twopointouch

(Or, for those enjoying the puns, Nashional Guard.)

Every social media destination has some sort of scoring mechanism:

• Twitter followers
• Linked-In contacts
• Facebook friends
• Blog subscribers/comments

Those are the four I personally use most consistently, though I dip in and out of all the others to see what’s happening. They all have an equivalent.

What’s the result of those scores? Bigger is better always seems to be the suggested case: something that’s very deliberately designed into the UI is your score. Other people’s scores are almost always a click away.

For the owners of those products, it’s absolutely the case that bigger scores are great. The more people you’re connected with, the more time you’ll spend on the site, the more likely you’ll eventually click an advert or buy into the premium features, and the more trouble it is to move. For me, moving from Linked-In to a rival business network like E-cademy or Xing or Ryze would be a major pain.

The quality of the product doesn’t really matter, either, when the score’s at stake. Why do we use Twitter? It’s flakey and restrictive. Jaiku was way better than Twitter; there are up-and-coming competitors like identi.ca that offer way better features. Not to mention already dead competitors like Plurk. But my people are on Twitter and that’s why I put up with it. I have X followers there and X/5 on its closest competitor.

The ludic (playful or game-like) element of social sites provide a massive incentive to stay and play. I was delighted to beat my high-score on Twitter yesterday. That’s pretty childish, in most people’s estimation. No, actually it is childish: I should be ashamed of myself. And so it’s something that sounds gauche when we admit to it. By-and-large, we don’t, unless we have no embarrassment reflex.

But let’s talk about it.

I want to beat you at Twitter, Facebook and the rest. If your score is higher than mine, then I am jealous. If it is lower, then I scorn you. Why? Ummm dunno. Because it’s there. Frankly, because it’s designed like a game and in the same way I want to win our chess game that we might have one day, I want to win our Linked-In/etc. game.

This is the secret dashboard on Linked-In/Twitter/&c:

So what would happen if I stopped playing? My rank on the killboard would decline rapidly.

What does stopping playing mean on these sites? Not visiting; not accepting any friend requests that simply boost the friend count; not joining in on discussions where I know – or suspect – there’s no real challenge to established points of view.

Would I have fewer friends? – possibly. Would the things I said and did be less right? No. [My job role as a publisher clearly means that reach is a KPI. That kind of taints what I might do as a real human being. ]

The other consequence of the ludic nature of social sites is the effect of that on people’s behaviour, as I’ve talked about over the last couple of posts. If it looks like a game, and playing it like a game offers some rewards, then of course people will do that. If the game is approval, and it is in many cases, then that will lead to approved behaviour. Scoring systems on social media destinations are nearly always linked to approval in some way. The other part of the game is competition – you have to have a better comment than the other guy. That’s really great in some ways, because it makes people reach for ideas. Really terrible in other ways, because destroying the opposition becomes the focus. Thus the phenomenon of the Angry Internet Man – a great phrase possibly coined but definitely popularised by the awesome gaming site RockPaperShotgun.

This is a little way off from the Foucault post, in some ways, but it leads to the same conclusion. Social media may well be a force for good, creativity, innovation. But at the same time it is also exerting control and perverting behaviours.

PS. I think last.fm and similar taste-based networks have different dynamics, but that’s one for another day.

When you have this sort of team on your side.

Only about 20 months late on this.

(And yes – I wish I could shut off that frickin’ tweeting from the Cooking Mama post below. I’ll replace the widget with a link v.soon.

What I imagine many readers are looking for from an English social media and technology blogger is an overdue Thanksgiving treat. So here you are:

<(delme)embed src="http://www.peta.org/cooking-mama/swf/cooking-mama.swf" width="300" height="219" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" /> Widget deleted for noise pollution!

This is a cheeky bit of social media from US animal rights organisation PETA (full size and downloadable versions here). It’s a sort-of protest that plays on and satirises the Cooking Mama games from Majesco Entertainment. You might come across the latest instalment on the Wii over the Christmas period. As you’ll see if you play the game, you prepare a thanksgiving dinner with an emphasis on the unpleasantness of it all – it emphasises the visceral elements of cooking meat and was thus intended to draw attention to the sad plight of turkeys and prompt people to give up meat.

Sadly (for the animals, I guess, and also PETA’s marketing gurus) reaction to the game doesn’t suggest that it’s created a lot of hard-core vegetarians with this release:

(from the digg comment thread)

This game is AWESOME!!!
Can we have Slaughterhouse Mama next? I wanna bash some cows IN THE HEAD on my DS!
Seriously, PETA. Nintendo’s gonna sue you, Majesco’s gonna sue you and all you did was make the game more awesomer.
EPIC FAIL FTW!!!

(from the thread on Kotaku)

To be honest, this just makes me hungry, and reminds me I need to buy meat

(from the thread on Rampant Coyote)

Not only did the game miss the mark in inspiring the gross-out they wanted to achieve, but doesn’t that message miss the point entirely in the first place?
I mean… "Don’t kill animals… it’s gross!" Is that what PETA’s message is now… not kindness or concern or humanity… no. It’s about keeping clean now, cause you know, don’t wanna do anything that’s gross.
I could have respected something like, a cute little turkey with big eyes pleads with you not to kill it or something, and if you do so you end up feeling evil or something. This is nothing like that. So yeah, even from a crazed PETA-freak perspective, it still misses the mark, I thought.

The web makes ideological interventions tricky for organisations because you can’t be sure who the audience is going to be. If you follow current trends and make your game bloggable and portable through a widget, you increase the reach of what you’ve done, but also increase the chances of a very different reaction to the one you had planned. While Cooking Mama is a kids game, the parody was launched in the adult market, and its widget-ness helps it spread in that demographic. Adult gamers are generally used to pretty good gore, while this offers nothing more gory than Wolfenstein 3D. It would be equally tricky if they produced something photorealistic and considerably more graphic, in which case they’d be accused of attempting to shock, terrify and traumatise children.

Food for thought, one way or another.

If you start a job as an oil rigger, then there’s a 50% chance you’ll have a reportable accident within the next six months. After that period, the risk drops to 5% or less, as you get to know the ropes.

That’s quite frightening for potential oil-riggers and for people in the oil and gas industry who hire such folk.

I was lucky enough to be at a presentation from Kevin McNulty from Coole Immersive yesterday, part of the Visual Web Convention. They’ve made a simulation game that allows new oil-riggers to get that first six months’ experience for free. That’s to say, the likelihood they’ll have a reportable accident drops to <5% if they’ve used the game. That’s a fairly cast-iron case for games in the workplace, if you ask me.

Earlier in the day, Lord Puttnam gave a challenging keynote suggesting that this field – serious games – was a potential answer to the work he was doing with the climate change commission in the House of Lords. Briefly, his argument was that younger people are more likely to engage with games than any other media – I’d agree with this but suggest that older people are also gamers. Games are also blessed with the ability to offer experiential learning unlike any other pedagogic technique currently available – I think the oil rigger case study shows that’s true. Communicating the things that all of us need to do to avoid the looming disaster that climate change will bring is a tough problem for all professional communicators. We held a private event this week for advertising professionals called Can Advertising Save the Planet? The answer is probably ‘no’, but as communicators, we have the ability and responsibility to make things a little easier and better – the disaster is imminent, after all, but even the lowest of the low can do something to help.

If we are to steer society away from catastrophe and into education, games will have a key part to play.

Unfortunately, as Puttnam admitted, as soon as something is called a ‘game’ then bureaucracy and government recoils. The idea of our government lending public support, and ultimately money, to games, is stymied by its vocabulary. Games are trivial and a social harm in the minds of most bureaucrats and, sadly, most newspaper editors (see the press about the recent Byron Review which, while admitting a need for some governance over which titles were available to younger gamers, was overwhelmingly in favour of video games as a learning resource, if you bother to read the whole thing).

Flipping back to climate change and the emergency we face communicating the facts about it and what needs to be done, then games provide an excellent opportunity. But the flip-side of the problem with bureaucrats then sets in – entertainment providers are terrified of being associated with anything remotely ‘worthy’. Being ethical is, apparently, uncool.  There have already been a few brave attempts – World without Oil, the BBC’s Climate Challenge and others. But the likes of Sony, EA and Microsoft aren’t developing or promoting these sorts of titles. What needs to happen to make the big games publishers alert to their power to change the future?

[Update - Robin Blandford has some videos of what this looks like and a challenge for the rescue industry]

Blizzard, the company behind the most successful and profitable entertainment franchise in the world*, World of Warcraft, held a mini-conference in Paris last week to announce that a second sequel to its Diablo series – Diablo III – was in development. Unlike a lot of press conferences, they invited along lots of fans, active forum members and bloggers about the game. So far, so cool, but it gets better…

As is customary at top-end press-conferences, there was a schwag-bag for all attendees containing various branded giveaways. Mouse mats, mugs and stuff – it saves having to buy Xmas presents for a lot of journos. *cough*

(As an aside – Yay! that more bloggers and vocal fans are getting their hands on this stuff.)

But the cleverest bit (for me) was that this also included an online keycode for WoW that would allow players of that game to gain a new companion for their online avatars – the characters they play in the game. Remember, they invited guild leaders and fanatical WoW bloggers along**.

The pet itself will be a miniature version of the Archangel Tyrael of Diablo 2 fame who will travel with you on all your grand adventures in Azeroth! Pictures of this amazing new pet will be available on the official website soon for everybody to check out.

Get it? The WoW pet is a viral promo-item for Diablo III! It’s limited edition, so it’s sought-after; it’s a sign of prestige in the community; and it’s constantly in the face of relevant audiences.

Pure genius. Or evil.

________________________________

*World of Warcraft – or WoW to its friends – an online roleplaying game which charges a monthly subscription – to around 10mn people.

**WoW players organise themselves into ‘guilds’ to assemble teams for online combat and for social reasons – their leaders are the most visible, longstanding and respected players.

Via. Kotaku

I’ve been tagged twice for this so here goes. I have also cheated and extended this out to two weeks…

Telly: watched Extras and Dr Who over Christmas. Neither of them were as good as I’d hoped. Otherwise, I watched The Most Annoying People of the Year on BBC 3 through iPlayer, which was quite possibly the bitchiest thing I’ve ever seen, in a good way. In other people’s houses I was subjected to seemingly dozens of TV talent shows and shouty soaps.

Books: Ludmila’s Broken English by DBC Pierre is an excellent read, though not quite up to the standard of Vernon God Little, IMHO. The book has two separate threads which are well-created but then brought together rather clumsily in the finale. Imperium – Robert Harris – his worst book to date, sadly, though still a good read for a train journey. For self-improvement, I managed to get through a few more chapters of Ackroyd’s London: The Biography, too. I’ve got his book about the Thames lined up once that’s finished, some time in 2009.

Papers: My normal diet is freesheets – the Metro and the London Shite. Staying at relatives’ houses meant a shock switch to The Torygraph and the Daily Mail. How do people find the time? And why do they bother? Also enjoyed my regular doses of Uncut, Private Eye and the Economist.

Online: I’ve been offline for most of the time over the last two weeks, which was a very good idea and means I’m keen to get stuck into those 300 unread feeds.

Games: do these count? Anyway, much of my break was spent with The Witcher, which I can thoroughly recommend to old-school CRPG fans. Also developed a crippling addiction to fab puzzler The Lost Treasures of Montezuma.