jc herz

gaming is where 21c tech meets stone-age anthropology

“grooming gossip”
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/DUNGRO.html

verbally grooming each other by having conversation.

there are some basic archectypes of players of social games.
http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm

a successful game has to support all 4 archetypes to create a robust and healthy ecology
multiple ways to win.

ecologies have niches – there have to be multiple niches for an ecosystem to be robust

“different strokes”

games have to build value for the diff role in a persistent way.
pulled up the learning curve by the accretion of skills in a structured way. levl 1 -> levl

2 -> levl 3… power-ups…

we have to be able to display our status, our skills the things we have acrrued… it

happens in a story, a narrative. that skills-accretion curve in its self is a satisfying

narrative in succesful games (RPGS are self-actualising) [singing yourself into being]

human beings live in time, we like to see things grow over time, or imporve over time,

that’s the feedback that enourages our investment.

“artifacts of experience”
– boy/girl scout merit badges.
– stamps on your passport – badges of experience.
– skaters’ scars.. a narrative about how you got them
– tattoos.

how do you build an engaging system that feels like something is being built over time?
(cf. mattwebb http://interconnected.org/home/2001_01_14_archive.shtml#2023411)

how transparent to the player is the system that the player is building a persona within…

personalisation on the web… building of profile… they want to spend time refining the

persona.

pokemon – gotta catch ’em all. acquistion and transaction.

we’re wired to be hunter/gatherers.

streetbeam in NYC – infrared palm http://www.streetbeam.com/website/index.asp

after acquisition, comes trading… “trading is huge locus of value in game itself”

social currency – you make something that is valuable to other people. ways to groom each

other…. blogging links…

acknowledge/nodding/recognition – smallest quanta of human interaction. blogrolling =

grooming.

when you used to share music – it was a social interaction… making a mixtape for a girl…

napster stripped this away??? where was the articfact, the interaction?
uplister – the sleevenotes, not the music… the layer of context that you provide around

the object of experience.

group experience – the fact that people have a shared expeirnence… the fact that a lot of

people are having te same experience as you adds value to the experience… social

metadata… how do you represnet the social metadata??? sometimes more important than the

obect of experience.

web 1.0: indivdual whole wide world
multiplayer games: individual (player) group (clan, guild) whole wide world

why people like to expose the “to:” header of their funny/interesting email… so the group

can recognise itself.

stangers don;t matter that much…
two types that strangers that matter
1) celebrity
2) stangers in aggregate – the mob… (those who created yahoo’s 50 most popular stories)

tech always changes – the monkeys don;t… human nature persists, [but reacts diff to new

tech]

JC tells companies to do global search and replace -> replace “user” with “player” becuase

it will change what you build.

eric bonabeau: swarm intelligence

swarm intelligence is a mindset

how to you connect the dumb parts to get useful results.
kevin kelly quote from out of control.
[seems to paraphrase baran]

social insects can do it (ants, bees, termites and wasps)

social insect colony is:
-flexoible: colony can respond to internal petrbuation and external challenges
-robust tasks are completed even if some indivudals fail.
-dencentralised the is no central controller
-self organised the solutions are emegent rather than predefnid.

eric is an enginerr, not a bio-purist… a feature doen;t have to be biologically plausible

for it to work… what works works… but when he was exploring it purely fro the exotic and

exciting and novel apporach it WORKED!

how do we shape emergence – ow do we define indivdual behavior and interactions to produce

emergent patterns?

no indivdual ant knows the shortest route to the food source, just that they recognise the

trail scent that is strongest, which is statiscally emergent from the ant that got to the

food and back first getting back quickest… [my bad summation of experiement…]

efficient systems = ratio of explotation vs. exploration

if we are pure to biological models, then our systems are not efficient…

http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/ncontextsummary/346645/0 [from peterme]

“NO ANTS WERE HARMED IN THE SOLVING OF THIS ALGORITHM”

coverage will continue with matt webb as it’s too clever for me.
http://interconnected.org/home/more/etcon/swarm.txt