ABSTRACT

Social Heroes is a pervasive social game in which players trade points by tagging each other using Twitter. Through the accumulation of tags and points in defined combinations, they earn achievement awards and gain the ability to create their own tags and achievements. Taking the metaphor of APIs from software development and drawing parallels between the way we model game state, Social Heroes attempts to provide a ludic interface for our personal relationships. The result is a system for social play surrounding identity, relationships, and communication.

Keywords
games, social software, APIs, pervasive game, relational identity, cognitive modeling, game state modeling, ludic language

Here’s a video of my presentation:

Click through to read the whole paper, or download a PDF: Social Heroes: Games as APIs for Social Interaction

INTRODUCTION

Games are conversations. Information flows between players and the game system, and through that game system back to other players. A large part of both the metaphorical conversation of game play and everyday, language-based conversations is the process of modeling what the other party is thinking. In verbal conversation, that model allows us to communicate more effectively, and in games, that model allows us to learn how the game works and improve how we play. In multiplayer games, there exists a metacommunicative channel as well, with each player’s interaction with the game being communicated to the other players along with the message that it is a game action, that this is play [3]. Every game allows for at least this piece of metadata to be communicated, in order to establish and maintain the magic circle, delineating the game from the outside world. But additional information can be passed between players as well, with the game providing an interface for this metacommunication.

In software development, we refer to these sorts of frameworks as APIs, or application programming interfaces. APIs allow one piece of software to interface with another in a structured fashion, without regard for what happens with the data on the other side [21]. Recently, we’ve begun to see internet services emerge which look more like pure APIs than traditional software, with their primary function being to move data between endpoints. A good example of this is Twitter, which, despite having a website, is nearly agnostic as to the source and destination of the short text messages which users send and receive on the service [25]. Though APIs usually pass data through unaltered, the act of selecting what data to make available is a decision that shapes the way the system behaves.

My goal in building Social Heroes was to construct a game which served as an API for social interaction between players, providing a context for meaningful metacommunication. By making the mental models of social interaction more explicit, I hoped to allow for playful experimentation with modes of socializing, thus providing a better understanding of how these models are created. To that end, the driving force of the game became communication itself, and the platform for the game became Twitter, which provides a fairly transparent and flexible interface for textual dialog. What emerged was a platform for transmitting metadata about social state, a system for playful identity construction, and a game that blended performative language in the magic circle with phatic communication in the real world.

DESCRIPTION

Social Heroes runs on top of Twitter, allowing users to play using any device or software which can interface with the service, including the Twitter website, the Facebook website, desktop clients, instant messaging clients, and mobile phones, among others [27]. This pervasiveness was a primary factor in choosing Twitter as a platform, allowing for anytime/anywhere access to the game. The goal is to earn points from other players, which are categorized by the one-word tag which accompanies them. Over the course of the game, players earn achievements for collecting certain point combinations, and unlock more abilities in the game by earning multiple achievements.

Players join the game by following the Twitter user “socialheroes” just as they would follow their friends on the service. They begin the game with a store of generic points, unassigned to any tag, which they may give to other players by sending a message to Twitter. At the start of the game, tags were pre-defined by the system, but higher-level players have earned the ability to use their points to buy new tags and make them available for other players to use. All of the actions in the game are taken by sending messages to Twitter. Because of the nature of the service, this means that all game actions are publicly viewable by players and non-players alike. The most common game action, sending points by tagging another player, might look like this: @socialheroes @rebelprince +geek. (See Appendix for a list of tags, achievements, and system commands.)

This would send one geek point from the user who sends the message to the Twitter user rebelprince. In the event that rebelprince runs out of generic points to spend, he may send this geek point to another player, but he may not recast it as a different tag.

A player earns an achievement when he or she receives the required number of points for each of the specified tags. Earning an achievement is announced publicly and also delivered as a direct (private) message to the receiving user. An achievement also comes with 5 additional points to distribute to other users.

As with tags, initial achievements were defined by the system, but higher-level users may create their own. (Unlike tags, however, the creator of an achievement may never earn that achievement him or herself.) After a few achievements have been earned, the player gains a level, allowing him or her additional abilities, such as buying tags, creating achievements, or taking points from other users. Though the game is open-ended, the nominal goal is to achieve the highest level, Social Hero.
At any time, players may retrieve their own scores or the scores of other players by requesting them through Twitter, or by viewing them on the website.

BACKGROUND

Games, even analog ones, are sometimes compared to software: player input on one side produces game output on the other. But when multiple players are involved, it is perhaps more accurate to compare games to APIs: taking input from one player and delivering it to another. This interaction is often framed in such a structured way that it is not thought of as communication, but the passing of a ball or the moving of a chess piece are both examples of game-mediated communication between the players. Recently there have been explorations of games performing a similar framing function for our physical and mental environments. Big street games such as Pac Manhattan are concerned with altering our perception of urban space, while alternate reality games like The Beast and I Love Bees provide a ludic interface for websites, pay phones, and other everyday objects [22, 10]. SFZero, a Situationist-inspired “collaborative production game” is perhaps most upfront about its goals, referring to itself specifically as “An interface for San Francisco. That is to say, a new representation for the data that’s already there” [1].

All of these games feature some amount of metacommunication among players concerning the way in which the environment is to be regarded, a frame of mind which extends beyond the scope of the game. Indeed, the breaking of the cognitive bounds of the traditional magic circle is often an explicit goal in these types of games [17]. This is more of a return to form than a departure. During the 14th and 15th centuries, for instance, a football match would take place in the midst of the city itself, a momentary overlaying of the ludic on the mundane: “The whole landscape became transformed into game-space. Houses, agriculture, sites of worship lost their everyday meaning and became an abstract terrain whose qualities impact the possibilities of game play” [12].

What kind of game-space would be created with a similar interface for our social relationships? Social games such as Werewolf and Spin the Bottle provide a framework for interacting within the game, but the metacommunication is strictly limited to maintaining the magic circle. The social play is not readily extensible into non-ludic interactions, and the metacommunication is segmented from “the data that’s already there.” Artist Sophie Calle experimented with imposing game-like constraints on her own life, but what Calle created for herself approximates something closer to what Salen and Zimmerman refer to as “ludic activities”: more structured than merely a playful state of mind, but not easily identifiable as a game [5, 23]. Social software which encourages similar kinds of playful interaction between users has been gaining in popularity, particularly among dating websites such as Crazy Blind Date and i’minlikewithyou [7,11]. While these services certainly draw inspiration from games, they lack systems within which users can play and explore, situating them firmly outside of being actual games. Social Heroes aims to take a more direct approach by targeting the cognitive overlap between game design and social interactions.

GAME STATE & RULE MODELING

Game state is “the complete status of the game at a particular moment,” abstracted away from the player experience of the game [16]. The pieces in a board game will both store information on the game state and represent that information to the players. This helps make the game state easy to examine. Chess could be played without the board, as a series of verbal descriptions, but holding that amount of data in our heads would make it unplayable. We learn to play a game by examining the game state, taking an action in the game, and evaluating how the game state has changed. This feedback allows us to refine our mental model of how the game works, and, if our new model is more correct than the old, improve our chances that our next action in the game will yield favorable results.

A player becomes better at a game by interacting with the system, watching others interact with the system, and refining his or her ideas of how the game works over time. The relatively small number of variables allows players to improve their performance by establishing a repertoire for how to progress in the game [15]. The ability to grasp the system, and improve the way which one interacts with it, is a large part of what makes games fun, and holds them in contrast to the much more complex systems of the real world. Callois describes a player in a game as being “free within the limits set by the rules” [6]. This freedom is key to experimentation. The iterative loop of making a prediction, testing it, and revising it is part what we’re referring to when we talk about “play” in games. Overlaying this formal system on top of a less defined one, such as our social relationships, can provide for a more experimental approach to establishing previously undefined rules.

Social Heroes’ command-line like interface affords this kind of experimentation toward defining the rules and limits of the system. In one instance, a player discovered the ability to buy new tags before the feature had been announced [A]. He bought one, of course, and the new feature quickly became public knowledge without ever being formally announced to the players. The game’s automated messages are particularly fertile ground for play and experimentation with the limits of the system, such as the resulting message when a player bought the tag “points”: “OK! You just bought points for 3 points! To start giving points points, reply ‘@socialheroes @TheirName +points’” [B]. The open-ended input of a text entry field allows players to explore the limits of the game system, discovering the rules experientially. And because all game actions are public, players can add to their repertoire of game play through observation as well as direct action.

One downside of running Social Heroes atop Twitter has been communicating game state to players, which is a common problem with games that cross established modes of play. While a player may receive his or her own score, or that of any other player, by sending a command to the game through Twitter, that interface is not ideal for judging one’s position in the game against more than one or two others. Score information has been made available via the website. This is less than ideal for accessibility purposes, and perhaps suggests that play should be limited to sitting at a computer, but it has improved the situation for play testing purposes. As Social Heroes scales, more complex data representation and new forms of score retrieval will be necessary to support meaningful play.

SOCIAL MODELING

Just as we model the rules of a game, we engage in similar processes of mental modeling for the rest of the world, from what direction a car is turning as we cross the street to what the next sentence in this paper might say. In The User Illusion, Tor Norretranders explains that “we experience not the raw sensory data but a simulation of them. The simulation of our sensory experiences is a hypothesis about reality…We experience only a fraction of what we sense — namely, the fraction that makes the most sense in context” [18]. This hypothesis is what we experience as explicit thought, or consciousness. Most of this modeling occurs implicitly, without us being aware that it is happening until we pull back the curtain and focus our attention on the process itself [20]. But there are some models which are handled more consciously than others, particularly those which are most crucial to our survival. We’re more explicitly aware of our mental models of our immediate environment, for instance, since we may need to react quickly to avoid harm.

Another area where we are more conscious of our modeling process is in our social interactions. Humans’ ability to form deep social bonds has played a large part in our evolution because our brains are highly tuned to modeling what is going on inside each others’ minds [13]. This is particularly true in conversation, one of the most complex social interactions. Norretranders defines effective communication as causing “a state of mind to arise in the receiver’s head that is related to the state of mind of the sender…the information transmitted must elicit certain associations in the receiver” [19]. Managing our partners’ mental models becomes even more important than the literal information that is being communicated. It is this awareness of each others’ minds which allows us to recognize signals and symbols abstracted from reality. This allows for metacommunication, which, as described above, makes activities such as play possible [4].

When setting out to design games as social APIs, one of my goals was to bring these implicit mental models which dictate our interactions with each other closer to the top-of-mind. Social Heroes creates a game which exists solely as a series of ludic interactions with other players, thus raising consideration of these interactions to the level of game modeling in the minds of the players. This explicit simulating of social exchanges causes actions among players to be more purposeful. At the same time, the game context balances that consideration by lowering the stakes and allowing for play.

Furthermore, the pervasive and immediate nature of the game means that any social contact between players, whether direct or perceived, becomes subject to in-game actions. In one instance, a nickname was jokingly assigned to one player outside of the game, which sparked a flurry of tag buying and assigning between two players sitting at a table together [C]. In this instance the players were tagging each other with these nicknames, exporting traditionally verbal teasing to the game. The same interaction could have occurred from across the country, which would have been a typical use of Twitter. But two people sitting next to each other would need a reason to Twitter their conversation , making it public, which Social Heroes provided. This playful sequence of revenge, battle, and detente within the game is a footnote in the larger context of the personal relationship being played out across the table, but the ability to tap into the API of the game provides a structure for social bonding and identity construction.

RELATIONAL IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION

From the earliest paper prototypes, identity construction was an important part of Social Heroes. The first concept focused almost entirely on negotiating identity through a series of public and private membership in different groups. As that mechanic grew into Social Heroes, the public perception of identity remained a salient factor. Thus, as the game developed, it became an important rule that a player may not give himself or herself points; all points must be awarded by other players. By tagging each other, players are constructing relational identities, in which their game selves are defined by others [24].

In one instance, a player bought the tag “rockstar” in order to tag another player in exchange for a real-world favor [D]. This was in spite of an achievement called “Rockstar” already existing. In effect, the sender was attempting to short-cut the receiver to an achievement by sending him that point. Soon thereafter, a third player attempted to tag herself with “rockstar,” only to be rebuffed by the system [E]. The game is flexible in the social hacking it will permit, but it may only be performed by others on your behalf.

Relational identity is an important part of how we socialize in groups and in society. By expressing our personal identity in public, we encourage others to read our signals and form an identity for us which matches what we are trying to communicate about ourselves [8]. This is another example of how modeling each others’ minds comes into play: the application of archetypical labels to another person is a particularly powerful form of identity construction because of the cultural metadata which it implies. As an API, the game allows for only short labels as identity markers, preventing the development of complex profiles. By forcing even the most intimately acquainted players to perform very coarse acts of relational identity construction for each other, Social Heroes becomes a game of teasing, flirting, and light-hearted social play.

LUDIC LANGUAGE

Building the game on top of a platform designed for transmitting text underscores its roots as a framework for ludic communication. In order to play the game at the most basic level, a player must type a tag, address it to another player, and make it public. Game play is only possible through the direct entry of text, rather than, for example, selecting tags from a drop-down list on a web page.

In the context of Social Heroes, the act of tagging is illocutionary: it performs the action it describes. The only way to tag a user is to say that you are doing so. Using language as game action allows the tag to operate as both description (or “locution”) outside of the game as well as action (“illocution”) within the game. While the tag and achievement system had been designed to be illustrative of the receiving player’s real life actions, certain tags, such as “flirt,” are ambiguous [F]. Inside the game, it is pure illocution: the tag is applied by sending the message. Outside of the game, however, only social context dictates if it was intended as locution (describing the receiver as a flirt) or as perlocution (an act of flirtation from sender to receiver) [2]. This ambiguity, which is encouraged by the restriction of the game rules and syntax, heightens the sense of playfulness surrounding the language of the game.

In other cases, tags were specifically adopted for perlocution, an attempt at evoking the state they represent in the receiver. For example, sending “glamor” points to other players before an important presentation in order to bolster morale [G].

These examples provide some interesting early cases for linguistic play within the framework of the game, but the limited vocabulary of tags and achievements in the earliest versions prevented more expansive use. Within a week of the fist play test beginning, players had begun adopting the game’s “+tag” syntax to send “points” to each other for tags which were not a part of the game [H]. While they knew that these messages served no purpose for scoring, this ludic interaction continued alongside normal game play and unrelated messaging on Twitter. Players were using the game as a phatic device, a reason to exchange non-consequential (in the real world) communication, while at the same time playing with illocutionary language in the game. The question became how to combine those two use cases.
It is important to note that all Social Heroes game actions are situated in the flow of messages from other Twitter users, where the same information could easily be communicated in plain English. This use of the Social Heroes structure for other communications suggested that the syntax and game rules were well constructed, and that the limited vocabulary was hindering more widespread game play. Soon thereafter the ability was added for players to use points to buy new tags into the game, which were publicly announced and available to everyone.

This resulted in an explosion of game play and deeper metacommunication. There was a large increase of in-game tagging and point exchange as a result of real-world actions, as players would not hesitate to buy a tag in order to publicly express gratitude or to tease a friend [I]. Tags were often purchased and used exclusively by one player or for a short period of time, suggesting some sort of expiration system, perhaps [J]. And because the purchase of tags occurs publicly, but without the involvement of another player immediately, it was used as a way to broadcast the purchaser’s own desire or temporal state. For example, when a player buys the “needscoffee” tag just after sending a non-ludic message about being tired, we can assume that he is broadcasting his own state, and would likely appreciate someone giving him a “needscoffee” point [K]. The public announcements of tags and achievements also provides a peripheral vision of game play outside a player’s own social group.

This broadcasting of temporal state has become the most common type of metacommunication in Social Heroes. While the points and achievements of the game are long-term assets relating to identity and relationships, the sending of points and buying of tags is very immediate, due to the broadcasting nature of Twitter. The service is designed with this type of use in mind, with the website prompting users with the question “What are you doing?” [26] While Social Heroes players continue to use Twitter for non-game communication on a regular basis, the in-game communication has taken on the role of metadata, annotating non-game exchanges both in real-life and online [L]. If the game is an API, the linguistic structure it provides is what makes this metadata creation possible. And because this game activity is visible to non-players, as well, it is readable by all of a player’s friends on Twitter.

This is consistent with the way folksonomies are used as metadata on many social software websites, in order to categorize photos, links, etc. for later retrieval [9]. But the communicative use of tags in Social Heroes, and their limitation to being granted by other players, situates them in the realm of metacommunication. While the act of giving tags as points is a use of performative language in the context of the game, as discussed above, it has no reality altering effect on the outside world, and in the larger context of social interactions, it becomes almost phatic. By blending these two extremes of communication — phatic communication whose contents are unimportant and performative speech whose contents shape reality — Social Heroes creates ludic language with high consequences in the game and low consequences outside of the game [14].

CONCLUSION

Within the context of the play testing, Social Heroes has proven successful in establishing a metacommunicative channel between players within a game context. The resulting construction of relative identity within the game, the use of blended illocutionary and phatic language, and the generation of social metadata has been extremely valuable to observe during testing. Player feedback also suggests that the pervasiveness of the game adds to the heightened awareness of social modeling.

Social Heroes has only undergone play testing with up to twenty players over the course of a few weeks, so the need to examine how play develops with more participants is a high priority, particularly as the game spreads across social groups. The creation of namespaces surrounding social groups has been raised as an idea for future development, though that would eliminate the peripheral vision that is currently afforded by the overlapping clusters already created by Twitter. And the ability of play to remain engaging over time has not been tested, though players’ willingness to adopt the syntax suggests that it may be less of an issue than initially thought. Rules are still being refined, of course, and the need for better score representation has already been discussed.

This is, of course, only one game, and one approach to designing games as APIs for social interactions. Targeting specific social phenomenon for ludification would be one approach for further investigation, with bonding and bridging capital being prime areas for exploration due to their straight-forward quantifiability. Identity construction could also benefit from further exploration in pervasive games, as the tension between personal identity and relative identity is both instantly recognizable and yet often remains implicit.

As gaming shifts away from the keyboard and the couch, and mobile technology allows for pervasive, digitally enabled games, it will be natural to see more integration between the ludic and the mundane. By crafting games as systems for player exploration of these boundaries, they will undoubtedly push and pull them in ways we cannot anticipate. And by designing these games as layers on top of implicit social models, we may draw these models closer to the surface and create a system for experimental social play.

APPENDIX

What follows are a list of tags, achievements, and commands at the time of writing. Initially players began with 20 points, which was later lowered to 12. Achievements came with a bonus of 5 points each, and buying a new tag would cost 3 points. All misunderstood commands are responded to privately by the system, with helpful information provided where possible. Updated information and rules available at www.socialheroes.net.

Original Tags
The tags created by the designer, which the play test began with: geek, flirt, glamor, creative, hipster, athletic, philosopher, zealot, disaffected, sophisticate, punk, innocent, drunk

Player-Created tags
Tags which players in the play test created themselves: badassmofo, yourmom, outstanding, nerd, butthead, needscoffee, rockstar, demon, tagwhore, haaay, cylon, trekkie, mooch, points, sleep, mosfet, ultrabrite, karma, canhaz

Original Achievements
The achievements and tag requirements to earn them, as created by the designer for play testing: (At the time of writing, player-created achievements had just been implemented, and no player was yet at a high enough level to yet do so.)

• Pollyanna (5 innocent)
• Gutterpunk (3 punk + 2 disaffected)
• Billyburger (1 disaffected + 3 hipster)
• Rockstar (2 punk + 2 glamor + 1 creative)
• Sexbomb (3 flirt + 3 glamor)
• ITPer (2 geek + 2 creative + 1 philosopher)
• ITPissed (2 geek + 2 drunk + 1 punk)
• Socialite (1 glamor + 1 sophisticate + 3 drunk)
• Footballer (4 athletic)
• Bible Thumper (4 zealot + 1 innocent)
• Poet (2 philosopher + 2 creative)
• Beat Poet (2 philosopher + 2 creative + 1 hipster)
• Seducer (2 flirt + 3 sophisticate)
• Richster (2 disaffected + 1 hipster + 1 sophisticate)
• Freetard (2 geek + 2 zealot)
• Musclehead (3 athletic + 2 innocent)

System Commands

• @socialheroes @TheirName +tag (to give points)
• @socialheroes @TheirName score (to get their score via DM)
• @socialheroes score (to get your own score)
• @socialheroes buy Tag (to buy a new tag for 3 points)
• @socialheroes make Achievement Name +# Tag +# Tag +# Tag (to make a new achievement – see below)
• @socialheroes tags (to get a list of current tags)
• @socialheroes help (to get help)
• @socialheroes more (to increase the frequency of direct messages from the game)
• @socialheroes less (to increase the frequency of direct messages from the game)
• @socialheroes off (to turn off direct messages from the game)
• @socialheroes on (to turn on direct messages from the game, sets your frequency to low)

REFERENCES

1. “About SFZero”. Accessed May 6 2008.
http://sf0.org/about/
2. Austin, J.L. How To Do Things With Words, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 1962. 99-108.
3. Bateson, G. “A Theory of Play and Fantasy”. The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology. Salen, K., and Zimmerman, E. (eds.). MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2006. 316.
4. Ibid, 316.
5. Calle, S. Double Game. Violette Editions, London, England, UK, 1999.
6. Callois, R. Man, Play, and Games. Barash, M. (trans.). University of Illinois Press, Chicago, IL, USA, 2001. 8.
7. Crazy Blind Date. Accessed May 6 2008.
http://www.crazyblinddate.com
8. Goffman, E. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor Books, New York, NY, USA, 1959. 22-34.
9. Golder, S.A., and Huberman, B.A. “The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems”. Information Dynamics Lab, HP Labs, 2005.
http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0508082v1
10. Hon, A. “The Rise of ARGs”. Gamasutra. May 9 2005.
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20050509/hon_01.shtml
11. i’minlikewithyou. Accessed May 6 2008.
http://www.iminlikewithyou.com
12. Jacob, S. “Folk Football: Landscape, Space and Abstraction”. Febuary 5 2008.
http://www.strangeharvest.com/mt/archive/the_harvest/folk_football_landsc.php
13. Johnson, S. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. Scribner, New York, NY, USA, 2001. 196-199.
14. Juul, J. “The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness”. November 4 2003.
http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/gameplayerworld/
15. Juul, J. Half-Real. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2005. 95-96.
16. LeBlanc, M. “Tools for Creating Dramatic Game Dynamics”. The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology. Salen, K., and Zimmerman, E. (eds.). MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2006. 447.
17. McGonigal, J. This Might Be a Game: Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. University of California, Berkeley, 2006. 66.
18. Norretranders, T. The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size. Sydenham, J. (trans.). Penguin Books, New York, NY, USA, 1998. 289.
19. Ibid, 93.
20. Ibid, 289-90.
21. Orenstein, D. “QuickStudy: Application Programming Interface (API)”. Computerworld. January 10 2000.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=43487
22. Pac Manhattan. Accessed May 6 2008.
http://www.pacmanhattan.com/
23. Salen, K., and Zimmerman, E. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2005. 307-309.
24. Somers, M.R. “The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach”. Theory and Society 23, 5, (October 1994). 625-627.
25. Twitter. Accessed May 6 2008.
http://www.twitter.com
    Ibid. Accessed May 6 2008.
26. “Twitter Fan Wiki / Apps”. Accessed May 6 2008.
http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps

TWITTER CONVERSATIONS

A. Menscher, Corey: “@socialheroes buy badassmofo”
http://twitter.com/crackhead/statuses/798768574

B. Dory, Mike: “@socialheroes buy points”
http://twitter.com/DoryEx/statuses/799699770

Social Heroes automated private message to Dory, Mike: “OK! You just bought points for 3 points! To start giving points points, reply ‘@socialheroes @TheirName +points’.”

Dory, Mike: “@socialheroes @ds1935 +points”
http://twitter.com/DoryEx/statuses/799701360

C. Ralsey, Heather: “@mawopi’s new nickname for me is MOSFET (http://rewrit.es/sBD). still not quite sure why.”
http://twitter.com/Heather_R/statuses/802173740

Dimatos, John: “@socialheroes buy mosfet”
http://twitter.com/mawopi/statuses/802178732

Dimatos, John: “@socialheroes @heather_R +mosfet”
http://twitter.com/mawopi/statuses/802178918

Ralsey, Heather: “@socialheroes buy ultrabrite”
http://twitter.com/Heather_R/statuses/802177768

Ralsey, Heather: “@socialheroes @mawopi +ultrabrite”
http://twitter.com/Heather_R/statuses/802179097

D. Varland, Scott: “@socialheroes @ds1935 +rockstar”
http://twitter.com/scottiev/statuses/799040049

Varland, Scott: “@socialheroes buy rockstar”
http://twitter.com/scottiev/statuses/799041692

Varland, Scott: “@socialhereos @ds1935 +rockstar”
http://twitter.com/scottiev/statuses/799042079

Soltis, Daniel: “@scottiev dude, rockstar is an ACHIEVEMENT, not a POINT”
http://twitter.com/ds1935/statuses/799044213

Varland, Scott: “@ds1935 I don care. I buy Daniel rockstar! ”
http://twitter.com/scottiev/statuses/799045019

E. Ralsey, Heather: “@socialheroes @heather_r +rockstar”
http://twitter.com/Heather_R/statuses/799057720

F. Marsh, Zannah: “@socialheroes @mawopi +flirt”
http://twitter.com/zannahlou/statuses/792807619

Dimatos, John: “@socialheroes @zannahlou +flirt”
http://twitter.com/mawopi/statuses/792859729 

Dimatos, John: “@phantasmagora +flirt”
http://twitter.com/mawopi/statuses/792860832

G. Simon, Adam: “@socialheroes @scottiev +glamor”
http://twitter.com/rebelprince/statuses/796915997

Simon, Adam: “@socialheroes @DoryEx +glamor”
http://twitter.com/rebelprince/statuses/796915660

H. Dimatos, John: “@socialheroes @mawopi +junkintrunk”
http://twitter.com/mawopi/statuses/796026696

Soltis, Daniel: “@socialheroes @mowapi +scaryuserpic”
http://twitter.com/ds1935/statuses/796062274

Menscher, Corey: “@socialheroes @mawopi +insaneinthemembrane”
http://twitter.com/crackhead/statuses/796138293

I. Varland, Scott: “@socialheroes buy rockstar”
http://twitter.com/scottiev/statuses/799041692

J. Menscher, Corey: “ @socialheroes buy tagwhore”
http://twitter.com/crackhead/statuses/799125301

K. Solits, Daniel: “ @socialheroes buy needscoffee”
http://twitter.com/ds1935/statuses/798838797

L. Dimatos, John: “ @socialheroes @heather_R +karma”
http://twitter.com/mawopi/statuses/802341762

Users schedule dates in advance and, if a compatible match is found in the right area at the right time, both users are sent a text-message-length profile and blurred photo, and asked if they can meet at a system-specified location in the immediate future. Until that point, backing out of the date is fair play, but once agreed, the users are both bound to show up and stay for at least twenty minutes. After the date, users must rate each other for both compatibility metrics (such as attractiveness and personality) and general datability metrics (such as promptness and politeness). These ratings are used to both improve personal results and to weed out users deemed inappropriate to the emergent community.

OkCupid has employed a user-generated polling system and a thoroughly complex algorithm to match potential suitors since 2004, which has worked well for them. But computation can only be performed on existing data, and users are only willing to answer so many poll questions. CBD is an experiment to see if injecting lots of data directly relevant to the compatibility and datability of other users into the system can improve results and produce better matches. From a software perspective, it’s a brute-force attack on the dating problem. From a user perspective, it’s a computer-optimized version of speed dating. And from a social perspective, it’s an attempt to compartmentalize the dating process and optimize it toward the strengths of either humans or computers.

personal identity is handled by the software

Personal identity on CBD is fairly limited from a user perspective. Instead of the typical online dating site, which presents an array of profiles to browse, CBD shows the user nothing about potential suitors before, during, or after the signup process. That notion of a profile, that hallmark of dating and social networking sites, isn’t even apparent at first. One is, in fact, being created behind the scenes, as users fill out the dating survey required at sign-up. (OkCupid users get a much shorter survey, with a lot of data being pulled from their existing profile.) Unlike other profiles, though, this one is not primarily for other users, but for the CBD software to run against its date-matching protocols. This makes a huge difference, both in the questions being asked and in the responses given. danah boyd talks about an entire generation which is learning to “write themselves into being” by constantly creating and re-creating online profiles, and this type of linguistic identity construction is critical to presenting oneself online. CBD replaces the traditional audience of one’s peers (and, on a dating site, potential lovers) with the software itself, diminishing the impulse to craft a perfect self image.

This anonymity among users is absolute on the website; using CBD requires relinquishing the choice of potential dates into the hands of the system in a demonstration of fatalistic trust in the algorithm. (Users can review profiles and photos of people they have already gone on dates with.) But because we’re talking about romance and sex and not job interviews, there needs to be some emotional hook to actually convince users to drop what they’re doing a go to meet their dates. (CBD seems designed for users to over-book their dates, since many scheduled times and locations will not line up with potential dates, and they are given the option to turn down a date just before it would happen.) As the first point of contact between users, the date invitation is both the emotional hook and the only subjective information about potential dates a user will see before meeting them. During sign-up, users are allowed a few sentences to provide to potential dates, which are mostly designed to get over the initial hump of meeting someone new: ways to spot them in the crowd, a few topics for potential conversation, and why they’re using CBD. This profile data is augmented by a single line at the time of scheduling, and sent along with the date invitation when all of the quantified data has aligned in the system. Then, if both users agree to meet, as described above, the whole process goes offline.

Until the point of a date, users are anonymous to each other, and identity is treated as irrelevant except as answers to a series of survey questions used in the matching process, under the assumption that software is the best way to handle the rough-grain sifting. The moment right before a date, minimal identity between two users is established in order to aid in coordination and test for any obviously erroneous matches. And then the software leaves the fine-grain sorting to the users, wherein personal identity is firmly established.

Up until this point, CBD would seemingly be placing users into a non-iterative prisoner’s dilemma, wherein defecting would be the natural course of action. In this scenario, defecting might mean arranging the date and then not showing up. While there might be reason not to defect – if the date were attractive, for instance – that would imply multiple iterations, as the users would both have to cooperate to meet in the first place, and then decide to do so again based on physical attractiveness. So the system needs a way to guarantee that users do not defect initially, and ideally to weed out users who frequently defect even upon iteration. The CBD solution is to take the relational identity established during the date and feed it back into the system.

relational identity is outsourced to the humans

CBD treats the actual date itself as a black box of data: it knows what went in and what came out, but doesn’t pretend to know what goes on inside. From a user perspective, of course, the priorities are just the opposite: we care less about the input and output and a heck of a lot about what happens on the date itself, whether that’s sharing a soda with two straws or a quickie in the janitor’s closet. Regardless of where the date falls along that spectrum, each person will emerge with some sense of who the other is and how well they were suited to each other. This is the data that CBD wants when the date is over, and the information that is usually left out of online dating sites: relational identity.

We spend most of any first encounter forming an internal model of the other person by testing and refining our assumptions about them. On a first date this is especially true because of the unfamiliarity and the fact that both people know it’s a test for compatibility. The vague and blurry picture we get from the date makes up part of that person’s relational identity, their identity as defined by how other’s view them. And a relational identity formed on a first date is immediately applied to determine how the date ends and whether there will be another. If CBD can extract a relational identity from each user after every date, they can optimize matches for good first dates.

So, after the date is completed, both users are required to answer some questions about it before they can go on another date. The questions are engineered to suss out the important parts from the black box of the date, including how compatible the users are (from a physical and a personality perspective), as well as how good a date both were in general (ie, were they on time and friendly, or would you tell a friend not to date them?). These are quantified questions, answered with numerical ratings and booleans, to describe the fuzzy social situation which happened inside that black box in a way that the software can use.

These two types of data are used in different ways: the more subjective information on how well matched the users were is used to help refine matches for those two users, and perhaps tweak the overall algorithm. CBD is attempting to aggregate relational identity about each user from each first date in order to better match them. The initial profile is needed to seed initial data, but as a user goes on more dates, I would expect that the data reported back from those dates becomes more important in the matching algorithm. Other users, after all, are who the software is trying to match the user in question with, and the aggregate relational identity of many dates must provide a decent profile against which to match other profiles.

The more objective information gathered after a date, which addresses general datability, is used to create the iterative prisoner’s dilemma in an otherwise mostly anonymous system. Users are held responsible for their actions under threat of the system, not for fear of retribution by any individual user. This elegant design allows the community standards to arise from the users, and yet also checks for abuses to the system such as lying about intentions toward sex on the first date.

real-time dating, now in your town!

CBD seems to be glancing in the direction of constant, real-time matching. Because the system is designed to use rapid face-to-face communication as a brute force attack on the relational identity matching problem of online dating, it works best when many people go on many dates. By removing the scheduling component (except, perhaps, always-off times), CBD might increase both the number of dates as well as the sense of spontaneity, but also improve the accuracy of the algorithm. Some sort of Dodgeball-esque location awareness would need to be incorporated to manage potential matches, but might be incorporated into the matching itself: “Do you want to go on a date in SoHo in 20 mins?” “No, I’m in Brooklyn today.” “Okay, we’ll text you if we find a match in Brooklyn today.” This would surely scare off the more timid users and those new to the site, and should likely be an option rather than subsume the entire service for that reason. But this always-on dating is clearly where the industry is headed, poised on the brink with many other mobile social software applications, and suggested by some of the existing affordances of nouveau-dating website like CBD and iminlikewithyou.

Conclusion

In segmenting the problem of matching potential dates in order to optimize the components toward what computers and humans are each good at, Crazy Blind Date creates what, on the surface, appears to be a non-iterative prisoner’s dilemma. By keeping users anonymous and providing no user-visible infrastructure for post-date interactions, users would seemingly be able to break the trust of the system and other users at any point. But by requiring feedback on every date, the system constructs a more cleancut case of iteration than most social software to date. Iterations are aggregated across every other user whom one goes on dates with, with the result being an increasingly accurate representational identity for each user becoming established within the system. Therefore, if the feedback questions are well constructed, matches should improve greatly over time with the increasing frequency of dates, as the system is designed to mimic the natural vetting of social situations. It’s an elegant approach on the back end that just requires a lot of data on each user to work well. As the rest of the social processes seem optimized to produce that data, the only thing left would be to increase the available data, and, therefore, to send a lot of people on a lot of dates.

Superheroes: competitive storytelling for fun and profit

The first game is an iteration on the alliances mechanic which I’ve been working on for the past couple of months. One of the things I learned during play testing was that adding a narrative framework – not necessarily a long involved narrative, but something to help frame the game rules and motivations. (Some people might call this a “theme.” They would be correct, and less pretentious than me, apparently.) Because I’ve been wanting to work on a superhero project for some time now, and had been mulling it over for awhile, I threw it on top of the skeletal mechanic, and found that it fit quite well. Here’s how it would work:

Players would be given (or choose?) a super hero identity and assigned to an initial squad within the game. Each player would be classified according to what their power did (ie, elementals can affect the elements, while healers can, well, heal), as well as the squad they belonged to. Squads would collectively be able to choose if they were good or evil, and players could move between squads (and hence sides of the good/evil axis) as they wished, but could never change their core identity. The real identities of the players would become their secret identities, of course, and they would be able to retcon in an origin story for their super hero identity. (Retconning is important to me as a social construct, particularly in relation to identity construction. The process of establishing how Adam Simon became oh-i-don’t-know Prophecy Boy would be an important element of pulling players into the game.)

The game itself would center around missions, which would be distributed across the game to squads and classifications of players. So sometimes a squad would have to work together, and sometimes several elementals – representing different squads on both sides of the superhero/supervillian divide – would have to work together. And sometimes a player would have to choose if he should support his squad or his class.

I was having trouble determining what the missions would be, and how to give people super powers, and it was seeming more and more like it would be very narratively complex, practically an alternate reality game. Daniel pointed out that I was back to trying to solve the ARG problem – that ARGs mostly don’t have game mechanics, they’re all narrative. And I really can’t focus on fixing ARGs and making a game which reflects social relationships in the mechanic at the same time; it’s tackling too many unsolved problems at once. I might as well work on the game state problem, too. (The game state problem being that big games always have to resort to hacks so that players can tell what each other are doing, something which is implicit in localized games. It occurs to me that our little band of game makers has done a decent job of uncovering and classifying the major problems of our field. Now we just have to fix them.)

So, okay, what happens if I take the collaborative narrative / scavenger hunt / puzzle solving of a traditional ARG and add in the teams and alliances mechanic? That’s kind of interesting, and I like the idea that different groups would be constructing different narratives, rewriting the story to their own advantage. The overarching story would be housed in one place, and bits and pieces would get added as they were discovered, but rather than a universal truth, the public story would represent the interests of the squads and classes that discovered the appropriate narrative artifacts.

This all sounds lovely, but it feels incredibly heavy to me. It would probably require a lot of asset production, on top of writing the narrative, building the technical backend, and recruiting players. It probably doesn’t scale beyond the initial players. And I’d most likely wind up managing players 24/7 while it was running, since there would be no other puppet masters to help. And I’m not sure it would actually get at the problem I’m trying to address: the ability of games to bring our subconscious models of the world to the surface. Problematic.

Achievements: an API for social interactions

The other game was a reaction to those issues, and came out of wanting something very light, as I saw ColorWars revving up to begin. ColorWars is a bit problematic, but the notion of building games on top of APIs is really interesting to me, and I’ve recently been thinking about how Twitter itself is – in its purest form – just an API. The web interface is incidental to many Twitter users. And when you start thinking about APIs as structures which can be applied to things outside of software, interesting ideas begin to emerge. At ETech, Kati London spoke about things which created APIs for social interactions, something which Socialbomb, our proto-thesis, certainly creates. And Tom Coates talked about Fire Eagle existing everywhere the network touches. So what kind of game can exist as an API for social interactions, and exist everywhere the social network touches?

This led me to social achievements, which you could think of as either Xbox achievements for everyday life or an insanely scaled up version of Socialbomb. The idea is that any player would be able to give any other player (and maybe non-players, too) points in different categories. Get the right combination of points in specific categories, and you’d get an achievement, which would become part of your public persona. So, for example, if Daniel is being a big flirt, I could give him 2 flirt points, which could put him squarely on the road to Gigolo, which requires 10 flirt points and 6 spendy points. I’m a bit torn on if these should be constructed more as character levels in an RPG or quests, or some combination of the two. But that can be play tested until it works.

I built a version of this with stickers and note cards (a game designer’s favorite tools), and have sketched out a way it would work over Twitter. There are plusses and minuses to both the physical and the virual versions, and I would build and test different combinations until I hit on a good one. I have some ideas on expanding this idea outside of the give-or-take of pure social interactions, such as earning special points or achievements for getting points in a specific place or social context. And I’m working on an idea for an inventory system, which would allow you to collect physical objects, combine them, and use them on people or places to earn points that way. (The inventory system may also become it’s own game for my game design class…)

The downside of the achievements idea is that it may be too light, despite being a rather pure instantiation of my thesis statement. It doesn’t need narrative, but it does need more player agency – there should be some way for me to gain points besides being granted them by another player. And I don’t especially want my thesis game to just be a Twitter application. I would need to pull out more depth if I was really going to be pleased with it. I think I can do that, but I’m not sure how yet.

A common problem among both ideas? I don’t think they scale. The superhero one would require enough management by me that I think I’d need to stick with a set number of players. And achievements could scale among online communities, but the real-world interactions, which I’m most interested in, would likely never occur amongst players outside of the groups I seeded it in.

Reactions?

Update: In the comments, Scott put forth the idea that “once you had reached a level sufficient to grant an achievement – this would alter your influence on other players,” which is exactly the obvious kind of depth that the social achievements needs. I’m not convinced it needs to be as automatic as he’s positing, which would essentially be a multi-dimensional Socialbomb, but I’m pondering it. And after a sleepless night, I’ve been mulling over the notion of identity being tied to objects, for both ideas.

Update update: In a startling turn of events, I’ve made a decision! More soon (first I’ve got to craft a presentation for tomorrow morning), but the winner is achievements, but with a superhero twist. And I might keep the name Social Heroes, after all…

In this post I’m going to explain how to output files from Eagle PCB in order to send your designs off to be professionally fabbed. There are two major steps before this in the process: creating the electrical schematic, and moving from that schematic to a board layout. I’m not going to cover those at the moment, as they were the subject of a recent ITP drive-by, and the impetus for this post was to add the production info into the mix, but if there’s any demand I’ll post some more tutorials down the line. In the meantime, if you haven’t moved from schematic to layout yet, Instructables has a couple of excellent tutorials on PCB layout in Eagle and also making custom parts in Eagle.

So, from here on out, I’ll assume you’ve got a finished schematic and layout, and are ready to send it off for production.

First, you have to output your files to send to the production facility. The CAM processor in Eagle takes your PCB layout and breaks it down into things that the fabrication machines can use, in the form of copper, paste, silkscreen, soldermasks, and drill files. You’ll have multiple of each type, except for the drill file. These are sometimes called Gerber files, in reference to a popular manufacturer, and are what the production facility will need to make your boards.

I’ve uploaded some output presets which will produce the files you need for most production facilities (Gerber274x with Excellon drill files). You can download those here (Eagle CAM presets), and drop them into your /Eagle/cam/ folder. These presets are designed for two layer (top/bottom) output, but if you’re doing something more complex than that, you probably won’t be reading this! Okay, now we’re ready to output!

Click the CAM button in the toolbar (it looks like two teal filmstrips).
Go to File->Open->Job…
Select sfe-gerb274x.cam first.
Click Process Job, and you’ll see a number of progress bars race by as Eagle does its work.

You may have noticed that we output an Excellon drill file as part of that job, but, for some reason, due to a quirk of Eagle, it never outputs correctly for me as part of that job preset. So, let’s output just the drill file in the correct format.

In the CAM processor still,
Go to File->Open->Job…
Select excellon.cam.
Click Process Job, and you’ll have the correct drill data.

Now, if you look in your project’s folder (which should be somewhere like ~/Documents/eagle/projectname/), you’ll see a number of new files. These are your CAM files which you’ll send out for production. You should have:

• *.DRD – drill data
• *.GBL – bottom copper
• *.GBO – bottom silkscreen
• *.GBS – bottom soldermask
• *.GTL – top copper
• *.GTO – top silkscreen
• *.GTP – paste
• *.GTS – top soldermask

The awesome thing about designing PCBs is that Eagle (and other CAD software) will actually produce the files that control the fabrication machines. On one hand, this gives you total control over what gets produced. On the other hand, if something doesn’t turn out right, you only have yourself to blame, so you want to double check everything before confirming any order.

Now that you’ve got your files, zip them up, and upload them to FreeDFM for checking. No matter who you wind up ordering boards from, FreeDFM is a great service to use. Within an hour (often less), you’ll receive an email that will point out any obvious problems with your files and layout, as well as giving you a link to view your plots online. This lets you double check the layout of each part of the board, and makes it easy to spot errors or problem areas. If things aren’t correct (and they hardly ever are, the first time, fix them, output, and upload again. Just be sure you change the version number, as otherwise their system may not recognize it as a new upload.

FreeDFM is owned by Advanced Circuits, so you’ll also get a quote from them along with your results. The quotes page is wonderful in that you can see how different quantities and turnaround times affect your order. (And, yes, unless you know better, you’re fine with prototype quality boards and not paying for the electrical check.) They produce their boards in Colorado, so can turn things around in a day if you’re willing to pay exorbitant fees. When we ordered boards for Socialbomb, we ended up paying $500 for 50 boards with a 2 day turnaround. In general, things get cheaper for larger orders and longer turnaround times. For Advanced Circuits, if you leave two weeks for production, you’ll probably even be able to get small quantities cheaply. And, I must add, they have excellent customer service, and are very easy to get ahold of on the phone. After my wonderful experience with Advanced Circuits, though, and seeing that even the Socialbomb boards would have fallen to under $4 a piece if we had a few weeks for production, I don’t feel the need to shop around. Other people at ITP swear by BatchPCB and Golden Phoenix, which both produce the same quality of boards at a discounted price. They both send the boards to China for manufacturing, though, so you really need several weeks turnaround time, but you can get some simple boards down to a few dollars a piece in quantity.

Having your PCBs manufactured for you is very rewarding. I highly recommend it over perf boards or even etching when you’re ready to take your projects to a second revision.

Update:Advanced Circuits also has a fast and cheap board fabbing service called BareBonesPCB, which I wasn’t aware of at the time (probably because it’s hidden under a different domain name!). It will probably do the trick for most projects, and still ships in a day. Woot!

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ITP Thesis: Midterm presentation (with notes) (PDF)

Here’s the midterm presentation I just gave in my thesis section (the PDF includes the presenter notes, and is perhaps more comprehensible). I felt like this presentation was a return to form for me – lots of photos, not a lot of text – and it seemed generally well received. I had just playtested for the first time the day before, and I feel like the project is gaining the momentum that it so desperately needed. The next step is to iterate on the version that I tested, adding a narrative (superheroes, I suspect) and some context, and also to try testing something that’s going in a completely different direction. Those should both be happening in the next week…meaning that I very well may have two playtests over spring break. Making up for lost time, it seems.

After the jump, my text-based summary of the presentation, which is a combination of the slides and the notes.

I’m working on social games, which I’m defining as games where the relationship between the players is an important part of how the game mechanic, or how the game actually works. There are two mechanics which i decided to try building a game around: Alliances and Collection. So, players would belong to different groups, and would decide which group to support at any given time, as well as collecting non-players as Friends, and scoring extra points for socializing them into one of the player groups.

Because I’m focusing on social relationships, and those are most acute face-to-face, it isn’t going to be a videogame or a board game, it was going to be a big game. I’m particularly interested in big games which break the rules of time by being somewhat persistent, and during which the players are inhabiting the same general physical environment. But why games in the first place?

Games are formal systems of rules which, once we know how to play them, makes it possible for us to predict the outcome of our interactions. This is what makes them fun, unlike the real world, which has too many unknown rules and variables. We do this by evaluating game state, which is a snapshot of what’s going on in the game at any given moment. Game state is reflected in the board of a board game, the field and scoreboard of soccer, and the heads-up display in a videogame.

It turns out we treat everything else in the world pretty much the same way: we devise theories of the way the world works, make predictions, test them, and revise them. Unlike in games, though, we mostly don’t think about those models consciously. It’s just how we see the world. Two areas where this is less true (ie, that we’re more conscious of the systems we’re examining) are social situations and our physical environment. This is evolutionary: it was (and is) important to our survival to have a conscious working model of these systems. I decided that I wanted to tackle the social side of things, and build a game that reflects the social relationships between players within the game mechanic itself. As it turns out, bringing the environmental systems into play might be a good solution for one of the problems during playtesting.

Over the past year and a half, I’ve been working on games which alter the relationship between the players and their friends, and between the players and the city itself. One example is Socialbomb, a game about reputation, which is a social system that’s easy to quantify into a game mechanic. Socialbomb players carry devices which display their reputation score which rises and falls based on the scores of other players they are near. The Invention of Murder is a mystery game which takes players to locations in lower Manhattan surrounding an actual unsolved murder from 1842, altering their view of the city by merging past and present.

Here are the basics of how the prototype game worked:
Players were assigned a different Team (A or B), and a Group (Circle, Square, or Triangle), and were set out with a limited number of stickers with which to claim friends. Each sticker could only be used to benefit their Team or the Group. We played 4 rounds, which lasted an hour each, and had a unique way to score. for instance, in the first round, if a player could convince their new Friend to buy them a coffee, they got a bonus point. At the end of the round, everyone would come together, tally their scores on a scoreboard, and find out what the special rule was for the next round.

The results were, of course, mixed. Friend collection and tagging was fun, and made the game highly visible in the environment and for non-players. On the other hand, the rules and scoring were too complex, synchronizing all the players in rounds doesn’t work well over several hours (much less days), and the game state itself became confused and stressful once there were a large number of friends tagged. And, perhaps most distressingly to me, this is the sort of thing which could have been made on Facebook, and probably would been easier to play, so what am I getting from doing it offline (other than the fun of stickering random people at ITP, which should not be under estimated)?

So, from here, I’m going to make two prototypes to playtest: one iteration on these basic mechanics, and one new concept. For the next version of this game, I’m going to use narrative and theme to help explain the game mechanics. Explaining that Teams and Groups are like Race and Class in a role playing game, for example, would have been more straight forward than my abstraction. Also, the players should be focused on managing the social state amongst themselves or others, but not both. I’m going to opt for internal social state, and thus replace the collection of people with the collection of the environment – players will collect places, rather than people. (See, I told you the environmental side of our brains was going to come into play.)

In brainstorming a new concept, I’m going to explore an infection and containment mechanic, since I really like the idea of players spreading something in the world and then having to go back and clean up their own mess. I’m also thinking about using real-world resources of some kind as power-ups for a smaller, more local game. Whatever the case is, I’ve determined that modeling the mechanics on very specific social concepts (ie, how Socialbomb is based on one word, “reputation”) is going to make for the clearest mechanic and most interesting play.

The questions I had, after all of this, are whether the mechanics of Alliances and Collection are good ones (people seemed to think they were), and what the interface of my game is ultimately going to be. I think finding the interface will help immensely, but it also seems that determining a narrative will go a long way toward establishing that. So, my next immediate step is probably narrative. And I’m thinking superheroes.

Socialbomb unit, originally uploaded by doryexmachina.

Last week we took Socialbomb to O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference. We held a BoF session on getting social games away from the keyboard, and ran a full-scale, 30-person game of Socialbomb with the latest rev of the hardware at the Emerging Arts Fest.

We got a response better than any we could have expected, met some wonderful people whose work and opinion we greatly respect, and had a great time seeing all of the awesome things that are going on. I’ll post more on ETech someday when I’m feeling less consumed by thesis, but for now, here’s a beautiful shot which Mike took of the new devices. I feel very proud and hugely relieved. Back to game designing!

And here’s a video of our innocent little children behaving like the proto-Cylons that they are: once they see each other and start sending data, their send/receive patterns fall into step, making their transfer LEDs blink simultaneously. We didn’t program this behavior at all, and everyone (including us) finds it vaguely threatening. Emergence at work!

Socialbomb units in action from Mike Dory on Vimeo..

HVRG rules (PDF)
HVRG assets (zip with AI), includes everything you need to build and play HVRG except for a die color-coded to the money squares

For our Game Design class, John Dimatos, Brian Kim, Zannah Marsh and I designed the Happy Village Real Estate Game (HVRG). We started out creating a game about apartment hunting in New York, but the ruleset quickly spun out of control and became impossible to balance. What we ended up with was HVRG, a game which is a satire of our game design process. It comes complete with adorable retro kittens adorning everything and not mentioned in the rules, as well as a simple resource-gathering mechanic. Zannah did the excellent design of the assets, and I designed the board. The rules PDF is linked above, along with a a zipped folder of Illustrator files, in case you have an inkling to download your own copy of HVRG. The full board is below, and some photos of our hand-made prototype version, which I still find quite charming in and of itself.

A lot of my projects at ITP seem unduly influenced by Harry Potter. Certainly my first major physical computing project was directly inspired by Weasley’s clock, the ARG I worked on last semester went through it’s own Potter phase, and it has long been known that, given the time and resources, the solution I’d like to build to address the problem of managing game state in big games is a real, physical Maurader’s Map. (The proximity we’re working with on Socialbomb is one step toward that.) And certainly physical computing and big games overlap a lot with popular conceptions of magic.

But as I’m sitting here, contemplating what I’m trying to make out of my thesis, it occurs that I really just want a sorting hat and giant hour glasses which fill with jewels when you do well and which loose them when you do badly. House tables and mythologies, points magically conferred and removed at the whims of the powers that be. Part of playing the game is not finding loopholes, but learning which ones to exploit, and that breaking the rules – and then the entire idea of rules and divisions to begin with – is the only lasting way to win.

And then it occured to me that Harry Potter is, itself, structured like an ARG; the wizards operated in a secret world layered upon the Muggle reality. The secret wizarding world exhibits loads of ludic properties: the big game of the house system and its points, of course, but also secret societies, the search for horcruxes, piecing together partial information about the past, and a very fuzzy magic circle. As the books wear on, the line between the wizard world and the Muggle world disintegrates, and the pressure to contain it through the solving of puzzles increases. In fact, you might be able to read the entire series as a warning against brink games and pushing the limits of the magic circle. Voldemort started making his own rules by making a new “house” (the Death Eaters), and the horcruxes, in an attempt to gain control over Muggle and wizard alike. He was, however, still playing the game of the Deathly Hallows, which was ultimately his undoing, as Harry unwittingly checkmates him in that game. Of course, in this world, part of restoring order also means reinstating the magic circle, wiping Muggle memories of wizard wars, and making sure that the only big game being played is the relatively harmless one of house rivalries.

More thoughts on this one day, I’m sure. Possibly sooner, depending on which ways the thesis winds blow.

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ITP Thesis: Methodology presentation (PDF)

Here’s a presentation I gave on the methodology of my thesis project. The details of the system (ie, the use of Nintendo DSes and/or Socialbomb hardware) were just for reference, as the final implementation will likely be quite different. Including that example, though, seems to have been the thing that makes what I’m after clearer to people, so I’m glad I included it, despite my reservations about discussing platforms that I’m not using.

There’s also a rather thorough description of a card game prototype I developed to test some of the rules and ideas I’ve been working on for alliances. I think you can even play it based on what’s in the presentation! If you do, please let me know!

While the content of these “missions,” as I’ve been calling them, is still in flux, there will undoubtedly be something that users are doing besides managing their relationships. It would be possible to reduce the gestalt by one if the user generation of missions was removed, which may happen as I work out the details of how they will work. I used the term “manage relationships” because, while I expect most of them to be group memberships, pairings will occur and need managing, too.

On the scale of group participation, I think the game itself will walk players down the line from “me first,” (ie, they get their first mission, which will come from the system itself), quickly through “sharing” to “conversation,” when users are creating, completing, and evaluating missions for each other. As the groups grow and compete, they will eventually become collaborative, in designing challenges for the other teams, and, if galvanized enough by the competition, may resort to collective action. Perhaps it’s too ambitious to cover the whole scale? I’d say that, at the very least, most of hte game will happen in the conversation to collaboration realm.

Ingenious (play online) is an abstract strategy board game designed by Reiner Knizia, in which players place conjoined hexagonal tiles on a board, scoring one point for each similarly colored hexagon which emanate from the five available faces of each half of the played tile. Each player keeps score on his own publicly-visible scorecard, advancing each color’s marker from zero to eighteen, and holds six tiles in his hand on every turn. When the board is full, the player with the highest low score of any color wins.

This atypical win condition, which is a hallmark of Knizia’s work, allows for more complex and non-obvious strategies to emerge while playing Ingenious. If the objective were more traditional, for example, to get the most number of colors to their maximum score, there would be a relatively straightforward approach which would allow players to focus on whichever color would earn them the most points on any given hand. But the suggestion that all colors should be given relatively equal attention throughout the game gives rise to significantly different gameplay and strategies, particularly in relation to the bonus play granted for maxing-out a color.

The rules state that “players must attempt to advance all six of their color markers, not leaving any of them behind,” which would seem to be a sensible approach for ensuring that no single low-scoring color is the player’s undoing in the end. Indeed, playing with the notion of keeping all of ones’ colors progressing at a slow and steady pace is a reliable way to have a low high score somewhere between seven and eleven. This ignores several conflicting realities which come into play, though, including a temptation for immediate gratification, the benefits of maxing out a color early, and a desire to thwart competitors’ plans. And these strategies can often yield much higher low scores if used well.

The deeply ingrained ludic addiction to scoring is a difficult habit to break, and despite the instruction to the contrary, players will likely place tiles in such a way to get a large payoff in one color if the option is available. I suspect the human tendency to focus on one goal at a time might also contribute to this, as well as hopes of securing one color safely high on the card, or preventing another player from taking advantage of the high-scoring situation. In any case, despite the opposite strategy being suggested by the rules of the game, one of the first strategies players seem to test is going straight for the highest scoring options on each turn.

As the game would have it, this is not an awful strategy, and, if used consistently, can pay off. Since each color which reaches its maximum point value confers an immediate bonus play of an additional tile, players with high scoring colors early on may effectively outpace their competitors simply by having played more tiles. The effects become even more pronounced when the bonus plays are chained, further maxing out other colors. Key to this strategy is commitment; if the bonus plays are not used to their full advantage, it quickly becomes a loosing battle, and players who are keeping all their colors in pace may surpass a player with some which are maxed-out. Unlike more traditional win conditions, it’s possible to max out several colors and still lose the game, which is why this strategy may not immediately seem beneficial to unexperienced players.

Another important strategy which follows from the max-out strategy is to block competitors’ access to the high-scoring areas which they need most. Because each player’s current scores are public knowledge, aggressively targeting other players’ weak colors is one way to ensure that one’s own low score remains relatively high. It may be difficult to effectively manage this strategy during a four player game, however, and because it’s impossible to implement during the first several rounds of play, it can only work in concert with another strategy.

In my experience playing Ingenious over the past week, the best overall strategy seems to be a combination of the latter two approaches, first racing a few colors to the max in order to earn extra plays, and then using tiles with those colors (which are now unable to score points) to block opponents from advancing their low scoring colors. While there are games in which this approach will fail miserably, particularly if one is prevented from completing an in-progress run, either by luck or by a competitor, on average it yields consistently higher low scores, in the ten to fifteen range.

While playing the solitaire variation, the elimination of the bonus play means that the best strategy is nearly always to advance the colors relatively equally, but taking advantage of high-scoring opportunities as they arise. It demonstrates that the simple elimination of the bonus play for maxed-out colors severely reduces the complexity of available strategies and, in fact, makes playing solitaire a less-than-ideal way to practice the game.

Ingenious shares many traits with Scrabble, actually making the strategy in Scrabble of focusing on the placement of the tiles rather than the length of the word, explicit in its design. In order to create more complex gameplay around this simple idea, Knizia adds two more simple ideas – that the highest low score wins, and that maxing out a color earns a bonus play. These two rules create a tension between the desire to advance a color quickly, and the fear that some color will fall behind and become the player’s downfall. This tension is the key to Ingenious, and makes the development of complex strategies possible in enjoyable and interesting ways.

Description
I’m interested in games as a mediating device, both between the players themselves and between the players and their environment. My thesis will be a multiplayer pervasive game which draws parallels between the social systems of the real world and the formal systems encapsulated in games. This will be accomplished by overlaying a game world onto the real world in such a way that it makes players highly cognizant of their social relationships with other players (and non-players), as well as their relationship to the urban environment. In both cases, by the end of the game, the player should feel an increased sense of agency in constructing these social facts.

Players will receive “missions” from a central database, delivered either to their mobile phone or a custom device designed for the game (TBD). Each mission is a Situationist-inspired short call to action that alters the urban landscape in such a way that other players would recognize it, within the context of a narrative framework which is first introduced when players join the game. Missions may be location-sensitive, and only triggered when players are in the correct vicinity, or they may be more generally applicable. Once sent a mission, a player may decide to complete it or not. If they opt out or fail to record proper documentation within the time frame specified, the mission is assigned to another player by the system. For completing a task and documenting it appropriately within the time limit, the player is granted points, as well as the opportunity to create a task for another player.

Completing a task which was created by another player sends the documentation to that player, who can approve or deny that the task was completed to their satisfaction. If the task is approved, the two players will begin to be linked in the system, eventually becoming a team and operating similarly to one individual. Once a team has been established between two or more players, they may begin communicating with each other directly to coordinate mission completion, and once the team has three players, they will begin competing with other teams. The competition between teams will necessarily cause them to encounter each other in physical space, where “offline” negotiation (ie, out of view of the game system) will be possible, and players will discover that they can shift teams at will. Over time, the players who have maintained a loyalty to the system-assigned teams will coalesce into one large team, competing solely against the splintered ad-hoc teams, which, through some narrative prompting, will discover that they can recruit new players to the game. During this second wave of the game, the antiestablishment players must recruit new players, cure the infected, and create new missions to help topple the authority figure and balance the city.

Personal Statement
I’m very interested in the psychological effects of game play, and what happens when players step inside the magic circle. Social interaction changes immediately, and, in a real world game, so does the player’s relationship to their environment. The relationship between these voluntary systems of control and the systems of control which exist outside the magic circle, as does the meta-cognitive process of exploring these boundaries in a consequence-free environment. But is is consequence-free when the game world is the real world? Can experiential media be used for persuasion and to spark philosophical thought? What happens when we render the virtual or fictional into the real world – does it become more real?

All of this is being filtered through my recent thinking on public play and festivity, politics, the power of words, mythologies, super heroes, performativity, consciousness, social networks, networked objects, and mapping.

Research
SFZero, Jane McGonigal, You Are Not Here, Portal, Roger Callois, Abarat, Clive Barker, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, V for Vendetta, Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, Bertolt Brecht, Michel Foucault, flash mobs, Jenny Holzer, Oblique Strategies, Snow Crash, Scott Westerfeld

My projects: Socialbomb, Three Houses, Rumplestiltskin, Sneaker Seed, When is Where, The Destiny of Rooms, Booty Dialer

Work Description
I will build and run a large-scale multiplayer game with both physical and online components. The player interface will be through wirelessly networked devices and/or mobile phones and websites. Site specific content will be provided through custom-built hardware installed at locations which are key to gameplay.

The platform for the game has not yet been determined. I’m examining the possibility of designing game-specific hardware or developing a custom mobile phone application. Failing both of these options, most of the game features described above can be performed through text messaging and email.

Sites/services with things in common:

• SFZero, a “collaborative production game” which has players performing tasks in the real world which are created and judged by other players. It also distinguishes between “friends” and “foes.”
• Cruel 2 B Kind, a big game in which successful players add their conquered opponents to their teams until everyone is playing on one of two sides.
• iminlikewithyou, which forms connections between users based on their interactions on the site, rather than through a simple “add friend” or “email this person” button.

Things I’m hoping users will do:

• Actively manage their relationship to their teams and other players as part of gameplay strategy.
• Experience a strong sense of immersion and bonding with the other, unkown players when they start seeing evidence of the game which they did not create.
• Switch teams several times, and develop strategy between teams.

Things that could go wrong:

• Players feel a lack of investment in the game, and stop playing.
• Active players created tasks steer the game in a direction which makes it difficult for less invested players to participate.
• Players hate the idea of teams or the people on their teams, and stop playing.

I think you can expect multiple ITP theses, as well as other documents, dealing with SANs in the coming months. More soon.

I’m slowly realizing that, while reading theory is very useful in expanding my thoughts after finding The Idea, it’s almost counter productive when searching for it in the first place. Interest in a wide range of topics is not my weak point, believe me, and I’ve already got a handle on the basics, so reading theory actually compounds the problem of trying to narrow down all the many directions I could go right now. I wind up with more crisscrossing strands of thinking in my head, not less.

I think the secret may be to read the theory when there isn’t a looming deadline or project, to load all that info into my brain, and then again after finding The Idea, to help expand it in interesting ways. But while actually searching for inspiration, thoughtful fiction (especially science fiction, which is mostly what I read at this point) might be a better influence. Reading theory is holding The Idea so close that you can’t focus on it, just the world around it, but reading fiction puts it off to one side, so the next time you glance over it’s plainly obvious, situated right in the midst of all that theory.

This, of course, seems totally counterintuitive, so I’m not saying I’m going to heed my own advice. But I really had to do something besides read Callois right now.

Much more stuff from finals and the show coming soon!

The collages work very effectively to slowly reveal the truth about Emily’s supernatural powers and her role in the bus crash. Even once all was revealed, I was convinced that the modern Emily was not entirely conscious of what she had done until late in the play. And the visual design of the projections works as a metaphor for memory – some things receding to the background, some barely in sight, and those things which we most wish to forget rendered in bright, crisp detail. It also hints at the magical realism of the play early on, well before we’re aware that Emily is anything more than an awkward geek, playing an important part in telling this story that, if told in reverse, might seem more like Carrie and less like the complex examination of our relationship to tragedy and hope that it is.

The offset video loops themselves create a somewhat interesting view around the square, but I was most drawn to the fifth monitor, which showed me different locations, more than watching the same location at different times. This is largely attributable to the fact that, while there were certainly different people and activities displayed, nothing was surprising from one monitor to the next. While the desired effect seems to be to make the viewer aware of the intricate ballet of city squares, it felt more like watching through a security camera, with the computer controlled cameras severely underlining the sense of surveillance.

The absence of the soundtrack was also troubling to me, when I discovered later that I had missed it. Was it not working, or just entirely too subtle? Did it act on me in a subconscious way at all, I wonder? Most importantly, would it have made the installation seem more alive, as the creators intended, or, as I suspect, would the voices appear as the manifest breath of Big Brother himself? I can only speculate, of course, but I find the fact that the authors did not address the surveillance issue directly somewhat troubling.

Super Hero Game

Description
I’m interested in games as a mediating device, both between the players themselves and between the players and their environment. My thesis will be a large-scale multiplayer game which explores the relationship between players’ internal narratives and the collective narrative of the game. One goal will be to make players aware of the system within which they are working as a metaphor for the cultural and political systems we move in every day.

The narrative layer of the game will be focused on the relationship between personal mythology and cultural mythology, and will deal with the power of speech acts to shape reality and mold the physical world. Some components of play will include: actualizing a shared mythology of the city, the use of networked objects to alter psychogeography, public play and performance, and the blurring of fictional or virtual space and real space. Above all, players should leave the game with a heightened sense of agency.

Personal Statement
I’m very interested in the psychological effects of game play, and what happens when players step inside the magic circle. Social interaction changes immediately, and, in a real world game, so does the player’s relationship to their environment. The relationship between these voluntary systems of control and the systems of control which exist outside the magic circle fascinates me, as does the meta-cognitive process of exploring these boundaries in a consequence-free environment. How much can we change by playing a game? Can this experiential media be the ultimate method of persuasion? What happens when we render the virtual or fictional into the real world – does it become more real?

All of this is being filtered through my recent thinking on public play and festivity, politics, the power of words, mythologies, super heroes, performativity, consciousness, social networks, networked objects, and mapping.

Background
SFZero, You Are Not Here, Portal, Abarat, Clive Barker, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, V for Vendetta, The User Illusion, Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, Bertolt Brecht, Michel Foucault

Implementation
I will build and run a large-scale multiplayer game with both physical and online components.

Link to the page in the project database (for ITPers only), where all the updates will go.

Spoiler Alert v.2! This post contains some spoilers for the 2-player ARG I’m working on. If you’re playing, or think you might play, don’t read it!

Since I don’t think I’ve properly explained this, I should say that I’m working on an ARG with eight other people. But I can tell you this without spoiling anything because you will probably never play it, because it’s specifically designed for two people. I talked a bit about the psychology of what we’re doing, but that’s an idea about the long term effects of the game, not the moment-to-moment experiences we’re hoping to create for our players, which has been the topic of much discussion in our meetings. On one hand, we’re engineering a bit of fatalism into the system, which is a remnant of an earlier (and not altogether gone) idea about magic – we want the players to feel the attention and detail of this alternate world we’re creating for them. But we also want to give them agency. The one big thing that’s remained constant for several drafts of this project is that we want them to walk away feeling more powerful, not less. And so the most important moment in our game will be the players rejecting something they believe we’ve asked them to do. In effect, they have to break the game they thought they were playing. Now does all that talk of meta-cognition make sense?

Of course, this is strikingly similar to Portal, in that “I always want to make what I’m playing” kind of way. What we’re hoping for, in our game, is something akin to that moment when GLaDOS tells you to incinerate your Weighted Companion Cube, which, up until now, she has been telling you was your friend. The Companion Cube, in fact, would have been just like any other cube had you not been instructed to carry it about and told it was your friend. When you actually do incinerate it, though, something seemingly non-diegetic happens which throws the entire “I’m playing along even though I don’t trust GLaDOS” scenario into start contrast: an achievement is unlocked. Xbox Live achievements are often granted for completing key milestones, but most often for completing the morally unambiguous goals of the game. This achievement, appropriately titled “Fratricide,” is granted at the moment GLaDOS is praising you for following orders to incinerate the closest thing you’ve had to a friend in the entire game. In effect, your Xbox is siding with GLaDOS against your moral judgement as a player. It’s an obvious parallel to the relationship between the player and Chell, who is trapped in the machine’s game world. Talk about meta-cognition: suddenly I was plainly aware of my Xbox as a system of control and questioning whether it – not the game itself, but the system – would actually allow me to win.

Portal is well praised for its wit and ingenuity. The character of GLaDOS is brilliant, the move from on-stage research to back-stage escape is a wonderful conceit, and the mechanic, is, of course, hugely elegant. But the one thing I won’t ever forget about Portal, and which I think has slid under too many radars, is the moment when it made me question if I was playing my Xbox, or if it was playing me. And that’s the moment we’re hoping to create in our game. ARGs are already powerful systems for recontextualization and meta-cognition, and rather than hide that, we want that system of control to become readily apparent to our players, so that they may break out of it and finish the game by making their own choices, rather than ours.