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Digital Search II: A User Perspective on Database Design

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

If I’m anxious about Google becoming a database vendor, it’s partly because the user experience with existing databases has been so dismal to date. On the other hand, Google’s understanding of and commitment to usability is head and shoulders above any of the other vendors in that world. Maybe Google’s completed version of Book Search will have an interface that invites rather than repels use, and has a stable long-term vision driving its design. If so, it might almost be worth it to just let them go ahead and fence off the commons, for the same reason that the consolidation of monopoly capitalism in the late 19th Century at least paid off in terms of standardization across a broad range of products and technologies.

Working on a couple of new projects, I’ve been diving back deeply into catalogs and search spaces and portals. It’s mostly been a depressing experience. Here and there, I have a satisfying feeling that something I’ve used for years has steadily improved. Our own local catalog Tripod is so vastly better in basic design and navigation than a decade ago that it’s almost startling. Another old stalwart, JSTOR, feels more intuitive in its design than it once did.

Travel across various search spaces and databases, though, and several basic frustrations arise.

1. Databases which default to an advanced rather than simple interface upon first access. Sometimes that’s because a portal points to the advanced interface, sometimes it’s because the basic interface is a hidden or obscured option.

2. Basic interfaces which are cluttered or require toggling four or more separate drop-down menus or other settings even to carry out a basic search.

3. Advanced interfaces which are really cluttered, with constraining menus, toggles or radio buttons scattered across multiple columns. Sometimes a search page looks like someone vomited up every kind of interactable object that’s ever been used in a form or UI. (Or as in the case of ISI Web of Science, with a marketing slogan at the top that’s made to look like interactable text.)

4. Diversity of interface designs. By now, we really should be converging on a common design. Instead, every vendor seems to feel an obligation to maintain a different design as a branding tool, not to aid users.

5. Constant shuffling and pointless tinkering with the UI for databases. It’s one thing to make a really big shift (say, towards an inviting basic entry-point interface away from a cluttered entry-point advanced interface) and another thing to constantly move menus around in a page layout. But the latter is very common behavior.

6. Really low standards for the quality of digitization and for searching within digitized text. JSTOR is a happy exception, but some other digitization projects are just hair-tearingly poor once you get into the nitty-gritty and start to make serious use of the resources they hold. There’s at least one company doing archival digitization where I find the type of material they’re digitizing appealing but I’m prepared to argue against ever buying anything they’re doing because the design and usability standards of their work are so slapdash.

7. Fragmentation of material. Rather than moving towards amalgamation and interoperability across databases, you really get the sense that everybody’s been busy grabbing at whatever piles of text they can lay their hands on, building the biggest little mudhill they can manage to put up, and then building walls around it. There are interstitial services that help a user “jump” from one little fragmented collection to another and portals that aim to be a “top level” to return to, sure, but we should be doing better by now.

Posted in Academia, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property | 1 Comment »

Digital Search I: Google Poisons the Well

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

I am apparently not the only person who feels a bit bait-and-switched by the state of Google’s digitization projects after the settlement. So much so that Sergey Brin himself has sallied forth to defend the current terms in the New York Times.

Several years ago, my feeling was that the main forces opposed to Google’s digitization of libraries were some of same groups and interests opposed to digitization in principle, or to open-access forms of publication.

Sure, there were also those with specific suspicions about Google’s intentions, most particularly regarding how the company intended to profit from the project. In retrospect, those suspicions were warranted.

Back when the digitization of some big academic libraries began under Google’s supervision, the company tended to politely sidestep direct questions about their own financial interests in the project. I recall several conversations I was involved in where the speculation was that Google intended to operate a book store to compete with Amazon, focused on in-print books that turned up in searches.

Or that the company was interested in working on the next frontier of problems with search technology itself, which required going beyond the clever mirroring that Google presently employs (e.g., using people do on the web as a kind of map of how knowledge is connected and what kind of knowledge is important). Searching a huge space of scanned books and document for relevant content might take a completely different approach to work well, and that approach might add up to a technology as lucrative as Google’s initial approaches to search turned out to be. Or that the company would somehow link the project to its existing advertising business.

The fear was always that Google would try to grab hold of the “orphan works” in large research libraries once they were digitized and sell those back to research institutions on an exclusive basis, to become the king vendor atop the mountain of digital databases. Well, once the settlement took on concrete shape, that turned out to be exactly where the company was heading.

I was initially welcoming to Google’s initiative because I believe that digitization is crucial for the improved dissemination of knowledge. I think scholars in many fields have been for a great many years frustratingly indifferent to dissemination as a primal commandment. Digitization at this scale is expensive, so I was always open to the idea that Google would try to make back its money in some fashion. The problem is that they’ve chosen to try and make it back in the one manner that will permanently impede rather than enable new conditions of information circulation.

Brin disingenuously suggests that out-of-print work is available now only to those who can afford to hop on a plane and fly to a library which holds such work. There’s a very small class of materials about which this is true: rare books, archival holdings and the like. Which are not the materials being digitized at the moment. Otherwise, there are a fairly large number of institutions which participate in inter-library loan or in more regional equivalents. The books may have to fly on a plane, but not the researchers.

Making a Google-digitized collection available to libraries for an annual fee doesn’t permanently open up that collection to a wider circulation. The basic problem with the entire economy of digitized research materials at the moment is that the whole apparatus has become a gun held permanently to the temple of libraries: work that they formerly owned outright is now rented for variable fees from vendors who are mostly interested in the extension of their own monopolies over information rather than on lowering barriers to use. Google’s entry into that economy just turns that gun into a rocket launcher.

I don’t mind it if Google Book Search recaptures its costs through ad revenue or through sales of in-print books. I don’t really care that much about whether the revenue goes to a rights-holder, or about making efforts to find rights-holders. I think some of that concern is a red herring, and is mostly about making sure that existing publishers get whatever cut of the pie they think they can snatch out of the whole deal. Scholars mostly don’t research and disseminate for royalty payments. Worrying about a slightly bigger share of chump-change is for chumps.

I do mind if the orphan-works content of Google Book Search is something that Google owns and sells access to on a vendor basis. When Brin titles his piece, “A Library to Last Forever”, my instinctive riposte is “A Monopoly to Last Forever”, that this is the worst kind of digital enclosure at the largest possible scale. This is really one of those moments where we either make digitization something that permanently opens up a knowledge-producing commons or something that permanently is controlled and exploited by a single interest.

In that context, it’s not only unconvincing for Brin to defend the project in terms of its urgent necessity, it’s actively hackle-raising that he does so. When I hear something like, “Hey, don’t worry about the fine print or the nitty-gritty details, we can work that out later. The most important thing is that we get it done, right? Think of the children!” what I hear instead is, “Ya got trouble, my friend, right here in River City”.

Posted in Academia, Books, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property | 6 Comments »

From Gourmet to the Daily Gazette

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

I was reminded for the first time in years of the existence of Gourmet magazine a few weeks ago when a foodie colleague of mine started talking about some recipes she’d made from it recently.

I used to subscribe to Gourmet some years ago. I stopped reading it because at some point, I just didn’t enjoy a monthly reminder of travel I’d never be able to afford, dining I was unlikely to indulge in very often, and recipes that mostly didn’t excite me. When Gourmet made the news this past week due to its cancellation, it turned out that I wasn’t the only person who had felt the same way.

I didn’t stop being a foodie when I stopped reading it. I didn’t stop reading it because the Internet came into being and replaced old-media. Something did change in my media and consumer habits, though, and maybe the Internet has had something to do with this change (whether cause or effect, I’m not sure). I stopped thinking of some of my media and leisure consumption as habitual, or as a kind of personal tradition. And I started having a much more pronounced hair trigger when it came to changing that consumption. Gourmet or anything like it stopped being habitus, a thing that defined an aspirational life or state of mind. I started reading Cook’s instead because it seemed practical and useful. But I’m just as much on a hair trigger with that as I am with anything these day. Christopher Kimball’s completely inane frontspiece to every single issue is enough alone to make me pull that trigger, but in the latest issue, they’ve started sequestering some of the content in the print magazine behind a paywall on the website. That’s pretty much the end for me.

This is the real issue for a lot of old media. They used to be a habit, a tradition, a part of life. As such, you ignored what you didn’t use or like the same way you ignore a tear or a stain in a piece of furniture that you otherwise find comfortable and can’t afford to replace anyway. But now I think a lot of audiences have a much more active imaginative engagement with what they read, and much less patience for a publication that isn’t nimble in its response to the needs and desires of its readership. You go to old media for a kind of quality you can’t get in new media, but now we expect much more for our (relatively small) payment.

——-

On the other side of the fence, though, it’s curious to see how much an old rhetoric about an expectation of quality still informs the way that some readers interact with new media. I was struck a bit by this right here at Swarthmore recently. In recent years, there’s been an online campus newsletter, the Daily Gazette, in addition to the regular campus newspaper, the Phoenix, both published and written by students.

Both publications have editorial staffs and operate under an old-media umbrella in the sense that they’re composed of articles that the editorial staff has commissioned or reviewed and decided to publish, rather than being new-media platforms that are open to any content. In practice, though, it seems to me that any student who really wanted to write something could publish it in either, particularly in the Daily Gazette, which is purely digital and isn’t affected by an economy of limited space.

Recently, one student published a satire aimed at the activists behind the Kick Coke campaign here. Several students wrote a column in reply complaining about low standards in student journalism and calling upon editors and reporters to publish better, more meaningfully investigative work.

The divide between old media environments and new media ones isn’t about print and digital. Mostly, old media is now clearly a packaged product. I buy it, I consume it. If I’m sufficiently unhappy with it, I stop consuming it. Print journalists lately have been proclaiming themselves instead to be public servants, to be an organ of civil society, and made it out that the consumption of print journalism is a form of republican virtue. This may have been true at some point in the past, but if that’s the social contract between readers and reporters, the reporters broke the contract unilaterally some time ago.

If I’m unhappy with the content of new media, well, first off, change the channel. There’s a lot out there. If I don’t find the blogs I like, switch to Twitter feeds or asynchronous bulletin boards or what have you. More importantly, roll my own, if I can.

Sure, I couldn’t do a blog reporting on current conditions in Guinea because I’m not there at the moment. But somebody can. But I could and do blog about issues in higher education, scholarly writing, U.S. politics and popular culture. Making your own media tends to connect you to others who are making media that provides some of what you can’t provide for yourself.

In a new media environment, complaining that someone should not publish work that you find to be of low quality is mismatched rhetoric ported over from old media consumption. You can certainly criticize such work, though often I think it’s best to just ignore what you really disdain. If it’s not what you think should be said, though, it’s up to you to say it. So in the case of the Swarthmore debate, for example, it feels oddly antiquated to me to see students (especially students with activist aspirations) arguing that it is the responsibility of student editors to provide the readership with a different kind of content while suppressing other kinds of content. A digital publication can shrink or grow dynamically in response to the amount of material provisioned to it by authors and creators. It doesn’t have a resource or price limitation that forces an editor to choose to publish a satire or an investigation, a light piece on fashion or a serious treatment of a public issue.

For a student at a college like this one, there’s nothing easier than writing what you’d like to write about the life and culture of the institution. There’s a lot of information lying around waiting to be used. The best complaint is not a demand that others write and publish differently. It’s rolling your own, saying what you think ought to be said, putting your own name and reputation on the line.

I’m completely happy to relate to some media and forms of information passively, to buy it and stop buying it as a product depending on my satisfaction with its quality. I might even warn a producer that they need to change the product to keep me pleased. But if it’s the kind of media where barriers to an active, participatory role are low, that’s not the right kind of response. Then my job is to make what I want rather than demand that it be made.

——-

Addition: It turns out Christopher Kimball knows that people hate his stupid frontspiece and doesn’t care. Bang! Goes my hairtrigger.

Posted in Academia, Blogging, Food, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Swarthmore | 6 Comments »

Course Zero

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

There’s an interesting article at Inside Higher Education about the new breed of peer-to-peer style sites for collecting student notes and course materials, officially for the purposes of providing study aids. In reality, at least some of the sites in question look more like an open-source reinvention of the ye olde buy-a-term-paper services, or as IHE points out, the old file-cabinet-in-the-frat-house that collects old exams.

I’ve never gotten too agitated about this kind of site before, because I partly think that there’s an easy way to avoid being vulnerable to the misuse of these kinds of resources: don’t use the same exam year after year, and don’t give essay prompts that are conventional or typical assignments on a common subject matter. It’s easier to spot a student who has turned in someone else’s work when what they turn in is weirdly non-responsive to the particular prompt you handed out.

That said, I think it’s worth keeping tabs on what these kinds of companies are up to. So I went off and looked at Course Hero, the main focus of the article. All I can say to the CEO of Course Hero is, don’t insult my intelligence by claiming that you don’t use webcrawlers to prowl .edu domains to harvest content for the site. What you find in the folders for Swarthmore is a bunch of junk pulled straight out of specific folders on the server, with the server folder titles on it, most of them connected to the oldest layers of our web presence. Almost none of the stuff in there has got anything to do with actual courses taught here: it’s some old .pdf handouts, some faculty c.v.s, a few papers or publications by faculty. Useless to anyone, especially to some would-be plagiariser at another college who is hunting for a paper to rip off. It’s a lot of noise. But seriously, don’t even try to pretend that this is all coming from user submissions, that’s laughable.

I assume that the main reason for stuffing the site full of junk grabbed by a crawler is to give the impression that the site is full of content in order to incentivize students at various institutions to submit their papers and exams in order to gain access. If you look around the web, you see a lot of sites with user-created content that kind of fell short of a critical mass and now are struggling to figure out how to get people to continue to submit content. Review-based sites in particular often struggle to keep users motivated to contribute content on a regular basis rather than just when they’re really pissed off at a service or product. I don’t think this kind of strategy is going to work for getting around that problem: it’s just a digital Potemkin Village, and pretty easily seen through.

The one open question for me about a site like this is what I ought to think or feel when I do happen to spot a student’s work that’s been uploaded to the site, which I think I might have spotted while looking through our campus folder there. There isn’t any way to forbid a student to share their own intellectual property, and I wouldn’t want to try. On the other hand, it’s hard not to feel wary about someone who participates in a site of this kind, because I can’t see any genuine motive for it. A digital activist who is exploring how to use social networking for the general good is going to invest in some other kind of project, and a student who wants feedback on their work is also going to look elsewhere. A student who needs extra support for coursework at a place like Swarthmore has a host of local options that are high-quality and very targeted, as opposed to the assortment of junk and miscellany cluttering up a site like Course Hero. Why would you upload papers and exams to a site like this if not to keep the option of grabbing a paper or two when crunch time comes?

Posted in Academia, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property, Swarthmore | 4 Comments »

A Facepalm Moment

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

There’s a lot of discussion going around gaming sites about Stardock CEO Brad Wardell announcing that his company would boycott UPS because UPS was pulling its ads from Fox.

Wardell’s backtracking since the story began to circulate is the kind of mix-and-matching of gestures that makes me rub my temples wearily. His objection to the UPS boycott, he said, had nothing to do with Fox News or Glenn Beck, just that UPS had made a public statement that they were conducting a boycott. His own statement wasn’t intended to be a public action, because he made it on a Facebook page to hundreds of friends. He doesn’t like companies that try to push ideology, but he’s not trying to do the same. The Internet twists what people mean to say or do.

Ok. Wardell is not the first to feel that what happens on Facebook, stays on Facebook. I’m sympathetic when the person saying that is an 18-year old who is stunned that some stranger is making fun of a humiliating picture or statement from a Facebook page. I’m not so sympathetic of a professional who has by his own recounting been in business with digital media for 20 years professing equal surprise that what was said on Facebook circulated beyond Facebook.

I’m also a bit confused by Wardell’s views on companies, ideology and advertising. Stardock makes interesting games, but it’s equally known for a taking a very strong position against conventional forms of DRM, a position which Wardell and others have definitely seen as extending beyond their own products. That makes perfect sense: DRM protection is a core issue for digital media producers. But consumer products companies that advertise on television similarly have every reason in the world to be concerned with the associations that can form between the content of such media and the products advertised alongside that content. If you were hoping to reach the audience for some programming at a particular network, but that network as a whole had gained a very strong negative reputation with some of your customer base due to one or two provocative programs, why not try to influence the network towards being a more favorable advertising environment? If you’re trying to influence the network, why not say something publically about your own company’s position?

Let’s suppose Wardell’s decision to prefer FedEx as a carrier was completely private, that he just told his fulfillment people to switch and didn’t tell anybody why he was doing it. So now UPS doesn’t know what they’ve done to lose Stardock’s business. If Wardell doesn’t want politics to influence business, he can’t even tell them that he’s made a switch for some reason other than pricing, because surely it’s a political position to argue that in some aspect of life, we shouldn’t have political positions. So what’s the point of calling down to his employees and telling them to switch to FedEx? Personal whimsy fueled by quick-fire emotional reactions, I suppose. I’m kind of thinking that’s not really the best way to run a business, but there’s precedent enough for eccentric if successful CEOs sending off OCD-fueled memos about the seams in the fabric of an employee’s shirt.

If a CEO is entitled to shift company policy based on momentary annoyance, it’s even easier for consumers to let momentary annoyance influence what are already whimsical buying decisions. I have a lot of things to play and view, my cup runneth over. I tend to find, though, that it’s these kinds of quick and emotional reactions to companies that become lasting buying rules for me. I need a lot of persuading to get involved in a formal, highly coordinated boycott campaign, but very little to trigger a kind of private decision to avoid a particular company. When I get really irked by dumb management of a product launch, for example, that tends to lock in a “don’t buy from those guys unless they give me some reason to reverse my feelings” attitude if the company’s products are ones that I can take or leave or are interchangeable with products from other companies.

Posted in Consumerism, Advertising, Commodities, Games and Gaming, Information Technology and Information Literacy | No Comments »

The Limits to Shill

Monday, August 24th, 2009

I continue to feel pretty diffident about the controversy among anthropologists about the Human Terrain Team and other uses of qualitative social science by the U.S. military over the past decade or so. The issue for me is not whether this is an intrinsic misuse of anthropological or qualitative research, blurring the lines between legitimate fieldwork and other uses of ethnographic methodology. That’s partly because I feel that anthropologists have a tendency to draw overly stark lines between their own disciplinary traditions and all other forms of fieldwork, usually in the process implying that all other kinds and styles of qualitative fieldwork are both ethically and methodologically suspect. Ethnography is spying of a kind. Or to flip it around, there’s plenty of kinds of intelligence-gathering that take place in plain sight.

The issue for me is not whether institutions like the police or the military can legitimately use anthropology. It’s whether those institutions are prepared to accept what they’d learn by doing that kind of research honestly, or whether the use of anthropologists or other researchers is just a way to put sugar on a brute-force shit sandwich. At least in some cases, what our military or other militaries might have learned in the past by doing genuine, sophisticated anthropological research is that there is no way to achieve the declared objectives of a military mission, and that you either alter the objectives or end the mission. In Afghanistan, for example, I’m not sure that it would lead to successful counter-insurgency if all ISAF Forces became profoundly culturally sensitive. It would help, as would the casual overuse of aerial bombardment or brutal intrusion into communities. But culturally sensitive or not, the ISAF don’t live there in the truly long-term sense, they’re not a part of villages where the residents have to make choices about whether to collaborate or tolerate Taliban forces who have an intimate knowledge of the social networks in that village and work with people who do live there.

So it’s fine to study something using any method or specialists you like. Just be ready to hear what that method is going to tell you.

——-

A very different example of the same issue. The New York Times today has a piece on how market researchers and others are using computer analysis to try and identify embedded sentiments within online discourse. You don’t need a computer to do that, just use the hermeneutical engine located inside your own head and do some reading.

Use computers if you like to spot trends, I suppose, but to really know what a surge in expressed feelings means in any given Internet forum means, you really have to be a long-term follower of the flow of conversation and communication at that forum or others like it. Saying you’ll do “sentiment analysis” with computers on online forums is like saying you’ll do “sentiment analysis” in a literary work. I don’t doubt that something roughly along those lines is possible, but to really make any sense of it is going to take a human being doing interpretation the old, slow and human way. An algorithm that spots a change in word usage in a long-running forum is only alerting its minders to an event: making sense of that event is another matter.

The issue is not at all that market researchers are trying to analyze sentiment at any rate, or even the methods that they’re choosing to analyze it with. It’s whether they’re prepared to understand what they find out, and to act upon it. Just to take an example from the article, when Wal-Mart looks at “Labor Force and Unions”, it finds that there is a lot of negative sentiment. The Times suggests a public-relations strategy as a response to that finding. Wrong answer. If you’re really doing sentiment analysis, you’d understand that this strategy is a great way to make more negative sentiment. Because the reason there is negative sentiment is that Wal-Mart’s labor policies are pretty bad.

That’s like suggesting that you send a shill poster into a fan forum to promote a bad new movie or video game, to counter negative sentiment you’ve detected. If your shills are new posters, everyone almost immediately detects the shill and all you’ve done is increase the negative sentiment. If it’s an old, established poster, you’d have to pay that person off a great deal to get them to shill, unless they routinely shill for things, at which point see, “increase the negative sentiment” above. A non-shill poster who starts sounding like a shill is obvious; a non-shill poster who somehow manages to promote something in an appropriately cynical, somewhat denigrating way is not really helping to counter negative sentiment in the first place.

What you really learn by doing sentiment analysis (by computer or the better human-brain-reading-things way) is, “Don’t do whatever the hell it is that is pissing people off if you really can’t afford to piss them off”. If you’re Wal-Mart and you’re seeing some impact from your bad labor-management, do better by your employees. If you’re sitting on top of a $100 million cinematic turd, try to avoid shitting out celluloid crap in the future. If you can’t or won’t change, don’t think that there’s a magic trick buried in “sentiment analysis”.

What happens when there’s a new raft of consultants selling some new thing like sentiment analysis is that as the new specialized service develops, the people selling it are increasingly pressured by clients to make the information come out in a way that is soothing and tranquilizing, that either says that the problem doesn’t exist or that there’s some superficial cosmetic strategy that lets the organization go on doing something flawed or self-interested while somehow getting rid of all the criticism and negativity that behavior has incited. The most avid buyers of that kind of information tend to be the mid-rank bureaucrats and managers who are less concerned with long-term missions and more concerned with their own short-term prospects, and they can dance a beautiful duet with consultants or pet researchers who are willing to whisper them sweet nothings as long as the salaries or payments keep on coming.

For institutions that really want to know something that they don’t already know, and think it’s important for the long-term mission, then there has to be some willingness and preparation to hear information that’s not palatable and to act on it in that form, up to and including ending the practices or projects involved outright. Because the issue is really not the use of novel methods: it’s what’s true in the world around you, and about what keeps some organizations from being able to hear or understand those truths. The world itself doesn’t conform to what middle-managers and bureaucrats sometimes need it to be. Sometimes it really is murky, or ambivalent, or confusing. Sometimes it’s exactly the opposite to the way that the CEOs and generals and political leaders pretend it is. Sometimes if you want to know how people feel, you’ll just have to join them down in the fogginess of daily life and grope your way around the hermeneutical mist like everyone else.

Posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy | 5 Comments »

Liveblogging State of Play, Day 2, Lunch Session

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

Talking about new media reporting and games.

Julian Dibbell: the hook of these stories is maybe completely done in the terms that we’ve seen so far (e.g., “this is the future! there are people with stores in Second Life!!!!” but thinks there is still a tremendous amount of fascinating stuff to say; that imagination and simulation are really important still.

Bernhard Drax, reporting from within a virtual world

Ta-Nehisi Coates. normalizing gaming, normalizing virtual worlds. Talks about how he was comfortable blogging about Michelle Obama, music groups, politics, and so on, and then he decided to add blogging about World of Warcraft–was curious and anxious about what would happen when he did. Surprised at the positive and substantive responses. Is attracted to stories that tell him something about himself, so why not talk about being a gamer, too? Great quote: “I used to wonder if when I died, I would want people to say, ‘Hey, he was a great frost mage’, but now I’m thinking that would be ok, it would be ok.” On joining a guild of academics and writers in WoW: “The prospect of not having a 14-year old tell me I was so ghey was so enticing”. The journalism question for him is this: what is it that makes the social part of virtual worlds satisfying to him?

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Posted in Games and Gaming, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property | No Comments »

Liveblogging at State of Play, Day 2, Session 2

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

Session on kid and tween worlds.

Joost van Dreunen. Stepping away idea of designer as author, moving towards the idea of supplying tools to players or participants. Video games as meaning-making experiences. Interested in how kid worlds/tween worlds actually make money. [ME: I think this is a really good question where there are likely to be inaccurate or misleading assumptions.] In his view, this is partly about how you extend a commercial or consumerist presence into the home if you’re a media producer or consumer-products manufacturer. Question the designers have to solve is how to give children agency over spending decisions without violating legal restrictions or antagonizing parents; prepaid cards as major technique. Movement of toymakers into this space is a really significant development, online components to offline play. Sees power law; very small number of players keep the world going, draw other players in.

Angela Tiffin, representing Children’s Advertising Review Unit, self-regulation group, trying to control advertising to children online. Early on created guidelines for gathering personal information from children, which informed later legal regulation. Issues that are key remain: gathering information, controlling disclosure by children in chat, etc. A lot of concern now rising about the kind of information used for behavioral marketing.

Betsy Book, talking about There. Q: how to manage an unplanned shift in the demographics of the game in which younger teens/tweens started appearing more and more in the game. Older and younger users tend to feel rivalrous, how to deal with that. Also problem with use of credit card instruments by children that draws adults in with some degree of alarm. But also lots of positive interactions, mentoring that spontaneously forms. Refers back to discussion of Whyville yesterday; says that There really doesn’t see itself as teaching citizenship to children, but about enforcing content standards. More concern really about branding–do you really want tweens if that drives older players away, how do you keep the space culturally mainstream?

Erin Hoffman, game designer. Lengthy resume–GoPets, Dragonrealms, Shadowbane

Designing for kids is harder than designing for adults. Columbia University project to teach nutrition to kids through massive participation game. Trying to give a game for parents to run alongside, so parents can understand more of what’s going on.

Doug Thomas. Research question: what are kids actually doing in these worlds? we don’t really know as much as we could or should. Problem: it’s very hard to study kids. Hard institutionally in particular, enormous IRB issues. Asks: how serious is it actually for kids to give out phone numbers and so on online? What are the actual risks that kids are incurring? The probabilities of risk? The power of fear in controlling what can be done in design of kid worlds, do we want to push back on fear, and how?

———

Posted in Games and Gaming, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property | No Comments »

Liveblogging State of Play, Day 2, Session 1

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

I’m at the developer roundtable.
Dan Norton, Raph Koster, Jesse Houston, Nick Fortugno, Mike Sellers

[Me: Thank god for these guys, just as an aside: developers interested in exploratory conversations about the form, who don't just stare at people and say, "It's all under NDA, everything is under NDA, my breakfast cereal is under NDA".]

Raph Koster: there’s much less diversity in MMOs, no experimentation.

Mike Sellers: it’s easier to talk about the few places where something is changing. Mike says even Eve Online is “kill monsters, get gold” [ME: I don't really think so]. In some respects, tools are less sophisticated now than they were in the 1990s. So question is, where are the little mammals that will survive if the dinosaur designs die? Says, “Maybe the little games in Facebook”.

Nick Fortugno: We conflate too many things together, an MMO doesn’t have to be a fantasy RPG. Why does everything get defined by World of Warcraft? Massively multiple participation before these technologies was about voting, other kinds of big social experiences; we don’t have a deep imagination of what a game with 10,000 people might be.

Jesse Houston: Let’s stop talking about WoW as the winner. It isn’t a winner, it’s a benchmark.

Raph Koster: WoW just has as many players as a bad little cable show that’s heading for cancellation. [ME: 1. Guys, stop talking about WoW: it always makes developers look like sour grapes purveyors. 2. NO individual game scales well against other popular culture.]

Mike Sellers: there are more bird-watchers or NASCAR fans than MMO players.

Dan Norton: let’s be positive!

Mike Sellers: I want to stay negative for a moment. Virtual worlds aren’t real the way lots of things are real. Maybe we’re just talking about buggy whips or player-pianos. [ME: but Mike, when player pianos had a big market, player piano makers talked about them. Should they have stopped talking about them then because someday there was going to be an iPod Touch? By that context, stop talking about airplanes, televisions, etc.]

Mike Sellers: publics are media and entertainment agnostic, meaning they’ll move on. Who cares about Joanie Loves Chachi these days, for example? [ME: Mike! Take a look!]

Nick: Learning curve difficulties, ossification of the form as obstacle to new players. If these are skewed always to people with huge amounts of time, they’ll never evolve.

Raph: average in all virtual worlds, even pre-graphics, is 20 hours/week. So economies, graphics, etc., doesn’t make a difference in terms of engaging players. The nature of the engagement hasn’t changed.

Quick exchanges between whole panel: upshot, we’re not as mass market as we could be, some things are. [ME: GUYS WHY IS BEING THE MOST MASSIFIED THING POSSIBLE THE GOAL? Seriously, not even television or movie producers imagine that the film they are making must have total penetration of the mass market to succeed.]

Jesse: We need tools for players to take more control over experience of play.

Raph: I’ve tried.

Nick: We have to approach games keeping in mind what they are for people, what they expect.

Raph: Dancing is my poster child in MMO design. There was dancing in text muds, then it went away in graphic MMOs, then I got a lot of people asking for dancing in SWG, so I put it in. But a lot of people complained, why are you spending time on dancing as a design? But now we have dancing in every MMO. [ME: Did AC, EQ, UO really not have a /dance emote? I can't remember.] So we need things that have common cultural touchstones in MMOs.

Nick: A lot of emergent behaviors in earlier MMOs have become codified, and then become expectations for hard-coded design structures in all subsequent MMOs. Strong tied people: my real friends VS. my acquaintances/loose ties.

Mike: MMOs today are good at supporting strong tied connections, actually, not weak ties though.

Raph: agree with Mike. They cluster people a lot, they make strong ties, and that’s as much a design consequence as a social prior. We should figure out how to support ‘weak ties’ better–that’s what something like ‘Mafia Wars’ does.

Nick: But I think there’s been lots of experimentation with weak ties in MMOs and not so much trying to imagine in new ways dealing with strong ties. But weak ties are what’s new and interesting in our world, and these technologies, so it’s where all our attention should be.

Mike: intentional communities as an interesting way to think about weak ties. But it’s very risky to experiment with novel forms for intentional communities.

Nick: when casual games started, we were very surprised by the people who played them, we thought it would be the same people who were already gamers. So suddenly there are conventions for casual games: don’t ever use the keyboard, don’t use the right mouse button, etc. So the way forward is to look at the interactive conventions that exist for an audience. You want what’s natural, e.g. Wii Sports. [ME: But what's 'natural' in physical, real-world games like golf and tennis has layers of complexity, too: there's the casual golf and the serious golf in the real world too]

Mike: All other software besides games has an external task it has to satisfy, some external need; a game has to create the task that will be fun.

Raph: there is a collision between making the game challenging vs. increasing sociability. Can you make a better chat system? Yes. But does it make the game worse? Yes. Instancing makes the game run better, but it ruins the social system. Travel is treated as a nuisance in virtual worlds, but it forces people to have social connections to people near them, not always be where their friends are. In-world economies need more travel, but we don’t think about that.

Dan: Are there things that players expect in MMOs that you wish had never happened? Features you’d love to eradicate forever?

Jesse: I wish guilds had less rigid structures, and there were more innovative structures supported.

Mike: We did have other structures in Meridan 59. But then you have to support those variations, and that’s a design burden. So we moved towards a norm, which takes relatively minimal and modular design.

Raph: I would kill levels and classes. They’re rigid and limiting. [ME: But then why does Metaplace, a fairly social world, have levels????]

Mike: Asheron’s Call’s allegiances were a non-guild system that was kind of an alternative to level-class.

Jesse: City of Heroes has a weak-tie mechanic.

Mike: So what I would kill is questing. It robs us the ability to experience deeper, better narratives. Appeal for dynamic world.

Jesse: right, we should have dynamic worlds where lots of things can happen.

Nick: Let’s get rid of MMOs that present to each player the promise of being the hero.

Raph: the problem is just the weight of the conventions we’re importing from game to game, to the detriment of the form, some of which come from before digital media.

Jesse: that’s a problem with more than MMOs, all digital games have this issue.

[ME: I'm going to need to think about this panel and write something later. I think these guys are largely stuck chasing their own tails in some curious and unnecessary ways.]

Dan: So what should we be building?

Raph: Let’s make persistence more central, the dynamism of worlds more important.

Mike: yes, but persistence can take a lot of forms, can be just about identities and not about worlds.

Jesse: I think achievements are a really nice feature, can be even more of it, giving people more and more ways to be distinctive and individualized.

Dan: But achievements are almost a better, richer way to data-mine player experiences.

Posted in Games and Gaming, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property | 3 Comments »

State of Play, Day 2

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

Trying to think about yesterday’s sessions before we get started. What is sticking with me is this:

1. No application, design or game can live up to the utopian imagination of potential users or players, and that utopian imagination is surprisingly resilient in the face of many disappointments. I’ve been writing a bit recently about a couple of notorious past cases of vaporware MMOs where players really expected everything and more from them: a sandbox, a mimetic mirror of the world, an instrument to reform real life, and more fun than a barrel full of monkeys. So I should know better to have those feelings myself by now. And yet, I really was struggling with deflated feelings as I messed around with Metaplace during and after Raph Koster’s keynote on it. Those feelings aren’t fair to Metaplace, which seems very interesting in many respects, and provides some fascinating points of contrast and comparison to Second Life in particular. But somehow I was expecting an authoring environment that would generate a wider variety of visual and narrative experiences for users and a wider range of implied invitations to possible creators. Maybe that has yet to come, because it’s still very early days for it. The thing for me now is to see it for what it is and what it was meant by its producers to be. Still, even in those terms, to go back to my post from yesterday, I was struck that Raph seemed to position Metaplace in terms of functions and purposes that are already strongly served or satisfied by existing tools and applications.

2. This morning, Doug Thomas is talking about the theme of “Plateau” for the conference, and in the magic circle and economies panel, I did feel that we’re at a point rather like that. But it makes it frustrating because it’s hard to move the conversation onward in a number of respects.

Posted in Games and Gaming, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property | No Comments »

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