/dev/culture

More Random Conference Reviews

2012-01-30T11:43:00.000-05:00

The annoyance at this kind of thing apparently diminishes with time, as this only annoyed me for about ten minutes.

Reviewer C, are you insane? Actually Reviewer C seems like a quantitative person based on the comments, and half the paper is qualitative, which in the circles I travel in is a strength of analysis thing but if you're hard core one or the other you won't like it (and you'll be wrong).

Measure	Rev A	Rev B	Rev C	Av.
Quality of Theory Development/Literature Review	4	4	2	3.3
Quality of Method and Analysis Employed	4	3	2	3
Significance of the Findings	5	3	2	3.3
Relevance to the SIG	5	4	3	4
Quality of the Writing	5	3	2	3.3

Makers vs. Takers

2012-01-26T16:29:00.000-05:00

I was having a discussion about online communities--really they are communities with an online component (which may be 100%), but if you start thinking about them as online then you are putting the cart before the horse--and I realized there is a nice phrase that is also an important part of the issue: makers versus takers.

Communities are made and re-made through a few key actions:

Communication (shares the same root as community)
Making (can be making textual content, the same as communicating)
Sharing (communication is part of this)
Play (with others)

Communities make themselves. Yes that is analytically unhelpful, but I don't really care, because it is true. They are self-forming. Despite what I have seen on some marketing web forums, marketers and forum hosts do not make communities--they can provide the right environment, but the people (the community members) have to do the rest.

Often the result is an in-group versus out-group situation: the community (in-group to itself) versus those who think they made and think they own the community. If you are outside the community but seek to harness the community for your own gain, you are taking from it. Communities don't take kindly to this (if you're familiar with American history, think taxation without representation).

There are lots of examples from spaces such as Second Life, Spore, LittleBigPlanet, WoW, and others. These are spaces where there is a community (of some sort, and also communities) which occasionally disagrees with and argues with the controlling company. It is makers vs. takers.

Academic Reviews

2012-01-26T16:12:00.001-05:00

Yes sometimes the process takes a long time.... (I have never had so many rounds of reviews in all my life.) Nine months, but obviously I had to write it before I submitted it, maybe a year. Not sure when the issue comes out (IJoC).

Success!

This Is Not The Homage You Are Looking For

2012-01-22T18:03:00.000-05:00

Finding a Star Trek reference in EQII was hard enough, but recently I came across a Star Wars reference too. If you know Star Wars, you know this quote, it's one of the more famous ones from the first movie (the actual first movie -- Han shot first, don't forget!). From the Coldain quest line (for the wolf mount), the quote is from the beginning of the film when Alec Guinness says, "These aren't the droids you're looking for." (It even spawned a funny demotivation poster.)

Finally, the Love Boat

2012-01-20T13:36:00.001-05:00

I finally managed to get a picture of the quote from the Love Boat that is in EQII. It doesn't fit the gestalt of either the game or the majority of homage in the game, but it fits the character who says it, so if you don't realize it is from the Love Boat it isn't jarring, and if you do, it's just a little weird. "Love Boat" is a lot weirder, it sounds like a boat full of hookers. Most of the homage in EQII is part of what Kaveney* calls a “geek aesthetic,” part of the wider world of knowledge one might have as part of the geek community, and although “The Love Boat” does not fit into this aesthetic at all, it is still playful homage.

Google Search on "love exciting and new".

*Kaveney, R. (2005). From Alien to The Matrix. London: I. B. Tauris.

I Can Has Game

2012-01-16T12:38:00.003-05:00

There is so much homage and cultural play in EQII I will have to stop at some point. Here is the I Can Has Cheezburger quest. (And yes that's one of my alts, in his guild cloak, but not on his flying mount, everyone has a flying mount now.) Notice it's a cat-person who gives you the quest, appropriately.

SOPA, PIPA, Benkler

2012-01-15T15:01:00.000-05:00

SOPA and PIPA have made a lot of headlines lately, deservedly so, Luckily the White House stepped up and said Obama wouldn't sign either of these horribly misguided bills. (Edit: Or, apparently only SOPA is shelved?)

I'd like to quote Benkler, from his Wealth of Networks (2006), p. 2:

The rise of greater scope for individual and cooperative nonmarket pro- duction of information and culture, however, threatens the incumbents of the industrial information economy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we find ourselves in the midst of a battle over the institutional ecology of the digital environment. A wide range of laws and institutions— from broad areas like telecommunications, copyright, or international trade regulation, to minutiae like the rules for registering domain names or whether digital television receivers will be required by law to recognize a particular code—are being tugged and warped in efforts to tilt the playing field toward one way of doing things or the other. How these battles turn out over the next decade or so will likely have a significant effect on how we come to know what is going on in the world we occupy, and to what extent and in what forms we will be able—as autonomous individuals, as citizens, and as participants in cultures and communities—to affect how we and others see the world as it is and as it might be.

Spot-on. There are two other angles to the story, one, companies following the old business models that have always worked in the past and doing so until the company is run into the ground, and two, those with wealth and power both ignoring the law and bending the law to their will, making laws that benefit them.

Edit: MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito's take on the bills.

The Academic Ronin

2012-01-14T19:13:00.000-05:00

At conferences, you have a badge with your name and, often, affiliation. I am unaffiliated, an "independent scholar", or as I like to say a ronin, so my name badge just says "New York". On the elevator one day, another conference attendee looked at my name badge and asked where I was from.

"Brooklyn," I said.

"Brooklyn? Brooklyn.... Brooklyn?" Then the elevator opened and we walked off.

Eventually, Dr. S and I figured the guy had probably meant What university are you from?, although that wasn't exactly what he had said.

HICSS 2012

2012-01-10T14:18:00.000-05:00

Just finished a great HICSS (Hawaii, conference, system sciences). Lots of great people and all-day free coffee. Maui was great, I had never been there before (there is a National Park up at 10,000 feet on top of one of the volcanoes). I can't exactly explain what "systems sciences" are, it's not really communication studies, but I have a better idea than last year.

Abiding in the Wii

2011-12-12T11:12:00.001-05:00

Was playing some Wii Sports Resort the other day, specifically the bowling (where yes you can get English on the ball by spinning your hand like you do with a real bowling ball), and noticed this guy in the background:

Some of you may realize that looks a lot like Jeff Bridge's character from The Big Lebowski, a.k.a. "The Dude". The Dude, of course, bowls. Now I grant that the background of this bowling game was filled with a large number of Miis who covered a large range of visual types (hair, clothes, skin tone, etc.), but, this one was pretty good. He is even reflecting off the shiny parquet floor.

Copyright and... Whaaaat?

2011-11-27T10:15:00.001-05:00

Sometimes you have to wonder about copyright. You read some odd little snippet about a copyright and have to wonder, what in the world is going on?

"The Bulldog Club of America (B.C.A.), which owns the copyright to the American standard..." (From the Sunday NYTimes magazine.)

What? Apparently "the standard" is just a written description, and written things do indeed fall under copyright: "the bulldog standard (a written template for the look and temperament of a breed)." But this isn't just a copyright of some written stuff, it's more than that, it's the definition of a breed of dogs (with horrible health problems) as recognized... well as recognized by people who recognize it.

Making, Self-Making, Community Sharing

2011-11-20T12:21:00.001-05:00

I was skimming through a web forum for people who care about and work on a particular type of car (E46Fanatics, for a specific body-model of BMW, the E46, which looks like this), not primarily mechanics but instead owners who maintain and work on their cars -- car modders, essentially -- and I noticed that a lot of them would, as part of their post (and probably part of their .sig), include a photo of their car.

This is in part because their car is something they have modified since it came off the showroom floor and, although it may not exactly be unique, it is probably unique or definitely quite rare in that specific configuration. (We're talking rims, tints, suspension, trim, some things you can't see so easily in a shot of the body of the car, and some things I probably don't even know about.)

However, it is also in part because the car is part of their identity -- it is something they are proud of, something they may have had a hand in modifying (i.e., creating), and it is something that identifies them as a member of the community.

What struck me (was the tire that flew off the car... no no) was that this is the same behavior that some people who play MMOs do in their MMO forums -- in some cases people will post pictures of their in-game avatars. I think this has been written about academically, but I don't offhand recall by who. But it's easy to see the similarities:

Posting/sharing the image
Image is of the thing that the community is about
Object in the image is made, to some extent, by the poster

So we have:

Sharing
Membership-claiming
Making

All of these activities (or behaviors if you will) are pro-community activities, they can both create and reinforce community and sense of community.

The obvious and significant difference between these two examples are that one community deals with concrete objects (cars) and the other with digital objects (MMO characters), yet, the behavior is the same.

(EQII has a default sig image, I grabbed the generic "this is what it will look like" image which doesn't have the character image in it but is for my main. And, that's an E46 with three really nice non-standard features: the rims, the clear turn signal covers, and the spoiler.)

He's Dead, Jim.

2011-11-08T11:07:00.000-05:00

Star Trek is all over the net. Everywhere. Even before the World Wide Web (and I'm not having a debate about capitalization or hyphens with that). But, I hadn't seen it in EQII, despite all the homage there, until now.

"He's dead, Jim," is the classic line spoken by Dr. McCoy (a.k.a. Bones) what seemed like every time someone or something died, which was quite often.

Someone has even made a little montage of "dead" quotes from Star Trek, mostly by Bones but not all.

Candy Humor

2011-11-07T15:04:00.000-05:00

EQII also has plenty of cultural references, like a quest based on icanhazcheezburger. Here, though, is some of the Nights of the Dead (Halloween) candy, spoofing green M&Ms. (Nice M&M color chart in Wikipedia showing the timeline of changes.)

Seasonal EQII Homage: Norm Baites

2011-10-31T15:43:00.000-04:00

There is so much homage in EverQuest II, it is almost ridiculous to continue pointing out examples, although it is nice to have some visuals in the blog. Here is one I think is seasonal, given the name of the character, Norm Baites, obviously playing on Norman Bates from the famous film Psycho. I'm not sure the character is usually there. Norm is wearing an EQII Halloween mask (Halloween is renamed "Nights of the Dead") of a nautilus-like creature and ends up looking like something from a Lovecraft novel. Given it's The Nights of the Dead in EverQuest II currently, Norm makes sense as a seasonal homage. You can see his name floating on the top of his head.

Survey Results: Age and Industry Job

2011-10-31T12:58:00.001-04:00

A lot gets made of how some modders hope to get a job in the industry. When talking to my friends at Sports Mogul about the survey, they theorized that this might correlate with age, where younger modders have this idea while older modders are more established in career tracks. Indeed that is what we see, although younger modders (at least in this sample) have a range of opinions about it.

"I Told You So"

2011-10-28T17:35:00.001-04:00

About five years ago I told a major market research firm the following:

Currently the Zune is too problematic to be part of the digital near-future.

I said that Microsoft had to "fix it." I don't think the market research firm liked that I said that, since they blew me off after that. Something happened earlier this month that was so barely noted I missed it until earlier this week: Microsoft cancelled the Zune. It is actually difficult for me to find a news outlet that I am used to using which reported it (but there is always Wikipedia).

I could say that it feels good to be right, but I've been right the entire last five years and I've always known it. As for the market research firm in question, well, they don't know what they are doing.

Survey Results: Motivations

2011-10-23T13:48:00.000-04:00

Here are five of the motivation questions from my game modding survey (not a random sample), re-ordered and shown as a bar chart in percentages. Motivations about the industry in reddish tones on the left of each grouping, green in the middle is other players, and on the right of the groupings is fun and "improve the game for yourself". I know the colors aren't optimal but the chart does a good job of showing that people aren't motivated in relation to the industry. I don't think this says modders are selfish, I think this is a reflection of how people get an idea to improve a game (their own idea), and then make that idea via a mod since they want to improve the game based on their idea, and, it's fun.

Even zoomed out, you can see the pattern (but that could be a fabrication based on the questions, however, I did group the questions and the pattern is the end result, not the other way around). (The image/chart should really have a title, but it isn't meant to stand on its own. "Modder Motivations", perhaps.)

One Quick Result - Modders' Survey

2011-10-22T12:34:00.000-04:00

Been busy filtering out spammer entries and trying to get the write-up done for ICA (due Nov. 1st), and I haven't pulled all the numbers but here is one I made a nice little graph for. The nice thing about the graph is the curve, which was unexpected -- I expected a decline, but the "No" response on this question set roughly doubled with each proceeding question, so the curve is rather visually appealing.

Here is the rough table, I haven't formatted it completely. Numbers are % and # of respondents. N=111.

What is also cool is that the numbers are fairly high, although it is possible that I got a lot of pro-community modders in my survey since I advertised for it on mod forums (a form of community) and the respondents may be slightly more helpful than the more general mod population (since they were helping me by taking the survey, although perhaps they were feeling curious).

Interactions with Other Modders

	No	Yes
I have told a modder I liked their mod or thanked them for making it.	7.2 (8)	92.8 (103)
I have made comments in order to help someone improve their mod.	12.6 (14)	87.4 (97)
I have contributed code, scripting, voice, visual elements, or other content to someone else’s mod.	23.4 (26)	76.6 (85)
I have co-authored a mod with others.	43.2 (48)	56.8 (63)
I have taken ownership of a mod someone else stopped working on.	82.9 (92)	17.1 (19)

Sometimes You Feel Like Homage

2011-10-20T17:47:00.001-04:00

Another example from EverQuest II. Many don't fit Kaveney's "geek aesthetic"(1) like this one. Geek aesthetic is mostly sci-fi/fantasy nerd/geek culture. If you Google "sometimes you feel like a nut" you'll see why this is homage (although it isn't trademark infringement). This example is from EQII's version of Halloween, going on in-game currently, "Nights of the Dead".

1. Kaveney, R. (2005). From Alien to The Matrix. London, UK: I. B. Tauris.

Survey Drawing Winners!

2011-10-20T15:57:00.000-04:00

Ok after weeding out the big fraudulent entry and a few other obvious ones via data cleaning, I was able to...

Make a list of the valid emails.
Use NeoOffice's "random" function to choose three numbers.
The numbers were 66, 75, and 60, which were all a little high and close together but indeed that's random.

The winners are... Well the initial parts of their emails, so they can probably recognize themselves but no one will be able to send them spam (so not even complete to the @ sign), are:

Rolanxxxxx
Shirtxxxxxx
Twilightxxx

Later this afternoon I will be completing the Amazon side of things--I'm a little behind due to the big survey spammer and their 20+ entries, since I really didn't expect that--and then maybe I can do some analysis as well.

THANKS to everyone who actually took the survey for real, there were a lot of you and I am really grateful for your time and your help with this project. Thanks also to Ambrosia Software and Sports Mogul for advertising the survey on their boards (and boo to the three sources that didn't help, you know who you are, your name could have been here!).

eHarmony Pimps the Virgins Again

2011-10-20T11:45:00.000-04:00

Game Modders' Survey Now Closed

2011-10-19T21:18:00.008-04:00

I had some preliminary results up, but Survey Monkey alerted me to the likelihood that a fraudster hit my survey and took it over 20 times. Survey Monkey is working with me on it, but until I get those responses out of the results I can't do anything. (This also means I can't yet run the drawing for the Amazon gift certs, although those were apparently enough of a draw to lure in the unwanted fraudulent respondent.) Sucks. This person is not a modder, they are a fraud! Boo! You have been caught and will not be "winning" a gift certificate (winning in your case equals cheating). Everyone ELSE did not cheat, and I am really honored that they all took my survey.

I have used the HTML comment tag to make it so you won't see the previous and now-invalid write-up, but you can view the page source if you really want to see it. If the fraudster answered "male" every time (I don't know yet), then the male-female ratio will be severely distorted (with the fraudster, it was 33F/109M, so maybe it's more like 33F/85M).

Well, it is internet, I knew this might happen, I just didn't think it would.

Edit: Or, bummer, almost all of the female responses were from the fraudulent respondent. Perhaps the findings from this survey, once the data is cleaned up (amazing what some people do), will show that the % of women who mod is more in line with the % from the IGDA survey (10% or so, mentioned in the part I have now commented into invisibility).

Game Modders' Survey: 100+!

2011-10-14T17:24:00.000-04:00

I would like to thank all the respondents who have completed the game modders' survey, since as of this afternoon over 100 people have completed it! Awesome! Thank you everyone! (117 as of right now!)

If you are a game modder and would like to take the survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Y7DRNL5

The survey runs until Oct. 19th.

If you aren't a game modder but want to look at the survey, this link will put your responses in a different "collector" so you can peruse the questions: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7LQP9GT

It is really awesome to see that 117 people will complete a survey from some random person (me) who they don't know. And, it's about modding, which is very exciting stuff (mods are cool, modding is making and playing and usually there is a sharing element to it so there's a community angle -- modding is a the middle of the Venn diagram of several awesome and important things).

Hopefully I can get it analyzed and written up for ICA, due Nov. 1st, that's the plan.

Because Fun is Important

2011-10-08T18:53:00.000-04:00

Fun. It's important. It's enjoyment, it's learning, it's playful, it's related to sharing which relates to community, I would say it's everything but I just said design was everything (although I'm sure the two are related).

Let's play connect the dots:

Because it's fun.
Because it is fun.
Just for fun.

Which we will give context to with some sources:

"Bob, why do these bears play?".... "Because it's fun." (Italics in original.) Stuart Brown's convincing and moving book, Play, from p. 28, about why bears play (the book is about play and much more than bears, which are just a few pages). Brown is an MD and a play researcher; in other words, he's an expert and knows what he is talking about. (A national bestseller.)
From a small survey of computer game modders, one respondent's answer to "WHY do you take spend your time and effort into developing an idea on how to make the game better and/or developing some user-generated content?"
The title to Linus Torvalds' book about why he started what became linux and why he codes.

I keep insisting that this is deeply-rooted human behavior and I get academic reviews by people who have no idea what I am talking about, look, people, it's all the same.

Steve Jobs and Design

2011-10-08T18:38:00.000-04:00

Design is really an important part of the Steve Jobs story, and it isn't one that a lot of people understand. Some do. So, although it isn't an understanding that comes quickly or easily--it's more like riding a bicycle, you have to learn it by doing and falling over sometimes--it is one worth understanding.

So, here's a NYTimes article on Jobs and design, and here's the text of Jobs' Standford address from 2005, where he discusses calligraphy, and lastly here is one about Jobs and what is not there in terms of design, called ma, or what is not there, which I think is a vital part of the picture (the author of that article, Jeff Yang, explains it well).

Everything is design, design is everything.

Steve Jobs, 1955 - 2011

2011-10-06T16:07:00.003-04:00

I only saw Steve Jobs once, since I didn't live in the right places or do the right things to meet with him or see him at a Keynote. I saw him at the NeXT building, in 1993 or so, and he was running a meeting. I remember the building had a cool glass staircase in the middle, just like many Apple stores do today. So I don't have any stories about Steve Jobs, but I do have a story about the Macintosh, interfaces, and understanding the Mac, because Steve got it, and a lot of other people didn't.

Freshman year I got my first Mac, a Mac Plus. Previously we'd had a family Apple IIc, which was awesome. The Mac was so different at first I didn't even really know how to use it. One following year, perhaps sophomore year, as a computer room TA I attended a meeting where the new student computer lab was announced, or something like that. This wasn't the computer science computer lab, but the one where students would all write papers (amusing, there used to be computer labs where the only things students did on computers was write papers). The person in charge announced that the only computers in the lab would be brand-new IBM PS/2 (somewhat strangely, Sony would later use the same name, at least as spoken, for their second Playstation, but really almost no one remembers IBM's little odd computer line).

I knew this was a horrible decision, so much so that I had a look of shock on my face. I probably would have forgotten this entire event, except the computer person looked at me and said, "You're a Mac person, aren't you?" somewhat smugly.

The problem was Macs cost more -- in the immediate, this financial quarter, short term view.

But what I knew was that the GUI that Apple had started to make viable was the future, and needed to be the present, and that the DOS-based world of IBM and Microsoft was on its way out.

Instead of a GUI, which is vital for word processing -- think of formatting like centering, italics, and bold, all the things that students do in papers -- we got... some hackneyed CLI and a word processing program with an almost unusable interface. This means the TAs were always busy answering the same formatting questions, and students wasted thousands of minutes sitting there trying to figure out the command for italics or save.

There was no mouse (actually, there might have been, but a mouse without a GUI is somewhat stupid). There were no menus. What you saw had nothing to do with what you got. I don't remember exactly, but text in italics was probably highlighted a little. Text in bold, perhaps moreso. To find any command, instead of using an easy menu-system, there was the horrible set of function keys. If you're old enough you'll remember those horrible plastic templates that you had to put over the function keys to see how to get any command you needed. F4 did something, shift-F4 something else, ctrl-F4 a third thing... Probably alt-F4 and maybe even alt-shift... An entire massive template, with tiny text and absolutely no order to the commands at all.

The computer lab was horrible for both students and TAs. The college's computer buyer had no idea about computers, she only knew about the bottom line for that term. I knew what it should be, because Steve had showed me: he a vision, he pushed for it, and made it happen.

Later, I had a NeXT cube for a while. Even with an 040 processor (after-market) and only four colors (black, white, and 2 greys), there was a great ease and simplicity to the design of the GUI. Not a simplicity of poverty, but one that gave you everything. I think this is what people are talking about when they talk about how Steve Jobs knew to focus on what to take away, and what wasn't there.

XKCD's tribute:

Game Modders Survey - Live!

2011-10-05T16:48:00.000-04:00

My Game Modders Survey is now live, through Oct 19. Are you a game modder? I would like to learn more about your sense of community and your motivations. Your help is awesomely appreciated, and, three random respondents will win $20 Amazon gift cards.

My survey has already been picked up by my friend Clay over at Sports Mogul, which is a great help.

Felicia Day Homage with Felice Adae

2011-09-28T16:20:00.004-04:00

The masters of homage, those clever designers for Sony's EverQuest II, have homage for just about everything, including actress Felicia Day, who is present in EQII via the NPC Felice Adae. The names are phonetically similar, and both are white women with reddish hair. (Of course the whole idea of "white" in EQII... well, there's no Europe, and in the real world that's where a lot of white people are from, right?) The EQII version is an elf, I think (observe the ears) or a half-elf according to the wiki, but Ms. Day has also played an elf (well at least in these photos).

Why is this blog-worthy? Well, I can do a photo, and visuals are good for blog entries. And, EQII and Ms. Day are very internet-relevant topics. But it's a nice clear homage, something I've covered before. It's one thing to say how there is a ton of homage in games (games are playful, homage is playful), but for a more emotional impact I have to show it's true, and this is a great example. Ms. Day has also done some awesome MMO acting work, EQII is an MMO, and the homage is a nice way to give her some in-game credit.

While nosing around the net to see who else has pointed this out (since it is from the second-most recent expansion, it's not new), I found yet another homage in EQII, this time to the awesome show Mythbusters. (I keep trying to get a picture of the Love Boat homage since it really doesn't belong in EQII, but I missed it last time and it doesn't occur every time you walk by the character in question. If I do finally get it, I'll post it.)

Edit: Kotaku just came out with an article, Felicia Day is Just What Gaming Needs. Timely.

Professors as Comedians

2011-09-26T12:56:00.000-04:00

Professors and comedians have a lot in common. When I was young, a slightly older friend of mine was starting on what would be a successful career as a comedian. I realized that I learned a lot from watching his shows, especially about audience engagement, the use of personal stories, narrative, and humility in front of an audience.

	Comedian	Professor
It's your job	Yes	Yes
Live audience	Yes	Yes
You have a narrative you want them to follow	Yes	Yes
Need audience engagement	Yes	Yes
They're judging you	Yes	Yes
They're paying for it	Yes	Yes
They expect their money's worth	Yes	Yes

MMO vs. MMORPG

2011-09-22T11:24:00.002-04:00

When you read "MMO" in the headline, did you know what it meant? Or did you think it could refer to two different things and you weren't sure which one it was? No, you knew it meant "massively multiplayer online role playing game." That's why it's MMO, not MMORPG or even MMOG.

There are actually three reasons why it is MMO:

There aren't any other "MMOs", so "MMO" is clear.
"MMO" is consistent with the MMO-predecessors, MUDs and MOOs (text based, multiplayer but not massively so, and role playing or not).
"MMO" is also consistent with the TLA standard (three letter acronym) from computer science.

So, if you don't use MMO and instead use MMORPG, it tells me that you probably don't know much about computer science, don't care about previous forms of online spaces, and you like to write like it's the 1980s and every computer referent has to be written in lengthy, all-caps words, like say COMPUSERVE there I look like an idiot now don't I? That's what you look like when you write MMORPG!

And, truth be told, MMORPGs (I did it for a reason there) aren't very RPG-ish anyways. People don't play roles so much as do what they want. Sure, maybe in WoW or EQII you're a healer or a tank. Healer and tank do fit one definition of "role", but not really in any deep way. "RPG" has mostly come to mean "a fantasy game like Dungeons & Dragons, with elves and mages and such," and really has very little to do with roles as played necessities. Second Life is far more about playing roles (if you want it to be) than any MMO that I am aware of, even though Second Life is not a game, although its sandbox approach allows for people to play games in it (just like a sandbox).

Edit: Apparently this bothers me so much I wrote about it last year, but it's too annoying to keep in mind. Maybe it will become an annual rant.

Inconsistent Interfaces

2011-09-21T17:52:00.007-04:00

Apple, which is usually the master of great interfaces, pulled some weird things in the recent upgrade to OSX. The Calendar app lost its metallic look and feel (and I don't like it and it's not consistent with everything else). The Contacts app lost the great letter-tabs that let you jump to a letter (this feature is still present in the iPhone version).

But in Mail they did something I don't understand and have only noticed recently (so I assume it was not like this previously). If you make a new message, some of the buttons (like for attachments) are on the left, whereas if you reply some of those same buttons are on the right. I do a fair amount of attaching, and this is highly annoying since I cannot make a work habit, I have to actively think about it each time.

Here is a reply. Only the Send button is on the left, Attach is on the right.

Here is, as you can see, a new message. Attach is now on the left.

Given there is little difference between a new message and a reply, I cannot see that there is any reason to move the buttons around. (Everything is about design.)

Edit: I remade the images so they fit better. The image/textwrap is killing me, though.

PAX Writeup

2011-09-21T15:27:00.001-04:00

A great writeup of PAX by Matthew Baldwin at The Morning News. "PAX Primer", but pre-subtitled "Of Dice and Men" which is pretty funny. A good read (which is why I am mentioning it). I've been to a PAX Prime and a PAX East.

With less than a single lap remaining, Team One encounters a string of disasters: they are struck by lightning; they crash into a wall of fire; and then, perhaps disoriented by this cavalcade of misfortune, they barrel off the road while trying to navigate the final bend.

Hysterical. But the writeup is much more than just about games, just like PAX. Amusingly has a photo a lot like one I took at the last PAX East (since it's a cool photo, the one of the dice for sale).

Iron Crows - Shipbreaking

2011-09-19T12:12:00.002-04:00

Modern shipping vessels, ships like oil tankers and container ships, help us live our first-world lives with affordable items. But, like how our modern computers often end up in the third world to be broken apart even with the accompanying health hazards, so too do these massive ships. The breaking apart of these ships is the focus of the documentary Iron Crows (NYT review), a powerful and sad film that could have used a bit more of a guiding hand in terms of narration but is still worth seeing. It takes place in Chittagong, Bangladesh, where the shipbreaking takes place.

What is fascinating, although perhaps not unexpected, is that you can easily see the ships of Chittagong, Bangladesh, in Google Maps. Granted the view will change as Google gets newer images, but for now there they are.

Here is a snippet, from the dozens of ships currently viewable. At the bottom, one that is mostly stern. Top left, perhaps that is for natural gas or something that we like to ship in spheres. Top was a cargo ship, it's huge. Along the shore the ships are more in pieces, further out they've just arrived or were too big to get closer to shore. (I have rotated the image 180 degrees, so although the ships are facing the "wrong" direction the image is less disorienting to view.)

Edit: From my friend Anna, see this photo essay at The Economist.

Gotta Catch 'Em All: Pokémon and EQII

2011-09-14T17:03:00.000-04:00

Pokémon was such a well-known cultural event (it's a card game, it's a marketing gimmick, it's little animals....) that even South Park based an entire episode on it (season 3 episode 10 and of course you should go watch it now free (legally) online).

So perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised to find that the masters of homage at Sony included it in EverQuest II, since they included dozens and dozens of cultural references in the game. As I've pointed out, this kind of behavior is common human behavior and occurs in a lot of games, not just EQII. (Sony makes an appearance in the South Park episode at about 5:30.)

Although it's been in EQII for a while, there are so many quests in-game and I only just came across it recently. The quest is Grassgalor, a chokidia who eats lots of grass I guess. You have to capture him as he might have lots of powers... or not. But you have to catch him in a little sphere, which you get as the reward--a chokéball, which when activated causes Grasssgalor to appear and follow you around. If you know of Pokémon, you know this is how they work (you contain them in special Poké balls and release them when needed).

Google H Score, Year 3

2011-09-10T09:19:00.001-04:00

This is the third year I've posted my Google H Score, and, my H score is up to five! Yes! My original post about my Google H score (and year 2) that started the whole thing showed that, back then, my G-H Score was 4. Is more still more? Are there hot topics and more-widely cited journals? Do things fade over time? No idea yet. And, hey, my solo score is up to 3.

In order to get to 6, I'll need the Cross National Study... to get to 6, and one of the lesser-cited ones also to get to 6. Tough to do, I think, but there is some solo work out right now (one R&R, one new submission from ICA, and one I'm vetting with a friend which will go out soon) and two co-authored pieces in progress (well they're not progressing while I work on this post...).

Article (short title)	Journal	Author(s)	Year	2009	2010	2011
Mechs of an online public sphere	JCMC	Solo	2005	*25	*42	*51
To broadband or not to...	JoBEM	Co	2004	9	10	12
Honey, I shrunk the world!	MCS	Co	2006	8	12	15
Playing Internet curveball...	Convergence	Solo	2006	7	11	12
A cross-national study...	TIS	Solo	2007	1	2	5
Technology as place	(chapter)	Co	2010	-	-	2
Online org...	(HICSS)	Co	2011	-	-	1
Copyright notices...	JCMC	Solo	2008	*1	*1	*1
Global citation patterns...	IJoC	Solo	2009	0	0	x
Strat and global elite theory	IJoPOR	Co	2009	0	0	0

Values as of Sept 10th, 2009, 2010, and 2011.

* indicates one self-cite (relevant!).
x = missing from/mis-titled in Google.

Neither self-cite affects the Google H value.

The numbers fluctuate from time to time, which is odd but they do.
HICSS is conference proceedings.

On Academic Writing

2011-08-23T15:41:00.000-04:00

Academic writing... well some of it is horribly dry and unreadable, filled with jargon which seems to be the author showing how cool they are while not actually saying anything. As as academic who is pitching a manuscript which is neither dry nor jargon-filled, I am sensitive to these issues. I once wrote, about a horrible book I was reading, "the author has confused the use of jargon for research." Recently I received some feedback from an academic press about my manuscript, "the manuscript is interesting [and] written in a lively manner..." I don't think "lively" was a good thing to the author of the letter, although it isn't clear. I think lively is important.

George Orwell explained five (six) rules of effective writing, note rule 5:
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Jargon is a problem, although science is a good thing and has its time and place. If you are trying to explain something to an audience that knows the scientific word, like in a journal article, fine, but if you want to reach a wider audience, think carefully about your word choice.

As the newest APA (6th ed.) style guide stated clearly, "Although scientific writing differs in form from literary writing, it need not lack style or be dull" (p. 66, 5th printing). IT NEED NOT LACK STYLE OR BE DULL. Ok "need not" is a rather formal construction, but NOT BE DULL. I don't think there would be a need to write that unless there was enough scientific writing that was dull. There is even an index entry for "Jargon, avoidance of" (p. 265).

Most people who have experience with publishing ask me if my book is "academic or trade?" Do you know the one about how there are two kinds of people in the world, those who think there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don't? It's like that. This is an oversimplification and doesn't serve anyone well. There are lots of smart books written by academics and non-academics that have a wider audience, and may be published by a trade or academic press. There are smart histories written by non-academics like Bill Bryson (lively style) and Nathaniel Philbrick. There are accessible histories written by professors, like Fordlandia by Greg Grandin at NYU. There are non-PhD part-academics like Clay Shirky, who is a professor at NYU and whose books are read both in classes and more widely by the public. There is Lawrence Lessig, who is a professor but whose many books are widely read.

Then there is also Clifford Geertz, specifically, two of his articles, both well-known, one about Balinese cockfighting and the other about a funeral. Because this is not an academic publication, I can say how both are lively pieces, although sadly the main character in the second one was not very lively, due to death. But his piece on cockfighting has blood flying and penis jokes (since "cock" in English parallels the equivalent word in Balinese and thus all the off-color jokes that go along with that). Penis jokes! The man of cultural anthropology wrote about penis jokes. That is lively, that is good academic writing. Granted it's not good just because it's lively, but academic writing can be good and lively at the same time. And if your writing is lively, it's of interest to more people, and thus you'll reach a wider audience. It's also more enjoyable to read, and who doesn't like that?

Let's try a checklist, which is, I grant, fabricated. Is your writing...

Lively
Straightforward
Deathly

I know which I prefer, as an author and as a reader.

Cats Still Rule The Net

2011-08-15T22:19:00.001-04:00

I remember in 1996, when I had just started my graduate work at UM, and I had a NeXTcube in my dorm room that I left on all the time (solid Unix there, thanks, the base for today's OSX yes that's right), and cats were pretty much the internet (except for MUDs and file depositories at universities).

Today, cats still rule. Amazing longevity. Behold my examples:

Nyan Cat (currently at 31.8, even without the cool scrollbar that they made and nuked).
Maru (with his own YouTube channel).
What I am talking about! Kittywood Studios.

More About Professoring

2011-08-04T10:24:00.001-04:00

A piece, "What Does A Professor Do All Day, Anyway?" by Prof. Edward Ayers, from 1993 but still accurate today.

The only logical solution that some people can draw is that we must be goofing off...

Yeah but we're not. If you think that, you weren't paying attention.

The Indepenent Scholar Thing

2011-06-29T10:08:00.001-04:00

I was reading the acafan entries over at Henry Jenkins' blog, and in one of the entries Karen Hellekson writes a bit about being an independent scholar (like me).

I am unaffiliated, and people's reactions (when they see "independent scholar" on my name tag...) are often weird, like they're not sure how to deal with me.... My job as a freelancer is isolating. This academic thing is a way to get out of the house, to talk about things that really interest me, to engage with fabulous like-minded people, and to have substantive, thought-provoking conversations.... My scholarship, including writing articles and books and editing an academic journal, is basically unpaid service that I can't explain in a sentence at parties.

(I have trimmed that a bit, as you probably noticed.)

I completely agree. It is difficult for a lot of people both in and out of academia to get that I just don't like teaching (because at the same time a lot of them do). A lot of the academic world is about status. This makes sense, it's supposed to be merit-based. Is your work any good? Does it add to scholarship? This is reflected in where you have a job, the conferences you present at, and the journals in which you publish. So, if you don't have a job, you do not initially fit into the framework; you for some odd reason aren't playing the usual game (either you are a horrible scholar and can't get hired or you had a thing with a student and will never get hired again). Generally, if you have a PhD and attend conferences, you are supposed to like teaching.

I don't, I like research.

Being a Professor

2011-06-18T11:57:00.000-04:00

"Being a professor is a profession that has been shown to have the longest work hours, heaviest work demands, highest psychological stress, and lowest occupational energy expenditure compared to other professional occupations," Megan A. Kirk and Ryan E. Rhodes, in an article called "Performance Pressure" that I read about on the Tenured Radical blog (to which I was pointed by a tweet).

Yup, I knew that. Too bad almost no one believes it. I think a majority of people think that professors walk into a room, talk extemporaneously for an hour, and then their day is done. Easiest job ever. Not so. I won't go into grading, class prep, office hours, building syllabi and keeping reading up to date, coming up with assignments, trying to do research, writing it up, presenting it at conferences, and service, which includes various committees (student theses, college/university panels, etc.). Did I mention grading? I did? Well I should mention it like three times since I hate it, and I don't know anyone who likes it. (No, we don't make tests and assignments so that they are easy to grade, we make them so students have the best opportunities to show us what they know -- not that we make them easy, we just have to put students in a positive situation where they can work well.)

"Longest work hours, heaviest work demands, highest psychological stress..."

On Source Material

2011-04-30T19:31:00.000-04:00

So, I've been poking at the cultural work for "the Other" done by Elves (hinted at in my original post on the matter), and one common influence for what Americans think of Elves is the game Dungeons & Dragons (yes in addition to Tolkien, of course). A common quote, widely found via Google (or here for example), for the D&D source is attributed to D&D creator Gary Gygax, supposedly from an old Dragon magazine. Gygax (supposedly) said,

Drow are mentioned in Keightley's The Fairy Mythology, as I recall (it might have been The Secret Commonwealth [of Elves..., by Kirk]--neither book is before me, and it is not all that important anyway), and as dark elves of evil nature, they served as an ideal basis for the creation of a unique new mythos designed especially for the AD&D game. [Supposedly from "Books Are Books, Games Are Games" in Dragon #31.]

So I looked at both -- Keightley online via Google Books, and Kirk in the 1933 edition at the NYPL although I later discovered it is also online. It's in neither (well it is once in Keightley, as a verb). The nice thing about the online sources is, you can search both via Google (Google Books or Google with the URL for the Kirk).

The searches:

What does appear is trow in Keightly, but they are little green-clothed Shakespearean fairies: they are "of a diminutive stature" and "are usually dressed in gay green garments" (p. 165).

Keightley, search on trow.

According to the Wikipedia page on Drow (the D&D version), Gygax later corrected his source. But the uncorrected quote was what I ran into a lot initially. This isn't an "interent good, internet bad" story, it's more a story about people (Gygax misremembering, people putting up quotes and then never noticing corrections....).

Sadly, I can't verify the Dragon quote by Gygax.

Leisure Suit Larry's Last Laugh

2011-04-21T13:23:00.003-04:00

Recently, with the game series Dragon Age (Origins and II), Mass Effect (1 and 2), and even Grand Theft Auto IV, there has been a focus on relationship management in-game. GTA IV was a bit heavy in this respect, whereas you can ignore it somewhat in the others if you want. But, the thing is, if you choose the right dialog options with the right characters, you can have sex with them. Ok it isn't usually shown very explicitly, isn't realistic (nor is the dialog or the whole scenario in the first place), and it seems like an odd addition to the game that isn't related to what the point of the game is.

An LSL screenshot - love me some pixels.

But there was a game series where sex was the entire point of the game, the Leisure Suit Larry series (which, according to Wikipedia, survivied longer than I thought). I remember them from when I was a teenager, although I never played one. They were generally thought of as rather weird, they weren't quite games, they weren't quite legit uses of your computer, and they weren't real porn either (now we have the internet for all that).

But with the intentional, direct inclusion of dialog to get to sex in hugely popular, successful, and mainstream games, Larry is vindicated to some extent. (I still don't find these weird sex scenes in games anything worthwhile or even hot, they're just creepy.)

Scenes are easy enough to find in YouTube. Here's a search for Mass Effect 2 scenes, and a video making fun of one (a combination of the gameplay footage and real people -- that makes it sound creepy -- real people as if they were other characters on the ship who do not get it on with the digital in-game characters). I've tried to watch a few to see what they are like but they are all so creepy right away I give up. (And I gave up on Mass Effect 2 since I found it rather tedious and repetitive.)

Edit: I totally forgot The Witcher, which I really see no reason to play.

Ludic Goes Captcha Mainstream

2011-04-07T15:35:00.000-04:00

You have got to be kidding me (especially in light of my recent posting on such things).

Game Designers and Culture Play

2011-03-31T18:53:00.000-04:00

People can't resist piracy I mean cultural homage. Of course it's not piracy when a giant company does it. Some of the homage found in Dragon Age II, although not all of it is well-cited.

On Half Elves, Narrative, and Cultures

2011-03-31T13:05:00.007-04:00

I was reading "Second-Hand Elf" over at the Escapist Mag, and realized there is a bunch of stuff about elves we usually don't see in fantasy games. So, it is time for a cultural studies/critical theory approach to elves. Non-exhaustive, of course. But, we typically have "half elves" and "dark elves" (Drow from D&D).

Merrill, from DAII (She's an Elf)

I am very sure many people have pointed out how "dark elves" being the evil other is totally absurd. OMG dark people! Scary! I don't actually know what to say about this, it's been done over and over, sadly because it keeps coming up. Actually, in The Elder Scrolls series I don't recall if they're evil or just elves--ah, just elves of a particular sort. (TES has several kinds of elves.) The dark elves, called Dunmer in that series, can be anywhere from bluish to greyish to pale white, given the characterization capabilities in the game (see the Google image search page).

In D&D, well at least the first version, Drow were from deep underground. Usually things that live underground lose their pigmentation, and their eyesight, so they are kinda creepy and pale. Not so the Drow.

We could discuss how different species (elves, dwarves, humans) are called "races", which is totally wrong but typically done across game spaces. Dwarves and humans are not the same race in the same way as all humans are members of "the human race," or "race/ethnicity" on the census or a survey of some sort. That has been commented on before as well. (There's material in both a Google Scholar search and a regular Google search. Who knew there was a journal of Tolkien Studies?)

But the whole "half elf" thing is fascinating. Why? Because it doesn't end there. It can parallel with the history of whites and blacks (or, "whites" and "blacks", really) in the US (or elsewhere, but I know the US material best, although I'm not an expert or published on it). Since it's fictional, it can't totally parallel the real-world situations, but the real-world can act as a guide.

Why is it half-elf? Why not half-human? (D&D also had half-orcs, since humans and orcs could also have children, but elves and orcs could not. Don't ask me about the genetics, this is fiction, there are no real genes here.) Ok yes, it's human-centrism. Humans write the fictions, the games, humans are the players. But if it is real in the fiction, it's not that simple.

What about the quarter-elves, and three-quarter-elves? (Note we're sticking with the human-centric nomenclature there. Quarter-human, anyone? Sounds like a science-fiction film.)

I think I have to drop the hyphens.

What of half elves where one parent is "pure" human and one "pure" elf, and then half elves where both parents are half elf? Genetically (there are no real genes here) they would... I think... be the same, but culturally they might be very different, or be framed differently by different cultures. Half elves could be a sustainable culture, genetically speaking (since if all you have is half elves, all you get are half elves). What about half elves with one parent 1/4 and the other 3/4? Yay, math.

There has been some good academic work done on "passing," where mixed-race people try to pass as a "pure" member of one of their parental/ancestral races. Maybe a 1/4 elf would try to pass as a human (there's a plotline there for a game).

Some half elves would be born of love, others.... not. Sadly. Vengeance-seeking children, anyone? (Ok that's a too-typical plotline, but, this is fiction we're talking about, even though I am paralleling it on reality.)

A wealthy human noble could proclaim his hatred of elves within racist human groups (I mean, speciesist), while secretly paying off his half elf daughter to keep her quiet, years after impregnating her then-16 year old elf mother who was a maid in his family's manor. Oh wait that already happened in real life.

There might be cultures that accept half elves, and ones that don't, or that lump them in with whichever species (elf/human) is less-accepted. There could be pure-blood societies on both sides, perhaps some would be racist, but maybe there would be pure-blood societies within the fictional elf and human societies who focus on pureness of bloodline, thinking that all bloodlines should be pure, yet they bare no hatreds based on species. That might be a stretch, but we're talking about fictional worlds here, imagination is key. (It could be like, they appreciate both horses and donkeys, and don't disrespect mules [which are the offspring of a horse and a donkey], but they prefer horses and donkeys stick with their own kind when it comes to creating offspring.)

Mules may not be a particularly satisfying end to this post in terms of narrative, but, if there is a fictional world where humans and elves can have children together, I think most fictional worlds fall short on developing the cultures (for better and for worse) around that issue. Why is this worth mentioning? Because game designers are getting much, much better at plotlines, in-game cultures, and back stories, and are aware of the importance of such things, that's why. It's time to take another step forward, and this is a place where such a step could be taken.

We could discuss skin color of humans in game worlds, and how in the real world there is a genetic and geographical history to it, yet there have always been people on the borders of those worlds, the borders themselves are not robust, and how there is actually a huge variation in how people look (and it's not just skin color). Oh and how game worlds don't always include the geo-genetics of human appearance. It's a good step forward for game designers to allow different human and main character (the player's character) appearances in games, but there are still steps forward that we can take, in terms of visual complexity, backstories, inclusiveness, and in-game cultures.

Bethesda's Dumner Artwork

The Elder Scrolls series does this a bit, with different types of elves and humans that you can play and then modify how they look, and you can even play lizard-humanoids (Argonians), cat-humanoids (Khajiit), and orcs, and all the "races" have their different backstories, although the Redguard as "black people" seems a bit forced (in addition to the "dark elves"). There are no half elves in the Elder Scrolls (well not III and IV), but you can modify the appearance of you character heavily, and you can change many specific facial features (and skin tone) a great deal. I don't know if you can create every "race/ethnicity" of human beings, but it gives players wide latitude. I feel I should mention there are also "Bretons" and "Nords", which are based to some extent on French cultural elements and Nordic cultural elements, but I haven't studied how closely these are to reality -- it's fiction, of course, they don't have to be.

Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II also portray elves as an underclass, and Dragon Age II has a half elf (named Feynriel) that you need to help find a home as a quest, since he may not be accepted in either society (IIRC he can pass as human, though). I think the writers did a pretty good job with it, although it's just a start (and it isn't part of the main storyline, so it isn't as developed as other parts of the game's stories). There's a bit about elf parallels to real-world cultures in the DA wiki (which could of course change at any moment, and it isn't particularly sourced but it's there for now).

It's nice to have some backstory, but race and cultural differences in the real world can be fraught with difficulty for cultural outsiders (and in fictional worlds, where are the lines between "based on" and "this is made up"), although learning about other cultures and meeting people from other cultures is an awesome and important thing to do. It's also how we get half elves.

Edit: I also realized that half elves, when they come from a setting with a variety of exclusive elves such as high elves, dark elves, and wood elves, are usually half human and half generic elf, even though there is no generic elf in their setting. And why not all sorts of mixed-elf elves?

Edit: Oh look at that, Bretons in TES are half-elves, sort of. They're human, but they're part elf. Or were. Or are a sustaining half-elf community and genetic group who are considered human.

Google: What Are You Doing?

2011-03-27T11:28:00.000-04:00

Sometimes you have to wonder. The newest Dwarf Fortress (0.31.24, which will be 0.31.25 soon most likely) has a minor fix, "Corrected baby guineafowl to keets." Keets is not in my local dictionary, so I looked it up with "fowl" in Google, and the first result came back with "fowl" but not with "keet", instead Google gave me "keep". No no Google, that is not what I wanted, which is why I didn't type it. Seriously, this kills me. #fail

But, keet is indeed, apparently, a baby guinea fowl...

Cultural Play and the ASWCC

2011-03-26T18:23:00.000-04:00

There is an object, humorously called the Aperture Science Weighted Companion Cube, in the game Portal. But, people like to play with things, and we like to play with the things we like, and we like to play in the spaces in which we like to play (on the surface, that's a tautology, but that's not just what I mean, I mean, we like to play in them and play sometimes means not following the rules), so, when people like the Companion Cube, they play with it across the spaces they like to play in.

Thus the Cube is not just in Portal.

People have included the Cube in...

Spore (by EA) [examples]
LittleBigPlanet (by Sony/MM) [example at 1:10+]
Second Life (by Linden Lab) [example]
EverQuest II (by Sony) [example]

One of these things is not like the other, however (and I won't claim that that is an exhaustive list).

Which one?

EverQuest II. In the first three, the majority of content is created by players/users; in fact, the point of those worlds is to have a lot of content created by players/users. (I include "users" since Second Life is not exactly a game.) In EQII the majority of physical (virtual) content is made by the game designers/maintainers at Sony. Mundane items, game actions, and conversation are content that are made by players, but a lot of important items are not made by players. Yet, in EQII there is the Cube (and many other cultural references).

We love to play with the things we love, and we will do so across the various spaces where we can play, even if that object is not from the space we are in. Thus, the Aperture Science Weighted Companion Cube is in a lot of places. Culture is not just objects and practices we create, culture is something that we further play with and redefine over time. I think "culture play" might be a good phrase for this fundamental human behavior, despite the title to this post where I use the phrase "cultural play", which is a better headline.

The four spaces in the list also include many other cultural references through cultural items and homage, because this is something that we, as humans, are driven to do.

New Media, Old Framework

2011-02-12T12:11:00.000-05:00

I attended a taping of Al Jazeera's Empire, at the Columbia School of Journalism yesterday. Some of the panelists were Carl Bernstein, Amy Goodman, Evgeny Morozov, and Clay Shirky. Although some interesting, Twitter-friendly sound-bytes were said, ultimately there was little new or insightful, which was rather disappointing, given the combined (and individual) intelligence and experience onstage.

The main focus was new media and Egypt. But new media, or social media, was never defined, and at one point we watched Al Jazeera (television, which is old media) over the internet (which is new media). Clearly the two are not distinct. Maybe everyone except me knew it was a straw man argument.

Amy Goodman complained how only in two places in the US can you receive Al Jazeera over cable TV, which is a good point, except that you can watch it anywhere you like as long as you have an internet connection: Wasn't that the point of the internet, at least from ten years ago? You can go watch it right now if you like. Given that we had just watched President Obama on Al Jazeera streaming over the internet there in the room, and NYC is not one of the two places you can get Al Jazeera in the US over cable, it was a strange thing to say (although I agreed with her, but still).

Shirky had the odd claim that the cell phone network (which was mostly ignored in the discussion) and the internet were essentially the same, since cell phones can push and pull info over the net. That much is true, from the user's viewpoint, but the way they are run (in terms of organizations and technologically) and the way they are regulated can be very different from country to country. Also, 20 years ago I would sit in my dorm room and connect to BITNET over my modem, but no one would have said the phone system was a part of the internet.

Morozov had the nice point that the internet is neither necessary nor sufficient for revolutions, and he is 100% correct on that point. Revolutions have happened before the year 1990, and they have failed since (Iran is one). He had some nice points about other media being used to aid communication in older revolutions (like tape cassettes, I think). By understanding the common motivations behind using communication technologies to spread messages during different periods of civil upheaval (cassette tapes and broadcast TV in the past; Twitter, SMS, and satellite TV today), we can understand the important features and affordances of the technologies, and can make sure we build those into future technologies and try to protect them legally and technologically. (Much could be written about that, I will not try to do so here.)

Everyone did agree that revolutions are a form of organization, and organization takes communication, and that people will communicate with the best tools they have at hand. Today that is indeed some of the digital, online, internet, Facebook, Twitter, whatever you want to call them, whatever their labels are today, forms. But this media ecology also includes television, cell phones, and face to face, and a good analysis and understanding of human behavior has to include all of the behaviors, not just the newest and coolest ones.

The most annoying part of the taping was at the beginning when we were all told to turn off our cell phones, since the wireless headsets of the camera people and the producers were running into interference problems (I thought this was why we had regulation about these things). No Twitter for you! Tons of people tweeted and re-tweeted the same sound bytes over and over, they may have been in the room or in the overflow room. The needs of old media (TV) had triumphed over new media.

The most amusing part of the taping was when the make-up person powdered Shirky's head.

The biggest let down was that Shirky and Morozov did not come to fisticuffs. People on the internet love to say how they are polar opposites on this Egyptian/revolution/Twitter discussion. They're not. They were seated far apart from each other. They actually agreed on mostly everything. Morozov had a wide range of examples of revolutions. Shirky had a nice analytical point, questioning when do we define the beginning of a revolution? Egypt had several uprisings and riots previously, they could easily be counted as "the start" of this most recent action.

All of this left me wondering about new media and old media. If I can get Al Jazeera (old) over the internet (new), then what does that mean about "old" and "new" media? I think it means the framework is not useful.

The alternate framework, more in use lately, is "social media," such as Facebook. I originally got on Facebook since a friend of mine, in about 2004, wanted to see what her undergraduate students were doing on this new (to UM) medium, but she didn't want her own account: Could she use my email address to sign up? (Facebook was still restricted to selected universities at that point.) She spent the next two hours laughing, reading some things to me (all of which were hysterical), but also exclaiming how some recent find was amazing but totally inappropriate to read to me out loud in a coffeeshop. She would turn the laptop around so I could read the post in question, and indeed, many were completely inappropriate to read out loud with other people around.

If you had told me then that a website, which was restricted to a few American universities and was exclusively used by American undergraduates to post writing that could not be read out loud in a coffeeshop, would, six or seven years later be used to foment revolutions and topple governments, I would have thought you were insane.

And you would have been, since that's not the Facebook we have anymore. It's open to everyone, and millions around the world can use it. And this is, I think, where we find the real difference between the things we are talking about when we talk about new media, old media, and social media.

It is a question of both content production and ease of group formation.

Newspapers have global distribution. They are all over the world. There isn't any one newspaper that you can get everywhere, maybe the International Herald Tribune (aka the New York Times), the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, or the Guardian (yes, all in English, but ok Le Monde maybe). You can write in and maybe they will print your letter to the editor.

The internet, too, is found all over the world. And newspapers are found on it.

But with the internet, so many more people can make content. And although the majority of content is, like so many academic journal articles, unread, it is much easier to find things online, and when you find written things, you often find the person who did the writing.

So I think that is the big difference, which is why "social media" is a better term than "new media." Social media let us create content, find content, and find the people who made that content much easier, and on a much larger scale, than ever before. Once we find those people, we can connect with them in some way: follow their Twitter feed, "like" or join a group they made on Facebook, or some other type of connection. And, thinking of Morozov's warnings about how the internet makes surveillance easy (in the 1990s we would have mentioned Bentham and the Panopticon), notice that I did not mention type of use, or who is finding who and following them: it could be friends, it could be the police arm of an oppressive state. The technology is, to some extent, use-neutral.

A small aside about industry, which wonders why we write-off television:

Television has done well in the last 20 years, there are many, many more channels than there used to be. Al Jazeera is one. In 1980 in the US, most likely you could only get the local, over the air broadcast channels, some of which would be part of a national network like NBC or PBS, however they were all ultimately local channels. Now you can get channels from all over the world, in all sorts of languages (I can get Spanish, various Asian languages, I think I've seen Greek, there are probably others, there's the BBC America of course). And there are many, many more channels (I do not actually know how many I get, well over 100), and most of them are national and have no local presence to speak of. I do not have satellite, but I have friends who do, and I am under the impression that there can be many, many more channels available.

The internet... well in terms of business, it's different. It did very badly ten years ago when the dot-com bubble burst.

But there are different components to both of these industries. The internet has, for instance, backbone providers, local connection providers (so, mine is Time/Warner sans AOL), web site hosting companies, blog posting sites, content providers like Apple/iTunes, Hulu, the New York Times, Gawker, and Salon, but also entities like Amazon who sell physical goods (and yes digital music and digital books). Television (from a US perspective) has local broadcasters, national networks (like NBC), national channels (like AE or Sy Fy), but also all of the production studios, cable providers, and satellite providers. Content production is not enough for success, as public-access cable was a huge failure in the US: the content produced by the local people who cared was generally terrible and no one watched. Yet do the same thing, generally speaking, on YouTube, and it might work--but the distribution is totally different (as is, I suspect, the content of successful non-professional material when compared to local access cable). (Sorting? Wider distribution? Sharing? The "long tail" of terrible material... You can't have the "short head" of great stuff without the long tail, but with searching and "liking" and such you can more easily find the "short head" that you're looking for. Something like that.)

This is, perhaps, an important distinction between "old" media and "new" media: New media such as Facebook and Twitter have corporate structures that are not at all connected to the content-generation of their sites or the editing of that content, but yet many "old" media have the two bound together -- the writers, content creators, and editors are all employees; not so for the masses of FB and tweet-land. Cell phones, as part of the telephone network, are interesting since today "smart phones" are really mini-computers with phones built-in, but phone networks have been around for over 100 years and we have always been able to speak our minds on them. Phones were not a communication tool with an easily-achieved wide reach. Yes you could call anyone, but calling everyone was much harder, even one-at-a-time or with a phone tree, where you call five people (5) who then call five people (5^2=25 + 5 =30) who each then call five more (5^3=125 + 30 = 155), etc. (People invented that method, that system, in order to reach more people--that is simply what we do, via whatever technology, and the current ones are the best we have for doing so.) I cannot fit phones easily into this framework, which shows that the framework isn't quite right, but also that we have diverse communication tools at hand, and that those tools in turn have diverse functions. This, I think, is a good thing.

In the end, it appears that if you put the tools of production into the hands of the people, great things happen.

Hulk Smash

2011-02-07T18:29:00.000-05:00

Here's an image to go along with my story about Feep and the Purple Pants, which sounds like a Encyclopedia Brown story but isn't. I didn't want to grab one off the internet, this is a picture I took of a guy's sweatshirt (you can see the drawstrings).

The Hulk's pants... they are always purple, and torn. Bruce Banner could be wearing a three-piece suit or a bathing suit yet the Hulk always ended up in torn purple ~~pantaloons~~ pants (the pantaloons are the EverQuest II version, which is the point of the story).

Big Words and Small Ideas (and Reviewers)

2011-02-01T12:55:00.000-05:00

I've been reading cartoons over at The Oatmeal, and I wish I could apply The Oatmeal's sensibilities to some reviewer comments I just received from ICA. Let us explore why. (Reviewer comments are a topic I have discussed before not once but twice at least.)

My paper title: Look at the Toilet I Made for My Avatar! Community-Building Through Meaningless Elements in MMOs.

Status: ACCEPTED at ICA. Bold, italics, all caps, you heard that right.

The "toilet" part is a narrative hook, something absurd but relevant and in the paper, designed to peak readers' curiosity. Really it's about the sub-title, and the toilet is an example of such a meaningless element. I use EverQuest II (EQII) as my exemplar. Communities are important.

Comments from first reviewer: None.

Summary: Useless.

Comments from second reviewer: "The author looks at the concept of transportation, which is operationalized..."

Summary: You're kidding, right? The word "transportation" is not actually in the paper. There is one paragraph that mentions the work of another researcher who mentioned in-game travel. I certainly don't operationalize it. Did this reviewer read the paper?

Comments from third reviewer: I don't even know where to start.

Summary: Useless cultural studies dreck. Not that all cultural studies is useless, I know they get defensive about that, some is quite good, but, to roughly quote my former advisor and cultural studies giant, Susan Douglas, there are a lot of universities that crank out useless and wrong-headed cultural studies people. (Michigan is not one of them, thank you, although my degree is not in cultural studies.)

Let us take ~~two~~ three comments from this reviewer.

Apparently, I "...reference Durkheim, Goffman, and Carey almost as an aside in an unconvincing discussion about ritual."

Except no. This reference is in the discussion. The discussion is supposed to be concise, and you don't explain every piece of literature in the same manner as you do in the literature review (the literature review is still concise, though). And, I discuss certain practices, such as online weddings, and also holidays in-game (so, the EQII version of Christmas, and Halloween, for example). Weddings are ritual. Holidays, especially and obviously ones with religious meaning or origin, are ritual. Weddings have deep historical and religious origins. Maybe the reviewer doesn't like how I discuss ritual, but it should be in there (all three theorists talk about ritual and community, so it is relevant). "Christmas", for example, does not exist in EQII. This is a fictional world with elves, there are no Christians. Jesus Christ and whatever Roman holiday Christmas usurped do not exist in this fictional world, nor are they part of the backstory. "Christmas" is turned into "Frostfell." It is still ritual, and it still has pro-community functions, just like our Christmas does.

The reviewer also says, "The paper would be substantially improved by more deeply immersing itself in the canonical cultural/critical literature on how cultural meaning is produced, appropriated, maintained, and challenged."
Uh, no. This is not a cultural/critical studies paper. I do not look at how "cultural meaning is produced, appropriated, maintained, [or] challenged" at all. That is not this paper. That could be some other paper with the same examples, but not this one. I look at how cultural meaning is used in order to create community by whatever terms you want to use to talk about it (groups, strong ties, bridging or bonding, etc.). But I especially consider how items which, in-game, do not have meaning for advancing one's character or for the narrative of the game, such as toilets or weddings or Frostfell, serve to advance community.

This reviewer also uses the words emic, etic, and ludic, none of which I like in the least. I do not even know what emic and etic mean, although I looked them up once. They are just not used in the literature of the academic areas where I reside. Using them identifies you as an insider to some evil academic cult, I am sure. Let us observe the sentence that contains them.

"The methods section makes an unconvincing case for the trade-offs between emic and etic approaches to participant observation..."

Given that I don't use the words emic or etic, I don't see how I can be making a case for the trade-offs between them. Pretty amazing that I manage that. I could be making a case for what they actually mean, but (after having looked them up), I'm not doing that. I just point out how some people use participant-observer to study virtual worlds and MMOs. Some people use other methods. I just reviewed my methods section, and there is no discussion of any trade-offs in any way at all. None. Given it's a lit review (but yes in the methods section, for the methods lit), should I....

Review the literature about virtual worlds and MMOs; or,
Ignore what other people have written about virtual worlds and MMOs.

I vote for #1. So do 5/5 PhDs (ok I asked myself five times, but I was amazingly consistent).

Emic: I don't actually have anything to say about Emic since I really, honestly, have no idea what the heck it means. I just don't. I have a PhD from one of the best universities in the world and I'm Phi Beta Kappa in college. This means, I am the man. But I don't know these words. I don't like them, I don't use them. I could tell you more about unicorns, and they're totally imaginary (sorry to tell you if you didn't know). Let us turn to... be seated for this... Wikipedia. I know, I know, I can hear your complaints already.

AHA!

They are so... well I've been judgmental enough already... they are so useless on their own as to be joined as one in the same Wikipedia article. And the discussion page is much longer than the page itself (never a good sign, but always fun to go read it).

As the article points out, these are just fancy buzzwords for "insider" and "outsider" points of view. One might also use "subjective" and "objective" as well, but we don't really need to get into a discussion of "objective" right now.

Etic: I can't recall if this is the "insider" point of view, or the "outsider" point of view, and it's irrelevant since I should never see these words again. Nor should you. (It's the outsider point of view. Well that's what the Wikipedia page says, that could change at any time.)

Oh wait I am horribly wrong, this reviewer does not use the word "ludic." But they could have. Someone must have, somewhere, since I block out emic and edic and etic or whatever they are. I think edic and emic (e-mic?) must have reminded me of ludic, since they are all horrible words that should never be used, can be expressed with much more simple words that have actual meaning, and they all sound alike (I think they all rhyme with "BLARGH!").

I apologize to reviewer #3. You are, nonetheless, still misguided about the direction my paper should go in. (It is where it needs to go, already!) And you used... those two words I can't even recall how to spell them, they are so bad my brain refuses to contain them. They are cast out.

Ludic: This means gaming, or of games. There is nothing wrong with the word gaming, except it doesn't sound very cool or academic. "Ludic", which is Latinate, sounds much more official. This is the view of people who want to study games, and play them (heaven forbid), but don't take gaming seriously, so they need a fancy word to make their activities defensible.

"Are you a gamer?"

"Oh good Lord no! I'm ludic."

"Oh, I see." (Quietly shuffles far, far away from our ludic friend.)

When you pull this crap, the corpse of Mark Twain should rise from the grave and give you a good buggering. If you can't explain yourself in plain language, then don't explain yourself, but especially don't make up words to tart up what it is you're trying to say. If what you're trying to say is so boring that you need the word "ludic" to help you out then you shouldn't be speaking in the first place. Yes, I know, the originator of the word, Huizinga, is the ancient god of game studies, and we all have to bow down at his altar and cite his Homo Ludens work to show the reviewers we know what we are talking about, or else we're not ~~in the cult~~ actually knowledgeable about game studies and oh just reject my paper already. And if you think I'm too pedestrian because I used insider instead of... etic? emic? I don't care, whichever one, then please, please reject my paper, because I don't want to know you.

Edit: Here are some guidelines from George Orwell.

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Twitter, Facebook, Revolutions, and Spectacle

2011-01-28T19:08:00.000-05:00

I think I should call this post, "Twitter, Revolution, and the Narcissism of Internet Commentators."

Internet commentators, such as myself, seem to have a certain fascination with the relationship between the Internet and political revolution. I think it is that, we derive our power from the power and importance of the Internet: If the Internet is powerful enough to cause a revolution, then we are powerful too.

But as we all know, revolutions do not need the Internet. Historically speaking, the Internet is so new that almost no revolutions can claim it (or, the Internet can't claim them). Revolutions need organization and power, and the Internet can help organize quickly and massively (for either revolutions or flash mobs of people who dance in stores). The American revolution had armies fighting, the French revolution had the Bastille, The Russian revolution had the red army and the white army and the murder of the Tsar and his family, the Chinese communist revolution had the armies of Mao and Chang Kai-shek. None of these had the Internet.

The recent uprising -- a failed revolution? -- in Iran had the Internet, and cell phones, and smart phones, and current communication technologies that allow people to organize and share messages on a massive scale with unprecedented speed. (The telegraph was the first communication technology to separate communication and transportation, and it was an amazing thing.) But the Internet, with its Twitter and its Facebook, did not bring down the regime there. Burma is still Myanmar, China is still slowly destroying Tibet, and there are other examples one could mention, each with its own history, complexities, disagreements, and more than two sides to each one.

Twitter and Facebook share in a criticism that has been made about television: That we watch it, we feel we are part of it, but we are not, we are in fact at home watching television (and many of us do so from our nice, safe, Western nations, vast distances from the real action, yet here it is in our living room on the screen). Twitter and Facebook, the technologies of the moment, are like this but to even more of an extent: We can see the tweets from people who we believe are actually there, on the ground, surrounded by riot police -- as long as they tweet in English, that is, and English is never the language of the nation in question, nor is it ever clear how educated one has to be, or what social class one belongs to, if one tweets in English and its not your native language. Clearly such people are not tweeting for their local audience.

That is not a criticism, however, but it is occasionally overlooked. Knowing your audience is always important, as is knowing about the message sender if you are the audience.

Somewhat akin to slacktivism, I am sure someone has written about this feeling of immediacy we can get from tweets before. I think these communication technologies are important, but their endless hyping stems from a misunderstanding: The current embodiment of digital communication technologies allows us to communicate widely and freely, which is an important change from past communication technologies. But it is not about Twitter, and it is not about Facebook, they are merely the names of the embodiments of the forms we are using today. This is instead a more enduring story, one of people, and how these technologies let us do what we have always done, that is, connect, be it to plan a meeting for coffee or an attempt at revolution.

Edit: This isn't to say we don't care about our fellow human beings, or that we don't want to see what it happening to them. Often we do.

Also, John Stewart and his team nail it, as usual.

See also this article (the second half mostly) at the New York Times by Scott Shane.

And see this blog post by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, fellow academic.

The Future of Facebook

2011-01-28T12:48:00.000-05:00

First, I'll recommend this Mimi Ito interview from PBS. It's just a few minutes long. In it she points out how kids don't generally like online social spaces where their parents are.

Watch the full episode. See more Digital Media - New Learners Of The 21st Century.

One element that stems from this observation is about the future of the Facebook userbase and Facebook itself. As its users get older and more of them become parents, will their children want to use that place where their parents hang out online? Probably not.

I could be dramatic and make statements about Facebook's not-so imminent demise, but that assumes all kids act the same, or that kids won't carve their own spaces out of the larger Facebook "Zuckerberg says we should share everything" space. It also assumes stagnation on the design side of Facebook, and they've been a moving target for several years, although usually in the pro-commercial side (share!) and not the pro-user side (privacy if you want).

I'm also not going to predict that in about 10 years we'll see all the current pre-schoolers decide on some online space that isn't Facebook. Given technological change, and the ease of making a social networking website (relatively speaking), it is difficult to predict how we will conceive of, talk about (academic: framing, discourse...), and label future online spaces. MUDs were in some ways early social software, but we didn't call them that (although people did point out the social side at the time).

But, to use market-oriented terms, there is clearly an opening for such a space. Could we see a resurgent MySpace? What happens to kids as they grow out of those "kid spaces" that seem odd to me since I'm an adult (and I don't follow them), what are they, Penguins?, Disney?, Habbo Hotel? Hobo Hotel? I don't know, they aren't marketed to me (as neither a child nor as a parent).

But, if kids want their own spaces, will Facebook be able to provide a space where kids feel it's their own? Given the number of adults on Facebook currently, and that teens on Facebook currently will grow older and many will have their own children, where will those children go when they are online? Will we even call it online at that point? (Probably, given that word has been around for a while and transitioned to today from modems, walled-garden online service providers like AOL used to be, and other dial-up services like BBSes and mainframes back in the day.)

Facebook's current userbase is a factor in its future userbase, and there are reasons to believe some of the current userbase will be a drawback for the future (youth) userbase. This problem is not, I don't think, easily overcome.

The Phrase "Computer-Mediated'

2011-01-23T13:58:00.000-05:00

Although I am a fan of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (JCMC), and I am indeed typing this on a computer (but could be on a "smart phone", as could you, which are really just mini hand-held computers with touch screens), I have never been a fan of the phrase "computer-mediated communication." It just doesn't resonate with me at all.

I remember as a first year graduate student, a professor told me to look into "computer-mediated communication" which I think I did but I don't think I found JCMC. The phrase was the problem, it was like calling work where people drove to their workplace "automobile-assisted employment." It is true, but to me it really missed the point so much I didnt see why I should look into it. Seemed like "cybernetics" from the 1960s, they were just talking about people using computers, trying to make it sound cooler with a cool name implies quite strongly it really isn't that interesting in the first place.

CMC doesn't quite have that problem, but it seems to miss the point. There was never any "paper- and ink- mediated communication" that studied letter writing and typewriters. And computers in 1985 versus computers currently are so different, as are the things we do easily on them, although this flexibility is useful. The computer doesn't restrict us very much (at least not nowadays), it isn't the interesting part of the equation, the people are.

If You Follow, You Will Never Lead: Microsoft's Business Non-Strategy

2011-01-10T19:02:00.001-05:00

The title of this post comes from my years growing up as a sailor in Nantucket, Massachusetts, on the wall of the old sail room in the Nantucket Yacht Club. The idea was that you'll get the same wind as the boat ahead of you, and, unless you are a greatly better sailor or have a vastly better boat, you will never overtake the leading boat. If you were that great, you probably wouldn't be behind in the first place.

This is not completely true in business, despite the myth of "first mover advantage", which is only true for successful products (so, not true in the long-term for Palm, nor for Apple's Newton, nor Atari in video games, to name a few). If you can copy products but improve on them without getting sued for patent violation, that may be viable, albeit difficult, and, honestly, foolish.

But it is Microsoft's strategy. I'll have to point out ahead of time that although they are ahead in market share in terms of operating systems if you group all the different versions of Windows, they are not ahead in some equally valid areas of measurement, such as smart phones (iPhone versus Windows Phone -- and they're not phones, of course, they're minis, as in, mini computers), digital music devices (iPod versus Zune), and, another measure, market capitalization -- Apple closed at an all-time high on Monday ($342.45), for a market cap of $314 billion, second only to Exxon Mobile in American companies. (The most recent number I can get for Microsoft's market cap is $240.5 billion. Not bad, but less than $314 billion, clearly.)

I would include digital music sales, but I don't actually think Microsoft really does that in any workable manner (iTunes Music Store versus what?). I'll have to check. I guess I could mention PlaysForSure. Oh I guess it's Zune Marketplace, which seems like a copy of... the iTunes Music Store. Well that continues to back my point. (I'll place it in the table below.)

The point is, Microsoft loves to copy, or on occasion purchase outright, what others are doing. And they usually do it badly, in terms of design and usability, despite market success over the long term, so far. Let's look at some examples.

Microsoft	Bought/Copied
Bing	Copied Google (see note)
DOS	Licensed another form of DOS (86-DOS)
Halo	Bought Bungie, for the Xbox
Hotmail	Bought, not as good as Gmail
Windows	Copied Apple's Mac OS
Windows Phone	Copied Apple's iOS and iPhone for the most part
Xbox	Copied Sony to challenge the PS platform
Zune	Copied Apple's iPod
Zune Marketplace	Copied Apple's iTunes Music Store

(I corrected/clarified the copying/licensing for DOS, I didn't like my initial explanation and it turned out not to be very accurate.)

The point is, Microsoft does not lead, it follows. I admit one interpretation is that I am saying that first-mover, which I just derided in a previous paragraph, is a strong effect, but that is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that Microsoft does not innovate, nor does it really micro-innovate, copying a product and then improving it as much as they can (incrementally). They buy products when they can't make a good competitor, and they copy products and they still can't make a good competitor (Apple's OSes have always been better, don't compare market share unproblematically since you have to deal with the hardware side of the equation, where Microsoft was not making the computers).

Apple tends to make products (and services) that make new markets (or, do so successfully). They are, to some extent, based on pre-existing forms, but not ones that are market successes.

Category	Apple's Move
Digital Music Downloads	iTunes Music Store (paid, not early free Napster)
Digital Music Player	iPod (a digital Sony Walkman)
GUI OS/Mouse	Original Mac OS (from work at Xerox PARC)
Smart Phone	iPhone (a mini computer, really)
Unix	OSX (based on NeXTSTEP, from Unix)

I'm avoiding the iPad as I think we need to wait another year to see how the "tablet" market pans out in the initial phase of the iPad era. Like NFL football before Thanksgiving, it's just too soon to tell. Apple's iPad has generated the most media coverage of recent tablets, which could be an honest indicator of quality, but I think there is some effect from journalists (not incorrectly) thinking they need to cover the iPad. There are probably some other items I could place in the list, but those are the most defensible and explainable that I can think of. (So, I'm avoiding USB and floppy disks.)

As I pointed out, it could be argued that none of these were new products either, but the thing is that, unlike with the Microsoft examples, none of these Apple products went up against anything similar that was successful in the market. (RIM's Blackberry series of phones, although cool, were still in the interface and paradigm of cool handheld phone devices, like Palm to some extent, the iPhone is a different device, it is not really a phone in the full sense, it is a computer that also has phone capability -- did you ever call your desktop computer a phone when it had a modem?) OSX didn't face a mass market Unix, Unix is mainly in labs, corporate back offices, and the homes of Linux geeks. (I've had... two? At least two, Linux boxes, so far.) There was an MP3 player before the iPod (I can't recall the name offhand), but it was not widely successful. Apple made a better interface (the wheel, which has now been replaced with touch screens for the most part).

This is also not to say that everything Apple does is gold (the Newton didn't succeed in the market, Apple's computer offerings were overpriced, underpowered, and muddled in the early 1990s, and there have been occasional but odd AppleTV offerings--usually a Mac with a TV tuner card--which seem to have worked themselves out finally), nor that Microsoft isn't a market success (despite, or perhaps because of, monopolistic practices, and who can resist taking a shot at Microsoft's Bob?).

Leading, and innovating, versus following. As others have pointed out, innovation is risky, but not innovating is moreso.

Update: One area I avoided, unintentionally, was web browsers. Sure, both Apple and Microsoft have web browsers, neither are original, and both are bundled with their OSes. I am pretty sure MSIE came before OSX's Safari, so it doesn't fit my pattern, but Safari wasn't establishing a new market. Not every product for both companies work as examples, but more than enough do that we can look at the overall pattern.

Note: When I said Bing was "copying" Google, I didn't mean literally copying the search results, I just meant the idea. Apparently, according to this report, Bing is indeed directly copying Google search results. Amazing.

Straits Times Mention

2011-01-10T16:50:00.000-05:00

Some work I did with Dr. Marko Skoric got mentioned in Singapore's paper of record, the Straits Times. The work looks at media use by students who were organizing a protest. One important take away was how the students navigated the media environment, using both the "new" media and the "traditional" media. If researchers and analysts only consider the new media environment, they aren't going to get an accurate picture of human behavior.

More Homage/IP Theft

2010-12-21T13:43:00.001-05:00

Although I already posted one example of ~~IP theft~~ cultural homage in Fallout: New Vegas, I found another common one so I thought I'd share it. The famous holy hand grenades (count ye to three...) from Month Python's Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Some cultural items (or I could say cultural texts) are canonical to certain cultures, and knowledge of them serves as a cultural identifier. In the previous post, it was The Princess Bride, here it is Monty Python. References to Monty Python can be found in many geeky places, for instance there is fleshwound armor, a reference again to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in both World of Warcraft and EverQuest II.

So why do we do this kind of thing? Because we, as a species, love to play, and we love to play with the things we love. It's what we do. Belonging to a group is also very important, historically speaking we don't tend to survive on our own. Play is often done with others, and aids group-formation, and showing knowledge of in-group references like "holy hand grenades" shows group membership. Humans have been called hyper-social beings, and now we have all of this social media and here I am using some of it to show the sociality of some other people using a Monty Python reference. Of course I am also showing my group membership to this geeky crowd, since I am playing Fallout: New Vegas and I knew what the holy hand grenades were.

However I have reached a bit of an impasse with Fallout: New Vegas. One of the quests is glitched and you can't get past it, so it effectively stops your game right then and there, no way around it, unless you are on the PC. (I can maybe work past it by going back to my last save and ditching the companion who causes it.) I am not, however, the only person to feel that there are too many bugs in the game. One thing that bugs me is the large number of floating rocks and corners of houses where light comes through. There is even one rock formation that is not "closed off" on one side, so you can walk into it (to the far SE by the miner's camp near the lake, a bit to the left of the camp on that slope).

When There Is No Digital Sediment

2010-12-17T18:25:00.000-05:00

I may have been thinking about the ancient peoples of Europe, or even Neanderthals, at the time, but I realized one thing some virtual worlds lack today is the archaeological record found in the layers of sediment put down by time. There is no digital sediment there.

This was not always so, I don't believe, particularly with MUDs. In the non-virtual world space, with Google and the Wayback Machine, there is plenty of digital sediment. Wikipedia is all digital sediment. In MMOs, I don't think there is any, although I don't know every MMO in this manner -- in EverQuest II, if you stop paying for your house or guild hall, it's off-limits. Any "history" was put down by the game designers and isn't the same as the history of the digitally lived experience, even when that "history" refers to the original EverQuest.

In Second Life, you have to buy space. I am not entirely sure what happens with space that is given up -- I'm under the impression it gets sold, either to another user or a land broker, but either way the digital objects are usually wiped and something new is put in, with no layering on the past, just an erasing. Although it make digital building easier -- and I am a bit hesitant to call it "building" since it has very little to do with building in the physical sense -- it certainly does away with one of the usual conditions of the real world. I imagine if the owner of a zone doesn't want it, and can't sell it, it gets erased. Eventually Second Life will have to shrink, but I don't follow Second Life currently (it's creepy) and I doubt the Lindens will trumpet the loss of "land" like they trumpeted when all the corporations and embassies moved in (when the corporations moved out, it wasn't the Lindens talking about it).

MUDs, since many of them were non-commercial and run on some university server somewhere, just built up stuff over time. There weren't exactly layers, but there were additions and additions and more additions.

Some games use history as a feature. Dwarf Fortress is one; once you dig away the rock in the mountain, it's gone. Sure you can essentially fill it back in, but not with original stone, you have to make floors and walls instead. The history of the space is often there. SimCity, from what I recall, had some features that were easy to undo (like zoning) but other ones that weren't. Overall, though, you could re-build anything in-game, erasing everything before it.

But if we want to deal with virtual worlds as real-ish worlds, or as real worlds but in digital form, we need to remember what qualities digital worlds don't have. History is vitally important to us, but often the digital sediment of the past is missing. It's not presented as a bug, it's presented as a feature.

The Memex Contains and Is You

2010-12-10T14:21:00.000-05:00

I am sure someone has pointed this out before, but I was looking at a blog post and there was the now-common "Like this on Facebook" link, and it struck me that we are the connected document.

It's like what they did in Caprica, which I thought was a good show. They portrayed the initial virtual world as full of porn and violence, and they built online independent avatars based off of the giant database of information about any particular person (and behavioral algorithms).

We can see the beginning of this distributed database, there is the more social side of it (Facebook, etc.), and the more commercial side of it (how that information is used to select advertisements to place on a page you visit). It is a web of connections and data, where you are at the center of it. Your online self is represented by this data, but in a stronger way that just it being a record of your actions online. With enough connections and enough data, it is you.

Reading Links (Mostly Wikileaks)

2010-12-10T11:39:00.001-05:00

David Pogue about Corning's Gorilla Glass, very cool. (The odd man out in this listing.)

2600 objects to Anonymous' DDoS'ing in the whole Wikileaks thing.

Glenn Greenwald has some good and accurate coverage of the Wikileaks madness.

The New York Times has a nice piece on European reaction (bemusement and surprise) to the American fuss over Wikileaks.

Honestly I haven't seen any surprises at all from the relatively few leaked documents. It's not like the documents have outed the identity of any undercover CIA agents, that would be the Bush administration who did that.

Play and Homage (and IP Theft)

2010-12-04T14:42:00.000-05:00

People like to play with the things they like. If we play with snippets of music, we are called pirates by the music industry. If we play with other cultural items, like TV and comic book characters, and if we do it in spaces like Spore or LittleBigPlanet, it's seen as acceptable (although I am sure it is a bit more complex than that, I don't have any insider info from EA or Sony about it).

What is interesting is when branches of the big intellectual property companies, like Sony (with Sony Music, and Sony's movie and television production), have spaces where intellectual property is borrowed by the company itself (although since companies are not people, obviously this is done by the people at the company). So Sony's EverQuest II has lots of cultural homages (or theft) in it, placed there by the people who work for Sony Online Entertainment. One "homage" is the epic (or something) questline for the swashbuckler character class, which is loosely but obviously based on the movie The Princess Bride. Swashies are pirates, right? And pirates are an important part of the film.

(Hmm actually I should, to be thorough, see if that's a Sony film -- but there are lots of examples in EQII that aren't owned by Sony, so even if this is not a good example the point still holds.)

Ok Wikipedia says it is not a Sony-owned piece of IP. It's Fox and Lions Gate and MGM. We are still on here with this example, good.

And this is found across companies and virtual spaces, so I was pleased but not too surprised upon some reflection to discover another Princess Bride reference in Bethesda's recent game Fallout: New Vegas (developed by Obsidian). In one cave you will discover big cave rats, but, they are not just big rats in a cave, they are rodents of unusual size. If you know The Princess Bride, you know there are rodents of unusual size in the fire swamps. It is possible this is done with permission, but I really doubt it. (That would also put a big dent in this argument.)

But, the whole point of this post is that I took a photo of it (since I play it on my Xbox 360, not on a PC where I could take screen shots and have mods, which would be cool).

(The "S" down at the bottom of the photo is light hitting the S in Sharp, the brand of television I have currently.)

Names and History

2010-12-04T14:13:00.000-05:00

A nice point by Paul Graham about what we call touchscreen devices like iPhones, which I saw on boingboing (I thought, but can't find it, maybe not) and Daring Fireball:

The only reason we even consider calling them “mobile devices” is that the iPhone preceded the iPad. If the iPad had come first, we wouldn’t think of the iPhone as a phone; we’d think of it as a tablet small enough to hold up to your ear.

This is standard human behavior, we've done it before. We present new things in terms of the more-familiar then-current things. Horses led to horseless carriages, from which we dropped the "horseless" and "-riage" part of carriage to get just car (I believe), which we still drive. There was also the iron horse (the locomotive), and the wireless telegraph (early radio before voice was used).

Call of Your Sofa

2010-12-01T11:27:00.000-05:00

I was passing through Times Square the other day, sadly, it's a terrible place, and Red Lobster should really be illegal (not just because it's fast food, but because of what they do to seafood), and I was amused by this Call of Duty billboard.

The current ad campaign has lots of "normal" people, and a few television-based people (Jimmy Kimmel and Kobe Bryant, I think), running around with guns shooting at a ruined building. The people on this billboard are supposed to be normal people (they are either actors or models though). They are each holding two pistols of some sort, and have two rifles on their backs (I will assume one is an M16, and, given the game, I hope the other is a sniper rifle).

I like most of the Call of Duty games. But this ad campaign is ridiculous.

When I play CoD, and when most people do, we are sitting on our sofas. We are holding a very light weight video game controller, just one, in both hands. We do not move. We do not run. We do not sweat (the people on the billboard, IIRC, are all sweaty from running around with heavy guns).

The people in the billboard are not holding one light weight controller. The M16, according to Wikipedia, weighs about 8 pounds. So, let's say that's 16 pounds on their backs (not too much). Well they could be M4 carbines, which weigh a bit less. As for the pistols, well Wikipedia gives the weight of the M9 in ounces and grams, so about 1kg, let's say 2 pounds (not much). Of course there is kickback from when the weapon fires, which isn't anything like the vibration of an Xbox 360 controller.

The Xbox 360 controller weighs about 250g, one-quarter of an M9 pistol, so the Xbox 360 controller is 125g in each hand compared to 1kg for an M9 in each hand like in the billboard.

The whole thing is pretty ridiculous. Reminds me of the NFL's "Play 60" campaign -- you should get exercise, just not when games are on, then we need you to sit passively in front of the television so we can sell your viewership to advertisers. (Remember, football is not the product, you are the product, and your attention is sold to advertisers.)

Edit: It has been pointed out to me that I forgot the weight of the ammunition and grenades. This could be... well I don't know, but, more than nothing. I have no experience carrying around a bunch of ammo or grenades. They are all metal though.

Microsoft's Kinect

2010-11-22T13:10:00.000-05:00

Penny Arcade has had quite a bit of writing about the Kinect, they don't particularly like it, but others are fascinated by it. Whatever their take, I am profoundly disturbed by Jenna Wortham's writeup in the New York Times (indeed where one tends to find her writeups), especially the sentence that says how hackers are "getting the Kinect to do things it was not really meant to do," because this is not at all true (besides the "not really..." part, which any good Wikicultist would flag as "weasel words" and actually be correct about it).

The Kinect was not designed to be a motion sensing device that is inherently and only part of the Xbox 360, if it were, it would have been built in. It is not. It is a motion sensing device that you can connect to something with the right connector, with Microsoft hoping that would be the Xbox 360. And if you know anything about people, you know we like to play with things, especially things we like.

“Anytime there is engagement and excitement around our technology, we see that as a good thing,” said Craig Davidson, senior director for Xbox Live at Microsoft. “It’s naïve to think that any new technology that comes out won’t have a group that tinkers with it.”

Except of course Microsoft, or the people at it, were extremely naïve, because earlier...

A [Microsoft] representative said that it did not “condone the modification of its products” and that it would “work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant.”

Microsoft's model has typically been one of control. Control over Windows, control over the Xbox, control over Microsoft Office, and so on. It was Sony that made it easy to load Linux onto their PS3, not Microsoft and its Xbox 360, although Sony later took away this capability (I am not sure of the politics behind that one, it may be interesting). Note that hackers have adapted Linux for both platforms regardless.

But we've seen so many instances where people do like to play with things (it's a part of who we are). For instance, Bethesda's line of games, such as Oblivion, which is available for both the Xbox 360 and Windows. There are no mods for games or anything on the Xbox, it's not part of the business model. (Mods, made by players, opposed to patches and DLC, by the company.) On the PC, however, there is a thriving mod scene (which I have written about). Bethesda supports the modders, gives them forum space, and interviews them (here is one example, and you can check out their posts tagged "modding"). The people at Bethesda know we like to play games and play with games, and we will do so whether they want us to or not. Mods can, and do, fix bugs, add new maps, zones, characters, quests, and everything: for the game producer, your customers can be developers who make the game better, for free. It's not just win-win, it's win-win-win (producer, modder, players).

Here's a recent Ten Best Oblivion Mods list from PC Gamer. Keep in mind Oblivion is over four years old already. In part because it's a great game, but in part because of the mod scene, people are still playing it.

I'm not sure, definitely, how old the modding scene is: the Internet itself is essentially a giant mod, so, 40 years. It depends on your definition. The Flight Sim mod scene is pretty old, dating back to at least 1990. That's 20 years (and Flight Sim is now, or was for a long time, a Microsoft product!). One would think that everyone would have noticed this long-standing given (I resist the word "trend" there, this is a not a trend, it is a constant).

Design Options

2010-11-10T17:23:00.000-05:00

I want to talk about two designed items, the choices behind them, and the resulting ease of use: an alarm clock and a recycling can.

I have a Brookstone alarm clock, with a long-life battery so it will always (or, for longer than the rest of it will last) remember the time, like magic (that's the idea). As a user feature, they built into it the time change for daylight savings. Which is nice, since I don't have to ever change the time, it does it automatically, like my phone and my computer. Except I do have to do it, four times a year, since the US Congress changed when we change the time.

The problem is it's hard coded, and not at all flexible, and the information that is hard coded into it (what date the time change happens) did indeed flex, but the device can't. So, zero was better than two (zero changes if the clock changes the time, twice if I change the time). But now it's four, and if zero is better than two then we know four is pretty terrible.

(To be clear, it's four because it changes earlier than it now should, so I have to change it back, then it doesn't change when it's supposed to, so I have to change it again, and do this the two times a year we change the clocks. And this only works if I live in part of the US where we change the time.)

Automatic time change? Good usability decision. Hard wired? Not good.

The other item, a recycling can, I saw the other day at one of the artsy theaters on Houston street here in NYC. One problem with a lot of public-area recycling cans is that people are busy and their attention is elsewhere and they throw out trash in recycling cans, which makes it look like a trash can and more people do it. But this design had a little lid with the recycling logo on it, and you had to lift the lid, which meant you had to look at it and think, "How do I open this, aha a handle, oh look a recycling logo." It forced you to slow down a second, and think, but only a very small, easy amount.

Granted these are two different areas of design, but they both remind us of the importance of design, and how little things can make a big difference. Also, flexible systems.

Acronyms and MMOs

2010-10-29T10:59:00.000-04:00

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, we had games like World of Warcraft: multiplayer, Dungeons and Dragons-based, online worlds. Except they were text. They were called MUDs or MOOs, MUD for Multi-User Dungeon and MOO for MUD Object Oriented (a comment about the programming behind it).

We also had Dungeons and Dragons and a whole slew of other role-playing games, called RPGs.

Notice these all adhere to the three-letter acronym standard, which also has a three-letter acronym, TLA.

Eventually graphics and bandwidth improved, and we had graphics-based versions of MUDs. People started calling the MMORPGs, which was just stupid. No one called them MUDRPGs or MOORPGs. MMO would have not only fit the TLA standard, it would have thematically matched MUD and MOO, besides being visually similar to MOO (MMO, MOO, although they are "m-m-o" and "moo" like a cow, respectively, and MUD is "mud" like dirt).

Currently there are some people who use MMO, thankfully, yet there are, rather oddly, others who refer to MMOs as MMOGs. This is strange for three reasons:

It does not conform to the previous acronym method for these objects (MUD, MOO).
It does not conform to the TLA standard.
There is no other "MMO" so it's not as if MMOG is a clarification, the G is extraneous.

You could argue that MMOs are indeed Massively Multiplayer Online Games, and so you have to have the G, but given that an acronym drops so many letters already, why not one more? We already lost the Role Playing part. MMO is still just as clear, and as an acronym is 25% shorter than MMOG. (Overall, MMOG drops 27 letters, and MMO drops 28, which is not a significant difference in the loss of original information.)

Apple, Handhelds, and Disruption in Markets

2010-10-25T13:52:00.000-04:00

Every time I see an advertisement for a touch phone, smart phone, or whatever you call them, I can only think of how Apple created this working technological system and the market. Really they are touch-screen handheld computers, but they come marketed like phones, so we call them phones and think of them like phones--computers had modems built in, at one point, and we could actually make phone calls on them, but no one ever referred to a computer as a phone.

I don't want to say "the market for these devices wouldn't have existed without Apple," since that's not true, the market did exist before Apple made the iPhone, and that's why the iPhone immediately sold so well. However it is true that these smart phone, or touch-screen handhelds (TSH is not a good acronym, though), would not exist today without some company having made the move first and having a positive market response, and in this case, such an overwhelmingly positive response that every other phone player wants in on the game.

And that's why we have to think about disruptive technologies.

I am not, by far, the first to point this out. The radio powers in some decade in the past sat on the newer, better, FM technology since their entire empire was built on AM radio, and their manufacturing process didn't make radios that could tune to FM signals, and none of the radios out there could tune to FM. Eventually they rolled it out. I have read how companies fear new technologies, since it is risky, changing what you are doing is risky, and people fear losing their jobs if the company shifts to something new.

Thus, Apple. Not a player in the phone market. No one at Apple stood to lose much if the iPhone wasn't a hit. But they also had experience with the iPod, the iPod as part of the larger iTunes system, and they could learn from their earlier Newton, from Palm, and from RIM's Blackberry. And given than the iPhone is really a computer, Apple had experience in that market.

None of the established phone makers would have made an iPhone knock-off, like they all do now, it was simply too risky. They didn't have the experience, they were locked into thinking about cell phones and not touch-screen hand helds, and they didn't have an existing infrastructure into which they could connect the device (iTunes). It is possible that individuals or teams at the more innovative cell phone companies tried to push an iPhone-like idea, but it wasn't until Apple blew the cell market open did anyone else make one. And of course it isn't actually the cell market, it's something new that people took a while to figure out, just like the iPad.

Sci-Fi and Victorian Grammar Rules

2010-10-23T23:48:00.000-04:00

I've seen commentary somewhere about split infinitives and Star Trek ("To boldly go!"), but it only recently clicked with Star Wars and "These are not the droids ~~for which~~ you are looking for," with its preposition. I've written about Victorian grammar rules before (and according to Google I am pretty much the only person who refers to them as that, which is... odd... given that I didn't make up the phrase) and a piece by David Foster Wallace about such things.

Now, if anyone can pull off using formal written English when using spoken English, Alec Guinness was one of those people, but it would have been jarring.

For the Star Trek intro quote, splitting the infinitive makes for better cadence/rhythm/meter.

If we look at sci-fi as being about the possible, well, there you have it.

Facebook's Insane Application Allowances

2010-10-17T18:23:00.000-04:00

I fired up Apple's iPhoto Uploader for Facebook, and I hadn't done so before so had to connect the app with my Facebook account. To do so you have to give permission to the app to do a variety of things (see photo), maybe. Although presented here in a nice visual list, this seems to be the standard list of things you have to give every app in Facebook when you want to use it (so I use practically no apps).

The list is insane.

iPhoto Uploader doesn't need to do any of those things. Does this mean it is going to? Or it might? Or is it just standard boilerplate and it will only upload photos and nothing more? Standard boilerplate would make the job of the people at Facebook a lot easier -- "Just use this text, the lawyers approved it, no app does all that, most do very little." But it's not at all clear what iPhoto Uploader will do, and I just said it could do all of those things.

I don't want it to, and it doesn't need to, post to my wall, access any of my information, access relationships, and it certainly doesn't need to access my friends' information. No way no how. And really it shouldn't, that would be a ton of info that I don't think Apple needs, although in this age of data mining who knows. All it needs to do is access my Facebook photo space to upload photos.

Edit: Oh look at that. "New Facebook privacy breach involves apps leaking user data," at boingboing.

Community and Dwarf Fortress

2010-10-01T16:41:00.000-04:00

I haven't posted much lately, besides working on the book I've been ~~playing~~ studying the game Dwarf Fortress (available for Windows, OSX, and Linux) and the culture of its fans. It is a difficult game for at least two reasons: One, it is a difficult game (you have to micromanage a ton of stuff, more as you grow your fortress), and two, the interface is brutal. And there is no winning the game. There is no win condition. There is only eventual death for your Dwarves.

The game, without an added tileset, is all in ASCII. No, not text, ASCII. So yes it looks like text, but it's not words. The 2D world is presented in ASCII (but it's a 3D world, you scroll up and down through levels). That E over there? An elephant. T? That's a troll. O? A giant Olm. Lowercase c? A small cat, aka a kitten. But not everything is letters. I use a tileset, since I found the original flavor of DF absolutely impossible, especially when combined with the difficulty of the game for newbies. (So actually those letters are the ones I get in the tileset, they may or may not be the ones in the un-tilesetted game interface.) Here are some screenshots at Bay 12.

Try reading this review, which says, "nothing about it is simple. Dwarf Fortress is immense, hugely complicated, insanely detailed, and uses only ASCII characters for graphics." And more!

But this does not stop the fanbase. In fact, given that people often emotionally buy into something stronger if they had to put more effort into it, we can see why this might be so (and is for some, if you can get over the learning curve, which is really more like a learning cliff it is so steep). Here is a simplified flowchart of the game. Keep in mind some DF fan made that flowchart.

But we see a lot of things that people do with other stuff are the things people are doing with Dwarf Fortress.

Fans made a wiki, and have updated it across major version changes. (You will want it open whenever you play.)

Fans made tutorials, since the game is impossible without them. (Here's one, and here is the wiki page with several.)

Fans have modded the game with tilesets (again, impossible without, except for the real die-hards). Here's one that is pretty amazing. Here's a page with links to mods and tilesets.

Fans have made DF art and stories based on gameplay. (Well worth a look, great art style, and funny, note the grim humor.)

Fans start up a new game, and then hand it off to someone else, to let them run the fortress, and they write it up. (This is for an older version of DF, which I think had just one level. Note the grim humor.) (To use and paraphrase Sony's and MM's LittleBigPlanet tagline, which I use all the time, they played, they created, they shared.)

There are of course forums, where players help out by answering other players' questions (so I learned that flux needs to be on the same level as your smelter and forge or it won't be available, it's bugged and was driving me crazy).

It's fun. (I didn't link that for no good reason, by the way. Note the grim humor.)

But the fun (as defined above in that link) is pretty amazing, and relates to the absolutely grim sense of humor that most DF players exhibit when writing about DF online.

Here's a line from a current (may change!) wiki entry: "It is unknown whether this is a bug or a feature."

From the Bronzemurder saga that you should have read (really):"I play Dwarf Fortress. Sometimes I wish I was a meth addict instead."

There seem to be a lot of stories of accidental floods. Elephants. Elves. Forgotten beasts. Dwarves falling down wells (apparently they do that). Dying of thirst during winter if you have no water source (oops!). On occasion they kill each other. "Things of that nature" where "things of that nature" include pretty much anything.

There are many other examples that I've seen, and that you can find online. I won't say "I will try to post them" since if I never do then it will be one of those never-corrected online sentences, posted and forgotten.

Edit: A Master's thesis on Dwarf Fortress? Why yes, the MIT Comparative Media people have been there and done that.

Updated Google H Score: More Begets More

2010-09-10T10:45:00.000-04:00

Here is a one-year later followup to my post about my Google H score. As you can see, the papers that were cited more often a year ago were cited even more often, in a mostly exponential manner. More cites meant even more cites. I think the general mechanism is that, as a paper is cited more often, it will show up in literature (as a cite) that people read about a given topic, so people are more likely to cite articles they see widely cited (assuming the article is relevant, and hopefully people won't cite an article unless it's good, so to some extent "widely cited" relates to quality). Higher-cited articles are generally listed higher in Google Scholar searches as well. Newer articles about hotter topics will break this pattern (apparently I am not writing recently about hot topics!), but I think this is one factor. Of course if more cites means higher quality, this could just be an issue of quality. I have the feeling that source journal also plays a part, but that's for a variety of diffuse reasons.

Notice that my Google H score is still 4. Bummer! I need 3 more cites on "A Cross National Study..." paper to get my Google H score to 5.

Article (short title)	Journal	Author(s)	Year	2009	2010	Incr.
Mechanisms of an online public sphere	JCMC	Solo	2005	*25	*42	17
To broadband or not to broadband	JoBEM	Co	2004	9	10	1
Honey, I shrunk the world!	MCS	Co	2006	8	12	4
Playing Internet curveball...	Convergence	Solo	2006	7	11	4
A cross-national study...	TIS	Solo	2007	1	2	1
Copyright notices...	JCMC	Solo	2008	*1	*1	0
Global citation patterns...	IJoC	Solo	2009	0	0	0
Stratification and global elite theory	IJoPOR	Co	2009	0	0	0

Values as of Sept 10th, 2009 and 2010.

* indicates one self-cite, relevant, honestly!

Neither self-cite affects the Google H value.

The numbers fluctuate from time to time, up and down.

Touch is not a Natural Interface

2010-09-01T10:43:00.000-04:00

There is a rather dismal article over at the New York Times, To Win Over Users, Gadgets Have to Be Touchable, by Claire Cain Miller. (I think my expectations are too high for the NYT, but that's another story.) The main idea of the story is that the current touch interfaces (thank you, Apple) are "natural" and we don't need to learn them, we know them already.

Unlike past interfaces centered on the keyboard and mouse, natural user interface uses ingrained human movements that do not have to be learned.

But this is not at all true. A lot of the things we do with touchscreens are the exact same things, conceptually, that we've been doing with GUI interfaces since 1984 (GUI, for those of you who have forgotten, stands for Graphical User Interface, meaning, a mouse, windows, file icons, folders, probably a desktop, in other words, not the text-only CLI, which is Command Line Interface).

If you want an app to launch on your iPhone, you touch it.

If you want an app to launch on your Mac, you touch it with your mouse, which is your onscreen finger. Technically you mouse over it and double-click it, but, it's the same concept. Your mouse cursor is always in the screen, your finger spends most of its time not physically touching your touch-device screen. Same thing.

I could go on, but let's look at text. If you want to select text on your iPhone, you hold your finger on it and expand or select the amount of text you want. If you want to select text on your Mac, you have to take similar direct action on the text with the mouse cursor, which may involve clicking (perhaps with the shift key) or click-dragging or double-clicking.

It is, again, the same basic concept.

In some ways, it is not "ingrained." Widespread literacy is a historically recent phenomenon, but I doubt the ancient Romans poked their finger at text on a scroll and expected anything to happen.

In other ways, it is ingrained, because by copying the concepts from desktop, GUI-based, operating systems, touch-screens were copying a computer front-end that tried to mimic our human interface with our real-world offices: files, folders, trash cans, and a desk (desktop). If you want to do an action on an item, you poke it with your mouse cursor.

I've seen many a touch-device running Windows, where the mouse cursor follows your finger. I cannot remember what these devices are, they may be airport check-in kiosks. (I am pretty sure some were.) Your finger is the mouse.

Of course if you have an iPad or iPhone and there are no buttons on it, well, what's left to try? Touch.

I am reminded of a scene in one of the Star Trek films (the one with the whales, and Chekov's famous line about "nuclear wessels"). Scotty sits down in front of a classic form factor Mac, and tries to talk to it like he would his futuristic computer. The current-day assistant looks confused, and then hands Scotty the mouse, saying "Try this." Scotty picks it up and tries to use it like a microphone. (Eventually he gives up and uses the keyboard, which isn't a realistic approach to what he ends up doing, but that's besides the point.)

Natural interfaces are learned. (We spend many years learning how to interact and interface with the real world and especially people.) They may be easy, but they are learned.

Connect: Online Avatar Dancing

2010-08-31T20:23:00.000-04:00

I've just started Musicophilia, by Dr. Oliver Sacks (author of several great books I have read), and so want to present a first-draft section I have on dancing, specifically why so many people are all about dancing avatars, videos of dancing avatars, and why we like dancing in general.

The footnotes are a bit unclear, but at least Scrivener did the copy (of copy and paste fame) well and automatically included them at the end, in a nice list format. I'll add some title information.

Dancing (draft), from Connect.

Dancing is a big thing on the Internet, especially YouTube, where you can find real dancing (like the music videos MTV used to show), and seemingly pointless but occasionally funny videos of avatars dancing in MMOs like World of Warcraft, EverQuest, and There.com. People like dancing so much that MMO companies have built dance moves into the capabilities for avatars. It certainly doesn’t help your level 7 elf battle orcs, but that’s what people wanted.

Not everyone is into online dancing, as the Reuters in-world employee, Eric Krangel, found out. “As part of walking my ‘beat’, I’d get invited by sources to virtual nightclubs, where I’d right-click the dance floor to send my avatar gyrating as I sat at home at my computer. It was about as fun as watching paint dry.”[1] The problem is Krangel wasn’t there for the dancing and the music and the text-chatting. He wasn’t a part of the community that likes that kind of activity. He was there as a Reuters employee to sell the Reuters brand. He could have gotten into it, but that he didn’t isn’t a big surprise.

Dance is a form of ritual, a concept that receives attention from researchers, and as a form of shared and coordinated play it can lead to community bonds. It is a very old human behavior. As psychology researcher Fitch observed, “music and dance are found in all cultures, and have been for many thousands of years.”[2] Lee, writing about the history of ballet, pointed out that, “Throughout the ages, a wealth of documentation in the form of cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphics, description of ancient Olympic games, and Old Testament references have attested to the importance of dancing in society.”[3] Garfinkel, writing about early human dancing, cited evidence for dance in the Middle East and Europe as far back as the 8th millennium BC.[4]

Although we have a lot in common with our fellow mammals and primates, McNeill observed that “community dancing occurs only among humans.”[5] In further contrast to other animals who have behaviors that we refer to as dancing (like bees), humans dance in groups in a synchronized manner to music, which other animals don’t have, and music is “fundamental and central in every culture” writes Dr. Oliver Sacks in his book on music and the human brain.[6] In fact, dancing and music are tightly related in our brains. As Berkeley professor Walter Freeman explained, “music together with dance have co-evolved biologically and culturally to serve as a technology of social bonding.”[7] A shared ritual that fosters community, the two are “the biotechnology of group formation.”[8] The current English word play is related to an older and similar Old English word, but, according to the Oxford American Dictionary, it is also related to the Middle Dutch word pleien, which, perhaps not surprisingly, can mean dance.[9]

Dance is a form of communal play, and is clearly an important part of who we are. Knowing this, we should not be surprised to find it online in some situations where it seems to have no point for the virtual world, as indeed we do.

[1] Neate (2009). ("The biology and evolution of music", in Cognition, v. 100)
[2] Fitch (2006), p. 199. (In The Telegraph.co.uk)
[3] Lee (2002), p. 1. (Ballet in Western culture)
[4] Garfinkel (2003), p. 106. (Dancing at the dawn of agriculture)
[5] McNeill (1995), p. 13. (Keeping together in time)
[6] Sacks (2007), p. xi. (Musicophelia)
[7] Freeman (2000), p. 411. (In The origins of music, by Wallin, Merkur, and Brown)
[8] Freeman (2000), p. 417.
[9] See also Huizinga (1955), p. 31, for more on play and dance. (Homo ludens)

Recent Review Scores

2010-08-26T10:18:00.000-04:00

Speaking of reviews, here are the scores from the ten reviews that Dr. Skoric and I received on a conference paper submission. We love you too, reviewer #1.

	#1	#2	#3	#4	#5	#6	#7	#8	#9	#10	Av.
Relevance	2	3	2	2	4	4	4	4	4	4	3.3
Theory	1	3	2	4	4	3	3	3	4	2	2.9
Methodology	1	2	3	2	4	2	4	3	4	4	2.9
Presentation	2	4	3	2	3	3	4	4	4	3	3.2
Validity	2	2	3	2	3	3	4	3	4	3	2.9
References	2	4	4	4	4	3	3	4	4	4	3.6
Contribution	1	2	3	3	3	3	4	4	4	4	3.1
Originality	2	4	3	3	3	3	4	4	4	5	3.5
Interest	2	4	4	4	4	4	4	4	4	4	3.8
Average	1.67	3.11	3	2.89	3.56	3.11	3.78	3.67	4	3.67	3.24

5-pt. scale.

Evolved Systems—Academic Peer Review

2010-08-24T17:50:00.000-04:00

Too often I see calls for reforming the academic peer review process, or, another favorite, for the eradication of academic tenure, and you read the article and you realize the person has no idea what they are talking about.

There's another such article over at the New York Times, by Patricia Cohen, Wikipedia Age Challenges Scholars’ Sacred Peer Review. There are so many things wrong with the article, it's almost a challenge to know where to start. Let's start at the beginning, then, since I already gave you the summary.

Peer review is not "sacred", as in the title. It's not clear what that means. Peer review is a process that evolved over a period of time to serve a need that scholars have, which is, figuring out which articles are any good in a way which works.

The first sentence continues the misguided commentary. "For professors, publishing in elite journals is an unavoidable part of university life." As a writer, you like your first sentence to be accurate, among other things. Publishing in elite journals is not at all "unavoidable". It is quite avoidable: don't submit papers to elite journals. Trying to get published in elite journals is usually required, but that is very different from publishing in them. In fact, if the journals are elite, they won't publish papers by most people. And if you're at a teaching college, publications are not as important as they are at research universities.

The second sentence continues the comedy of errors: "The grueling process of subjecting work to the up-or-down judgment..." No. Subjecting the work to review is easy, you send it in. The grueling part is doing the research, and then writing it up perfectly. This means you have to have a great research question, great data, great methods, and interesting findings. And it's not an up-or-down judgement at all. For all of the journals I have reviewed for, it has never been up or down. I've done reviews for five different journals, and two conferences (and I have reviewed every year for the conferences, and more than once for some of the five journals). It's always a range of options for journals, and you give comments. Usually, the options are like the following:

Accept as is.
Accept with minor revisions.
Resubmit with minor revisions.
Resubmit with major revisions.
Reject.

As you can see, that's not "up-or-down." Resubmits can be rejected, or sent back a second time as another resubmission, where they can be accepted or rejected (usually at that point they don't let you resubmit it again).

Cohen refers to peer review as a "monopoly". It's a process. She continues,

Instead of relying on a few experts selected by leading publications, they advocate using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience.

Relying on experts for their opinion on the article is the entire point! These experts are not "selected by leading publications," reviewers are selected by the editors at the journal where the paper has been submitted. Use of the word "swift" implies that peer review is slow. Well, not like we get paid for it. And not like it counts towards tenure. We do it to help make journals better, which makes the field better as a whole. Sometimes you might get 10% off books by the publisher which publishes the journal. If you do a good job, the editor might remember it, but that also means more reviewing for you in the future. And relying on "a much broader interested audience" is a terrible idea, papers should not be judged by an interested audience, they should be judged by an expert audience.

As a writer, you don't want too many reviewers, because at some point they will disagree with each other and then there is no way to change the paper to make them all happy (which is the only way to get the paper published). Note that this is not pointless reviewer-pleasing, if they approve of the paper that means the paper makes a positive contribution to the field. I co-authored a paper for a conference recently and there were ten reviewers, which makes our job as authors very difficult because many of the reviewers disagreed with each other (but they have no idea that they are disagreeing with each other, this is not publishing by committee).

Regarding one of the crowd sourced peer review projects, Cohen writes, "In the end 41 people made more than 350 comments." As an author I don't want 350 comments. I want maybe five sets of comments at most, from qualified people.

There are a lot of other errors in the article, too many to detail at length. Here's one:

The traditional method, in which independent experts evaluate a submission, often under a veil of anonymity, can take months, even years.

This is not true. For the two most recent reviews I have done, I had a one-month deadline. It is true that for one of my co-authored papers it took over a year to finally get it published, but that's because the journal changed editors and they lost the paper in the switchover, and because all three of the authors moved. The editors were also slow, but if you're going to be slow about "traditional" reviews (which are all done by email these days), you're going to be slow about web-sourced reviews. All of the things by which you are judged and upon which your job depends (teaching, research, conferences, publishing, academic service) don't just vanish because you switched to web-based reviews.

And the "veil of anonymity" that Cohen claims "often" exists is not real. Reviewers are anonymous to the authors, but the editor knows who you are, and the editor or editors will read your comments. If you're rude or out-of-line, they may send your comments back, and you will have tarnished your reputation. But the reviewers doesn't know who wrote the paper (although at times you may have suspicions, or if you think you know you tell the editor and recuse yourself), and that's important. The reviewer judges the paper on its own merits. The reviewer and the author are anonymous to each other, but the editor knows who both are, and as such fills an important gatekeeping function. By lacking anonymity with the editor, both reviewers and authors want to do a good and accurate job (which may mean rejecting the paper as a reviewer, as I have done several times). But by simultaneously having anonymity with each other, the authors and reviewers can focus on the words of the paper and the reviews. As a reviewer, I can crush some poor sod for writing a terrible paper and know they won't hate me, as a writer I know the comments are solely about the paper and not about me (and I won't hold a grudge against the reviewer for not seeing the genius in the paper). This is a very important part of the process.

Clubby exclusiveness, sloppy editing and fraud have all marred peer review on occasion. Anonymity can help prevent personal bias, but it can also make reviewers less accountable; exclusiveness can help ensure quality control but can also narrow the range of feedback and participants. Open review more closely resembles Wikipedia behind the scenes, where anyone with an interest can post a comment. This open-door policy has made Wikipedia, on balance, a crucial reference resource.

What a horribly wrong paragraph. "Clubby"? Reviewers don't edit. Fraud? Perhaps Ms. Cohen has never heard of the Internet, speaking of fraud? As I just mentioned, reviewers are not anonymous to the editors, and are fully accountable to them. Exclusiveness does indeed help comment quality, which is the point. Limiting the participants is the whole idea. Otherwise, I'll just go get all my friends to say how awesome my paper is and I'll do the same for them. It is not clear what she means when she says Wikipedia is a "crucial reference resource," Wikipedia is, generally speaking, a giant mess of articles that seem correct enough to those who speak the loudest. Academic databases are crucial references resources, Google Scholar isn't bad, but Wikipedia is a disaster.

The beginning of the second page is a little better, and is actually accurate, which is a surprise based on the first page, however it degenerates into an error-filled comedy once again. For example,

Advocates of more open reviewing like Mr. Cohen at George Mason, argue that other important scholarly values besides quality control — for example, generating discussion, improving works in progress and sharing information rapidly — are given short shrift under the current system.

Well, no. Discussion is what happens with your colleagues, on mailing lists, discussion boards, blogs, in the hallways, at the coffeeshops, and at conferences. Improving and sharing work is what conferences, email, and posting items online do. They have nothing to do with peer review.

Oh and we see the New York Times following its annoying idea about how people with PhDs aren't called Dr., as we deserve to be called. I could write, "Mr. [sic] Cohen...." but I think I've pointed out more than enough errors.

Play and Buttons and Fingers

2010-08-14T18:22:00.000-04:00

I was reading a New Yorker article, "Painkiller Deathstreak: Adventures in Video Games", by Nicholson Baker in the August 9th, 2010, issue, and, concerning the "seventeen possible points of contact" for his fingers and the Xbox 360 controller that he may need to consider to play a game and do one of the many actions he lists (like run, crouch, aim, fire, pause, leap, speak, stab, grab, kick--actually I think he lists 17), he writes...

It's a little like playing 'Blue Rondo a la Turk' on the clarinet, then switching to the tenor sax, then the oboe, then back to the clarinet.

So, yes, crazy mad finger positioning that you had better know ahead of time, like I was talking about previously.

Ukulele: Play, Create, Share

2010-08-09T13:29:00.000-04:00

(To be clear, "Play, Create, Share" is the tagline from Sony and Media Molecule's game, LittleBigPlant.)

I had finished most of the book--all the research, and all the body chapters were roughly at first draft stage. It was off at some publishers, so I decided.... needed, to take a break from it before the final push to make the intro better, tie together the loose sections at the end, and write up the conclusion. So, I decided to take up the ukulele and learn how to play it. (Ukes are cool, check out the vids in this post.)

The ukulele is a decidedly non-electronic, non-Internet beast. It is real, and tangible, in your hands, as are the calluses you might get. It has no built-in spellchecker, but you can hear when you hit a wrong note, which is curious and encouraging.

My cousin, who plays in a Uke band, made me a song book with chording tabs--these show you where your fingers go on the strings in order to play a certain chord (a combination of notes). The tabs are from the Internet. I email her, a friend, and my uncle, who was in a real band for many years, about playing stringed instruments. (I also have a few other relatives I can email about these things, but focus on the Internettedness of it all.)

There are tons of YouTube videos with people playing ukulele. They just do it. (My point is that we are driven, psychologically, to play with things like musical instruments, to create things like videos, and to share them -- all of the activities create and reinforce community, because we are driven to connect.)

Note this one of this kid, which has almost 24 million views in under a year. (1:18 ftw!)

There are also thousands of tablatures online, for a variety of instruments (although I mostly pay attention to uke and guitar tabs). People have made these, put them together, and put them up to share with others so that others can play too. (One frequent note on them is a rather weak write up defending the tab in terms of US fair use, which could be written a lot better.) Here's one with all of the songs by The Smiths (and it uses the same layout as this blog). (Hmm I had one for the Beatles which was kinda cheesy but did the job, but I don't see it now. Oh here it is, click through to a song hosted on the site and you'll see what I mean.) You can tune your uke online.

There are also groups, of course, a.k.a. online communities, like the Ukulele Underground, who host discussion boards and have instructional (and awesome) videos: ukulele lessons, ukulele minutes, and member videos. Yes, member videos, made by people and posted to the site.

Play.

Create.

Share.

It doesn't matter if it's video games and mods, it doesn't matter if it's a more physical and just as visceral object like a ukulele, it's what we do, and the Internet allows us to express this playfulness, this creativity, and allows us to share these things we love to do, since everyone loves to do them. (I'll point you to Stuart Brown's Play if you don't believe me, and you can check out the NPR/SOF show where he was interviewed.)

And, as I said before, and as Brown points out (in the book at least), these are all community creating and reinforcing behaviors. I could also talk a bit about the visceral, long-time importance of dance and how our mental structures which relate to dance are connected to the ones that relate to music, but it's been a while since I wrote that part of the book so it's a bit rusty. Perhaps later.

The thing is, we do this (connect) with possibly everything.

''They'll read everything.''

2010-08-07T16:22:00.000-04:00

So says Bruce Schneier, an author and chief security technology officer at British telecommunications operator BT in an article about the ongoing BlackBerry negotiations (I copied his job description from the article, to be clear, but if I put it in quotes it makes it look like the description is misleading). Specifically, he's referring to the Saudi government and the recent BlackBerry data dust-up. "They'll read everything."

And, as I noted, they probably already do read everything else. This still implies that the countries that aren't making a fuss are already reading all the RIM/BlackBerry data they want (and everything else), especially Western nations. The nations mentioned in the NYT article are:

Saudi Arabia
India
The UAE
Indonesia

So, one must assume that the US...

Gets all the data they want from RIM's BlackBerry service.
Doesn't share it with any of those above countries in a way they like.

Apparently there are already local servers, or deals for them, in Russia and China. The article says, "Schneier said the Saudi arrangement is similar to deals RIM has struck in Russia and China," which is not exactly clear if those have happened or will happen.

However, RIM "issued a statement last week denying it has given some governments access to BlackBerry data." So, it's not really clear. And, one can safely assume that some governments, like the US, don't actually ask in a way that RIM would have to refer to as "giving", perhaps it's more like "taking."

One also assumes that the US government would share anything important it discovers with the Saudi government if it were relevant (and vice-versa), so I don't see that terrorism is really an issue, and maybe various agencies aren't actually getting along as well as they should. Or, as mentioned in the article:

Critics maintain that Saudi Arabia and other countries are motivated at least partly by a desire to curb freedom of expression and strengthen already tight controls over the media.

Sadly the article does not actually name or interview any of these critics.

Addition: A better article, finally, from the NYT.

More Crowdsourcing Confusion

2010-08-03T11:25:00.001-04:00

There's an article today at the NYT about the Stardust@Home project which shows some of the clouded thinking and definitions around "the crowd."

So far, they've found three of the ones they are looking for in their aerogel, and each is apparently about 1/25,000 of an inch big. Wow. Go, science!

But, there's either a lot of empty aerogel or a lot of space dust of types they aren't looking for in their aerogel (the article isn't quite clear), so they needed help finding what they were looking for. The scientists threw it out to people on the Internet, which is where the article goes a bit off the rails.

So, the scientists have...

Help from an army of amateur researchers.

Are these people the crowdsourced people, or interns? It's not clear. I think it's the crowd, but the crowd isn't "amateur researchers," although one hopes to find such people in the crowd.

The scientists turned to non-experts around the world to sift through thousands of images.

That's fine, but if all the "non-experts" are doing is looking at pictures, well, pretty much every sighted human being is an expert at that. That's one of the things we are built to do, our survival depends on it (although these days, historically speaking, blindness is not as big a drawback as it was when we were in pre-history), we are in fact experts at it. They may not have PhDs in astronomy, but to look at a picture and determine some factors about it (angle of dust particle, I believe), you don't need to have a PhD in astronomy.

But,

Interspersed test images allow the researchers to check how well the dusters [the people on the Internet who are looking for space dust] are doing.

So we have them, but we can't quite trust them, although to be clear this is probably more of a visual quality check than a moral one, and it is one that scientists often take anyway with data (speaking as a scientist, we like data checks, it makes our data and results better).

The first presumed interstellar particle — actually two distinct pieces — was found by a Canadian duster, Bruce Hudson, who retired as a carpenter and groundskeeper after a stroke. Mr. Hudson said he had looked through 25,000 images, spending as much as 5 to 10 hours a day at it.

That isn't just a guy from the crowd, that's a pretty dedicated person! Most of the crowd isn't like this. But that's the often-overlooked point about the crowd, you don't want the crowd, you want the people in the crowd who might want to help, and distinguishing them ahead of time is difficult. It's easier to let them self-identify by giving them the opportunity to do so.

The person who found the second particle said,

“Although I spend my working days in front of a computer solving problems and verifying designs, I found it was quite relaxing to look through the photos and concentrate on the visual images.”

They're looking at images. If you have a working visual system, you're an expert.

BlackBerryBlocking

2010-08-01T12:27:00.000-04:00

In today's NYTimes, via the AP, Saudi Arabia to Block BlackBerry Messaging. The UAE, however, decided first and Saudi Arabia decided to do so as well, which makes for a rather odd headline. The UAE isn't instituting the ban until October 11, and why they are taking so long isn't addressed in the article at all. (Saudi Arabia will, maybe, block messages "later this month.") I assume they could do it tomorrow if they wanted. Is it more a case of posturing, to get some local control over BlackBerry messaging?

From the article:

Regulators say the devices operate outside of laws put in place after their introduction in the country, and that the lack of compliance with local laws raises ''judicial, social and national security concerns for the UAE.''

However,

Regulators said they have sought compromises with BlackBerry maker Research in Motion on their concerns, but failed to reach an agreement on the issue.

Sounds like strong-arming. Why is this needed, and why only with BlackBerry?

Unlike many other smart phones, BlackBerry devices use a system that updates a user's inbox by sending encrypted messages through company servers abroad, including RIM's home nation of Canada.

Users like the system because it is seen as more secure, but it also makes BlackBerry messages far harder to monitor than ones sent through domestic servers that authorities could tap into, analysts say.

Ah, the surveillance society! I would assume the US already intercepts and decrypts all the BlackBerry info. Apparently we aren't sharing enough with the UAE or Saudi Arabia.

Addition: What this strongly implies, if not outright makes clear (ok it's clear, they just don't say it) is that the UAE and Saudi Arabia are already scanning/reading/monitoring/intercepting all the traffic they want on other phone devices.

The NYT decided their own writeup would be better than the thin AP wire feed, so they have an article up.

What Bothers Me About "Inception" Buzz

2010-07-29T13:07:00.000-04:00

Spoilers: This post has them.

Inception is a cool movie, visually speaking. But beyond that, I don't think it has much. Leonardo DiCaprio's character is the only one who is developed, but all we get is that he loves/loved his wife and loves his children. The character of the mark (the son of the dying business man) is developed a little, he seeks his father's acceptance (this is pretty thin, though).

A lot of the material I've seen online says how amazing this film is. I agree it is visually amazing. But that's not what people are talking about, it's the question of what was real and what was a dream and whose dream it was.

And all of that is irrelevant.

Does it matter if the ending scene is a dream or not? No. It doesn't. Not one bit. Because these aren't real people, and we don't learn anything about anyone from it being a dream and wondering whose dream it may be. Does it matter which scene belonged to which dreamer, and were there clues that we had been mislead? Irrelevant. That may be fun, but it doesn't tell us anything. Is it revealing about the characters? No, because it needs to be revealed more clearly, and even if it is, so what? They're characters in a movie, they're not real, there is no insight here except about what the writer, director, and producers wanted to do in the film.

Does it matter if Leonardo DiCaprio's character has been in a dream the whole time? (I think we see the spinning top work at some point, but I don't exactly recall.) No, it doesn't. It's a movie, it's not real, it itself is like a dream. There is no reality in it. If LDC's character is in a dream at the end, then he's in his dreamworld fiction inside a movie fiction, so it's fiction. If he's not in a dream at the end, then he's in the movie's real world inside a movie fiction, so it's fiction. It does not matter. There is no weighty intellectual discussion here, unless you're in college and you think you're much smarter than you actually are (and then it is neither weighty nor intellectual, but sadly it is a discussion).

It's not even as if dream and unreality sequences are new to science fiction movies, we've seen it with the Matrix, but we've seen it before with stories such as The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland. The Wizard of Oz is old, it was written in 1900. That doesn't mean it isn't an enthralling idea 110 years later, but we've seen it before.

Visually Inception is a great, fun, inventive, beautiful movie. Beyond that, it's pretty standard. There's nothing wrong with that, but all of these people and critics think there is something weighty about the dreams. There isn't.

Community

2010-07-28T10:58:00.000-04:00

"It's this right here. Hanging out with your friends and fellow artists."

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1348

(Reminds me of ICA, and my "once a year" friends, as it should, since it's the same fundamental human need, the need to connect and form communities.)

Guitar vs. Guitar Hero

2010-07-27T18:55:00.000-04:00

I was pointed out to me by my brother that playing the guitar is a lot like playing a video game: There are certain things you need to do with your fingers at certain times, and you need to memorize the moves (either specifically or generally) before you try it so it works out better.

He's right.

Having played electronic games for over two and a half decades, and finally poking about working on the ukulele, it's entirely true. It isn't true for all types of all computer games, but for example with games on the Xbox 360 or the PS3, you need to know which buttons and triggers to mash when. Some games on computers are finger-twiddlers (mash buttons!). But usually not just any buttons, the right ones at the right times. Which means, your fingers have to be in the right place at the right time, just like fingering for chords on a guitar or other stringed instrument (bass, banjo, ukulele, upright, violin, etc.).

I can see a future where the current Guitar Hero and Rock Band guitar necks don't just have five buttons and a few other controls on the body (see Rock Band guitar info), they have some larger amount depending on the complexity of the device. A ukulele has four strings, so four across by however many you want down the neck. Basses usually have four (although I have a bass with five). Guitars typically have six strings, so six buttons across by the number you have coming down the neck. A great deal more buttons, but the idea and the skills are exactly the same. Where are my fingers positioned, and when? In the TV show Californication, the young daughter plays guitar and also Guitar Hero. Can Guitar Hero be a lead-in to guitar playing? I'm not sure if it is, but it could be.

[Addition]

Here's a good point by my friend Dr. Matthew Bietz. I totally forgot to think about the next step, of production versus consumption. In guitar games, we are consumers, and copy (to some extent) the music. With a real guitar, you make your own music, or make riffs on things, or play things slightly differently and that can be a good thing. Production is much more powerful, on an important, fundamental human level.

The tagline for LittleBigPlanet by Sony and Media Molecule is Play. Create. Share., and when we play music together, that is what we are doing. Playing, creating, and sharing are all community building and community reinforcing activities, and since we are driven to connect, they are all important. Playing a guitar game, there is play, but there is no create and share.

[End Addition]

Ukulele... You may not have much love for the ukulele, but here are some things that may help you down the path.

Walk Don't Run by amazing little Japanese crocheted guys.

While My Guitar Gently Weeps covered by Jake Shimabukuo (who has his own YouTube channel). Over 5.5 million views. He goes nuts at 2:40, although there are hints of what is to come earlier and you should watch the entire video anyway. Amazing.

Here he is, at 1:10 he demonstrates the range of the ukulele. And he's at TED. Most of you have not been invited to TED. TED? Very cool. TED = ukulele.

The Madness of Crowds

2010-07-25T12:38:00.001-04:00

"The wisdom of crowds" was never a wise saying, really it referred to how if you have a big enough group of people, a few of them will know something about the problem at hand. It's just statistics.

Sadly we have reminders about the madness, and thus lack of wisdom, of crowds all the time. There was just one recently at a music festival in Germany, where 19 people died and over 340 were injured.

I just came across this new Cocktail Party Physics post about the inanity of Amazon user reviews (that's the crowd at work, remember). I think part of the problem is explained, of course, by the Penny Arcade Internet F***-wad theory. I know that's not polite terminology, but they did name it first, and deserve credit for proposing it. Not that all Amazon reviews are anonymous, but many are only tied to an account name. The "audience" in the theory is also called a "crowd" just to be clear. Not that crowds are all wisdom, or all madness, we know people behave differently in crowds (or, as a crowd), and that you will some diversity of people in the crowd, but that depends on the makeup of the crowd of course. Nothing new to see here, oh the waste of ink and bandwidth is unfortunate.

"So Much For The Dell Model."

2010-07-24T12:15:00.000-04:00

I recall the hype about "the Dell process" or "the Dell way" or whatever it was (model, their manufacturing process), and the jealousy Michael Dell had over Apple's success. We Apple fans (and maybe some others) liked to refer to Dell as "Dull" since they made dull beige boxes.

Turns out their great production process wasn't. It was all accounting tricks. Reminds me of Enron, really. You would think people would wise up, although I guess the people who are dumb enough to think they are smart enough to break the rules are also the ones who aren't smart enough to make it work or get away with it. You could blame some of the losses on the economy, but Apple is doing fine.

So, the SEC has released some internal Dell emails where the Dell people discuss how they are only making their quarterly targets with a little side money from Intel. Or, a lot. Dell's quarterly target should have been "make great computers."

My headline is from the writeup by Ashlee Vance.

Flawed Comparisons

2010-07-23T13:25:00.000-04:00

Some comparisons really don't work, but are presented as if they are spot-on. Here's one from CNN's "Smartest People in Tech" that I found amusing, from #2 CEO Jeff Bezos' writeup (which comes after #1 CEO, Steve Jobs).

...virtually every iPad review compares Steve Jobs' tablet to Bezos' device.

Well yes of course, since readers aren't going to know of any of the few other touchpad devices out there (not touch phones, but touch pads). Although why you'd compare the two, when the Kindle does only one thing (and will probably stay that way) and the iPad... well, as the advertisement goes, there's an app for that, it's not a great comparison outside of the form factor and that the two devices are contemporaries.

Feep and The Purple Pants

2010-07-22T11:56:00.000-04:00

This is the current opening to my book proposal, trying to ground the higher-level ideas in an understandable and positive story. Granted, it's a story about pants, but a little bit of humor is good too.

One evening, when I was playing Sony’s massively multiplayer online game EverQuest II, one of my guildmates, whose character’s name is Feep, dropped a link for a pair of pants into the guild chat channel. He had just killed some evil creature, and the pants were part of the treasure he had received. Specifically these pants were torn purple pantaloons, which I had never heard of before. The name was unusual. I clicked on the link in the chat window to learn more about these purple pants. Up came the item description and statistics for the pants. They had a spell on them, called rage, that gave the wearer increased strength and stamina but took away intelligence and wisdom. These were not your typical pants or armor from the mythical world of EverQuest II, these were something quite different that really had no place in the game. They didn’t belong to any creature in the game, and they were from another company’s intellectual property altogether. These purple pants belonged to The Hulk from Marvel Comics.

Feep’s purple pants are just one example of the many ways connection and play are experienced on the Internet. People are playful, so Feep and I, and many others, were playing EverQuest II (often called EQII) at that moment. People like to connect, so the creators of EQII at Sony designed the game so that players would do better if they joined forces. People can form long-term guilds, and Feep and I were members of the same guild (although we had never met in real life). The programmers at Sony also made a guild chat channel, so all guild members could text chat with one another, because we like to connect, and communication builds and strengthens a community like a guild. Sharing can strengthen communities as well, and Feep was sharing information.

The homage to The Hulk was playful. The pants had to be made and placed in the game. People can make in-game items—from the mundane, like arrows, to the more spectacular, like fish tanks, and to the completely unnecessary, like toilets. People are driven to create things and are not just passive consumers. Players also make a lot of things about the game that are not in the game, such as guild websites and wikis.

But the pants were not created by players. EQII does not allow players that level of creativity. The Hulk’s purple pants were instead playfully made by the programmers at Sony. All people are driven to play, and play itself is a behavior that builds community.

To play EverQuest II, you need a computer that is connected to the Internet. Although EQII is in some ways tightly controlled (such as with what players can make), in other ways it is not (such as with the text and voice chat channels). The Internet is controlled much less than EQII, which was why Sony could go ahead and make the game run over the Internet without asking anyone’s permission to do so. EQII works, in part, because it runs over the open Internet, and players can make websites, wikis, and have real-life meet-ups. EQII as a whole takes place in many more places than just the EQII game world. EQII works because the designers knew that people like to play and, more importantly, like to connect.

The story of Feep and the purple pants highlights two fundamental human drives: the drive to connect and the drive to play.

Connect, in Serial Format

2010-07-20T16:21:00.001-04:00

Since enough of my book is written and off at publishers where it should get picked up, I thought I'd present some of the writing and ideas here in condensed, serialized form. The working title is Connect: Why the Internet Works, or perhaps Connect and Play: Why the Internet Works, but I am partial to the shorter title. (Note that is is not How the Internet Works, as one of my friends objected that Why might be about TCP/IP which it is not, this is why, not how.)

Why it works is because it allows people to connect.

The major sections are the introduction, the Internet, CompuServe, Videotex, and the conclusion. The Internet is the majority of the work since it is the system that is still with us, the one that succeeded where the others failed over time (although CompuServe was with us for a long time). All three systems were started or conceived of in the late 1960s (videotex is a bit different since it is not a system like the other two, but a type of system, but the comparison works and is still narratively compelling).

I look at what we do with the Internet, and discuss two fundamental human drives that are important for what we do online: the drive to connect (with others) and the drive to play. These are what make the Internet work.

CompuServe and videotex didn't allow people to connect enough, or to be playful enough with content. CompuServe adjusted over time, but couldn't compete. Videotex was designed with control in mind, and failed miserably (no no, Mintel was different, that's a long story, but it wasn't at all like any of the US videotex efforts although no one over here seemed to realize that).

People are extremely social (the drive to connect), and many mammals (and even some birds and octopi) are playful creatures. When a systems allows us to be who we are, we use it and it succeeds. This is not just true in life but also a key to success in business (for example, see the books Drive by Daniel Pink and the IDEO book The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley).

Most of the book looks at what we do online in a social way, so most of my examples and ideas will be based on Internet activities.

Look for posts with the Connect label. This is the first intentional one under the idea that I am going to do so, but I have some previous posts that stem from the work, so I'll go back and put the Connect label on them as well.

iPhone 4 Antenna Issues, Explained

2010-07-17T16:33:00.000-04:00

The first thorough, understandable, and yet technological explanation of the iPhone 4 antenna issue that I have seen is over at TidBITS, an article by Rich Mogull. Well worth several minutes of your time.

Decorating Your Device

2010-06-02T17:26:00.000-04:00

I was reading the summary of an article and I came across this sentence, roughly speaking:

they decorated their [devices] with shiny beads...

Typically, I'd be talking about cell phones, which is what I want you to think about. Typically, it would (also) be young women that do this. Hmm, Google is not helping much, trying to find images, but like this one generally speaking. (I assume there are tons out there, somewhere.)

However, the article is talking about the Afghan army, and how they "decorated their weapons with shiny beads." Nice. An AK-47 does send a message, doesn't it?

Edit: Oh found one! A real one that I took a photo of (owned by a woman), not just someone else's photo on the Internet. That's the back of an iPhone.

Edit, July 17: I was just in Manhattan's Chinatown and one store had several gemmed iPhone cases for sale out in front. I assume there were more to be found. I didn't get a photo though.

Overheard: Internet Exhaustion

2010-05-26T11:59:00.001-04:00

Overheard at a coffeeshop recently:

The Internet is totally exhausting. It doesn't make any sense, you're just sitting there.

Sitting can be tiring, as we're not designed to do it for that long (we do much better moving around, and we are great at walking, even if we are using heavily-modified fish fins).

But yes, emotional work can be tiring.

Researcher-Client Privilege

2010-05-20T14:53:00.000-04:00

I was reading Gang Leader for a Day by Suhdir Venkatesh, which is riveting (although he constantly comes off as unbelievably naive, you don't get a good sense of the years passing, and all the fuss over how dealing drugs is a business that runs like any other seems foolish, business is business).

But, some sentences from page 186 bothered me:

There was no such thing as "researcher-client confidentiality," akin to the privilege conferred upon lawyers, doctors, or priests.... While some states offer so-called shield laws that allow journalists to protect their confidential sources, no such protection exists for academic researchers.

And I ask, why not?

Lawyers have a JD, academics (usually) have a PhD. Physicians have an MD, we who are also doctors (but not physicians) have a PhD. D, D, D! Physicians try to cure the woes of individuals and also groups of individuals, we PhDs, especially social scientists, try to heal the woes of society as well. Like journalists, we may need to investigate and study the unsavory or illegal.

Jon Stewart and Chatroulette

2010-05-20T10:33:00.000-04:00

Yes, chatroulette's fifteen minutes of fame are over, but I was revisiting Jon Stewart's excellent piece on the fad (NSFW) and realized I should post about it.

The piece is notable because of its portrayal of much of the news media and their reaction to Internet things (note: "their" not "its" for news media since it is people, not a thing, I know it's incorrect grammatically but I don't like doing that, it's people). It also nails how people behave on the Internet as well (specifically, that some people like to behave badly and nakedly).

But it's also pretty funny since Stewart comments how most of the people he runs into are other reporters, doing a piece on chatroulette. It reminded me of academics and Second Life. There was a joke that, with all of the academics running around in Second Life interviewing people, they were only interviewing other academics...

Facebook and (In-Group vs. Facebook).

2010-05-17T15:28:00.001-04:00

There is always Internet indignation when the people at Facebook change up Facebook's privacy settings, and rightfully so. Farhad Manjoo has a nice writeup over at Slate. (And I just noticed, not to be outdone, there's one at Salon too, written by Mary Elizabeth Williams. And a good, longer article at TidBITs by Rich Mogull that includes thoughts on what to do about it all. As an aside, is that an awesome name or what?) And I meant to include this piece by danah boyd.

He's right that we've seen this before, but I'd add that this is a case of in-group versus out-group, where Facebook users feel they are being taken advantage of by an external agent, the people who run Facebook. It's a community issue.

People on Facebook are parts of various communities. The people who run Facebook are not a part of the majority of those communities, but seek to profit from them. Granted the people at Facebook have bills to pay for the servers and such, but there are limits. When external agents or communities seek to benefit from another community, that community (i.e., its members) feel attacked and threatened (to some extent). They react, defending their community from outsiders. We've seen this play out online before. In Second Life, there are always people who complain about "the Lindens" and how they are ruining Second Life. In EverQuest II, players complain if their favorite character type is weakened.

Facebook communities (of friends, families, different groups) make content on Facebook. They do this with posts, likes, photos, and groups. This community material is just that, community material -- it is made by and belongs to the community. When another community (the people who run Facebook) come in and use that material, or give it to others (in the digital way, they allow others to see it), this is something we instinctively react against.

As long as the people at Facebook feel they are making profit and not losing users, nothing will change. If they can increase profits, they will. Users may object, and the people at Facebook may be terrible at interfaces (or may be good at intentionally making bad interfaces so most information becomes public and they can profit from it), but until people vote with their feet or stop posting information (and perhaps actively delete it), I don't see that anything will change.

The iPhone and Multitasking

2010-05-06T15:22:00.000-04:00

One often-mentioned criticism of the iPhone, despite how the device and the information infrastructure in which it exists forced all the primary mobile carriers and manufacturers to produce and support touch-phones that are handheld computers/communication devices, is how it does not multitask.

I think it does multitask, though.

I have not read any official Apple specs about the iPhone and how it does not multitask, but I have never seen anyone say that it does, or that the critics are wrong. But if you have one, you can try this (and there are probably some other things you could do to get a similar thing to happen).

If you are in the photo app, you can choose to send a photo via text or email. If you choose email, the iPhone's email header with the to: and cc: and subject: fields comes up, you can auto-fill the to: field just like in email--basically it looks like you are in the email app and are sending an email with a photo in it, because you are. (I am not sure to what extent, though. It may just be "creating" an email, so it may not check for new mail.)

When you hit "send", you are taken back to the photo in the photo app. If the iPhone had no multitasking, your email would stop sending at this point. But it doesn't. It is being sent, from email, while you are in the photo app. It is multitasking.

If, when you hit send and then are taken back to the photo app, you switch over to the email app, you will see the "send" progress bar and see that it is making progress, but that it had started before you opened up email. Speed varies depending on the network, of course (wifi, 3G, reception, etc.).

There may be some reason this is not referred to as multitasking, but, to me it seems that it is indeed multitasking. I am in one app (the photo app) while another one is working in the background (the email app).

(See also my Reviewers are Pointless post about how it is easy to switch between apps on the iPhone where you don't have the screen real estate to see more than one app running in any large way anyway--sure you could fill your screen with ten status bars, but I don't see the point to that--so although it is not multitasking in this example, it is usually like suspending an app that you may not be doing anything with anyway, although there are some apps you might want running.)

EDIT: I asked a knowledgeable person about it, and he said that multitasking works but only for Apple applications. So, yes, but not for your app, so some people feel the answer is no. But yes. Irrelevant now, but I would have preferred accurate information in the first place.

People and Change (Time) Part 2

2010-05-04T11:36:00.000-04:00

Connecting with my earlier post on how many people in Detroit resisted accepting the standardization of time (and the move away from standard time), we see the same thing with the change from the Julian calendar (named after Julius Caesar) to the Gregorian calendar which we use currently.

From Paul Strathern's The Medici, Godfathers of the Renaissance, pp. 360-361:

By the turn of the seventeenth century the Renaissance was beginning to make itself felt in a range of increasingly disparate fields. The times were changing, even in the most literal sense: when it was noticed that the seasons were beginning to drift away from their customary positions in the ancient calendar, Pope Gregory VIII abandoned the ancient Julian calendar dating from Julius Caesar in 46 BC, and in 1582 introduced a new Gregorian calendar, at a stroke advancing the date by ten days. Yet many remained highly suspicious of such transformations, and as the new calendar was introduced over the years throughout Europe, it provoked riots, with indignant mobs demanding back the ten days that had been robbed from their lives.

Riots! Wow.

Apple vs. Adobe

2010-05-04T10:29:00.000-04:00

Great writeup about Steve Jobs' explanation of why he doesn't like Adobe's Flash over at TidBITS.

One point I found surprising, since no one else I have seen mentioned it, is how there is no Flash for any other mobile phone platform. Wow.

Despite the focus on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, Flash isn't widely available on any other mobile platform. Nokia includes Flash 9.4 on its N900, which is not a phone, but no Android, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, webOS, or Symbian phone handles Flash content. (There is a Flash Light player that works on many basic phones, but which requires Flash content that has been designed and optimized for Flash Light. The Flash Light site appears to be have been last updated in 2008.)

Annoying how people object to the lack of Flash on the iPhone and iPad but neglect to mention that.

Idiots on Parade and Net Neutrality

2010-04-21T14:56:00.000-04:00

John W. Mayo and Marius Schwartz are professors of economics at Georgetown. Bruce Owen is a professor of public policy at Stanford. Robert Shapiro is a senior policy fellow at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. Lawrence J. White is a professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Glenn Woroch is the executive director of the Center for Research on Telecommunications Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

They are also all complete idiots.

They have an opinion piece in the New York Times today. In it, they claim that net neutrality...

could stifle the innovation that has been the hallmark of the Internet.

Idiots. Net neutrality is what built the Internet, and what has made it so innovative.
You will notice that they are all economics and policy people, with one telecom person. There are no Internet people. There are no Internet innovators. No lawyers. Only those who were brought up in an environment where they were told by others, "Control is the one true way." They know nothing about the Internet.

When Reviewers Are Pointless

2010-04-12T15:11:00.001-04:00

A lot of reviews... reviewers, I mean... missed the point about the Wii (it's not the graphics, it's the experience). A lot of reviewers are currently missing the point about the iPad.

The iPad is not a phone.

The iPad is not a laptop.

The iPad is like a big iPhone, and like a touch-screen laptop, but it is not those things.

The iPad exists in an information environment, it is not just on its own.

Very few have compared it to eBook readers, although some have, but the point is basic: the iPad is so much better than a device that can only do one thing the comparison isn't worth exploring much beyond that.

We heard a lot about how the iPad does not have multitasking, until Apple said it will, then that complaint went away. But I don't see why we need it on a device that only allows for one app on the screen at a time. When I exit Mail on my iPhone and go to Safari, Safari returns to where I last was. Sure it takes a few seconds, so what? (And sometimes Safari annoyingly reloads the page when it doesn't have to.) Then if I leave Safari and go back to Mail, Mail returns to where I left off. I didn't miss anything by not having it multitask. The iPad is not a laptop.

We still hear how it does not have a camera. The iPad is not a camera phone. Maybe we want a camera on it, maybe not.

We hear how it does not have 3G. The iPad is not an iPhone, it is not a phone. I don't read laptop reviews, but is it considered a massive failing when a laptop does not have 3G?

People are still stuck with the wrong framework for understanding new devices. New devices sometimes mean new frameworks, and the iPad is one of those devices.

Some notable reviews that I like, so, not the ones I'm talking about with my criticism:

Xeni Jardin at boingboing

Daniel Eran Dilger at Roughly Drafted

There are also commentators who take the approach that there can be only one device, so various companies are going to try to "kill" the iPad. Here is one such article from the New York Times. I am amused by the line, "companies are hard at work on products that they hope will be iPad killers." Not that I believe in first-mover advantage (Palm, anyone? Apple's Newton?), but again we see companies responding to Apple's move. I was in Seattle in 2008 and played with the Microsoft tables in the hotel lobby, big touch screens that didn't work very well. But Apple got there first (well not with tables, but commercializing touch screens to the wider market). For a long time we have had a diverse computing environment (and cell phones, and automobiles, and...). I don't see that that will change anytime soon. The Zune, for some unknown reason, still exists, but it didn't kill the iPhone.

Architecture Link

2010-04-09T12:11:00.000-04:00