15may2002

Networked experience design


[first afternoon session]

we exist in social context. [fair enough. optimised for the african savannah]

she says: group size was limiting by the number of people who could pick nits
off each other (groom). at the same time our language was evolving, so that's
where the social size came from.

four kinds of players
- achievers: max out within the rule system. level 50 players. high score
- explorers: might be good players, but motivation is understanding the system;
easter eggs. modelling the system is a success state.
- socialisers: game is staging area for relationships. wants to be in community
of elders, have admin privs.
- spoilers: enjoy making life miserable for others, either inside the structure
or out of it (the system itself).
a successful game must accomodate all kinds of players. [hey, that's pretty good
stuff]

need multiple win states. diff people diff goals, diff reactions

aha, ecologies, niches, multiple niches in an ecosystem for robustness and
feedback loops. people *want* to be in diff niches. so there has to be a value
in all these niches.

games are learning curves. [in real life, where is the learning curve? you move
*yourself* into more difficult environment. like extra levels are extra
dimensions you can move in. not extra landscape, just extra ways to move in the
landscape you're already in.]

in a game: represent extra knowledge, reputation, etc, in some way. create a
story.

RPGs have the same narrative: to begin with no dexterity, magic. later, you're
better in these things. the build up is itself a satisfying narrative. [the
thrill of coming into being?]

so stuff like web services, p2p etc, represents what's in the moment -- but
doesn't let you represent your experience in time.

whereas in real life: rock climbers have their scars. frequent flier miles are
accumulated. all status things.

ah games politics. the kind of person someone builds in a MMOPW is dictated by
how that *world* lets people show this.

* how transparent to the player is the game in terms of the persona they're
building?

[hm. missed a bit there]

a few things:
- built in hunter-gatherness
- ebay as a game

currencies, social currencies, how to show people they're valuable --> how to
groom one another. we trade links, that's how we give acknowledgement
"acknowledgement is the smallest quanta of human interaction", nice quote.

reciprocal acknowledgement. blogrolling. [bloody hell, it's such an ugly term.
where did it come from anyway?]

napster stripped away the social context from the interactions, so it wasn't
meaningful in human terms. removed the shared experience, whereas uplister where
people shared playlists and *comments* didn't.

there's something in shared experiences. group knowledge. oscars, superbowl,
tim's keynote: there's a super-sumative amount of value involved when lots of
people shared an experience.

most web experience focuses on 1 user + the whole wide world. but in games it
focuses on {the relationship between the user and the group} and the whole wide
world. this changes the design parameters.

[i'm not saying much in this one. ~perculation~. this'll take me a while to
thing about. i've thought about games a lot before, which is maybe why it's
taking longer to absorb and understand]

strangers that matter:
- celebrities. we want to connect with them because that's the structure of our
society. we want to be proxied to them.
- strangers in the aggregate. yahoo's 15 most viewed story list. group social
awareness.

[aha! now i get why we're having this conversation here. that all popular
technologies which involve lots of people and scale to 100% of goodness with a
maximum number of people HAVE to operate in a way analagous to games to have
lots of people involved. so successful technologies have these game attributes
*as* SECRET PROPERTIES already, and so we need to identify these things.]

acknowledgement, self-expression, status: how can technology help with that? so
things have to understand this, and human nature
--> and THAT's the important design note

"replace the word 'user' with the word 'player'"

====

rumbling:
- yeah, so this game thing. maybe that's the way to get people involved in local
government. i've talked about this before on my weblog -- make a structure like
planeterion and let people evolve their own democratic systems because that way
they save time. but do it all through ditv and make it enjoyable at each step of
the way. involvement in society should take into account game design. Very
roughly: http://interconnected.org/home/2001_01_14_archive.shtml#2023411 but
that's not good enough.

- this whole etcon thing is identifying the secret properties. the thing we
bring out of this is we have to find a way of making these secret properties
possible, not try and emulate them [although that won't hurt]

- hey, there are loads of rss news aggregators coming out at the moment. SO -->
what's going to emerge out of having lots of aggregators out there? hm?

- tom coates says: the stuff that I wish someone WOULD ask is why game
functionality is so profoundly about social organisations and interpersonal
dynamics