This:

“Dear Ambassador, we are concerned that you are perhaps over-focused on human rights to the detriment of commercial interests.”

Reminds me of this:

I don’t know how true the first bit is (truth isn’t a digital on/off thing, or, at least, I doubt the truth here is). But, it strikes me, it’s worthy of news and/or investigation.

Erm, are we the baddies?

(Note: I was looking for an image for the post of ‘good guys’ wearing skulls and found this post on Pharyngula saying exactly the same thing but about a different source of disquiet. Once again, comedy works well as a meme-vector.)

Mysterious and possibly nefarious trading algorithms are operating every minute of every day in the nation’s stock exchanges.

. . .

The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren’t doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there’s no way they’d ever be part of a trade. The bots sketch out odd patterns with their orders, leaving patterns in the data that are largely invisible to market participants.

In fact, it’s hard to figure out exactly what they’re up to or gauge their impact. Are they doing something illicit? If so, what? Or do the patterns emerge spontaneously, a kind of mechanical accident? If so, why? No matter what the answers to these questions turn out to be, we’re witnessing a market phenomenon that is not easily explained. And it’s really bizarre.

It’s thanks to Nanex, the data services firm, that we know what their handiwork looks like at all. In the aftermath of the May 6 “flash crash,” which saw the Dow plunge nearly 1,000 points in just a few minutes, the company spent weeks digging into their market recordings, replaying the day’s trades and trying to understand what happened. Most stock charts show, at best, detail down to the one-minute scale, but Nanex’s data shows much finer slices of time. The company’s software engineer Jeffrey Donovan stared and stared at the data. He began to think that he could see odd patterns emerge from the numbers. He had a hunch that if he plotted the action around a stock sequentially at the millisecond range, he’d find something. When he tried it, he was blown away by the pattern. He called it “The Knife.” This is what he saw:

From Market Data Firm Spots the Tracks of Bizarre Robot Traders at The Atlantic.

What is this? Sinister or benign, signal or noise, shroud of secrecy or Turin Shroud? It’s pretty, whatever it is.

Read the rest at The Atlantic, it’s interesting.

Filippo then issued a challenge, saying that the commission to build the dome should be given to the man who could make an egg stand on end, as that man would have the skills required for the job.  After the various architects tried in vain to accomplish it, Filippo took an egg, whacked it on its end and then placed it on the table where it stood upright and did not fall over.

The other architects protested that they could have done that, too, to which Filippo replied that they could have built the dome, too, had they seen his model.  Impressed, the judges awarded Filippo the commission to construct the dome.

From Duarte Blog, Great Moments in Presentation History, the Architect and the Egg

More on the dead chickens problem of price discovery and assigning value; I love stories like these.

The vast question, though is:

How do you reconcile this kind of truthy story – the genius leaps into the Adjacent Possible of the unknown sample space – with the idiocies of patent law and copyright?

Let me next define the “Adjacent Possible.” Take a liter flask with 1,000 types of chemicals. Call these “The Actual.” Let them react by a single reaction step. Perhaps new species of chemicals appear. Call these the “Adjacent Possible.”

Now I point to the Adjacent Possible of the evolving biosphere. Once there were lung fish, swim bladders were in the Adjacent Possible of the biosphere. Two billion years ago, before there were multi-celled organisms, swim bladders were not in the Adjacent Possible of the biosphere.

If we agree, then watch! We do not know what is in the Adjacent Possible of the biosphere! We not only do not know what will happen, we do not even know what can happen!

Then can we make probability statements about the evolution of the biosphere? No. Consider flipping a coin 10,000 times. It will come up heads about 5,000 times with a binomial distribution. But, critically, note that we knew beforehand all the possible outcomes, all heads, all tails, all 2 to the 10,000 possibilities. Thus we knew what statisticians call “the sample space” of the process, so could construct a probability measure.

Can we construct a probability measure for the evolution of the biosphere into its Adjacent Possible? No. We do not know the sample space!

Part of the issue with copyright and patents seems to be that we’re not sure if people have gone from A – Z (which is worthy of reward) or started off from N (which probably isn’t):

“Q: How can companies become more adaptive?

A: You need to be able to recognise your adjacent possibilities. A lot of people can’t. They are at A, they want to go to X. And X is maybe twenty steps away. And they can?t visualise what the next step is that gets them towards X. They can work their way backwards to like N. But they have no idea how to get from A to N. They do know if they can get to N, they can get to X. But they need to know what B and C are. I find that a lot of people at a lot of companies are so focused on being able to articulate X, and then they hire consultants who work them backwards to N, that they never figure out B and C.”

Interview with Michael Lissack, quoted on Purposive Drift

Is the story about Filippo great because he goes right back to the egg?

Credits/thanks/more:

The link to Duarte Blog comes from the ever-resource-full @timkastelle

Edge.org have a talk with Stuart Kauffman on his idea of the Adjacent Possible

Image: the Adjacent Possible from Rafe Furst at Emergent Fool

Image: Buckminster Fuller/Dome from Art Tattler

It’s from The Onion, so it’s funny.

It’s also probably the most radical vision of the future you’ll see today (if you read this today and you haven’t seen it before – I have no idea how long it’s been out there.)

From today’s Big Think and The Razor’s Edge between Nobility and Crime: Who is Julian Assange?

Former FBI Director Louis Freeh once put it like this: “Ask the American public if they want an FBI wiretap and they’ll say, ‘no.’ If you ask them do they want a feature on their phone that helps the FBI find their missing child they’ll say, ‘Yes.’” Just make us safe. Just assure us our children will be safe. Just tell us what we need to know. Let the rest be silence.

Imagine what it’ll be like when the police not only have to sift through your boring Social Media sillage but that of your, erm, chickens too:

Today Chief Futurist for Cisco Systems Dave Evans appeared on the company’s netcast, Talk2Cisco, to answer questions about the next 50 years and beyond via email and Twitter. Turns out one of the world’s biggest technology companies is betting the Internet of Things is going to be big. . .

Evans said humans generated more data in 2009 than in the previous 5,000 years combined, although a lot of it is useless – comparable to saving all 2,000 photos from your weekend trip to the beach.

It doesn’t have to be all about police work. Adam Greenfield imagines the world of the read/write city, where we go beyond the civic participation experiments of things like FixMyStreet and hook up bus stops and lampposts to Facebook:

But what if we took a single step further out? What if we imagined that the citizen-responsiveness system we’ve designed lives in a dense mesh of active, communicating public objects? Then the framework we’ve already deployed becomes something very different. To use another metaphor from the world of information technology, it begins to look a whole lot like an operating system for cities.

Then we can begin to treat the things we encounter in urban environments as system resources, rather than a mute collection of disarticulated buildings, vehicles, sewers and sidewalks. One prospect that seems fairly straightforward is letting these resources report on their own status. Information about failures would propagate not merely to other objects on the network but reach you and me as well, in terms we can relate to, via the provisions we’ve made for issue-tracking.

Let’s hear from the lampposts. . .

I found The Onion video via Sean Garrett’s Posterous. // The news screengrab is from this interesting blog on media psychology.

The Onion video reminds me of that more-amusing-than-funny montage of the CSI Effect in action, Let’s Enhance:

The smarter we are, the more complex the economy becomes, and the dumber we become.

Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models assume we’re all playing a game where the goal is equilibrium. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), though we are all playing games, they’re not the same ones.

At least, that’s how I read this piece from The Economist, which is, frankly, a little beyond me, but contains the kind of phrasing that sets off pleasure nodes in my brain:

Agent-based modelling does not assume that the economy can achieve a settled equilibrium. No order or design is imposed on the economy from the top down. Unlike many models, ABMs are not populated with “representative agents”: identical traders, firms or households whose individual behaviour mirrors the economy as a whole. Rather, an ABM uses a bottom-up approach which assigns particular behavioural rules to each agent. For example, some may believe that prices reflect fundamentals whereas others may rely on empirical observations of past price trends.

Crucially, agents’ behaviour may be determined (and altered) by direct interactions between them, whereas in conventional models interaction happens only indirectly through pricing. This feature of ABMs enables, for example, the copycat behaviour that leads to “herding” among investors. The agents may learn from experience or switch their strategies according to majority opinion. They can aggregate into institutional structures such as banks and firms. These things are very hard, sometimes impossible, to build into conventional models. But in an agent-based model you simply run a computer simulation to see what emerges, free from any top-down assumptions.

Although DSGE models are also based on microeconomic foundations, they accept the traditional view that there exists some ideal equilibrium towards which all prices are drawn. That this is often approximately true is why DSGE models perform well enough in a business-as-usual economy. They do badly in a crisis, however, because their “dynamic stochastic” element only amounts to minor fluctuations around a state of equilibrium, and there is no equilibrium during crashes.

. . . ABMs contain feedback mechanisms that can amplify small effects, such as the herding and panic that generate bubbles and crashes. In mathematical terms the models are “non-linear”, meaning that effects need not be proportional to their causes.

These non-linearities were clearly on show in the credit crunch . . . These “network-based vulnerabilities” are just the kind of thing that ABMs are good at capturing.

Of course, ABMs need stacks and stacks of data. Of the real-time real-life variety, if possible. Which means the modellers are keen to plug in your phone, your Facebook, your Twitters and all that. Which I’m all for, to be honest. But we’ll see how it goes down with the tin-foil hatters.

Politics is tinkering. Cities are machines. More on the reasons I hate suburbs. And shopping malls. And some possibly naive things about Motown.

A place to live vs a place to exist
There’s a simple two-part test that any space-for-living needs to pass, in order to be habitable:

1. Are there neutral, public spaces for people to meet up, socialise and exchange information in both planned and spontaneous activities?

2. Are there run-down areas where people can open up new enterprises and experiment?

Most suburbs fail both of these tests.

Suburbs: the Worst of Both Worlds
In The Information Architecture of Cities, L. Andrew Coward and Nikos A. Salingaros explore the idea of the city as a complex system, or brain. People are neurons:

The networks of a city — the paths, roads, telecommunications, etc. — are the mechanisms that support information exchange. Nevertheless, a city processes information rather than merely moving it around. . .

The use of urban space is linked to the information field generated by surrounding surfaces, and to how easily the information can be received by pedestrians. A primary information exchange is a pedestrian going from one point to another. He or she observes things that are unrelated to the primary reason for movement. This information is functional; it can recommend secondary behaviors to the observer who is executing a primary information exchange. A successful city is one in which even simple movements are a rich and rewarding experience.

Suburbs, retail parks and other mono-zones appear simpler and thus cheaper. But they still need to ‘communicate’ in order to process information and solve problems. This becomes hugely expensive and needs expensive infrastructure which is unable to easily react to change, let alone create it.

The geographical separation of residences from workplaces (enforced by postwar monofunctional zoning) is a case in point. Because these two urban regions — apartment blocks or groups of suburban houses on the one hand, and office towers on the other — interact so strongly with each other as a whole, they do NOT define separate functional modules, despite the simplistic expectations due to spatial clustering. Instead, the geometry forces functional module formation of the most inconvenient kind, with information exchange that is very expensive to maintain because of long links. The modules that do form are too weak, and suffer from overextended transport connections and a lack of internal coherence.

Another problem with this example is that there is simply no way to form modules of intermediate size. A stable hierarchy of different modules that fit within larger modules can never evolve in a monofunctional urban region; yet we know this to be a crucial feature of any working complex system. The nuclear household and its immediate connections defines the smallest module containing work, school, office, and supermarket. In the majority of cases, there is no successively larger module that contains this elementary module — one immediately jumps from the nuclear household to the entire city. This lack of hierarchy is pathological from a systems point of view. . .

High-rise office buildings and horizontal “office parks” are not functional modules. Typically, there is very little to no interaction between different offices in the same building or “park”, compared to the exchange between each individual office and its headquarters, branch locations, customers, suppliers, bankers, etc. This elementary analysis invalidates both the office building and the “office park” as useful urban typologies, despite their recent proliferation. For similar reasons a region of suburban houses is not a functional module. Creating office blocks and suburban house groups makes all genuine functional exchange high cost (or imposes systemic isolation). This is the system force behind Jane Jacobs’ observation that successful city neighborhoods are always mixed usage. . .

Nodes that do not form part of a larger module are often parasitic to the city, since they use its infrastructure without contributing to an overall functional coherence. Nevertheless, that is how most restaurants, stores, supermarkets, and office buildings are built nowadays. Entirely surrounded by an isolating parking lot, they are designed to be built in the middle of a wilderness, yet they are forced right into the urban fabric, tearing it in the process. Restaurants designed to work as highway truck stops are routinely erected inside the city, and of course they don’t belong to it. People working in a nearby office building, which could provide clientele at lunchtime, have to drive their cars around a busy road to get to a restaurant that is literally next door.

Suburbs make it harder for people to both socialise and work. And they make it harder for societies to innovate; they promote a poverty of aspiration (if you discount the ambition of people like me to leave).

Modern societies have expended great deal of energy on managing and preserving ‘nature’ by creating reserves, National Parks and Areas of Outstanding [insert idea denoting societal value here]. We haven’t done as good a job at managing and preserving grime and run-down areas. Suburbs lack wabi-sabi; where is the space to open a business or start some new, as-yet-undreamed-of, enterprise or madcap scheme? If you felt like going on a wild goose chase or tinkering with your neighbourhood, where would you go? Politics and civic responsibility can never be about planning because the world is too chaotic. Politics is tinkering.

City-Makers’ Manifesto
I love the idea of the Repository of Objects:

The late experimental filmmaker and pioneer of underground cinema, Jack Smith, was once asked “Have you ever thought of another type of society?” His response, in part, was:

“… Like in the middle of the city should be a repository of objects that people don’t want anymore, which they would take to this giant junkyard. That would form an organization, a way that the city would be organized…the city organized around that. I think this center of unused objects and unwanted objects would become a center of intellectual activity. Things would grow up around it.”If the world is equal to Smith’s “city,” Detroit is the repository of objects.

Detroit gets a lot of bad press. But I’d put money on more exciting things coming out of Detroit than the suburbs where I grew up.

More:

• Did I mention that I hate suburbs?
• If you haven’t read Tim Maly’s Gradual Calamity post over at Quiet Babylon, you really really should.
• Check out the series of photos on incipient Desire Paths in Detroit (also linked to above as ‘more exciting things’)

Image of Detroit: urban agriculture from Anthropik Network. Everything else from Urbanophile or screengrabs from sites linked here.

More recursion (or is it embedding?) from the Buttonwood column in The Economist:

THE best bet for the long term is to buy shares and hold on to them. That was the lesson hammered into the heads of investors in the 1990s when the “cult of the equity” was at its peak. Unfortunately, they absorbed the message at precisely the wrong time.

The past decade has been disastrous for equities. Over the ten years to June 18th 2010 investors in developed-market equities earned a cumulative total return of minus 7.9%. By contrast medium-dated Treasury bonds returned 95.3% and high-yield American bonds 102.2%. Richard Cookson, the chief investment officer at Citi Private Bank (and a former journalist at The Economist), points out that the cumulative outperformance of high-yield bonds over equities dates back to 1995.

At first glance this seems rather odd. Bondholders have first claim on the corporate sector’s cashflow and shareholders take what is left. In theory, shareholders should earn the best returns over the long term provided profits keep growing. After slumping in 2008 profits have recently rebounded and, in the case of America, are close to a post-war high as a proportion of GDP. Even if profits had been terrible, owners of high-yield bonds would have suffered too because of a likely jump in corporate defaults.

The answer to the conundrum is valuation. As the cult of equity gained more and more adherents in the 1990s share prices were bid to stratospheric levels. On the best long-term measure, Robert Shiller’s cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio (which averages profits over ten years), valuations in 1999 were more than a third higher than their previous peak, just before the great crash of 1929. It was a nice irony. Investors bought shares because they desired high returns but their enthusiasm pushed prices to a level from which high returns became impossible.

It’s all a bit Yo Dawg.

Homo economicus: the concept that we’re all rational and narrowly self-interested (inevitably embedding the idea that this is somehow a good thing):

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

Obviously, it’s not only economists who’ve made a point of looking at things from the self-interest angle.

Related to this is the idea of Rational Expectations Theory:

This is the proposition that people behave as if they have a perfect prediction of the economy’s future path, and therefore they collectively fulfil that prediction.

The above quote is from the Knowing and Making blog. Which goes on to say:

In addition, we can surely expect economic actors to learn over time. One reason that Keynesian deficit spending may have appeared to work from the 1930s to 1950s but fail by the 1970s is that people learned of the existence of inflation, and started to demand pay rises to match it. Prior to the 20th century inflation barely existed. Even until the 1950s – outside of Weimar Germany and a few other special cases – significant inflation was not considered an important risk. Now it’s a basic part of all macroeconomic calculations.

Rational expectations, therefore, are only likely to account for the phenomena that we have learned so far. What new phenomena might lurk in our future?

The degrees of recursiveness this implies in Economics is startling. I don’t know why I’ve never seen this before.

Things get faster. My kids travelled round the world before they could walk. We seem to be getting through an epoch a decade; this is my third epoch, maybe the fourth?

Julian Barnes’ Porcupine is about the overthrow and subsequent trial of a communist dictator, Petkanov, in a fictional East European country. It’s set on the cusp of the very real epochal handover which took place in Central and Eastern Europe in the early 90s.

Petkanov taunts his prosecutor, Solinsky, with a question about his alleged monstrous nature. Monsters are, by definition, something ‘other’, he says. You can’t escape from the ‘other’ and it makes little sense to put monsters  on trial for they have – literally – no capacity for culpability. From the New York Times review:

“Either I am a monster or I am not,” Petkanov says to Solinsky at the end of the trial. “Yes? If I am not, then I must be someone like you, or someone you might be capable of becoming.”

Eschatology used to be about monsters and gods. Now it’s about people like us. Many of the Possible Future Global Catastrophes are still essentially monstrous, it’s true. But the sins of omission that are their mostly likely cause are uniquely human.

It’s not like we’ve not had it spelled out clearly. Nicholas Nassim Taleb has given us Black Swans and warned why globalisation is combinatorially dangerous. Buzz Hollings gives us Panarchy:

Holling and his colleagues call their ideas “panarchy theory”-after Pan, the ancient Greek god of nature. Together with anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter’s ideas on complexity and social collapse, this theory helps us see our world’s tectonic stresses as part of a long-term global process of change and adaptation. It also illustrates the way catastrophe caused by such stresses could produce a surge of creativity leading to the renewal of our global civilization. . .

Panarchy theory had its origins in Holling’s meticulous observation of the ecology of forests. He noticed that healthy forests all have an adaptive cycle of growth, collapse, regeneration, and again growth. During the early part of the cycle’s growth phase, the number of species and of individual plants and animals quickly increases, as organisms arrive to exploit all available ecological niches. The total biomass of these plants and animals grows, as does their accumulated residue of decay-for instance, the forest’s trees get bigger, and as these trees and other plants and animals die, they rot to form an ever-thickening layer of humus in the soil. Also, the flows of energy, materials, and genetic information between the forest’s organisms become steadily more numerous and complex. If we think of the ecosystem as a network, both the number of nodes in the network and the density of links between the nodes rise.

During this early phase of growth, the forest ecosystem is steadily accumulating capital. As its total mass grows, so does its quantity of nutrients, along with the amount of information in the genes of its increasingly varied plants and animals. Its organisms are also accumulating mutations in their genes that could be beneficial at some point in the future. And all these changes represent what Holling calls greater “potential” for novel and unexpected developments in the forest’s future.

As the forest’s growth continues, its components become more linked together-the ecosystem’s “connectedness” goes up-and as this happens it evolves more ways of regulating itself and maintaining its stability. . .

This growth phase can’t go on indefinitely. Holling implies-very much as Tainter argues in his theory-that the forest’s ever-greater connectedness and efficiency eventually produce dim­inishing returns by reducing its capacity to cope with severe outside shocks. Essentially, the ecosystem becomes less resilient. The forest’s interdependent trees, worms, beetles, and the like become so well adapted to a specific range of circumstances-and so well organized as an efficient and productive system-that when a shock pushes the forest far outside that range, it can’t cope. Also, the forest’s high connectedness helps any shock travel faster across the ecosystem. And finally, the forest’s high efficiency makes it harder for it to realize its rising potential for novelty. . .

Overall, then, the forest ecosystem becomes rigid and brittle. It becomes, as Holling says, “an accident waiting to happen.”

So in the late part of the growth phase of any living system like a forest, three things are happening simultaneously: the system’s potential for novelty is increasing, its connectedness and self-regulation are also increasing, but its overall resilience is falling. At this point in the life of a forest, a sudden event such as a windstorm, wildfire, insect outbreak, or drought can trigger the collapse of the whole ecosystem.

We’re living in the midst of shallowness and a narcissism epidemic - is one way of looking at it. Another is that, with the monsters demythologised and events moving so fast and everything hyperconnected in panarchic intertwingularity, we have a new perspective on things. It’s not so much we’re shallow, but that our view on the world has tilt-shifted.

It doesn’t make much sense to stop and stare too much at individual details in the Garden of Panarchy; a systems approach is more useful. This distance is easy to misconstrue, though. A holistic worldview and misanthropy can seem to have a great deal in common.

In The Third Man, Harry Lime (played by Awesome Welles) famously describes his feelings about the ‘dots’ from a high vantage point on the ferris wheel in an occupied post-war Vienna’:

Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?

He goes on:

Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat, I talk about the suckers and the mugs – it’s the same thing. They have their five-year plans, so have I.

From these elevations does temptation come – Matthew 4:8:

Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them.

But there are good temptations and bad temptations; there’s monsters and there’s people like us.

While most of us aren’t collapsitarians, I do sometimes wonder if we don’t have a fascination for the game of civilisational collapse. I suspect that the post-apocalyptic scenarios of many games and films is more about a sense of agency and power than it is about tragedy. Armageddon looks like fun.

Finnish research on The Psychophysiology of Video Gaming [PDF] studied things like fun. The researchers observed this in players of Super Monkey Bowl 2:

Unexpectedly, we found that Event 1 (the monkey falls off the edge of the lane to the depth of outer space) elicited an increase in positive affect as indexed by an increase in zygomatic and orbicularis oculi EMG activity, and a decrease in negative affect as indexed by a reduction in corrugator EMG activity. In addition, the event elicited arousal as indexed by an increase in SCL (IBI data were somewhat equivocal). Thus, although the event in question represents a clear failure, several physiological indices showed that it elicited positively valenced high-arousal emotion (i.e., joy), rather than disappointment. This is an important finding suggesting that event characteristics such as visual impressiveness and excitingness may be more potent determinants of the emotional response of the player compared to the meaning of the event in terms of failure or success.

Gaming thinker, Jesper Juul, is cautious of reading too much into this, but notes in this piece on gamers’ contradictory views on failure:

Although players do not want to fail, they may nevertheless enjoy it when feeling responsible for it. . .

. . . failure is central to the experience of depth in a game. . .

More:

50 Beautiful Examples of Tilt-Shift Photography from Smashing Magazine

Why does tilt-shift photography make things look tiny?

The more famous quote from the Awesome Welles Ferris Wheel scene is this:

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.

Games, fantasy and delusions of agency: Ferris Club

What can we learn from skunkworks? (And other attempts to manageify innovation)

Bob Marshall writes about the similarities between (and disappointments of) Agile and Skunkworks:

For those unfamiliar with the term, “skunkworks” is widely used in business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organisation given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on critical, advanced or secret projects. . . what’s the relevance of the analogy? I believe the relevance lies in the history of skunkworks. Even though some have produced amazing products, like the U-2 spyplane and the later SR-71 Blackbird, few skunkworks have succeeded in exporting their highly-effective ways of working back into their corporate host organisations.

Here’s a look at some of the reasons why, including unreasonable behaviour, fear, apathy and cognitive bias. But mainly because it might not be a good idea.

Xerox PARCWe invented the PC but forgot to tell anybody

It’s not even as if they’re all successful enough to be in a position to export anything back. The quintessential skunkworks failure is probably Xerox PARC:

There will never be a sadder example than that of Xerox. An inspired top management established the Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC), apppointed brilliant leaders who in turn recruited the brightest and best minds in electronics, and gave these people carte blanche and ample finance to follow their own predilections. PARC duly produced, not only the key innovations which made the personal computer possible, but also a working prototype. Their benevolent parent thereupon ignored the brilliance completely.

Just as organisations ignore their Agile teams today?

Why the skunkworks?Blame the customers

Some organisations believe they have little choice but to set up skunkworks because of Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma:

. . . large companies . . . are forced by customer demands and competitive pressures to invest heavily to sustain their existing strengths and, if possible, to enhance that prowess. This gives rise to Christensen’s Paradox. The conventional explanation when great firms stumble is that they suffer from ‘incompetence, bureaucracy, arrogance, tired executive blood, poor planning, and short-term investment horizons.’ The Paradox, however, states that large companies fail, absolutely or relatively, in face of disruptive technologies, not because they are poorly managed, but because their management is excellent.

Managers follow Peter Drucker’s dictum to ‘create and keep’ a customer, then get caught up trying to build faster horses. Failure is in the DNA of organisations that serve their customers well because most customers aren’t innovators.

DisorientationMessing with Organisational DNA

Booz & Company identify the four building blocks of organisational DNA; Decision rights, Information, Motivation, Structure.

Obviously, a typical skunkworks (Is this an oxymoron? Possibly not, as we shall see. . .) would need to play with all four to create the right environment for innovators. Equally obviously, this might result in disorientation for long-time employees. From Fast Company, Building Better Skunkworks:

Rod Adkins couldn’t understand why his career was taking such a sudden and devastating blow. Up until then, he was the epitome of a hotshot executive at IBM. In a culture where your status is determined largely by how many people you have working under you and how much revenue they produce, Adkins was a star. He ran the Unix computing division, a vital, thriving business with 35,000 employees and $4 billion in sales. And then, one day five years ago, the brass summarily stripped him of all that status and power. They reassigned him to a business that didn’t produce any revenue. It didn’t even really exist yet. Even its name — “pervasive computing” — seemed suspiciously abstract and weird. And now he had no one reporting to him. It looked as though this might be the company’s way of letting a senior executive know that he was no longer wanted there.

But, surely it’s reasonable for organisations to expect people to be able to deal with change? As anybody who’s ever worked inside an organisation knows, reason often has very little to do with it.

The Scorpion ChairmanInnovators have to kiss a lot of frogs. Poor old frogs.

Here’s another paradox.

It may be that only certain types of organisation need to set up a skunkworks. And the greater the need for one, the more likely they will be to behave like this scorpion.

A scorpion asks a frog for help to cross a river. The frog is afraid of being stung, but the scorpion reassures him that if it stung the frog, the frog would sink and the scorpion would drown as well. The frog then agrees; nevertheless, in mid-river, the scorpion stings him, dooming the two of them. When asked why, the scorpion explains, “I’m a scorpion; it’s my nature.”

One of Booz & Co’s Seven Organisation Types is the fits-and-starts organisation:

Fits-and-Starts
“Let 1,000 flowers bloom.”
This organization lures intellect and initiative—smart people with an entrepreneurial bent, but who often do not pull in the same direction at the same time. It’s a no-holds-barred environment in which a person can take an idea and run with it.

Which sounds a little like a skunkworks.

The reference to “Let 1000 flowers bloom” is a reference to the Hundred Flowers Campaign in China under Mao, an appeal for a range of diverse solutions to national issues under the slogan:

Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land.

Again, it sounds a little like skunkworks territory.

But in Mao’s China, many of the people who came forward with criticisms of the party and innovative ideas were later purged and executed. (Some say the whole Hundred Flowers Campaign was a ruse to reveal dissidents, though this is disputed. The comparison stands either way.)

It’s reasonable to see the skunkworks as a risky career move.

Best practice?Radical mediocrity in the typical skunkworks

The idea that all organisations have a pathological urge to purge themselves of frogs and flowers is self-indulgent, though enjoyable. It’s what The Strategic Enterprise: Rethinking the Design of Complex Organisations [PDF] calls Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma taken to “illogical extremes”:

This view holds that the politics, cultures, and business models will inevitably stifle the “destructive technologies” that could threaten the core business. Consequently, the only recourse is to constantly spin off the most exciting new businesses and promising innovations. [my emphasis]

The idea that your business will inevitably stifle innovation can only result in the skunkworks becoming a default option or, even worse, the dreaded “best practice” of institutionalised mediocrity.

So a deep sense of apathy could be one reason the good stuff doesn’t filter back to the carbon blobs in Sector 7-G.

First and Second Order EffectsFlashes and spillover

The Strategic Enterprise: Rethinking the Design of Complex Organisations [mentioned above - PDF] makes a distinction between the ‘flashy’ first order effects of web innovation (like glamorous start-ups and ‘killer apps’) and the second-order ‘spillover’ effects which have real impact on life, the universe and everything.

This recalls the idea of Macro-Myopia idea as formulated by Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome project:

We tend to overestimate the short term impact of a technology and underestimate the long term impact.

Perhaps this is also true of skunkworks? Again, from the Fast Company piece, Building a Better Skunkworks:

Harreld, who runs the program, promised the board that EBOs alone would produce two percentage points of growth for IBM. Given Big Blue’s awesome size, that ain’t hay: It means about $2 billion of new revenue every year. The actual results have wildly surpassed all expectations. Since the program’s inception in 2000, IBM has launched 25 EBOs. Three failed and were closed down, but the remaining 22 now produce annual revenue of $15 billion, a figure that’s growing at more than 40% a year.

But the impact reaches further than today’s results. These internal startups are beginning to influence IBM’s culture. “Through EBOs, IBM has become more of a learning organization,” says Caroline Kovac, who built a new $1 billion, 1,000-employee business in computing for “life sciences” clients, such as pharmaceutical and biotech companies. “We’ve become more willing to experiment, more willing to accept failure, learn from it, and move on. It’s more a part of our culture and our official processes. Now being an EBO leader is a really desirable job at IBM.” Harreld says he doesn’t even have to recruit EBO leaders anymore: “Today I have my peers coming to me and offering to run these.” . . .

When a pilot doesn’t work, Harreld quickly kills the EBO and finds another important position at IBM for the erstwhile leader who took the risk: “You want to celebrate failure because you learn something. It’s harder to do that early in your career. You need some level of security to say, ‘I screwed it up,’ and be comfortable that you’re not going to get fired,” he says.

Palmisano’s vision is for the spirit of EBOs to spread throughout IBM, and that’s what motivates the people who’ve been involved early on in the program. “Doing something like this within a large company such as IBM is not like being an entrepreneur, but it is entrepreneurial compared to the rest of the environment,” says Kovac. “I felt if we could do this right, it would change the ability of this company to move from ideas to markets. Our journey isn’t over, but it truly is a profound change.”

IBM, though, are an outlier here, as always. They’re so vast they can afford the epic journey towards ‘truly profound change’ (and multi-million dollar punts) sustained on a diet of ‘second order effects’. What about the rest of us?

Learning from SkunkworksIssues, problems, pessimism and yes buts. . .

It doesn’t seem likely that many managers will feel able to depend on a trickle-down of second order effects (especially when they’re more likely to affect the entirety of society rather than just your bit of the business) or the beneficial effects of the spirit of the skunkworks wafting through the ether. As David Snowden points out, without theory nothing scales. Organisations feel a need to deconstruct success.

But we’re absolutely no good at this. John Kay, author of Obliquity, says we we contrapt theories using the faux-prudential algebra of Franklin’s Gambit for the purpose of “legitimising rhetoric rather than a real guide to action”. Basically, we make up our reasons after we’ve made up our minds.

Another guru, Robert Heller, urges caution against models (and, erm, management gurus) saying our opinions on why managers, teams and organisations can’t help but be based on anecdote and rarely stand up to scrutiny. He goes on to further point out:

. . . the same management that failed with a diversification programme might well have been equally inept at managing an undiluted core.

In other words, even if managers copy the ideas and practices of the skunkworks, they might still cock it up. The link between the causes and effect of both success and failure are hidden from us. In order to replicate the success of the skunkworks, you may have to become them:

Nobody in the car industry could miss the significance of Toyota’s vastly superior productivity. Key elements of that higher achievement were also plainly visible, like the empowering of employees to stop the line the moment defects began to appear – whereas in the West the mistake was to insist that assembly lines had to be kept going at all costs. There were other simple and sensible ideas like kanban – the insertion of coloured cards in trays of components: when the card appeared, it was time to order new supplies. Then there was statistical quality control, which monitored performance by scientifically based sampling. All this was highly effective and easy to imitate.

So Toyota’s rivals in the West duly imitated the methods, but not the results. As Christensen and Raynor say, ‘while many reaped some improvements, none came close to replicating what Toyota had done’. Deeper study found that the Japanese had established a ‘culture’ (for want of a better word) which, so two researchers found, was expressed in four specific rules. These ‘create automatic feedback loops which repeatedly test the effectiveness of each new activity, pointing the way toward continual improvement’. Imitating this approach, apparently, brings performance that matches Toyota’s, and not only in cars.

It follows that you must take great care over the analysis of a role model before selecting what you will adopt from its practices, and what you won’t use. It also follows that you may misread the model. . .

Moreover, unless you are relentless in pursuing and testing both objectives and execution, you will never build the most valuable role model of all – your own. After all, that’s how the great Toyota model was built: not by imitation, but by imagination.

Sexier SkunkworksAn Agile Planet?

For most organisations, it’s probably not wise to become a skunkworks. For every story out there on the lumbering giants of the zombieconomy, there’s a story of a popular start-up with more enthusiasm than sense who fail to do anything else except come up with cutting-edge ideas which everybody loves but nobody appreciates enough to actually pay for (Not to mention the rampant pandoric innovation of the econopalypse.)

And working out where the success of the skunkworks comes from is hard (that is, if it is successful). Organisations seemingly have to navigate a treacherous course between the Scorpion Chairman and irrational exuberance, between competing with their skunkworks or collaborating with them so closely that there’s no point in their existence.

Kathleen Eisenhardt and D. Charles Galunic suggest, in Coevolving: At last, a way to make synergies work ¹ that there’s a third way. In order to reap the “1+1=3 benefits of synergy”, organisations should adopt a policy of co-evolution;

Managers at companies that follow the traditional rules for collaboration avoid internal competition on the grounds that it devastates teamwork, wastes resources, and cannibalizes existing products and businesses. By contrast, managers at coevolving companies let collaboration and cooperation coexist . . . Just as the distinction between friend and foe is blurring in the alliance webs outside the corporation, it is also blurring on the inside.

Their idea is for the various business units to exist in a ksymbiotic relationship with each other, based on healthy competition (cautioning against the lessons of the Japanese keiretsu and their conflation of complicity in failure with collaboration).

But Matt Ridley has a better idea; let them have sex:

How does evolution do cumulative, combinatorial things? Well, it uses sexual reproduction. In an asexual species, if you get two different mutations in different creatures, a green one and a red one, then one has to be better than the other. One goes extinct for the other to survive. But if you have a sexual species, then it’s possible for an individual to inherit both mutations from different lineages. So what sex does is it enables the individual to draw upon the genetic innovations of the whole species. It’s not confined to its own lineage.

Agile and skunkworks are from Venus, and the host organisations are from Mars. Surely this is something to celebrate.

Final NotesThis just in, random extras, follow-ups

• Next post will be thoughts on whether Innovation Management (or any kind of management for that matter) should be a profession. I’ll also be posting some ideas on why the Scorpion Chairman is the dominant mode in organisations in the service sector (most of my experience with innovation units have been depressingly Maoist). Any thoughts on either of these would be great to hear so I can include them in the posts.
• I saw this Tweeted by @Tetradian as I wrote the final paragraph. I think the idea of Separating Utility from Value Add idea fits well with Sexier Skunkworks. In fact, it’s a slightly less breathless (and much shorter) expression of what I’ve been trying to say above.
• All this sexy stuff might be a little offputting for some. A less icky version might be the riddle from Iain Banks’ Walking on Glass:

Q:
What happens when the unstoppable force meets the immovable object?

A:
The unstoppable force stops and the immovable object moves.

I may have misquoted this. Sorry, Iain.

• Lastly, you could say that IBM have encouraged their EBOs to have sex with, erm, their parents. So they’re definitely one successful model of the skunkworks. Of course, there are loads of alternatives to innovation via the Skunkworks such as Positive Deviance (at HBR and Fast Company). The Heath Brothers have rebranded the idea of ‘Positive Deviance’ into Bright Spots, which is probably a good thing. Spreading Critical Behaviours on HBR is also a good read on why it’s unlikely you’ll be successful with formal transfer programmes. As @davidgurteen Tweeted today, “This is what KM should be about!”. It’s certainly one way to look at it.
• Bob Marshall is @flowchainsensei on The Twitter. You should follow him. And me.
• Both of us are on Amplify / Amplify. Which is a useful tool and plays well with The Twitter.

Jonah Lehrer talks of the banal predictability of the human imagination:

In study after study, when people free-associate, they turn out to not be very free. For instance, if I ask you to free-associate on the word “blue,” chances are your first answer will be “sky”. Your next answer will probably be “ocean,” followed by “green” and, if you’re feeling creative, a noun like “jeans”. The reason for this is simple: Our associations are shaped by language, and language is full of cliches.

And not just language, our cultures and our professions are full of cliches too. What do you think of when you think of eLearning? It probably depends more on your previous experiences than any sense of the medium’s potential. What do you think of when you think of robots or computers teaching people? Far-fetched? An affront to Learning Professionals? Probably Japanese with a creepy demeanour deep in the uncanny valley?

If you’re lucky, you’ll have read Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age which is ostensibly a sci-fi novel about nanotechnology and, erm, other stuff. But for a learning geek, it’s about The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer:

a state-of-the-art interactive book . . . actually a super computer built with nanotechnology . . . With the unprecedented power to single-handedly educate its reader, the primer is designed to shape the values . . . by teaching young girls how to think for themselves . . .

Or:

The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer is a sort of magickal interactive book, capable of delivering an unlimited series of what the guys in my group at work like to call “growth experiences”.

In the book, a Neo-Victorian Artifax (a kind of super-engineer) called Hackworth receives the commission to design the device from Lord Finkle-McGraw with this description:

Lord Finkle-McGraw couldn’t prevent his granddaughter Elizabeth’s parents from sending her to the very schools for which he had lost all respect; he had no right to interfere. It was his role as a grandparent to indulge and give gifts. But why not give her a gift that would supply the ingredient missing in all those schools? It sounds ingenious, Hackworth had said, startled by Finkle-McGraw’s offhanded naughtiness. But what is that ingredient? I don’t exactly know, Finkle-McGraw had said, but as a starting point, I would like you to go home and ponder the meaning of the word subversive.

Of course, computers can’t auto-educate. At least, that’s the assessment of the Tiltfactor blog, citing Computers at Home: Educational Hope vs Teenage Reality in the New York Times and two other more academic papers. This is how they tweeted the blog post last week:

kids: spread of home computers/Internet access associated with significant declines in math and reading scores.

The BBC reports on a different story, however:

Professor Sugata Mitra first introduced children in a Delhi slum to computers in 1999.

He has watched the children teach themselves – and others – how to use the machines and gather information.

Follow up experiments suggest children around the world can learn complex tasks quickly with little supervision.

“I think we have stumbled across a self-organising system with learning as an emergent behaviour,”

Professor Mitra’s been working in the UK, India and Cambodia with kids to see if they can learn on their own using a computer to auto-educate and has come up with a new concept for schools, the SOLE, or Self-Organised Learning Environment:

“I wanted to test the limits of this system,” he said. “I set myself an impossible target: can Tamil speaking 12-year-olds in south India teach themselves biotechnology in English on their own?”

The researcher gathered 26 children and gave them computers preloaded with information in English.

“I told them: ‘there is some very difficult stuff on this computer, I won’t be surprised if you don’t understand anything’.”

Two months later, he returned.

Initially the children said they had not learnt anything, despite the fact that they used the computers everyday.

“Then a 12-year-old girl raised her hand and said ‘apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA contributes to genetic disease – we’ve understood nothing else’.”

I learned a little about DNA and cells a little myself yesterday using the kind of thing I could easily imagine on a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, a game called Cellcraft. In the game, you have to save a race of platypi by growing cells tough enough to survive interstellar travel to Earth. Actually, you play as the cell for most of the game, creating mitochondria and other organelles, repelling viruses and generally enjoying all the excitement there is to be had in a petri dish.

I could have been playing Air Forte, ‘a high-altitude game of math, vocabulary and geography’:

Computers don’t auto-educateWhy the hell not?

The point for me here is that these are the games I came across yesterday, around the time I read the piece on the BBC and the piece on Tiltfactor. There are thousands more.

So, I wonder how it is that Tiltfactor can come to such a gloomy conclusion about the influence of computers on learning. The blog post says, “Computers don’t auto-educate.’ I say it’s more accurate to point to instances where they haven’t auto-educated some children in some settings. These are very different things and lead me to ask, “Why the hell not?” (Incidentally, I’m not ruling out the SOLE stuff being over-hyped here either.)

One day, there’ll be a learning game for pretty much everything. I’m hoping this will come during my children’s career at the sausage factory. If kids are prepared to learn about biotechnology from a computer ‘preloaded with information’, surely they’ll be able to learn from more interactive content? I know I would have loved the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.

Of course computers can auto-educate (and auto-train too, for all of you workplace learning people).

Postscript: Donald Clark has blogged something similar – Robot teachers – endlessly patient, CPD updates in seconds

Further Readingmore about SOLEs and Painting the Cowpaths

• Tiltfactor is the home of the first ‘academic center to focus on critical play‘. It’s a really interesting project and you should definitely follow and subscribe to their feeds.
• Sugata Mitra works at Newcastle University.
• Interesting paper describing Sugata Mitra’s work with SOLEs and ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) teachers [PDF]
• And, of course, Sugata Mitra has a blog, called Barefoot in the Head
• Here’s an article in The Telegraph about the inspirational Hole in the Wall project
• All this reminds me of something I’ve blogged before – Painting the Cowpaths
• You can play Cellcraft online. There’s an Air Forte demo here.

Finally. . .

Some people have already noticed

echoes of the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer in the iPad (or, more accurately, in some of the iPad apps):

Here’s an interesting Prezi, about teaching maths – Math is not Linear. Followed by three lessons on what this could tell us about Management Training.

I like this kind of impassioned plea. It got me thinking about the beauty of business education.

Linearity sucksLinear teaching is for the benefit of teachers

I once did about 14 weeks of a Physic degree. It was in the early 90s and everybody was reading things like James Gleick’s Chaos and the Tao of Physics. Lay people were just beginning to get excited about the Aspect experiments, Uncertainty, Chaos Theory and Quantum Physics. Everybody had a copy of A Brief History of Time on their bookshelf.¹

On the very first day, at the start of the very first lecture, the physics lecturer took great delight in telling us that we wouldn’t be ‘doing’ any of that kind of interesting stuff for at least another two years. And then we got sent off to two-hour lectures in statistics. It was during one of these lectures I decided I’d had enough. The lecturer announced to a largely comatose theatre containing a couple of hundred people that he’d been reading from the ‘wrong lecture’. And then he launched into the right one. Nobody except him would ever have noticed this blatant disregard for linearity. And it had taken him more than an hour to notice.

Linearity serves the purpose of teachers far more than it does the purpose of learners. It often signals a lack of creativity. (Less charitably, it often signals total indifference on the behalf of instructors.)

Everything is interestingWhy don’t we talk about it more?

At school and at college, we never talked about maths. We always ‘did’ maths. It always felt like work.

I think one of the reasons everybody read all the pop-sci Physics books was the fact we were entranced by the novelty of the idea that Maths could be wonderful, beautiful, creative even.

Fast forward to the workplace today and look at, say, training in Project Management. Or Business Planning. Or any Business or Management course. There’s hardly any talking about what it’s like to do these things. It’s all bloodless case studies, effortless factoids and dry principles. But Management can be wondrous, beautiful, creative even.

This didn’t occur to me until very late in life.

Management Training is brokenLessons from a sports journalist

Jason Fry’s one of my favourite journalism thinkers. He’s a sports writer who’s been rethinking how we report on games:

The game story is broken. Its time has passed, and it is an anachronism in a world of Web-first journalism. We should stop writing them. Now. (I wish I’d come to this realization a day earlier, but sometimes you’ve got to take the journey to figure out where you’ve ended up.)

The sportswriters I talked to discussed the terrible deadline pressures of game stories — pressures that can result in the familiar, tired game-story formula of lots of play-by-play and some paint-by-numbers quotes. They discussed how game stories get in the way of old-fashioned reporting — building relationships with players and coaches and other sources, allowing for more interesting reactions and sharper analysis. Their love for the form came through loud and clear, yes — but so did their enumeration of its flaws.

The question to ask about game stories is the same question to ask about everything we do in journalism: If we were starting today, would we do this? That’s the question. Not whether we’ve spent a lot of money on the infrastructure of producing something a certain way, or whether a journalistic form is a cherished tradition, or whether it still works for a niche audience, or whether it can still be done very well by the best practitioners of the craft. All of those questions are distractions from the real business at hand.

If we were starting today, would we do this?

So: If I were starting a sports site (or a sports section on a general-news Web site), would I pay a reporter or some third-party source for a summary of yesterday’s game, knowing that today my audience is much more likely to have watched the game, can get a recap on SportsCenter once an hour during the morning, can see the highlights on demand from a team or league site, and can watch a condensed game on the iPhone?

Absolutely not.

Depending what budget you gave me, I would pay for the best box score I could get, get a graph of win probability or some other interesting visual metric, and try to offer a slideshow of key photos and/or video highlights. But I wouldn’t run game stories. Instead, I would tell my reporters to write something that a reader who knows what happened would still want to read the next morning. I would work with my reporters to find a new starting point. Maybe that starting point is this idea from Chico Harlan, a quote that wound up on the cutting-room floor of my column: “Maybe there’s a way to interpret [game stories] not as the story about the game, but as being about the most interesting thing to happen to the team that day.”

I think this is the key to beautiful management training. It shouldn’t be about management but about being a manager and about the manager’s place in the world.²

This isn’t linear. And it will involve a lot of talking. It would be beautiful to base management training on the most interesting things to happen to people during their day.

Some evidence that management training should be beautiful:

• Rands in ReposeRand’s Management category is made of win
• A Preliminary Atlas of Gizmo LandscapesThere are few man-made things more beautiful than a supply chain?
• I, KeyboardMe, guesting at The Januarist, on how I think post-industrialism is becoming more beautiful.
• The Joy of CraftMe, on an old blog, saying naive things about the beauty of the Sub-Dunbar Multi-national.
• Can organisations be beautiful?Design Thinking – is it any different from ‘design’? Some say no. I say yes; it’s design for non-designers, a move to democratise design, and disintermediate merely-adequate designers.
• God Bless This MessThe image below, taken from a post at the Cognitive Edge site, home of the beautiful Cynefin model.

Is there any management training out there that’s beautiful?

Is there anybody, for example, who thinks management can be like double rainbows?

The Double Rainbow Song, for those who can’t get enough of their memes:

¹ It wasn’t just Physics students who fell to this kind of faddish enthusiasm. I know people who studied Law because of LA Law and This Life. I know people who wanted to study Psychology because of Cracker. When we decide what to study at university in the UK, we’re still kids and many universities, stupidly and unforgivable, make sure your idiotic decision is almost impossible to change. Again, this is for their convenience more than yours.

² This applies to other subjects too. And it helps to address the issue of the sucky questions that teachers have a tendency to ask. Questions about beautiful things and people are lot more difficult to fudge.

You probably know the story of Clever Hans. Just in case, here’s a summary:

A horse which people thought could do maths turned out to be reading his instructors’ body language.

It’s an important story for learning professionals for a number of reasons.

1. Do you understand?Asking people whether they understand is a dumb question

Asking people yes/no questions often doesn’t make any sense.

Can you see the animal?

Asking people either/or questions often doesn’t make any sense either.

Can you see the duck or the rabbit?

But you see this kind of question in usability testing, classrooms, eLearning and surveys all the time.

2. Teach or train?Striking a balance between teaching and training

If you ask 100 people about the difference between teaching and training, you’ll get 100 different answers. At the time of the Clever Hans story, the New York Times [PDF] were clear:

The commission has issued a statement declaring . . . there is no trickery whatever in the performances of the horse, and that the methods employed by the owner  . . . differ essentially from those used by trainers, and correspond with those used in teaching children in elementary schools. They hold that the methods employed have in principle nothing whatever in common with “training” in the accepted sense of the word, and are worthy of scientific examination.

It’s a lot easier to train somebody to do something than to teach them. Train a man to fish and he’ll be able to catch fish. Teach a man to fish and maybe you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what he does.

A trend, especially in eLearning, has been to ruthlessly pare down the ‘material’ until it’s optimised for maximum transfer. This is seductive. But efficiency isn’t necessarily effective or brain-friendly and we’ll always have to contend with the Law of Conservation of Complexity. The more we simplify, the higher the chance of producing Clever Hanses.

3. Smarter Performance SupportPerformance Support can make people dumber

Einstein said (and has been retweeted on The Twitter about a million times):

Never memorise what you can look up in books.

This makes intuitive sense.

I used to live next to a kebab shop when I was a student. I went there at least once a week for a couple of years to buy the same thing, chips with chill sauce. And every time I went, I had a similar conversation with the young Turkish guy who worked there. What can I get for you? Would you like salt and vinegar with that? Wrapped or Open? Thanks, have a good night. All in flawless cockney-accented English.

One time, they got a new grill. I said, “You’ve got a new grill,” to make polite conversation. I’m English, and this is about as far as my social skills go. In the end, the ‘boss’ had to come out from the back to clear up the confusion. He’d learned a script and our weekly exchanges were pretty much the limit of his English. Clever Hans.

Performance Support that relies on just-in-time ‘push’ learning objects (or worse – scripts) runs the risk of producing frustrating experiences for all concerned. Performance Support systems, which work on a ‘pull’ principle, less so.

4. Questions for learning professionalsReflecting on Clever Hans

The Clever Hans Effect is ubiquitous in learning environments. Learners aim to please and we like to imagine we’re fabulous teachers even more so. When our learners do well, it’s gratifying. This leads to two conclusions which are, perhaps, non-obvious. And two action points. Both of which come from Required Reading for Maths Teachers I, a post on the excellent Research in Practice blog:

i. The Clever Hans Effect is clearly akin to cognitive bias. But for who? (Clue: it’s not learners)

With this in mind I believe it’s a very productive exercise to scrutinize our lessons (working with the whole class, a group, or an individual) with the question “how far was it possible to get by just following my lead?” It’s especially powerful to videotape class and then watch the videotape with this question in mind – you see a lot more that way. It’s also worthwhile to observe other teachers with this same question in mind, because the dynamic is much easier to recognize from the outside than in the heat of it.

ii. Mistakes are nearly always valuable information.

. . . it helps to be legitimately open to students’ thought processes whether or not they initially sound like what we had in mind. This is something I’ve had to work on. I have throughout my career been repeatedly surprised by the discovery that nearly every time a student offers an idea authentically (i.e. not as just a random guess), it makes some sort of sense. Maybe not complete sense, and maybe it’s not at all where I was headed. But if I can curb my initial reaction of “this kid is totally confused” long enough to actually take in the train of thought, there is almost uniformly some worthwhile reasoning inside it. Then even if I need to say “we’re going to stick to the topic,” I can do so after acknowledging the reasoning. The connection to Clever Hans is that if we want them actually thinking, we have to make sure our questions are legit. This gets communicated by acknowledging people for treating them as legit. If the only answers we acknowledge are ones that fit our preexisting image for what the answer is supposed to be, this communicates that the question wasn’t authentic, and it’s probably easier to try to guess what the teacher is up to than to engage it authentically.

Action points:

• Scrutinise learning objects to work out how much could learners get things ‘right’ simply by following our lead.
• Test your questioning performance. If learners don’t acknowledge questions as ‘legit’, dump them and produce something better.

Here’s a modern day Clever Hans. Actually, a Clever Maggie:

David Elchoness, CEO of Tagwhat, talks about their location-based AR social networking tagging thingy in this video:

He’s describing a world where you’ll be able to set your preference for what you see on every square inch of the planet from the ground ‘right up to the top’.

This is one of those double-take statements.

Their website says:

. . . you get a world map; some call it a grid, others a canvas. No matter how you look at it, Tagwhat gives you the world. From the Kremlin to a particularly pretty flower in the corner of your neighbor’s backyard – you own the globe. By clicking on the map, you can place “tags” (messages, web addresses, or photos) anywhere you like. Once you place a tag, it can be viewed on your desktop or in mobile AR (Google Android is available and iPhone 3GS will be coming very soon.) So, if you hold up your mobile at the place on the map where you put your tag, you’ll see the tag and be able to interact with it in AR.

. . . By following others in Tagwhat, all of their tags become part of your Tagwhat experience. Say, you tag Yankee Stadium and your wife tags Madison Square Garden. So long as you follow her in Tagwhat, you’ll have her MSG tag in your Tagwhat experience. And you’ll be able to comment on it. Tag your company’s retail locations around the world and attach a photo or link. People who follow your company will be able to see those tags on-line and in-person via mobile AR. They’ll also be able to look at the photo and open the link when they’re near the retail store.

Like football? Follow football teams or fans who tag the world with football images, videos, and trivia. Like Art? Follow artists who tag the world with images or videos of beautiful things. Going on a trip to Japan? Follow users who have tagged Japan, maybe find some great restaurants at low prices or a walking tour of Tokyo. At home, review them on-line. In Japan, you’ll have mobile AR to guide you around.

Even better, you can send a private ‘for your eyes only’ tag to anyone in Tagwhat who follows you. That means AR notes placed anywhere on Earth to friends that only they can see.

More human (and more exciting) is this take on Tagwhat from his blog:

Yesterday, President Barack Obama visited the Tastee Sub Shop in Edison, New Jersey. Since Edison is my hometown and I remember fondly many visits to Tastee back in the ’80s when I went to school nearby, I took a particular interest in the visit. I tweeted about the event and updated my facebook status regularly throughout the day as the President arrived in Newark, flew by helicopter to Piscataway, and then was driven by motorcade through the streets of Edison to his destination at Route 27 and Plainfield Avenue.

This is neither a current events blog nor a journal of my personal life or sandwich mania. It’s a blog about Tagwhat, our technology product. So, what does this have to do with Tagwhat, location-based services, or augmented reality?

Twitter and Facebook are great ways to update your friends on what’s happening in your world. But Tagwhat allows President Obama to be at Tastee Sub for visitors to see forever. By tagging the spot with his photo, as I did here http://www.tagwhat.com/dave/4561 I have created a digital monument to the President’s visit that will be viewable on-line in the Tagwhat map but more importantly via mobile at that spot as people walk by. What does this mean? It means that in 20 years when a school kid, not yet born today, walks by the Tastee Sub Shop in Edison, New Jersey, she will be able to see that photo, at that spot hovering in digital space. Imagine if you could look at the Delaware and see George Washington crossing? Or if you could see Martin Luther King, Jr. standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial as he gave his “I have a Dream” speech? It would simply be amazing.

In less than a minute I was able to place President Obama’s photo and a description at Tastee. This monument I’ve created has the potential to be there forever.

It took 100 million hours to build Wikipedia. How long will it take to tag the entire planet?

A few things come to mind:

How much will we be able to avoid spammers? Will we have to pay for Premium Reality?

Who will be the first celebrity AR tagger? Somebody like Chris Guillebeau?

CEOs of companies like this have a tough sales job. They have literally no idea what their customers will end up doing.

More on Tagwhat:

Augmented Planet

ReadWriteWeb

Wired

Is it even possible to over-hype this kind of stuff?

This article - Enhancing Brains: what are we afraid of? - comes to me via Open Intelligence.

Read it in full, is my advice.

A brief extract:

Of course, we have been engaged in less-direct cognitive enhancement for a long, long time. Language may have been our first crucial cognitive enhancement as a species. A few millennia ago, we added writing, an enhancement that dramatically improved our cognitive abilities to remember, to learn, and to communicate. The list stretches to the Internet and beyond.

Some might object that these are tools, not enhancements. But our tools are enhancements. Like everything else we do, tool use changes our brains. Literacy changes how our brains function and the physical layout of our synapses and circuits; so, no doubt, does Google. Although it may be useful to distinguish between “tool enhancements” and “direct brain enhancements”, we always need ask why—and whether—it matters if we improve our brains through a keyboard or by drugs, deep brain stimulation, or neurosurgery. . .

Finally, some people worry about where this will all end, projecting a path from Adderall to a human/computer cyborg. We cannot, of course, confidently predict where these technologies will lead. We can see blurred visions of the next decade or two; we can see almost nothing at all about the next century, let alone the next millennium. Mankind may change dramatically and cognitive enhancements may turn out to play a crucial role in that transformation. Or maybe not. I would suggest only that if we should develop safe and effective direct brain enhancements, we should not reject them for fear of where they may lead in a distant future. Future applications will be the problems, and the decisions, of our grandchildren and their grandchildren, who will have the benefit of more knowledge both of the technologies involved and of their culture’s views of those technologies. For us to think that we can, today, make better choices for them based on almost no information about the questions they will face is hubris.

It’s a good, well-balanced piece. As Henry Greely says, it’s not an argument for direct brain enhancement. But he does identify three ‘unsound’ reasons for concern; cheating, solidarity and naturalness.

I’m pretty much with him when it comes to cheating and naturalness (see here and here). But I’m less sure about solidarity – you could argue that the cyborgs in the rich world have an unstoppable lead with our smart accoutrements already. And our enhancements might give us more solidarity than we can might want, if we’re not careful.

Earlier post on Neuroenhancers.

Ideas having sex

Matt Ridley talks about how things get interesting when ideas have sex in his TED talk:

Tools can have sex too, I suppose.

Maps are tools

One of our most powerful tools has always been the map. The US Library of Congress recently paid $10m for a map of the world drawn up in 1507 by Martin Waldseemuller and Matthias Ringmann:

Was it worth the price? Some observers grumbled that it was not. But now that the map is on public display at the library, scholars and generalists alike have been looking at it with fresh eyes—and what is coming into focus is a document that is far richer, far stranger, and much more historically valuable than had previously been imagined.

The map turns out to be an enormously revealing patchwork of several different kinds of maps: the world as depicted by the ancient Greeks and Romans, as diagrammed by Europe’s Christian theologians, and as charted by the sailors who plied the waters of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.

There’s more. The name America, for example, very probably represents not just a tip of the hat to Amerigo Vespucci but also a multilingual pun that can mean both “born new” and “no-place-land” – a playful coinage that seems to have inspired Sir Thomas More to invent his new world across the ocean, one meaning of which was also “no-place”: Utopia.

The map itself seems also to have made a powerful impression on none other than Nicholas Copernicus, who began his landmark On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres by describing America as he saw it depicted on the map, and who then went on to argue that the existence of a fourth part of the world meant that the traditional model not only of the earth but also the cosmos would have to be rethought.

For the only surviving copy of the map that not only gave America its name and introduced the New World to Europe but also helped Copernicus rethink the cosmos, $10m seems a very reasonable price to pay.

iDevices and Supply Chains

Sourcemap shows visualisations of Supply Chains overlayed on Google Maps. This is one of the iPod, for example:

Though, this example seems fairly bloodless compared to the probable reality, which is whole lot messier:

A single iPhone is composed of 135 grams of material, including stainless steel, plastics, glass, a lithium-ion battery, and, perhaps most crucially for the tactile experience of iPhone ownership, a touch-screen display weighing in at 12.5 grams, just under one-tenth of the total weight of the device (PDF).  To capture the motion of the user’s fingers, that touchscreen employs a technology known as “Project Capacitive Touch” sensing, which registers movement and pressure with electrically-charged strips of the transparently conducting solution indium tin oxide (In₂O₃ and SnO₂).  The key and most expensive component in that solution is the rare metal indium, which is not mined directly, but typically produced as a valuable by-product during the processing of zinc ores (though, owing to increasing demand and limited supply, it is increasingly recycled from manufactured products).

Canada is one of the world’s leading producers of indium, producing approximately fifty tonnes a year, a quantity which is exceeded only by China (330) and Japan (60).  Within Canada, the single facility producing the greatest quantity of indium is Teck Resource’s refinery in Trail, British Columbia, which processes zinc ores hauled from the Red Dog pit mine in northwestern Alaska.  Such mines and refineries, scattered across the globe in the aforementioned countries, as well as South Korea, Belgium, Russia, and Peru, are the iPhone’s landscape of extraction.

Matthew Hockenberry, Director at Sourcemap,  points out just how messy things really are in the video below (see how messy it is to produce indium tin oxide from 1:34, for instance).

As he says in the introduction, laptops and other hi-tech devices aren’t like bottled water; there is no laptop spring:

Sourcemap @ MIT Communication Forum from Matthew Hockenberry on Vimeo.

Cognitive Maps of the iPhone

Ben Millen’s made a cognitive map of the iPhone.  This is a screenshot from his Heidegerrian Analysis:

It’s designed to elicit a greater engagement with everyday objects; his maps are having sex with way-finding techniques, Foucault’s Heterotopia, Lacan’s objet-petit and Harry Beck’s Tube map.

It’s all heady stuff.

Edible Geography

A typically wondrous post from Edible Geography describes the work of Esther Polak, an artist from The Netherlands, who wired up some people (and cattle) involved in dairy production in Nigeria with GPS devices, mapped their work journeys and then turned them into maps (which you can buy here if you’re quick enough) using a ‘Heath Robinson-esque’ robot. You’re better of reading the original post, but here’s an extract:

Rather than simply presenting these maps, however, Polak’s project revolves around the way each person involved in this greater milk journey understands their own movement within it.

To that end, she spliced together a toy robot on wheels and a plastic bottle filled with locally-gathered white sand, in order to create an ingenious Heath Robinson-eque device that redraws each journey exactly as it happened, albeit at a much reduced scale and a speeded-up timeframe. . .

Despite my unending enthusiasm for maps, the video-narratives (excerpts of which are available online) are actually perhaps the most arresting part of Polak’s project.

For each participant, the process of seeing their journey unfold, in miniature, on the ground in front of them seems to trigger an initial bemused amazement, followed by a flood of anecdote. Mr. Idiris starts gesticulating wildly at one point, showing Polak and her translator where he had to go round in circles for hours looking for a lost cow. Binta, his sister-in-law, explains why she chose to go to the fruit market in Kubwa to sell her nonno, rather than the one in Dutse.

This is maps and mirrors having sex. These are mirrors for cyborgs.

End

• There’s very little like Edible Geography on The Webs. I strongly urge you to subscribe.
• The video narratives from Esther Polak’s mapping project are here.
• I’m working on the assumption that all of these personal informatics tools are kind of like mirrors for cyborgs. And that a portrait of a cyborg would have more in common with a map of a supply chain than a painting. This may or may not make sense. Whatever.

I love the smell of commerce in the morning.

Mallrats

Malls have rules. Here’s a story about the kind of rules they have:

The new rules restricting minors at Mayfair Mall were implemented at 2 p.m. Friday. The new guidelines mean patrons age 18 and younger must be with an adult 21 or older after 2 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. Those who are 18 or older and look young can ask for a wristband to prove they meet the age requirement.

Ray Oldenburg coined the term Third Places to describe the neutral spaces where people hang out and socialise, characterising them as essential to a functioning democracy. Where do malls come in the order of things?

Apparently, patrons like these kind of rules. Would they feel the same way if the rule applied to other public spaces? If the rules meant that 17-year-olds needed a 21-year-old chaperone to walk the streets on Fridays and Saturday afternoons, would they feel the same way? I kind of doubt it. Malls are kidnapped public spaces and their arbitrary rules reflect this.

Karen Sternheimer worries too about the chilling effect on political activity mall laws have:

The rule that might have the most important implication is rule #4. “Soliciting, picketing, rallying…distributing literature…soliciting signatures or personal information of any kind…is prohibited without the express written consent of the owner.” Essentially this rule outlaws any political activity in the mall, a rule that is common in shopping areas nationwide.

What do politicking and young people have in common? I suppose it’s the fact they both get in the way of officially-sanctioned commerce. The mall guards don’t mind intrusion and disruption if it’s targeted advertising, for instance?

For all this, though, I quite like malls. Simply because I never ever go to them. When I go out, I take comfort in the fact my world is just a little bit less tawdry because someone’s worked out a way to segregate all the shops and all the people I don’t want to spend time with. I get to enjoy a kind of Premium Reality. Here’s Russell Davies on Premium Reality and Augmented Reality, or whatever it is that we end up calling it:

So far the only uses we can imagine for this stuff are pizza vouchers and art. Pizza vouchers because we think businesses will pay for it; art because we think governments and patrons will. But pretty damn soon it will become a media environment like any other — businesses will pay to target the rich and end up only addressing the poor because the rich have paid extra to avoid being targeted. So if you’ve got enough money, your world could look like HBO on a Sunday night — high quality and commercial free.

Malls fail to attract the rich because they’re relentlessly unpleasant experiences. The more control the place tries to exert over the space, the less they feels like they’re ours. Retha Hill, a professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, has just won a grant to develop a black history smartphone app:

Hill’s winning entry in the New Media Women Entrepreneurs contest, the Mobile Black History Project, is a free smart-phone application that will use augmented reality to enable users to access information about landmarks in black history from wherever they are.

For instance, a user in Washington could hold up their smart phone near the Lincoln Memorial and look through the camera lens to get information about the August 1963 March on Washington led by Martin Luther King Jr. . .

Users will be able to geolocate sites of black history up to 25 miles from their physical location. They also will be able to locate black-owned or -oriented restaurants, clubs, bookstores and other culturally significant places nearby.

You can add something to the Lincoln Memorial because it is a public space. This is Augmented Reality. Black history is already an essential aspect to the Lincoln story, the smartphone app simply accentuates this.

Malls aren’t really public spaces, though. You can add interactive billboards and make things more fun but it’s more of the same story. Malls are already saturated with shopping, it’s unlikely that something like this would prove more than a novelty:

In a place with only one story – in a place that only works as one space – there’s literally only one option: repurposing and subversion. Ironically, malls make this super-easy with their simplistic narrative of logos and straplines, as the leak in your hometown makes abundantly clear. Everybody’s seen the video by now, but it’s worth highlighting:

An important component of the project is that it uses BP’s corporate logo as a marker, to orient the computer-generated 3D graphics. Basically turning their own logo against them. This repurposing of corporate icons will offer future artists and activists a powerful means of expression which will be easily accessible to the masses and at the same time will be safe and nondestructive.

BP garages have been turned into an app. Just as everywhere will be, sooner or later. If it’s a rich, communal space, this will be Augmented Reality. If it’s a totalitarian monoculture, it will be Reality, Subverted.

More:

• a collection of billboard graffiti
• a collection of post-Deepwater BP logos
• Image of MegaMall from Manila Daily Photo on The Flickr Creative Commons

TURNING INTO GODS – ‘Concept Teaser’ from jason silva on Vimeo.

Shock. Horror. Blasphemy.

The Laster glasses are not opaque—they have clear glass lenses, looking like ordinary glasses with the exception of a thicker-than-normal earpiece. The earpiece houses a microdisplay projection system that sends the computer-generated image out onto the glass lens. A camera near the eye captures the real-world view and sends it back to the computer for analysis.

Sitting in a café overlooking Stanford University’s Rodin Sculpture Garden, an appropriate place to meet with a French researcher, I tried on the glasses. First, I looked at an industrial application—an overlay of data. I found I could easily ignore the text and see the real world outside, or concentrate on the text and read it with little difficulty. More fun—playing with a little Tinkerbell-sized dancer, and tossing her from hand to hand. (I have a feeling the folks at the next table were seriously starting to wonder about me at this point.) Key for me, I didn’t get that queasy feeling I’ve gotten trying video display glasses in the past.

Finally, an AR technology I can stomach

This will be the key to Augmented Reality taking off. One part Mujicomp, two parts antiemetic.

Laster are the company behind these non-nauseous AR glasses. One to watch, they seem to get the grammar of accoutrements.

Some types of notifications can best be consumed at a glance – ones that are short, actionable and time sensitive . . . A watch is the world’s greatest glancable display but you need to be able to consume it all in a glance.

Half Past a Freckle: the Software that Could Make you Wear a Watch Again

Extrapolating:

• We develop a grammar of accoutrements. The wrist is for glancing, specs are for location-based data, rings are for personal informatics.
• Moore’s Law: computing power doubles at a given price point periodically. Moore’s Second Law: “overall net efficiency of any electronic system will double every 24 months”. Metcalfe’s Law: networks’ value is proportionate the square of the number of connected users. Law of Bling: a cyborg’s power is proportionate to the square of the number of smart devices worn.
• Somebody who’s more Alpha than geek gets hold of this stuff and becomes the richest person in the world. On purpose.

Two great decks from the report of The Web and Beyond 2020 at Johnny Holland Magazine:

We should design our software to behave like a likeable person.

Once again, somebody’s echoing Mujicomp ideas.

One of the things I dislike most about things like Second Life is the amount of time people spend building neat things which they then expect you to look at and enjoy. The art in Second Life is – let’s face it – on a par with the art direction of your average porn-film-with-narrative-pretensions.

Robert Overweg is a photographer in the virtual world and he takes beautiful pictures. I love all of these and, if you’re in Amsterdam, he has an exhibition on till the end of July.

There’s a lot of good, interesting game research out there in the virtual stacks of Ze Intervebs. But it’s often locked behind a paywall.

Take the June edition of the Review of General Psychology. They’re asking $11.95 for each paper.

Here’s the contents:

But a quick search on The Google using the modifier:

filetype:pdf

And you soon realise that many of the papers are on Ze Intervebs for free. Are they trying to get paid or are they just messing with us?

Which of the following papers can I find on Ze Intervebs?for free, zilch, nada, null point, gratis, zdarma, lunch

The links back to the journal are for information only. Don’t click unless you have access behind the paywall, is my suggestion.

• No. Though, to be honest, who’d want to? Douglas Candland sounds like a beastly cad to me. Incidentally, this 1-page ‘article’ is still priced at $11.95.

• Yes! Link to PDF is here.

• Yes! Link to Blazing Angels PDF is here.

• Yes! Link to Vulnerability to violent video games PDF is here.

• No. But the researchers have published similar things before. Here’s a PDF via the Wikipedia.

• No. This is a shame because it looks interesting.

• Yes! Link to PDF

• No.

• Yes! Link to PDF

• Yes! Link to PDF

• No. I’d be really interested to see this paper. Although I suspect I’d be disappointed.

• No. Meh.

• Yes! Link to PDF

Overall, they score 7 and a half out of 13. Whether right or wrong, I’m not sure.

Are they all like this?

Gameify’s about making work and learning more betterer and funner with games, toys and play. And a lot of people are thinking about the same thing. Roughly speaking, the gameification people fall into two camps: Skinner-boxers and Dungeon-masters.

Skinner-boxing

The Skinner-boxers want to use the ideas from Behavioural Economics to motivate people  by adding points to everything. This is the realm of designing choice architectures and seeming contradictions like libertarian paternalism. Jesse Schell calls this the Gamepocalypse and it was a major theme of his amazingly popular talk at DICE10 (here’s an excellent round-up of some of the conversations this started). And an extract from a strongly disapproving Jay Bachuber at Wise Gaming:

If implemented on the scale Schell envisions though, games could easily become prison bars, or the walls of a Cretian labyrinth. This would be a world where nearly every waking moment is spent grinding. Even worse, we could live in a world where everyone we meet is an ally, an enemy, or just a game piece.

Skinner-boxing is one of the things that makes games ‘fun’. But, as Jonathan Blow observed in his MIGS 2007 lecture:

There are many ways to make a game “fun”, but we usually pick the easy one, which involves sacrificing the player’s quality of life.

Skinner-boxing can be a lot like McManagement, I suppose.

Dungeon-mastery

The Dungeon-masters want to harness games for good and usher in a new era of co-operation, Total Engagement and Epic Wins.

Jane McGonigal, in addition to observing that there is zero unemployment in World of Warcraft, says gamers are virtuosos at:

urgent optimism (everything is always worth trying right now), social fabric (we like people better after playing a game with them), blissful productivity (we’re happier working hard than relaxing) and epic meaning (we’re attached to awe-inspiring mission and stories).

Commenters have noticed a few problems with this, though. At Massively:

I do admire the idea of taking gamers and “using” them for a greater purpose, but I also think that people often become worse versions of themselves in online games.

And at BoingBoing:

I think her ideas of using collective intelligence via game form is a very interesting idea. Although i have to say she needs to develop better ARGs that are actually fun to get people to play and test this. World Without Oil was all about having people blog and so is Evoke. I dont enjoy blogging about homework assignments a game gives me; thats not fun game play like WoW.

The games are not always fun and their designers are wilfully blind to John Gabriel’s GIFT theory.

Second-lifers, Transmedia Types, Peter Principlists

There are other kinds of gameifiers too, though they’re less common (as gameifiers, not as people).

Second-lifers: they know virtual worlds are not really games but they think everybody should come and play with them anyway.

Transmedia types: they’re interested in games as a medium and enjoy a spot of theorificationising.

Peter Principlists: they’re busy promoting the idea of games to their level of incompetence.

Hmmmm, who have I missed?

This is for the game Empire Avenue, which I’m trying out to find out whether it’s a dungeon or a Skinner-box:

EAVB_KOOMOACJZM

Fuel efficiency in cars hasn’t improved since 1963. The obvious solution to this is to spice up your dashboard a little gameification. The idea of the SmartGauge dashboard’s Efficiency Leaves is simple – if you drive well, you grow a nice healthy tree. And if you don’t, the leaves drop off:

The gameified dashboard essentially reinvents the Driving Experience?

Ford has essentially reinvented the drivers experience of the car  and simultaneously produced a vehicle which proves that driving a Hybrid doesn’t have to suck . . . The bread and butter of this system are the “efficiency leaves” which most people will find themselves paying attention to for the duration of their drive. The efficiency leaves are essentially a plant stem.  As you drive the stem will either sprout leaves or lose them – the better you drive, the more leaves you get towards the plant’s bloom – or – the more aggressively you drive, the quicker you kill the poor plant. At first it felt like a gimmick, but, I believe that the more people who try it will enjoy using it because its like a positive reinforcement to driving – almost like playing a simplistic video game.  Only thing missing is  a “points system”  which might add a level of competition to trying to be more efficient.

The SmartGauge design turns the car interface on its head:

What’s most profoundly innovative about the SmartGuage design is that it turns the traditional role of a car’s driver interface exactly on it’s head.  “A guiding principle was to give the driver feedback about their driving,” Booth told me in the pre-interview for our panel discussion.   “Up to now, car dashboards have communicated information about what the machine is doing, not the driver.”    The reason behind the shift in emphasis is a simple business problem.  Many hybrid purchasers, who are socio-politically predisposed to choosing such cars for their green benefits, are unhappy customers.  They just aren’t getting the increased fuel mileage they hoped for.  Some aren’t getting anything near the optimal mileage recorded by the test drivers and car reviewers.  It turns out a lot of this has to do with the way one drives a hybrid.

IDEO did ethnographic research for the design and studied people like the so-called hypermilers. Can we learn anything from the cult-like hypermilers? Apparently,yes we can.

Kids can learn how to drive green from the backseat:

What you’ll see when you look through the steering wheel is a set of green leaves. The “Efficiency Leaves” are a graphical indication of a pilot’s driving style; more leaves mean greener, more efficient driving. Rapid acceleration and hard braking cause leaves to drop from the vines. Leaves grow when the driver accelerates gently, coasts, and brakes smoothly to help recharge the hybrid’s batteries.

“A child sitting in the back seat can recognize efficient driving techniques just by watching the leaves grow,” said Sonya Nematollahi, the Fusion’s Driver Information Senior Engineer. She led the development of the SmartGauge project from start to finish.

Sounds a bit far-fetched? Here’s a quote from a review on MSNBC (via Fierce and Mighty):

Failure to drive in a way that cultivated this garden sparked howls of outrage from the back seat, where my kids complained I was killing the leaves as they disappeared. So while it would be easy to dismiss the efficiency display as a silly gimmick, it is a hard-to-ignore reminder that with just a bit lighter pressure on the pedal, the Fusion Hybrid can get spectacularly good mileage.

Some see efficiency leaves as gimmicky:

The interface is slick, but the “efficiency leaves” feature seems sort of gimmicky, where a simple mpg readout would suffice.

You can toggle the display to get an mpg readout if you want to. (As any less bone-headed reviewer would probably take the trouble to find out.) In fact, part of the attraction of the dashboard is the fact it’s customisable. But I have to grudgingly concede the macho reviewer’s unwittingly-made point – designing a dashboard to inform is different to designing a dashboard to influence somebody’s behaviour.

Other people have had similar ideas on how to encourage greener travel. Here’s the UbiGreen Transportation Display:

The tree grows leaves and blossoms as the user engages in green transportation activities over the week. The UbiGreen Transportation Display highlights icons representing values related to the green activity (e.g., saving money and getting exercise are side effects of walking.)

Judge for yourself in this longer review clip, gimmicky or delightful?

Only for the hardcore (excerpt from The Design of Eco-Feedback Technology [PDF] – my emphasis:

The most widely used means to promote proenvironmental behavior change is information (e.g., via media campaigns, pamphlets, or websites). The assumption is that with better information people will act in more environmentally beneficial ways. However, various studies of informational programs have shown that simply presenting people with information on the benefits of proenvironmental behaviors typically results in only a marginal effect . . .

Many conservation programs use high-level written or verbal messages, called prompts, to promote conservation (e.g., “Use Energy Wisely”). Investigations into general prompting strategies have shown that prompting has limited influence on behavior but can be made more effective by improving specificity, timing, and placement. For example, The most widely used means to promote proenvironmental behavior change is information (e.g., via media campaigns, pamphlets, or websites). The assumption is thatwith better information people will act in more environmentally beneficial ways. However, various studies of informational programs have shown that simply presenting people with information on the benefits of proenvironmental behaviors typically results in only a marginal effect. To maximize information’s transformative potential it must be easy to understand, trusted, presented in a way that attracts attention and is remembered, and delivered as close as possible—in time and place—to the relevant choice.

Conscripting kids to do your dirty work seems to be an effective way of doing just that.

Here’s the first in a regular series of round-ups from the world of gameification. And a report on the all-important gameify vs gamify head to head boss battle.

First of all, bad news, everybody. Gameify is still losing:

Here’s a round-up of recent gameification news (okay, this is first one, so it’s got things going back a couple of years):

They’re in the room!

Glenn Entis on The Gameification of the Media at SBGames 2009 on Gamasutra:

In short, games are spreading everywhere. Games are designed around interaction and a great user experience. The value of good game mechanics is to be attractive, fun and addictive — they are easy to pick up and hard to put down. But those are good characteristics for everything to have, not just games . . .  ”gameification” will be needed for any successful consumer interaction experience.

Entis also talks about “the paradigm of tool as content, citing Spore’s creature generator.” It’s worth highlighting the toyness and playlike behaviour encouraged by stuff like Spore. Russell Davies has called these ‘social toys’ and contrasted their effortless playful nature in comparison with Skinner-boxing anti-games. It’s something I’ve noted elsewhere and labelled toyification (though, apparently, this word has a very specific meaning in games and refers to making the gamespace appear in 3D ie like a toy). The key point, for me, is that people hate having rules for toys.

David Helgason, CEO of Unity, on 2010: the Year of Gamification (sic):

Everything Becomes a “Console”
This one is somewhat controversial. It seemed that with the move towards mobile and web, the closed ecosystems of the console world would be under siege and eventually collapse. What game developer (except perhaps the ones most entrenched in with the Nintendos-Microsoft-Sony trinity) hasn’t fantasized about this walled garden having its walls rammed down?

Well, welcome to the new world. The iPhone has proven that given the right amount of “openness”, neither consumers nor developers really mind closed platforms.

Even on the anarchic web (regions of which remind one more of a Mad-Maxian post-apocalyptical cyberspace than an enlightened utopia), Facebook is in the process of creating a closed environment within which consumers and game developers can meet and exchange fun and money (more or less) safely.

This is a quietly radical prediction. What if you could visit Second Life within a game of Grand Theft Auto? Or vice versa? These kind of spatial-metaphor-busting ideas are very near. Who’s going to build the one-game-to-bind-them?

Byron Reeves, an author of Total Engagement, interviewed in H+ Magazine:

Everything in the future online is going to look like a multiplayer game,” said [Eric] Schmidt [Google Big Cheese] to this international audience. “If I were 15 years old, that’s what I would be doing right now. . .

I think I could imagine things that I could put on my résumé that, even right today, would be useful in applying to a job at Accenture or at IBM, at very substantial places,” he commented during the Metanomics presentation. “That would probably come from both of the worlds of games and Virtual Worlds. So if you say, ‘I’m a guild leader, and have been for the last nine months, of a 200-person guild that spans three continents,’ you’ve said, ‘I know how to make a website. I know how to motivate people. I know how to arbitrate a lot of foolishness with respect to who gets what when they do this.’

This is pretty much the same as he says in the book. People can do things in games that they don’t get a chance to do elsewhere.

Games design as modality

Bing Gordon thinks big things about video games over at Gamsutra:

I’m a believer in the game-ification of the world. I think video game design is the new MBA. Video game design is valuable in education, in internet portals, in advertising, in product design, in entertainment media design as well. Video games are so compelling that people who grow up playing video games will have their habits and world views shaped forever.

More from David Helgason inverviewed in H+ Magazine:

Game design can be such a pure interaction. I mean, many games are just interaction. There’s very little behind them. You’re just in the flow of touching something and it moves. It gives you some pleasure and there’s a little bit of frustration or stress and you want to overcome this thing. Not all games are like this, but many are. And that skill set… designing that and understanding it and optimizing it so that it feels really good… getting it right, where people have this pure pleasure from it… can be applied to a lot of things. We can see how powerful this iterative process is. . .

They did some very large experiments teaching kids with Sim City and The Sims — just playing the games. . . It was a research project sponsored by Electronic Arts. They rolled out these games and played them in schools, and someone ran around trying to figure out the kids’ retention and how well they could apply this knowledge afterwards. The conclusion was that they taught them really well. . . It turned out that retention was pretty good, but the application of this knowledge was very strong. . . You’re not actually reading the rules of the game; you’re kind of feeling them and internalizing them. People are pretty good at that, and can pick them up quite quickly, even complex rules.

Key points for me: iterative design process and embedded, internalised rule-sets.

Gamification of the News from the newsplay.org blog quotes Heather Chaplin in an podcast from Another Castle:

I’ve interviewed [James Gee] a bunch of times and one of the things people mistake about his work, because his book is called What Videogames Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, people think he’s advocating the use of videogames as teaching, but really what he’s saying is that videogames and the way that people play with them is a model for learning that the education system could learn from, which is a very different thing from saying we should start pumping videogames into the classroom…It’s more saying look at how people learn while they’re playing videogames. Something’s going on there that we could learn from.

I like this. Games as modality more than method.

epredator from Life at the Feeding Edge:

If you have ever got a buzz from receiving a level up in a game, or a promotion level at work, or a prize at a competition or a complement well meant then you already know of the impact of recognition.
Computer mediated experiences allow very quickly for new achievements to be generated for a never ending set of levels and trophies to be created. If you map that to a promotion structure in your average corporate, those events are few and far between and unable to be restructured due to legacy promotions of others. It is fairly easy though for World of Warcraft to introduce another 10 levels on top of the uber level of 70, or for Pet Society to introduce yet more rainbow poo.

Gameification, sometimes a bit scary . . .

Jesse Schell is quoted at AssortedStuff in the Spark podcast:

I think for the 20th century the dominant means of building one’s brands and capturing a person’s imagination had to do with graphic arts. It had to do with logo design and designing brilliant commercials and beautiful ads in magazines. . . I think in the 21st century it’s going to be much more about game design. It’s going to be much more about how can I incentivize you to focus on my product, pay attention to my product, tell your friends about my product, think about my product all the time. Game design is going to make that very easy to do.

An almost pure distillation of evil here from Tim Chang quoted in the blurb for the login conference:

Gaming 3.0 is about leveraging game mechanics and models to re-invigorate other markets: humans are inherently geared towards addictive behaviors and biases that can be exploited through game mechanics like points, achievements, and leveling up… We can utilize game constructs to perhaps revive other industries which no longer monetize as effectively via macro-transaction or advertising.

More from Tim Chang on Gamesbeat:

But these concepts can be taken much further, argues Tim Chang, a principal at Norwest Venture Partners. The idea of letting people “level up” in their lives and consumptions habits, could drive traffic to web sites and retailers alike. For example, if you were to introduce gaming dynamics to business-recommendation site Yelp, he said, you could generate instant engagement and healthy competition among foodies. He suggested that, instead of assigning the title of mayor to just one person, Foursquare should create tiers of fan-dom. If you have the chance to climb the ranks by coming back to a restaurant or bar — or airline for that matter — again and again, you probably will. . . Real life leveling systems can be applied to everything. . . If only the music industry had been more aware of this, it might have been able to save itself. Loyalty 2.0 is powered by game mechanics — then you can tap into marketing campaigns, coupons, etc. He even took it a step further, claiming that this trend toward game-ification could one day be leveraged to improve public health. If people have the opportunity to earn points for eating healthier — or, alternatively, can be punished for eating junk food — they will probably be more likely to stick to a beneficial nutrition plan. Considering that supermarkets know everything you buy after they scan it, it’s not inconceivable that health insurance costs could one day be connected with food purchases. “People who eat crap should pay more,” Chang said.

Ooga Labs on Gamification: Game Mechanics is the New Marketing:

But as those mediums and techniques begin to fade in their natural cycle of age and decline, what if instead of getting interrupted, people get wrapped in contexts filled with game mechanics that DIRECTLY induce them to take action. . . in a context that uses game mechanics such as leader boards, leveling, currencies, stored value, privileges, super-powers, status indicators, random reward schedules, etc . . . A good example of this is Tencent in China, a social network where many members have virtual pets. If Tencent wants to increase revenues at the end of a quarter, they simply write a script that make a large portion of those pets sick, which causes the owners to need to buy virtual medicine for the pet to heal it. Voila, a strong finish to the quarter.

. . . and sometimes not.

Badgeification vs Gameification over at Join the Company:

I think the distinction needs to be made between “badgeification” and “gameification”. (And better terms found for both, hopefully.) Badgeification may help to drive repeat app usage, but it’s a drive that has compulsion behind it rather than what should be behind real games: the more nebulous idea of “fun”. Unthinkingly adding badges and rewards to an app may not be a good long-terms strategy, but I’d challenge anyone to argue that any task would not benefit from being made fun.

Raph Koster says some typically smart things and adds in a welcome sense of perspective:

Are games in the vanguard here? Maybe, maybe not. After all, the world is changing around us pretty quick. If anything, we already need to distrust what we see and what it tells us to do, because quite a lot of the perceptions we absorb from media are not so much “wrong” as just “non-factual.” Spotting it has become a cottage industry, from Photoshop fails to political fact-checking. And we shouldn’t by any stretch think that games or game tactics are the only place where this stuff will be used or even most impinge upon our lives.

The Gameification of the Webs

BigDoor want to add game mechanics to your website:

What do techies mean when they talk about gamification? In BigDoor’s case, the company has developed a software platform that helps website publishers and developers build videogame-like mechanics into their sites and mobile applications. That means adding things like virtual currencies, virtual goods, points, badges, and leader boards—all with the goal of driving more people and visits to a website, and strengthening a company’s bond with its customers. The idea is that by rewarding loyal consumers who contribute comments to a site, say, or upload content such as photos, websites can create “virtual economies” that to this point have been seen mostly in video games

And BigDoor is not alone, see what Bunchball are doing:

More astoundingly, however, is the triple digit percentage increase Paharia sees in page views attributed to his “gamified” websites.

A video on what Bunchball are doing (jump to 00:24 to avoid blah blah blah):

Bunchball is the company that brings us the Nitro Engine:

Game designers have known for years how to address these needs, and they do it through Gamification. In the table above, green is the sweet spot for a particular mechanics, while blue is other needs that it hits. So Levels, which are belts in Karate, job titles, levels in a Frequent Flyer program, are primarily about status in a community, but also hit on individual achievement because it feels good to get to the next level, and competition because it feels good to be a higher level than all your friends.

At its core, Gamification is all about statistics.

If we play a game of Monopoly and then leave and come back tomorrow and do it again, and then again, it’s going to get boring pretty quickly. But if we start capturing stats – about who won and who lost, how many dollars each of us ended each game with, who ended the game with Boardwalk and Park Place, then we can use Reward, Status, Achievement and Competition to make the experience more interesting and incent and motivate people to play more.

Passively Multi-Player Online Games from Forbes magazine via Cognitive Design:

PMOG (Passively Multiplayer Online Game) layers game mechanics–via a Firefox extension–on top of daily browsing activities. Players can scatter booby traps and rewards across the Web, stumble across Web pages annotated with links and notes, or construct trails to favorite sites that entertain or inform the PMOG masses.

We’re not the only ones.

Applied Game Mechanics is a Posterous about Gamification.

And of course there’s our Posterous – Gameify and our Amplify blog – Gameify

If there’s anything we’ve missed, please get in touch.

Last words to Jane McGonigal

And, because it’s her, I’ll leave the last word to Jane McGonigal, who says: I need to game-ify writing my book:

I guess that’s why I love games, I have pretty much an insatiable appetite for helpful structure.

Post-script:

This image is semi-random because I just like these guys and they wrote a piece referring to one of the pieces above. They’re also typical of what a lot of gameification is about – it’s not about games and rules but about data as a new toy. We now have so much data lying around that we can tinker and play with it. This, as much as anything, is what gameification is.

Why can’t we use games for good? The argument seems simple; games can encourage good behaviour, so why aren’t there more ‘prosocial’ games? Here’s one of the reports on some recent research:

The results, published recently in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, show that those who had played a game like Lemmings were much more likely to help in low- and high-risk situations than were those who had played a neutral-themed game.

The authors also investigated why they might have seen this link between prosocial games and prosocial behavior. Essentially, they suggest that playing video games with prosocial objectives fosters a prosocial mindset that makes people more willing to help others.

According to a study cited in the paper, 70-85 percent of games involve some kind of violence. So, although the content of games can cause behavioral shifts in either an aggressive or altruistic direction, gamers are much more likely to experience the former.

The authors’ response to this disparity is a simple one. “There is clearly a need for prosocial video games that are highly attractive to customers,” they write. “Convincing the video game industry to create such games would be an important first step.”

And here’s another report on remarkably similar research from the same website, Greater Good: the science of a meaningful life, almost exactly a year ago:

They assigned some students to play a video game that the researchers deemed prosocial-either Super Mario Sunshine . . . , in which Mario must clean up environmental pollution, or Chibi Robo, where players assume the role of a robot who helps a family manage their house. Other participants had to play a violent game, such as Crash Twinsanity, where an anthropomorphic bandicoot moves from stage to stage, shooting, hammering, and throwing enemies who get in his way, while others played games, such as Pure Pinball, that were neither violent nor prosocial.

After playing the game, the students were paired with another person and told to make their partner complete 11 puzzles from a selection of 30—10 of which were hard, 10 easy, and 10 in between. They were informed that if their partner was to solve 10 of the puzzles correctly, then the partner would receive a $10 gift certificate. The researchers deemed a person’s behavior as “helpful” if the participant gave his or her partner an easy puzzle, “hurtful” if the puzzle was hard, and “neutral” for medium puzzles.

Their findings were quite dramatic: Those who played the prosocial games were significantly more likely to be helpful, while those who played the violent games were more likely to be hurtful.

While it’s highly likely that games can lead to self-knowledge, the idea of games being used in some kind benign operant conditioning social engineering scheme seems to come straight out of the ‘use TV to create a generation of Einsteins‘ playbook (or for that matter endumbening an entire generation using a fatal combination of Teletubbies and the web). Prosocial is defined as:

Beneficial to all parties and consistent with community laws and mores; Contributing to a beneficial outcome by negotiation, problem solving …

Are they talking about persuading games producers to produce more loserless games? Games are explicitly about choices and consequences:

Olson and Kutner’s work also suggests a positive and paradoxical dimension of playing video games with violence in them: helping kids to grapple with life’s scariest experiences.

Olson reports that many kids in their focus groups said they liked playing violent video games because they knew the fighting wasn’t happening in real life. In fact, many of the kids reported being much more scared by TV news. “They told us, “The news is real, and that makes me scared.’” In contrast, they could control the violence in video games. “There are things you can try out in a game that you can’t do in real life,” says Olson. “Some of the boys in our focus groups really liked the fact that you could choose to be a good guy or a bad guy. They can ask, “What kind of person would I end up being?’”

Olson’s son Michael says he and his friends do not play games just because of violent content. Instead, they are looking for a compelling storyline, intriguing characters, and interesting choices. “A good game to me makes you feel like a method actor,” he says. “It just draws you into the story and draws you into a character.”

These insights resonate with research into children’s pretend play. In studies of kids with imaginary friends, University of Oregon psychologist Marjorie Taylor has found that kids often create pretend characters who do sinister, nasty, and even violent things.

The game Fallout 3 starts with your birth. The first thing you see is your mother’s blood spattered on the first person camera; then you get to choose your name. Like David Copperfield, it’s one of the all-time great opening lines in games. As an experiment, I’m playing two parallel games. In one game, I’m as evil as I can be. In the other, I’m an angel. I’m keeping a diary:

Evil people don’t watch cut scenes, I’ve decided.  At least, not one’s with good times music. So, it’s straight into the game. The first thing I see is (my own?) blood spraying onto the lens of the immanent camera. “Let’s see”, says the doctor, “are you a boy or a girl?” Evil? Then, definitely, I’m a boy. No contest. . .  Next comes my race and my face and my hair. What is the most evil? I give myself a comb-over, blonde hair and blue eyes. An unsexy Nazi; the worst kind. Or the best kind?

Then, I kill my mother. Nice.

Making a decision to be ‘for’ prosocial games implies a willingness to place a serious limitation on games. I doubt there would be many people who would try to argue the case for limiting the kinds of make-believe games we play – why are video games different? Deciding what’s ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is harder than most people imagine:

“I think, when all was said and done, we were happy with the mix Fallout 3 offered. There were some clear good/evil paths, and the player could make those easy moral decisions, and sort of try to get those karma-specific level titles, or achievements, or be treated a certain way by the various factions. But there are also plenty of situations where it’s much more morally nebulous, and the player is left wondering, ‘Is this the right thing, or the wrong thing? . . .’

Unlike most games with a morality system, Fallout 3 had the extra challenge of creating a neutral moral path, which had its own unique set of challenges. “This was the subject of much debate during Fallout 3′s development,” says Pagliarulo. “Really, the biggest issue for us was deciding, internally, whether something was right or wrong! The designers ended up debating certain issues, and we came to realize just how differently we all viewed them.

“For example, a couple of us would come up with a situation that wouldn’t give the player any positive or negative karma. We felt it was pretty morally ambiguous, a good ‘gray’ neutral point. And then we’d bring it up in a meeting, and another designer would say we’re crazy, and it’s clearly good, or clearly evil. And we’d disagree. It was great… and so completely unexpected.

“So for us, because we had a system to track activities that are supposed to be clearly good or evil, the real challenge was in us coming to a consensus on this stuff. Is making a kid cry evil, or just funny? Some of the conversations we had bordered on the ridiculous, in retrospect.”

If you’ve ever played a game where the good and bad choices were signalled too clearly, you’ll know how lame it can feel; it’s the ludic equivalent of being asked, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party and are there any explosives in this bag?” by US border officials. From the same article as above, on Gamasutra – Ethics 101: Designing Morality in Games

“You could argue, and I think many have, that moral decision making in interactive entertainment sort of requires that you accept the sociopathic economist in all of us . . .”

Sociopathic economists’ big problem is that their models fail when they collide with the real world. Getting Homo economicus to comply with their models is like trying to jump across narrow ledges in a FPS; it just feels like it’s not meant to be (and, ultimately, if Homo economicus wanted to do that he’d play Crash Twinsanity ^[1]) But this is sociopathic economists’ problem. Few people who play games are silly enough to try out their models on the real world. (There are some notable exceptions).

What’s the answer to this mathematical conundrum? Don’t work it out, just take a guess.

1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8

What about this one? What’s the answer to this totally different piece of difficult arithmetic? Again, don’t work it out, just take a guess.

8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1

If you were in a lab among a group of people given the first problem, you’d probably have guessed around 512.

If you were in a lab among a group of people given the second problem, you’d probably have guessed around 2250.

This is the anchoring effect, described by Nobel laureates, Tversky and Kahneman, in 1974. People’s judgement gets ‘anchored’ on a figure and affects their estimates. In the first one, people see ’1 x 2 x 3 . . .’ and then fudge a guess upwards. In the second one, they see ’8 x 7 x 6 . . .’ and do the same. The sums are, of course, exactly the same. (You can see the anchoring effect for yourself by asking somebody, “Pick a number between 1 and 100, for example 87”. Now try the same thing, but this time say, “. . . for example 17″. Even when you tell people about the anchoring effect they find the anchoring number hard to resist.)

It seems just as likely to me that the people playing the prosocial games who suddenly tuned in to altruism were under the influence of something like the anchoring effect. You could use anything prosocial or cute or fluffy and achieve a similar effect. The idea that a game of Lemmings will turn you into a better person seems like neuroplasticity nonsense. It might make you more inclined to help Lemmings. If you’re looking for morality inside games, you’re looking in the wrong place.

As the fireworks screamed into the air, the horde attacked. We fought them off bravely for a while. The helicopter finally arrived, thudding to an unsteady hover at one end of the stadium. Only one thing remained: a dash across the zombie-filled breadth of the stadium, to where the chopper was hovering.

I carved a path through the grey-fleshed mob with my katana and got to the chopper first. Elated, I turned to see where my friends were.

At that moment, they all went down at once, overcome by mobs of zombies. Rochelle and Nick were far away, on the other side of the stadium, surrounded by huge mobs of zombies. I knew immediately that they were beyond help.

But Alastor27 had fallen less than 10 meters from the chopper door. He was down but still fighting – but he’d definitely die, as there was no one else to save him.

No one but me. I had barely any health left and was out of ammo. If I left the chopper, there was little chance I’d ever make it back.

But I still had my katana.

I jumped out of the chopper and layed into the mob around Alastor. In seconds, they fell in a heap of severed decaying limbs. I started helping Alastor up.

As I did, we were attacked again, by another wave. I turned to face them too. But I was too weak, and they were too many.

We both died there, in the stadium.

. . .

That moment remains one of my best gaming experiences ever. I remember being conscious of the moment of decision: I could escape, alone, by the skin of my teeth – or I could die trying to save my friend. I knew what would happen, and I chose the honourable course.

This is Phillip Trippenbach talking about a game of Left 4 Dead 2 in his piece Drama, not prose: storytelling in games. If you want a story in a game, you have to create it yourself. I’d argue the same is true of ‘good behaviour’. You can have ethical decisions in games, it’s one of the things games are good at. (You don’t have to be a sociopathic economist to work here, but it helps.) But the prosocial games we have ‘a need for’ seem to contain more in the way of morals than morality.

[I'll be continuing the series of my adventures as an emissary of evil/sickening dose of sweetness in the Fallout 3 universe in the next couple of weeks.]

¹ or, better, one of the Crash Bandicoot games made by Naughty Dog. back

Early on in most definitions of the word ‘game’ comes the word ‘rules’. Games are about rules.

Isn’t it just as likely games are about not-rules?

Games and play have been examined by a number of authors, with attempts at identifying their relation to life activities and their distinctive character. The importance of such an attempt lies in what it might tell us about the potential usefulness of games for the study of life in general . . . However, the general absence of any success in these attempts lies, I believe, in failing to look carefully at the nature of life itself . . .
In describing life as a game, I mean to give it the formal characteristics of a game: (a) the players have goals . . . (b) their actions are governed by a set of rules that specify which actions are prescribed, which are permitted, and which are proscribed . . .
These are, perhaps, as good a set of defining properties of a game as any; yet at the same time, they define most of the activities in the sequence which constitutes life. Most, but not all. For if life is conceived as a game with these properties, then those activities we know as “play” and “games” do not fit  . . .
Games as Vehicles for Social Theory, James S Coleman, 1968

In games, it’s convenient to think about the limited set of rules players have to obey. Convenient because it’s relatively easy, even when it comes to the 832-page core rulebooks of Dungeons & Dragons.

Much harder, but probably more accurate, would be to see games as perhaps they really are. Which is as a finite period where players choose not to follow a specific set of sub-rules for the over-game of Real Life.

For an illustration of what I mean, play Hell Tetris. But not for very long.

According to most interpretations, either everyone in the world is playing The Game, or, everyone who knows about The Game is playing. The Game is played all the time; players cannot quit, pause or take breaks from playing. [Rule 1]

Lose the Game

I play a game on Twitter, which I call Skinner. It started off as a private thing and a way to get ‘better’ at Twitter. And then other people started playing and I’d occasionally get a message asking me, “Do I get a Skinner point?” At some point I stopped noticing that I was still playing it. Its job was done and I had gamed a tiny sliver of reality.

So what do I mean by gaming reality? Games are powerful. And to be more specific, the elements of games when thoughtfully applied. Game designers have a toolbox of elements or ‘game mechanics’ to engage people — narrative, level-ups, points, data-rich information dashboards, replayability, game clocks, antagonists, social competition, ranks, reputation, achievements, missions, quests, progressive and adaptive levels of difficulty, real-time feedback, scavenger hunts, easter eggs, gear, gold, ‘rares’ and so on — and the elements in this toolbox can be applied to everyday life.

You Don’t Need Virtual Worlds When You Can Game Reality

The awesome Jane McGonigal invented SuperBetter as a private game to help her recover from post-concussion syndrome. Annie Wright used the Zelda Method to catch an underwear thief.

A brief caveat, though: I can’t say that viewing one’s life as a game is a good philosophy to apply universally, or that it is appropriate for any difficult situation. Just a few examples of situations in which this will notwork are: Weddings (the bride may SEEM like a final boss…), Funerals (FFS, do NOT say “Game over”), and though it may be tempting, while on a date.

The Zelda Method, Revisited

In fact, if you think about it, life is a series of Barely Games. Probably because, although highly formalised, we’ve modelled games on very thin slices of life.

The bottom line is that good games take advantage of people’s innate desire to compete with each other, but balance that with their need to receive rewards, including the approval of their peers — rewards that in some cases can be used to modify their behavior in certain ways.

Why Everything is Becoming a Game

Sometimes, all this gameification will result in good. And sometimes it will result in the exact opposite.

War is not mean to be precise. Games aren’t either. When they’re too precise, too fine-tuned they become something else. What that is, I don’t know.

Five Creepy Ways Videogames are Trying to Get you Addicted

This blog’s about the game. We’re going to try to lose it every day. Because that might be the best (or the only?) way to win.

Standard play does not require any active input and players go about their daily lives as normal. However, if a player thinks about The Game, they have lost. Loss is temporary; once the player stops thinking about The Game, they stop losing, but they will lose again the next time they think about The Game. [Rule 2]

Lose the Game

[PS This is the first post here - the origin post. It's supposed to set the scene for what we're trying to do here. But if you're still not sure then, put simply, we're about this massive question.]