dConstruct 2008: Tantek Celik: Social Network Portability

Why does every social site make you

1. re-enter your personal information?
2. re-add all your friends?
3. turn off notifications?
4. re-specify privacy preferences?
5. re-block negative people?

Keeping multiple sources of info (social networks etc.) up-to-date is a maintenance problem.

The goal should be giving users complete control over their data. Portable data + consistent URL = data syndicatability.

Had an interesting chat with Mr Thorpe after this one, who raised the point that in many cases, you don't want to share your identity between sites: you want to maintain many identities and quite specifically compartmentalise them.

Leaving aside whether we can enable people to express very instinctual and deep-seated behaviour explicitly... will they want to? Could we take the N different inconsistent versions of ourselves that we project in the real world (all the time lying to those we project to that yes, they're seeing the genuine article), XML-encode them and set them in concrete online?

dConstruct 2008: Joshua Porter, Leveraging Cognitive Bias in Social Design

Web design is now about psychology; web designers need to learn about it to create decent experiences.

"Bandwagon effect": people often do and believe things because many other people do and believe things.

Heuristics: rules of thumb which prevent us from needing to gather all information required to make a judgement. Sometimes these don't work all that well - this is cognitive bias. e.g. "Not Invented Here", prediction biases which lead to underestimates of time to work.

Seminal paper on this is "Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (1974)"

Talks about a few biases:

1. Representation Bias.
2. Loss Aversion.
3. Ownership Bias.

These sometimes combine: in the sign-up problem, loss avertsion and ownership bias overvalue what they use by a factor of 3. Because of ownership and prediction biases, software manufacturers overvalue their products by about 3x - so there's a combined 9x dissonance between what they want to charge and what users want to pay.

Demonstrates Freshbooks, which emphasises number of users through a worldwide map showing them (encouraging bandwagon effect).

Q: isn't this evil?
A: It's more about business ethics.

(Sounds like a "guns don't kill people, people do" type argument).

See also Duncan's talk at XPDay last year. Alan Cooper also touched on this at Agile2008.

dConstruct 2008: Aleks Krotowksi: Playing the Web

The web industry and the games industry DO NOT MEET. Strange, given that web people don't talk about games.

Games are sticky. Some people die playing games; many people lose their lives playing them. Stickiness is important because of advertising. (Shows a Wordle of business plans from Seedcamp to demonstrate the important of advertising to business models).

What do game designers do to create this social web and stickiness?

Graphics? Games have great graphics, but some games (e.g. VIb Ribbon) have deliberately poor graphics and are still compelling. So it can't be graphics.

Story? Many games have strong stories. But traditionally the story is the last thing to be stuck onto a game system.

No, it's the stickiness of play. "The experience economy": a very boring term for the word "fun".

Games designers and developers use three systems to bring social elements into games:

1. Controlled systems: what designers explicitly build, deliberately giving reward and encouraging repeat play. The web does this - encouraging an investment of personal data in order to see more value. Also consider openness: creating spaces to play in, or sandboxes. Look at Grand Theft Auto world. Sometimes this backfires, in games which are too open and too large (e.g. Tomb Raider 3). But the web is enormously open, vast space. The challenge is to create a funnel that feels wide enough that you have freedom, whilst directing them towards an "ending goal"

2. Enabling systems: social phenomena emerge based on the design decisions made by developers. On the web we have community; in games there may have been some, but not a great deal until games met the web (with Everquest, WoW, etc.) (Not sure I agree with this: what about LambdaMOO etc?). Look at real-money transfers on ebay arising from virtual goods in online games: a community rallying around a virtual object with real social value. Game walkthroughs or FAQs might fit into this category. There's no need to create an economic model around your site to do this: look at PacManhattan, amillionpenguins.com, PerplexCity, or ludic visualisations.

3. Psychological systems: e.g. the relationship between avatar and reality (shows lovely slide of people photographed next to their avatars). But yet most of the web is personalised: MySpace, Facebook, but even before that pseudonyms/tags/avatar photos. Web developers see points-earning systems as a means of bringing gaming principles to the web. Look at PMOG as a game where you earn points for on-web behaviour (e.g. "don't use google for a week"). Game developers create beautifully efficient feedback systems to encourage repeat play, should they not engage with these types of things? Games developers and designers don't tend to use formal HCI, they tend to be instinctual by nature - and by and large do a good job of it, partially because games developers are making games for people like themselves. In contrast, the web industry tends to be applying their skils to create things for other audiences.
   

Why is there such little games representation at web events?

Ends with a call for a group hug between games and web industry, then questions.

Online games involving community in the form of MUDs/MOOs predated the web by quite a long time. How has the arrival of the web (as opposed to the improvements in graphics and UI) changed the way these communities operate

After last years event, where I did a panel session discussing mobile user experience with Marek Pawlowski, I've been invited back to talk again at the Future of Mobile 2008.

I'll be drawing on the experiences we've had at FP of delivering mobile services across a whole range of technologies, and talking about to decide where to put in effort when building and launching your product.

The quality of other speakers is, I'll confess, a little intimidating: many faces that'll be familiar from the London mobile scene (plus a few folks I've not had the pleasure of meeting yet), ending with what I'm sure will be a heated panel fight^H^H^H^H^Hdiscussion chaired by Mike Butcher.

Slightly lower-key, it's Brighton Barcamp 3 next weekend (following closely on the heels of dConstruct 2008, which has been keeping Soph out of mischief for the last few months). Last year I was running on empty after travelling back from Black Rock City. This year I hope to actually stay awake long enough to do a talk... which looks like it'll either involve presenting our experiences adopting Scrum over the last year, or something about software development, martial arts and craftmanship (presuming I can OTA mind-meld with Mr Whiteland between now and then).

If you're coming and have any preference, do comment! From discussions with Ms Cottrell in the office and Mr Silver at the Tuttle club on Saturday, I think there's going to be a range of really interesting stuff going on...

I've been meaning to post up a little summary of the news on LocoMatrix. There's been quite a lot happening here over the last few months:

• We've been selected to receive a grant from the Technology Strategy Board's Creative Industries programme. It's a joint proposal with Brighton University, all themed around creating tools to assist with authoring games: a really important part of Loco. With a couple of radically different game formats already out there, we're keen to get some third parties using the platform and seeing how their perception of what they need differs from or matches up our thinking so far.
• Whilst we're on the topic of education, we're working with Portsmouth University on a collaborative project starting before the end of this year, the aim being to work with MSc students there on game authoring.
• A nice double-page spread appeared in London Lite, accompanying a story about location-based gaming which featured Loco quite prominently.
• New Scientist also ran a story on real-world gaming, in which Loco MD Richard Vahrman was interviewed.