don't mind the presence on the IM networks, because that's a necessity of those networks - you can't connect unless people are online - but mobile presence is useless, because everyone is online all the time anyway. And wasn't the whole point of cell phones that you would be no longer tied to a particular place or time or situation: you can call anyone anyplace anytime (barring some social conventions against calling people in the night)? However, I know there are tightly knit groups which love these kinds of applications, because they are living 24/7 closely anyway. But I am not sure I even want to know where my friends are. I think it would just make me bitter to know that they are out partying, traveling or otherwise enjoying themselves...

On his side, Niko Nyman have other concerns:

These services suffer from Metcalfe’s Law. They’re only useful if your contacts are using them as well. (...) the effort-to-benefit ratio is not good. I could see there being a benefit of knowing whether a friend of mine is available for interruption, or seeing where my friends are going on a Saturday night. But this assumes that a friend posts updates 24/7 about what he’s doing and where, yet I need that information for maybe one hour a week, possibly less. Realizing this, the 24/7 posting just seems like too much effort.

Then there’s that aspect of just keeping tabs on my friends’ updates “for fun and entertainment”. It could be just me, but watching what others are doing, described in three words, sounds like the world’s most boring reality show.

Why do I blog this? even though I don't necessarily agree with those comments (for example "mobile presence is useless, because everyone is online all the time anyway"), they are relevant viewpoints to discuss the importance of location-awareness.

Markus Schaefer seminar at EPFL

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I attended an interesting seminar today at the EPFL School of Architecture, as part of the Interactive City/Une Cité Interactive Design Studio (led by Professor Jeffrey Huang). The seminar was given by Markus Schaffer from Hosoyaschaefer. I already blogged about stuff they did here. He presented some examples of their work, mostly about visualizations; for example a map representing the evolution of "consumer psychology" or an evolution tree of car typologies (becomes a system of differentiation), maps of ratio between McDonalds burgers prices and salaries. Their work seems to be fell directed towards representing the globalization of the world.

That one was quite evocative (representing how Guangzhou became the center of a system/web):

He then move to the topic of Switzerland with some very interesting map (see their or here): "coming back to SWitzerland was like coming back to a really small world" (Markus previously worked for AMO/Rem Koolhas before heading back to Zürich). My favorite is certainly that one, which shows the importance of emigration in Switzerland (both as population and as founders of the most important companies there):

About AI and HCI.

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Grudin, J. (2006). Timelines: Turing maturing: the separation of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction, interactions, Volume 13, Number 5 (2006), Pages 54-57. This paper addresses an interesting topic to me, the connections between artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction, two fields that belongs to Computer Science. It tackles the problem of why HCI has not been closer to AI. The article goes through the different steps of AI history and describes some issues related to that.

AI's focus on future possibilities has relied heavily on government funding. CHI, focused on applications that are or could be in widespread use, has received support primarily from industry. This results in different priorities, methods, and assessment criteria. (...) With appropriately modest goals, machine learning is contributing to interaction design, often by focusing on specific user behaviors. Working AI applications strengthen the tie to HCI by requiring acceptable interfaces. Still, not many researchers contribute to both CHI and IUI, much less to CHI and mainstream AI venues. But AI researchers are acquiring basic HCI skills and HCI researchers employ AI techniques. Shared understanding may be indispensable for the next generation of researchers and system builders.

Why do I blog this? the article describes how AI and CHI are intertwined. This was of interest to me because my background is in cognitive sciences (psychology, lingusitics, AI, neuroscience) and I followed AI for a while. I have to admit that I left this aside in a past few years, rather focusing a lot on user experience research (I turned myself to ethnography and social sciences). I now feel the gap between the HCI I am interested in and AI issues.

PAC-LAN mixed reality game

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In the last issue of the ACM Computers In Entertainment, there is a paper entitled PAC-LAN: mixed-reality gaming with RFID-enabled mobile phones (by Omer Rashid, Will Bamford, Paul Coulton, Reuben Edwards, Jurgen Scheible) that I found very interesting. The paper describes how the incorporation of RFID readers in cell phones can turn it into a game platform to allow interaction with physical objects. The authors present an enhanced mixed-reality version of Pacman. Some excerpts that I found interesting: first the game itself is curious:

PAC-LAN is a novel version of the video game Pacman, in which human players use the Alexandra Park accommodation complex at Lancaster University as the game maze. The player who takes the role of the main PAC-LAN character collects game pills (using a Nokia 5140 mobile phone equipped with a Nokia Xpress-onTM RFID reader shell), in the form of yellow plastic discs fitted with stick-on RFID tags. Four other players take the role of the “ghosts” who attempt to hunt down the PAC-LAN player

It's funny to see how the pacman game is revisited over time (see for instance this version, PACManhattan or Human Pacman)

It's not well discussed in the game but I found pertinent to have the representation of the GPRS network/maze, and to design subsequently around it. That can offer a way to think about Matthew Chalmers' seamful design: how can the seams be exploited to design compelling applications.

I also found very pertinent this idea of "game monitor" developed for monitoring and server administration while in the field. Maybe it's because as a researcher I am interested by all the applications/dashboard that would help me to make sense of how the application is used.

The user experience analysis is very informative (for instance "identify tactics that became apparent during gameplay) and what has attracted my attention overall is the "space-time" analysis. The authors used a space-time plot (still have to check this Bamford 2006 reference) for data obtained during a trial and shows PAC-LAN being hunted down by a ghost:

Here is what they found using this technique:

From this space-time analysis, this particular ghost, despite a delayed start, was often very close to PAC-LAN, and therefore very active in the game. This can be measured dynamically within the game by performing a real-time cumulative correlation calculation between the path of the PAC-LAN player and each ghost. At some point in the game, the server can trigger a power move for the most active ghost. The points or power move benefits will not only encourage ghosts to be more active in the game, but could also result in more collaborative play, e.g., two ghosts lure PAC-LAN into an area where a third ghost is hiding with a power move.

Why do I blog this? because this is an interesting attempt to use mobile phones and RFID to create an pervasive game. The authors are trying to go beyond this concept by adapting the Sega Megadrive classic, Toejam and Earl, with NFC-enabled phones to allow near-field interactions (with touch). They indeed assume that "direct interaction as part of the game may produce a greater collaborative gaming experience", which is a good question to investigate with those technologies.

Inflatable art and future iterations of Movable Feast

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There is a very interesting piece by Marc Tuters in the Glowlab zine about inflatable art. It's actually a critical summary of the"Movable Feast/ Fête Mobile" project at ZeroOne San Jose/ISEA2006.

At its most conceptual level, the Movable Feast/ Fête Mobile project extrapolated current techno-political issues into a possible future scenario in which communities are locally connected through peering protocols while disconnected from Internet as a whole. The project was thus presented as a prototype for an arts satellite for a world in which the digital public realm is increasingly corporate and surveillance is ubiquitous, in which participants would remotely view their surroundings via an onboard camera, as well as exchange media files through a wireless local file server.

What is interesting IMO is also the description of the future iteration of the project as described by the authors:

...as a gravitational node for a reality-based video game. The rules of the game itself will be simple. Teams, situated on playing field, vie for control of the intelligent blimp, much as they would a ball in the sport of rugby. Participants thus attempt to control the blimp’s navigation on the field by organizing themselves, on the fly, into shapes and patters of movement recognizable to the blimp’s onboard vision system. While the latter may seems a departure form the more high-concept approach we developed for ISEA, at its core it remains theoretically informed by our interest in exploring new forms of collectivity in urban space. The phenomena of emergent self-organization is as central to terrorist networks as it is to popular democratic uprisings. As artists, we have thus settled on "play" as our chosen approach to explore facets of our individual and collective relations within the space of networked art.

Why do I blog this? first because I liked the project and second because of this game concept that seems pretty curious and relevant to explore ideas related to people's relation with space and networks.

LEGO joystick

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An intriguing joystick made out of LEGO:

Der Joystick besteht im wesentlichen aus einer Achse, die als Hebel benutzt wird. Sie kann vor, zurück, nach links und nach rechts bewegt werden. Der Hebel wird dabei von Gummibändern wieder in seine Ausgangsposition zurückgezogen. Zwei Rotationssensoren erfassen über eine 1:3-Übersetzung die Bewegungen in X- und Y-Richtung. Die Genauigkeit reicht dabei aus, die Koordinaten etwa in den Bereich von -5 bis 5 abzubilden.

Why the hell do I blog this? going through some papers about innovative game controllers, I was struck by the interesting potential of DIY/reconfigurable joysticks (see for instance that project). Maybe I should use LEGO bricks with kids to see how they would prototype the joystick they dream of.

Narrative represented as paths

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A representation from "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Oxford World's Classics)" by Laurence Sterne illustrating the Linear Progression of the Narrative:

Why do I blog this? I found interesting how a story could be turned into an illustration. Still trapped in timeline visualizations for my phd research, I was looking for curious examples of how to represent events that occur over time. In this case, what is relevant is the way the illustration depicts a non-linera path with deviations and circles.

Mass storage stone

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I found Michael Leung's "mass storage stone" stunning:

Mass Storage Stone - prototype, 2005 A portable 4 GB hard drive that fits into your pocket, and has similar qualities to a stone - textured and slightly cold to touch 53 x 40 x 25 mm - synthetic resin

Why do I blog this? I actually like the metaphor of the stone for an external hard drive; the shape is also convenient.

User Interface Friction

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In a short note posted on ACM Ubiquity, Andreas Pfeiffer describes the notion of "User Interface Friction":

We use it to describe and quantify the differences in fluidity and reactivity that exist between different operating systems, between software applications, even between different digital devices (music players, cameras, cell-phones, among others).

We can find examples of User Interface Friction in many places. Did you ever notice how menu behavior can slow you down when you are trying to access a command, like selecting a program from the Start menu in Windows? That's User Interface Friction. Did you ever remark how scrolling through long lists of songs on a MP3 player can be annoying? User Interface Friction again. In fact, any user interface has some degree of friction. Some of it we may not notice, despite that fact that it exists, other examples can be severely annoying. (...) User Interface Friction is inherent in any modern, menu-driven computer system and any device that sports a graphical user interface, and depends on a number of aspects, ranging from the speed at which the system displays a menu or sub-menu, to the efficiency of the mouse.

Berlin: Temporal Topographies

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Berlin: Temporal Topographies is a project by the Stanford Humanities Lab that investigates the historical and cultural layers of a city space.

The project takes Berlin-arguably one of the most rich, contradictory, and multi-layered cities in the world-as its point of departure and seeks to develop a research platform and pedagogical methodology for studying the history of the city space. The key objectives of the project are: 1. To develop a web-based research framework for the representation of the topographical and historical layers of Berlin by creating virtual reality maps of the synchronic and diachronic transformations of the city 2. To develop a pedagogical methodology informed by new media studies for teaching about Berlin, including the creation of curricular material for use in hybrid classrooms.

Why do I blog this? since I am interested in blogjects and history of objects, this project is curious regarding the investigation of different spatial and cultural layers.

A wireless smart ball that senses position, direction, speed and acceleration

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Via, this intriguing new device described in the press release as a wireless smart ball that senses position, direction, speed and acceleration :

STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM),one of the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturers, and Ball-IT Oy, a leading provider of advanced real-time wireless sensor solutions, today announced a novel MEMS-based wireless motion-control device. Making its debut at ST’s stand at Electronica 2006, the smart golfball-sized object can operate as a free-hand personal computer mouse, compass, measuring tape, pedometer, or a 3D-object controller

Why do I blog this? As Gene Becker says "Put that in your blogject and smoke it ;-)" (a private joke related to some other quotes from ubiquitous computing discussion). Anyway, what is interesting here is that it can be seen as a standardized wireless and sensing controller. Though the company says "I believe we’ve sensed the market’s direction and are on the ball", the observer is still left out with no precise ideas about what they want people to do with it (no worries some people have some ideas). Here is the only mention:

ST’s acceleration sensors are used to provide a motion-activated user interface in Nintendo’s new home console, Wii.(...) ST’s unique portfolio of two- and three-axis MEMS accelerometers targets a wide range of low-g applications from motion-based user interfaces to hard-disk drive and automobile-passenger protection. Market analysts predict that by 2010 there will be one accelerometer in each mobile phone and every portable hard-disk-based device (laptops, audio/video players), representing a total market of more than 1.2 billion units.

Aaron Koblin's visualizations of commercial air traffic

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I was recently stunned by Aaron Koblin's visualizations of commercial air traffic:

The following flight pattern visualizations are the result of experiments leading to the project Celestial Mechanics by Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne. FAA data was parsed and plotted using the Processing programming environment. The frames were composited with Adobe After Effects and/or Maya.

Why do I blog this? leaving aside the ecological problem of airtraffic, what is fantastic here is to see the overlap of flights, there is never a situation in which you have all those lines; geospatial traces up the air shows the history of flights, a kind of new layer in the atmosphere where people temporarily navigate. The movie is awesome.

Faces on street tech, Jesus on objects and some related thoughts

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A trend I have spotted in street art is the addition of elements on technologies so that it looks more human. Based on the perceived anthropomorphy of certain technological features one can find on a street (tubes, street lights, power adapters...), it's curious to see how adding few signs may try to humanize them. Two examples, one in Madrid (left) and another in Paris (right):Face on Technology (2) Face on technology

Why do I blog this? that's a noticeable and curious trend one can see. I also blogged about a similar phenomenon: pareidolia "a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (usually an image) being mistakenly perceived as recognizable”. The most known example is how people tend to see Jesus' face on any object. In the case of pareidolia, it's the interpretation of people that is at stake. In the case of the above street art, the perceived pattern is augmented by drawings or duct tape.

In the case of this drawn faces on street objects, what is at stake? I'd be interested by people's reaction? is these eyes make people less confortable than the real big-brotherish eyes of street camera/CCTV? are they perceived as augmentation by street-artists? Would the design of street object include this sort of metaphor?

Imagine if all the technology you can find down the street would have eyes pointing at you.

Turning a conference intro a creative event

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One of the innovation we're trying to bring forward at LIFT07 (7-8-9 February 2007 Geneva, Switzerland) is to have a more creative and interactive platform during the conference. This is going to be LIFT+, a concept intended as a bridge between creativity and pragmatism, allowing all possible forms of interaction, gathering individuals working freely on a specific topic - DIGITAL FRAGILITY – to evoke the overwhelming presence of connectivity in daily life. The whole point is to make the conference environment more creative so that people could participate and work out some ideas related to the concept of digital fragility. The website describes some of the project that we plan to have:

  • Plotter: Content and selected works will be printed (four plotters will output content uninterrupted) during the conference in the main entrance.
  • Double Photo: Build a tiny portrait-studio in the event’s premises, a small world (somewhat exterior to all the fuzz of such a conference) dedicated to shooting portraits.
  • Post-it Floor: You post literally – by writing on a post it - some words and its meaning. You’ll have to draw tehm with real pens
  • Snake Run: SnakeRun is an actual sized two-player snake game. Each participant controls a virtual snake that is projected on the playing field.
  • ...

Why do I blog this? as one the organizer, I can tell how stimulating it is to think about how to go beyond sit-and-listen-to-a-talk conference! We're trying to do our best to do something more innovative.

BlueStates: sense social relationships and build a social network

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BlueStates (see also here) by Mark Pesce, John Tonkin, an artwork presented at ISEA2006 that "art project which uses bluetooth - wireless networking found in many mobile phones and personal computers - to sense social relationships and, from that, to build an emergent model of an individual's social network".

BlueStates is by its nature a highly participatory work. Anyone will be able to visit the website - at http://relationalspace.org/ - and create their own views into relational space. Residents of cities around the world will be encouraged to add their own sensors to the global network of sensors, expanding the database to incorporate the inner social life of their own cities. Beyond this, the work's creators have committed to releasing all software developed for the project as as free and open source software (under the GNU General Public License), believing this will encourage others to create their own projects in relational space. Finally, artists will be provided with tools to that will allow them to permute the data gathered by BlueStates: Exploring Relational Space in new and unique ways.

Visualizations would be like:

In this case, a scanner named "Minerva" has found a number of other Bluetooth devices in close proximity to it, named "Hermes", "Hermione", "johnt-phone", and several others. Because Bluetooth signals are very low-power, a scanner can only sense other Bluetooth devices within a radius of anywhere from 15 to 50 feet from the scanner - so each of these devices were within 50 feet of the scanner. The scanner then sends the results of the roll call back to the bluestates database. Computers running the scanner software use their internet connection to send roll-call data to our database.

Why do I blog this? this is yet another relevant product with regards to location-sensing in city contexts; it's also related to my work (to be included in my phd chapter about location-awareness applications) since I am categorizing those interfaces.

DNA tatoo = Datoo

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Design company Frogdesign imagined the concept of Datoo (DNA tatoo):

The concept of the Dattoo arose in response to current trends towards increasing connectivity and technology as self-expression. (... The idea of DNA tattoos (Dattoos) is to use the body itself as hardware and interaction platform, through the use of minimally-invasive, recyclable materials. (...) All hardware would be created on demand and assembled via a special online design portal. Users view, test-drive, and select their product from a variety of options, both functional and aesthetic. They also set the lifecycle of the product, to be utilized for a few hours or a much longer amount of time. Once users are satisfied with their specific configurations, they have this fully-functioning circuitry - including all UI-interactive and display functions - “printed” onto recommended areas of their skin.

Utilizing future technology, Dattoos have yet to reach fruition. The final concept aims to achieve a convergence of the following capabilities: DNA-reader and identification technology; nanosensors and interactive “touch reading” for finger tips (Braille); pattern and image recognition; self-learning and educational applications; living materials that change shape and feel; flexible OLED displays; full voice interaction, directional laser speakers; bionic nano chips; and cyborg components.

Why do I blog this? though speculative, this concept is curious because he it shows how some current practice (tatoo, personalization) are expanded and applied to the "body as the interface" issue.

About urban playgrounds

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Urbanism magazine Metropolis featured an article about city recreational space interestingly entitled "The Politics of Play (by Linda Baker). It starts from the observation that "The playground is the McDonald’s of landscape design" since it is the same flat surface everywhere:

(picture taken by myself in Lyon, France)

Some excerpts I found relevant below. First some reasons about this low innovation:

Much of the design momentum originates in Denmark, Holland, and Germany, where children are increasingly viewed as an indicator group for successful urban planning. (...) “The whole space becomes a play element” (...) Over the past 15 years international play-safety guidelines have spawned a ubiquitous crop of red, yellow, and blue structures rooted in “impact-attenuating” surfaces. (...) Eliminating spontaneity and risk from children’s play not only discourages physical activity, critics claim, but deprives young people of the experiences they need to grow and develop as individuals.

But some people came up with interesting ideas:

At the Nature Playground, which opened in Valbyparken—Copenhagen’s largest park—several years ago, steep hills and felled branches share space with a sand-and-gravel pit and a village of woven willow huts and fences. There are wildflower meadows, a large snail-shaped mound with a spiral path, and five whimsical towers crafted from wood, metal, and Plexiglas (...) a ten-foot “mountain” fronted by a boulder climbing wall, a stream (or “leaping chasm”), and winding paths with fairy-tale-like arbors. “The play is not prescribed, so the kids have more opportunities to problem solve and use their imaginations,” says Leslie Fredette, a second-grade teacher.

This raises relevant questions about urbanism:

“We need not only new types of playgrounds but also an urban environment that makes it possible for children to participate in urban life,” Blinkert says. Freiburg’s next step is to reclaim the street as a safe place for children’s play, where kids can kick a ball, meet new people, or simply watch the world go by.

Why do I blog this? because I am interested in how space (and its infrastructures) shape people's behavior (ranging from physical to social or cognitive processes). There is a lot to think about here and this is very important questions lately addressed as "the architecture as the interface". This is then bound to my interest towards both urban computing and social science research.

Also to keep an eye on about this topic: PlayITSound, a danish company that work on how to enhance/improve playground to be more creative and playful. I don't know what Kompan (one the world’s largest manufacturers of playground equipment) thinks about that.