Life With Alacrity

iPhoneDevCamp and Hack-a-Thon

I feel privileged and honored to have been part of the iPhoneDevCamp this last weekend. Over 380 iPhone developers came out to the Adobe Campus in San Francisco to help each other make the best possible web pages and webapps for the iPhone.

I was the keynote speaker on Saturday and Master of Ceremonies for the MacHack-style Hack-a-Thon Demo on Sunday.

At the Hack-a-Thon almost 50 iPhone web applications were demonstrated to an enthusiastic audience. Take a look at Tilt, a game that takes advantage of the iPhone's motion sensor, PickleView, which is a same-time live baseball game enhancer, and The Pool, an attractive social game of water droplets hitting a pool. What is remarkable about these applications is not just the quality, but that each of them was written over just the weekend by a small team of 3-4 people who hadn't met each other before Friday!

Prizes were awarded after the Hack-a-Thon based on the spirit of openness, contribution, sharing, and participation. Prizes included 3 iPhones and some very expensive Adobe software. In particular Joe Hewitt, of Firebug fame, was honored for his positive contributions, generous spirit, and wonderful iPhone UI example code. During the demonstrations, more than one person praised Joe, saying that his assistance, his code, or his debugger made their apps possible. Personally, I think about one-third of the web apps presented used some of his code.

Building on my experience with the same-time collaboration tool SynchroEdit, and the Skotos web-based games, I worked remotely with Kalle from Sweden and Erwin from Kansas to present an AJAX chat application called iLace. I am particularly proud of how well this little web application performs and how well it works using the iPhone UI. In particular, I think its melding of text entry and chat message receipt and its response to changes between portrait and landscape modes are very good examples of what can be done for chat on the iPhone. Source code is available!

My keynote presentation slides are now available in .pdf and .mov. I'm told a live recording of the session and an .mp3 will be available soon.

Over the last few weeks an online developer community that I started at WWDC called iPhoneWebDev has grown to over 650 members. It's now the best place to get online support for building iPhone web pages and webapps. I'd like to keep the momentum from the iPhoneDevCamp going forward on this list, so if you are interested in developing for the iPhone, check out the example code and join the discussion today!

Ratings: Who Do You Trust?

My colleague, Shannon Appelcline, has been working on a game rating system for RPGnet. This has resulted in real-world application of the principles for designing rating systems which we've previously discussed in our Collective Choice articles. Shannon's newest article, Ratings, Who Do You Trust? offers a look at weighting ratings based on reliability.

On the RPGnet Gaming Index we've put this all together to form a tree of weighted ratings that answer the question, who do you trust?

Here's how we measured each type of trust, and what we did about it:

• Volume of Ratings for an Item. Introduce a bayesian weight to offset the variability of items with low-volume ratings.

• Volume of Ratings by a User. Give each user a weight based on his volume of contribution which is applied to his ratings.

• Depth of Content by a User. Give each rating a weight based on the depth of thought implicit in the rating which is applied to that rating.

These all get put together to create our final ratings for the Gaming Index, with each user's individual rating for an item getting multiplied by its user weight and its content weight, and then all of that averaged with the other user ratings and the bayesian weight too. The result is in no way intuitive, but users don't really need to understand the back end of a rating system. Conversely we hope it's accurate, or at least more accurate than would otherwise be true given the relatively low volume of ratings we've collected thus far.

Here are some of Shannon's earlier discussions about the design behind the new "user content" based RPGnet Gaming Index:

• Encouraging User Creativity - A look at the "XP" system which has helped to incentivize the creation of the database at the heart of the ratings.
• Managing User Creativity, Part Two - An examination of the nuts and bolts of RPGnet's Gaming Index database.

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Related articles from this blog:

2005-12: Systems for Collective Choice

2005-12: Collective Choice: Rating Systems

2006-01: Collective Choice: Competitive Ranking Systems

2006-08: Using 5-Star Rating Systems

2007-01: Experimenting with Ratings

Related articles from Shannon Appelcline's Trials, Triumphs & Trivialities:

#196: Collective Choice: Ratings, Who Do You Trust?

#198: Collective Choice: More Thoughts About Ratings

Dunbar & World of Warcraft

In my initial blog entry on the Dunbar Number I presented some statistics on group sizes based on the online game Ultimata Online. In it you could clearly see the power-law (pareto) curve, with diminishing returns at around 150, with most groups being 60 in size:

More recently, Nick Yee and other researchers at the PlayOn Blog have been researching the behaviors of players in the popular World of Warcraft online game. At my request, they sampled guild sizes over a one-week period, and prepared similar graphs:

Overall, these statistics still support my original hypothesis in my Dunbar Number post that mean group sizes will be smaller than 150 for non-survival oriented groups:

This all leads me to hypothesize that the optimal size for active group members for creative and technical groups -- as opposed to exclusively survival-oriented groups, such as villages -- hovers somewhere between 25-80, but is best around 45-50. Anything more than this and the group has to spend too much time "grooming" to keep group cohesion, rather then focusing on why the people want to spend the effort on that group in the first place -- say to deliver a software product, learn a technology, promote a meme, or have fun playing a game. Anything less than this and you risk losing critical mass because you don't have requisite variety.

Interestingly, the diminishing returns for large groups in World of Warcraft appear to cut off much sooner then they do in Ultima Online, with the 95th percentile 54 and the 99th percentile being 110. When I asked about why the 'knee' was much closer to 50 rather than Ultima Online's knee around 150, Raph Koster (the game designer who gave me the original Ultima Online data) answered that it might be because Ultima Online used a "veteran member" method of counting. This could result in under reporting of new users and thus pushing up sizes of more established groups.

Also different was the fact that the World of Warcraft guild sizes display a reverse power-law, with the smallest groups being much more common, rather then the bell curve of Ultima Online. If one-person guilds are excluded, the average guild size was 16.8, the median was 9. This seems to correspond much closer to my thoughts on a smaller 'nodal' threshold for group size that I've observed at around 15, which I describe in Dunbar, Altruistic Punishment, and Meta-Moderation.

My guess is that there is something about Worlds of Warcraft such that even participating in very small groups can be useful, whereas for Ultima Online the utility is gained mainly by sharing the resources earned by larger groups. Thus Worlds of Warcraft has groups that are "bands" as well as "tribes", while with Ultima Online groups are more llikely to be just "tribes".

I've not had time to play Worlds of Warcraft yet, so I'm curious if those who have more experience would agree with my hypothesis.

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Some other posts about the Dunbar Number and group size issues:

• 2004-03: The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes (also some really good comments)
• 2005-02: Dunbar Triage: Too Many Connections
• 2005-03: Dunbar, Altruistic Punishment, and Meta-Moderation
• 2005-07: Cheers: Belongingness and Para-Social Relationships
• 2005-10: Dunbar Number & Group Cohesion

Future Topics

I've been working on an ambitious list of topics that I'd like to cover over the next year. I offer them to you here so you can have some idea the areas that I am thinking about.

Office Architecture for Innovation -- Over the years I've built or converted three offices to my specifications. From this I have learned a number of things about about how to create a productive environment innovation-oriented businesses. These include some of the obvious suggestions such as fresh air and natural light, but also include not so obvious ideas such as using magnetic paint and providing a small washer-dryer.

Requisite Variety -- This concept from cybernetics applies to social systems as well. "The larger the variety of actions available to a control system, the larger the variety of perturbations it is able to compensate." More people, as well as a diversity of thinking styles and experience, give social software more "variety of actions", thus this is part of the reason why social software can be so effective.

The Art and Craft of Meme Design -- We are learning more about how to create an effective meme. Creating memes has always been an art performed by publicists, marketers, politicians, the press, and to a lesser extent by scientists and other academics. Have we learned enough to turn this art into an explicit craft?

Wiki Editing Dichotomy -- One interesting possible barrier of entry to active participation in a wiki is what I call the "wiki editing dichotomy". You have to be proud enough to believe what you are contributing is generally worthwhile to others (or at least worth your effort), but you also have to be humble enough to understand that others can improve it. I don't know of many other collaborative media that requires both pride and humility.

Choice & Neuroeconomics -- There are some that say at the root of every decision is emotion. Even a 'rational' decision appeals to a sense of balance or beauty. Recent studies using PET are establishing a neurological basis for emotions, and some reveal interesting facts about how we make choices.

Assessing Risk -- There are a variety of areas where we as humans have a difficult time being completely rational. One of these is risk assessment. It turns out we may be hard-wired to not be able toeasily understand risk that is greater then one in a hundred or so. Thus a very rare risk, say one in a thousand, will often be emotionally interpreted as having a much higher risk.

Persuasive Computing -- BJ Fogg's group at Stanford has done some interesting research on how computers can persuade you to do something. There are a number of useful ideas that come from this research. There are also some ethical considerations that should be discussed.

Cognitive Dissonance -- This technique is central to many forms of persuasion intended to change beliefs, values, attitudes and behaviors. It is used by facilitators, businesses, military organizations, and even cults. It can be used positively or negatively. How might it be used in social software?

The Dark Side of the Force -- The same social tools that we use for good, can also be used for harm. How do we ethically use what we are learning about social software? Some say that almost by definition social software attracts spammers, trolls, and innappropriate sexuality. What can we do to prevent these misuses of social software?

Conversation vs Communication -- Update and rewrite of my 1990 essay on how social software design needs to balance conversation vs communication.

Social Emotions -- We appear to have evolved a number of emotions that appear primarily to exist to support a common good, rather then to ensure our individual success. These include schadenfreude, mirth, naches, revenge, shame, pride, outrage, approbation, admiration, elevation, etc. Studies by Eckman on unconscious facial gestures, studies on the neurological basis for emotions, and studies on emotions in games, are proving that these social emotions exist. A number of them have interesting implications on social software.

Glances & Strokes -- There is some old work on the amount of eye contact we make with others in small groups, as well as some research from transactional analysis on strokes, which are the amount of recognition given to others through words and deeds. Is there a neurological basis for needing a certain number of glances and strokes each day? How does this concept apply to social software?

Weak Links -- There are some interesting social implications behind what we've learned about weak links in social networks. How do we identify and encourage weak links in our social software systems?

Negativity vs Positivity -- It is far easier for someone to respond negativel than positively. In political systems it is far easier to say no rather then yes. What social software encourages positivity, and is it possible to design social software to do so?

Time Economy -- Our ultimate most unrenewable resource is time. How time and attention are a basic economic unit that should be considered when looking at social software.

Group Life Cycle -- We often focus on how groups form, emerge, and grow. Yet there are many lessons to be learned from how groups die, including that it isn't necessarily a bad thing and that keeping a group from death can be dysfunctional.

Groupthink -- What causes groupthink? When is it good and when is it bad?

Two Thresholds in the Value of Knowledge -- In order for knowledge to be valuable, it must at minimum be more valuable then the costs to find and absorb it (costs which include bandwidth and attention). Tools like Google have tremendously increased the amount of knowledge that is worth the time and attention to find it. What types of knowledge fall below this threshold of value? Is there a limit to how much we can lower this line? Furthermore, there is another threshold where the knowledge is significantly more valuable than only bandwidth and attention. How much have internet tools impacted this second threshold? Many internet business models, in particular content models, require some ability to offer value in this upper threshold -- can they survive as this upper threshold changes?

Intimacy and Social Networks -- Social Networks Analysis tends to focus on the connections between people, either explicitly through acknowledgement of connections (LinkedIn, Friendster) or implicitly through analysis of your communication (Spoke). None are able to measure intimacy. Yet our intimate social networks are an important component of our overall happiness and contentment within both our professional and personal lives. How does intimacy work in social networks? Also there are some concepts in psychology known as communal vs exchange relationships by Clark & Mills from late 70's that may apply here.

Social Games -- A recap of Shannon Appelcline's and my analysis of the basic forms of social games types. These include relatively well understood ones like majority control, voting, meta-voting (Nomic), auctioning, etc., but also include less well understood games like playing of roles, dominance and submission, etc. There are also links to social emotions, such as mirth and schadenfraude.

Lessons from Castle Marrach -- We released the Castle Marrach online game in September of 2000, and it was designed from the beginning to be a game for the Bartle-type known as "the socializer". What lessons did we learn in the five years since the release of the game? What tools are in my social software toolbox today that might have helped with the design?

Lessons from F2F Facilitation -- There are many skilled practitioners of face-to-face facilitation, some of which are paid very high fees for their skills. What lessons can we learn from their experience that we can apply to social software? Why have so many of these facilitators failed to have success online?

More Human vs More Than Human -- Many futurists seek to offer us augmentation of our minds and bodies through technology. Many of these ideas may fundamentally change what it is to be human, and may even have unforeseen complications unanticipated by their creators. One interesting approach to looking at these technologies is to examine which make us "more human", rather then "more than human".

Lessons from Mental Disorders -- Most, if not all, mental disorders have their roots in survival strategies; however, they are over-expressed because of genetic or other causes. Examining the healthy behaviors hiding behind depression, autism, mania, schizophrenia, paranoia, etc. offer a number of insights on how we think.

Joy of being a Primate -- If you scan the surface of my writing, you may observe that I have a strong belief that our animal nature and genetics form an essential and often unconscious part of what it is to be human. You could interpret these "nature" over "nurture" ideas as limiting us to being just animals. Instead, I believe that by becoming aware of our primate nature, and choosing to leverage it or suppress it by conscious choice rather then letting it drive us unaware, is what makes us more powerful.

Smart Contracts -- Nick Szabo popularized the idea of using some of the primitives of cryptography in unique ways to create what he calls "smart contracts". He hypothesized approaches to cryptographic handling of collateral, bonding, delineation of property, bearer certificates, and much more. Others have proposed various auction protocols using these concepts. One of the fundamental atomic elements of many of these smart contracts is something called a "reusable proof of work", which Hal Finney recently demoed a version of at CodeCon 2005. What are the possibilities offered by smart contracts? What are the barriers to implementation?

Club System -- In the 80's, development of Ted Nelson's Xanadu vision was being financed by Autodesk. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons Xanadu failed to deliver any technology. However, a couple of their ideas could be valuable today, one of which is the concept of an alternative to the "user and groups" metaphor for computer security. Xanadu turned that idea upside down and called the result the "club system". The club system approach is particularly suited to the internet based collaboration tools, in particular wikis. I also have some insights to offer a cryptographic approach to the club system, which might allow P2P distribution of collaborative documents, while preserving group privileges.

Edges of Cryptographic Security -- The SSL cryptographic protocol offers a choice of a number of security properties: integrity, confidentiality, encryption, one-party authentication, and two-party authentication. But there are a number of security properties that very few deployed cryptographic protocols offer. These include perfect forward secrecy, undeniability, deniability, authorization, delegation, multi-party authentication, shared secrets, etc. What are these security properties and how are they useful? Why have they not been successfully broadly deployed?

The SSL Story -- When SSL was first proposed it was broken within an hour. Even when Netscape fixed those problems, it wasn't clear that SSL was going to win the battle of security protocols. SSL was competing against SHTTP which had backing of RSA and an industry consortium. The credit card companies merged their standards and were backing SET. The internet community was moving toward SSH. Microsoft was doing its own embrace and extend protocol PCT. So how did SSL win to become the broadest deployed cryptographic security protocol? The answers may surprise you.

I welcome any comments or suggestions for links on these topics, or any new topics that you feel are closely related.

User Content, Social Software & Online Games

Shannon Appelcline, my colleague at Skotos (an online game company that I founded in 1999), has been writing for several years a sometimes weekly, sometimes bi-weekly column on the topic of game design called Trials, Triumphs & Trivialities (rss feed for all Skotos Articles including TT&T).

His latest column Social Software & Gaming: User Content discusses issues of user content and user facilitation that apply both online game communities and social software:

...the more user content that we allow into games, the more troubles we have separating the good from the bad, the signal from the noise. As we introduce user content systems into games, filtering it will become the next challenge. Fortunately there are already some answers in our nearby field of Social Software.

As I wrote about in an older post, Shannon has also written a number of interesting columns on the topic of designing social games:

• Social Gaming Interactions, Part One: A History of Form
  
• Social Gaming Interactions, Part Two: Competition
• Social Gaming Interactions, Part Three: Cooperation & Freeform

More recent articles by Shannon have ranged in topics from analysis of the use of auctioning and majority control techniques in board games, how communities work in online games, the importance of enthusiasm in business, intellectual property and licensing, on transcreation, and much, much more.

I always find Shannon's articles rich and deeply thought out -- I think you will to.

Socialization in Online Games

Shannon Appelcline's "Trials, Triumphs & Trivialities" column in the Skotos Articles section recently featured a trilogy of articles about stretching the bounds of socialization in online games:

Social Gaming Interactions, Part One: A History of Form

The first article outlines the problem by looking out how social interaction has traditionally been handled in online games, and by considering how limiting these interactions typically have been. It also outlines how to expand traditional social interactions by describing three main categories of social interaction: competition, cooperation, and freeform.

That the majority of MMORPGs, MUDs, and other multiplayer games ultimately support achiever players over socializers, or even killers, I think begins to outline how poorly we understand--and support--true social interactions in today's multiplayer games.

Social Gaming, Part Two: Competition

The second article expands upon the competitive category of social interaction. Besides touching upon traditional direct competition, it also considers resource competition, economic competition, and the role of bluffing in competition. A number of examples are drawn from tabletop board games.

In looking at competitive interaction I intend to first consider some forms of competitive interaction that we've sort of covered--direct competition and resource competition--but will show how even in these "well known" interactions we've just scratched the surface. Afterward we'll get into some less explored possibilities: economic competition and bluffing. The end result? More variability in competition, more viability and for the players, ultimately, more fun.

Social Gaming Interactions, Part Three: Cooperation & Freeform

The third and final article expands upon the other two categories of social interaction: cooperation and freeform. Within cooperative interaction we find a spectrum of possibilities varied by the immediacy of the cooperators. Freeform interaction is given a more generalized overview, covering some of the reasons it appears and how to encourage it.

In Richard Bartle's categorization of multiplayer gamers, he very broadly touches upon "socializers"--players who are there because they want to interact not just with the game system, but also with other people. I actually believe there's a lot more granularity to the category of socializers than just its simple name. The biggest subset of socializers is, I believe, the cooperative players--those who are working together within the game system toward a specific goal. A few different MMORPGs have tried to appeal to this group, but as with competitive gamers there's also more we can learn from the word of tabletop games.

My personal belief is that the so-called "socializer MMPORGs" -- Sims Online, There, Second Life, etc. -- have missed the boat by not really understanding the socializer, or treating them like they are achievers. If someone can figure out how to break out of that trap, there may be a new hugely successful MMPORG game opportunity available.

Skotos and Social Software

I've been interested for several years in the ability of "player-generated content" to create niche or small multiplayer online games, at a company I've invested in called Skotos . At this point its oldest game Castle Marrach is completely run by the players, and 7 more games are being developed by their customers. The company is at break-even, but is not yet a 'commercial success'. There are some learnings from the world of massively multiplayer online games that apply to other kinds of social networks.

Some of these learnings have to do with size of groups -- different sizes of teams and groups in games can have very different effects, both positive and negative. I've never seen any Social Software that innately understands that a team of 7 behaves very different then a clan of 50 or a megaclan/tribe of 350. These behaviors have parallels to size of mailing lists, online communities, and even to the size of corporations. If Social Software can integrate an understanding of this then it might be significantly more successful

I'm also interested in what I call "social games" for online games. I don't believe that current MMPORGs serve well what the industry calls the 'socializer', which consists of 15% of current gamer population, but may in fact be much higher if you include women who don't currently play as many online games. Two recent articles that I've been collaborating with Shannon Appelcline on this topic:

Social Gaming Interactions, Part One: A History of Form

Social Gaming Interactions, Part Two: Competition

Part three isn't available until next Thursday, but is on non-competitive social interactions.

Posted on December 11, 2003 at 03:53 PM in Games, Social Software, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack