waiting in line
November 22nd, 2005 at 6:00 pm. 0 comments.for game design dan and myself are trying to take an idea he has had about the lack of communication in public space, in particular waiting in a line at say the bank or DMV, and people’s turning inwards in public situations with their iPod, PVP, PSP, cellphone etc. The idea was to make a game that would be played spontaneously at times when you found yourself in a line and was tuned to the flexible, temporary situation of the line and the people gettign added to and leaving from the line. This had a number of problems in my view, in particular the randomness of game interactions with strangers, but my attitude was the one we were trying to overcome.
We brainstormed pretty heavily on this idea and tried to add other ideas to it but it kept hitting a wall.
Instead of a game that is played while waiting in line we will try to make a game about waiting in line.
Frank didn’t seem to keen at first, thinking it was limited as being more of a one liner and not compelling as a game, but one I went through some of the game mechanics and possible gameplay he seemed to think it was ok. But just ok. He suggested looking at Grand Prix , which was a racing card game with no board and each player controlling a team or team of cars. The play was simply the playing of the card and reordering the position of the cars on the table. Which sounds much too much like what we had though of.
Possibly with work on the card contents and the mechanic of turns and rounds go we can add some interesting turns to it.
mr. kottke getting married
November 17th, 2005 at 5:38 pm. 0 comments.i’ve never met jason or meg but i’ve been a consistent reader of kottke.org for several years. congratulations on their engagement to be married
return to the real
November 10th, 2005 at 4:45 pm. 0 comments.from our thinking about networks syllabus
After almost 30 years of assuming that virtuality is the logical endpoint of human use of networks, the real world is re-entering the picture, with services that emphasize or rely on physical proximity coming to the fore in various ways, exemplified by sites like MeetUp, dodgeball, and Flickr. What is driving the increasing overlap of the formerly distinct categories of virtual and real, and what are some likely future developments?
In groups of 4 (can’t find anything online, but i seem to remember that magic number being more like 3) we are to analyze how these social networks are connecting back to the real world and enabling real world interaction.
dodgeball | meetup | craigslist | upcoming | flickr
listed in the order of most connected to real world activity or locality to the least. i would interpret this to mean that the ‘most local’ network has the largest percentage of its service devoted to the fostering real world interaction while the least has, umm the least. Our group is looking at flickr and while it’s the least in terms of locality, there is plenty of real world interaction to investigate
folksonomy : Tag’s epic struggle
November 9th, 2005 at 6:37 pm. 0 comments.for thinking about networks we read Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata a paper by Adam Mathes seeking to provide an understanding of user created metadata, data about data created by the end users rather than authors or professional catorgorisationalists classifiers. The term folksonomy comes from folk+taxonomy. Taxonomy being a professional classification system like you would see at your local library or the 14 catagories that all things must fit within on Yahoo. The discussion focuses on del.icio.us and flickr and the systems of tags that are used on both sites for users to catagorize their pictures or links in vocabularies that are known or important ot them. Of course the varied vocabularies cause overlaps in the namespace where the same item may have many different tags, (mac, apple and macintosh all meaning apple macintosh computers) or a single tag having multiple meanings. Not unlike the lore of the number of words for ‘snow’ in the eskimo language or conversly the lack of a word for water, from the viewpoint of a fish.
Flickr has, since the article was written, added clustery goodness as a way to group photos that all have a single same tag but varying other tags. The pot tag for instance has clusters for pot meaning marijuana, weed, etc. , for pot meaning something to cook food with and for pot meaning pottery, ceramics and the like. Del.icio.us has added more robust features that show the most popular tags that other people have tagged a URL with, suggested tags for a URL and, all the tags you have previouly used. TagTagger has a solution for overlapping namespaces.
Folksonomies have some of the best and worst qualities of classification systems as a whole, but its my thinking that the good already outweigh the bad, and the bad are currently being dealt with. The distributed nature of the way we describe our world allows groups to form around the way we see things. Tags let us add mini micro decisions to describe things and give off little hints and signs to the other people how we think of things. Flickr already has groups that form around a certain tag (sometaithurts, squarecircle) but I am unaware of groups forming more dynamically, around an aggregate of tags or tag styles.
There is a fundamental difference in the activities of browsing to find interesting content, as opposed to direct searching to find relevant documents in a query. It is similar to the difference between exploring a problem space to formulate questions, as opposed to actually looking for answers to specifically formulated questions
Can you find your soulmate this way? Are tags your digital fashion sense or haircut? Or are they indicative of your personality? Are they soulless meta data, meaning nothing out of context or when not part of an group of all tags? Its an unfinished though but maybe I’ll come back to it.
in the paper is the flickr tag sometaithurts so I thought it appropriate to include the most popular tags for the above article when I entered it into del.icio.us :
folksonomy metadata tags tagging del.icio.us folksonomies classification
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