2003-04-24

The Game Context as a Testing Ground for Social Software 
Stewart Butterfield


[Okay, so I get here late and Stewart appears to be telling the story of the
last few years of his lovelife told in words on sticks.]


Starting question -> What is a game?

A condition of a game is that you have to agree that one thing is more
significant that something else (eg, trump the ace. eg, find the flag).

The act of making that agreement is something that ties into social software.

So he's going to talk about
"The games that people play" [is a book apparently, check this out]:
Massively Multiplayer Games, Computer games, Games, Play

there are lots of example

"It's almost impossible to imagine a group of six year olds in a schoolyard at
recess *not playing a game*"

they're trying to explore what the limits of our interactions are, they'll try
and coax people to sell you Park Place, or tackle someone. exploring limit

good quote:
"Play is the exultation of the possible" - martin buber

definition of game: Premise for interaction

where kids play the whole time, adults play game to: sometimes for the game
itself, but also as a way of interacting with other people.

"the technology we need to develop isn't the tehcbnology of more polygons or
better 3d sound of more accurate simulations. It's the technology of people"
[BIG TICK!]
[ -- now where is this from? need to get a ref from stewart.]

weaving a game into the fabric of people's lives... [this is a really good
paper he's reading from. would like to get a copy of this]


in 1992, you had to be a power user to use the internet. you already had all
the arcana, so you *could* be social.

now loads of people are getting online and they're getting the expertise, so
they can be social in a powerful way.

[ooh, it's one of these screenshots which is actually a photograph of the
screen. zeitgeist!]

now there are some cool social network graphs, but it's impossible to get any
information out of them.

[hm. it's a case of not capturing the right information. maybe.]


this is the CULTURE|CODE section:

these are encoded things...
everquest: model of the world, model of people, etc, objects, verbs.
friendster: no world, just a relationship model, that's all.

making decisions about what you put into the code has a pretty big impact..
they put in a social index, and then new users started being bombarded with
"acquitance" requests.

a difficult distinction:
- culture is: we provide polls
- code is: we make ways for a group of people to decide on something, and when
it's decided it just *happens*

[I see this. Polls are just a way of abstract the decision making process. In
real life how does it work?]


this is REPUTATION:

in everquest:
. there was a problem with player killers
. they introduced a reputation increment for killing player killers
. player killers take turns killing each other, and bad player end up with
higher reputations

so then they tried NOTORIETY:

. players had powers to rate each other as murderers.

then SEPARATION:

. different servers for player killers and not player killers.

[hm. that's tough]


oh, another section. SCOPING:

text based MUDs: stewart says the reason they didn't catch on was that they
were really hard.

windowing allows scoping, so you can say "here I'm talking to someone", "here
this is the game interface", etc. [that makes sense I guess! scoping is more
like the real world, and easier to understand: things like machines. maybe
that's why muds seemed more real, because it was interleaved. it became a
thing_like_an_enviroment/person/cosmos. because it wasn't understandable like a
machine.]


CONVERSATIONAL GROUPS:

this is something that can be done in IRC [but not in other IM things:
one-to-one chat is different to rooms. although iChat blurs it now]. you should
be able to drag extra people into the room really easily. and backchannels etc,
all in the same place.


IDENTITY:

once upon a time in-game identity was completely separate to in-world identity.

now the two are beginning to overlap.

play with the interactions between these two:
one player visits the weblog of a person who is also in the game, they can see
the list of things for sale in their in-game store.

"Deep Play" is not a supergreat book, but there are some nice lines.
there's a good quote about how people acquired names.


notes of talk:
http://www.ludicorp.com/etcon2003/

GDC 2003 Small Worlds talk is highly recommended,
the url is on the last slide of stewart's talk.
http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/smallworlds_files/framework.htm


Question about the different sort of gamers... some people don't like games
without a winstate.
Stewart... "Finite and Infinite Games" is another book mentioned. [This sounds
like something I'd very much like to read.]
Ludicorp are trying to create and environment for people to get together in the
context of play, for the same reason people get together and play bridge or
chess. [this ties into Putnam's social capital I think.]