Category: General

General

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Creating Civic Value

These different kinds of participation don’t mean that we should never have lolcats and fan fiction communities–it’s just that anything at the personal and communal end of the spectrum isn’t in much danger of going away, or even of being under-provisioned. It’s hard to imagine a future where someone asks himself, “Where, oh where can I share a picture of my cute kitten?” Almost by definition, if people want that kind of value, it will be there. It’s not so simple with public and especially civic value. As Gary Kamiya has noted of today’s web, “You can always get what you want, but you can’t always get what you need.” The kinds of things we need are produced by groups pursuing public value.

We should care more about public and civic value than about personal or communal value because society benefits more from them, but also because public and civic value are harder to create. The amount of public and civic value we get out of cognitive surplus is an open question, and one strongly affected by the culture of the groups doing the sharing, and by the culture of the larger society that those groups are embedded in. As Dean Kamen, the inventor and entrepreneur puts it, “In a free culture, you get what you celebrate.”
— Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

: Zubon

Oh, the Controversy!

Pundits across the board must have had some soul-bearing New Year’s resolutions. No longer will they toe the line. They will say what they have to, goddammit! It seems that this was also the week to strike. The surprising thing is that most MMO blogs around the ‘sphere have been pretty tame when it came to 2011 predictions and 2011 posts. It has been the big gamesites that are deciding to no longer be kept down by The Man.  In no particular order:

Continue reading Oh, the Controversy!

Matting

I have a couple of recent posts on game elements that seem unnecessary. But I wonder sometimes. To what extent can intentionally impeding gameplay improve the overall experience? Or do we really demand perpetual orgasm?

Consider the case of forced grouping. Solo MMO PvE is convenient, filled with steady progression, and not terribly intellectually stimulating. By definition, the lowest common denominator works for pretty much everyone, but it provides few truly great experiences. The inconvenience and downtime of forced grouping trades off with a better potential experience, and we perhaps find stronger social bonds where grouping is forced. You will get more out of an MMO if you socially interact, but it is easy to stay safe and solo. Do we get similar benefits from going back to town more often? It gives us a designated place for social interaction and a reason to be there. I do not know how much that is in use or how the effect shrinks as you move away from capital cities to smaller quest hubs.

Downtime itself presumably affects our perception of the experience. It would be nice if we could value a high emotional plateau properly, but human psychology does not seem to work that way. Huge increases in the standard of living lead to only moderate increases in happiness, because we develop a new standard. Humans could very well prefer (on a scale of 1 to 10) the experience sequence 5 5 10 5 10 5 1 5 10 10 5 10 to 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10. I cannot see anything in our evolutionary environment that would have selected for properly enjoying a steady stream of perfect experiences; how often would that have happened in the ancestral wilderness?

Assume for argument that our species is economically rational enough to value the string of 10s at least as much as the mixed series, although perhaps not as much as all those 10s might imply. The string of 10s is inefficient. It is hard to make a 10, and you are not going to get it right every time even if you are really good. If you can get 90% of the value with 4 or 5 10s in a mixed series, you can get two great series for the cost of one perfect series (plus your recycled failures, half-assed attempts, and projects from interns), nearly doubling the perceived value of your content by mixing in lower quality content to spread it out. That worries me about our species. If you said I could improve my food by adding pebbles, because the lows spread and help us appreciate the highs, I would smack you.

But you can plausibly say that rich or spicy food can dull the palate through superstimulus. Quiet moments are often underappreciated, and they are when we can appreciate things we have experienced. But there are better and worse ways to have downtime, and it always chafes to be forced into it rather than finding your own level.

: Zubon

Frozen Sharing

Sharing a photo by making it available online constitutes sharing even if no one ever looks at it. This “frozen sharing” creates great potential value. Enormous databases of images, text, videos, and so on include many items that have never been looked at or read, but it costs little to keep those things available, and they may be useful to one person, years in the future. That tiny bit of value may seem too small to care about, but with two billion potential providers, and two billion potential users, tiny value times that scale is huge in aggregate. Much creative energy that was previously personal has acquired a shared component, even if only in frozen sharing.
— Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

Our fellow MMO bloggers will be familiar with the phenomenon of getting comments or sudden bursts of hits on old posts. Dig those trailing comment dates as people still reminisce about AC2, wonder what happened at the end of Borderlands, and read your Death Knight leveling guide from 2008. Feel free to comment with a link your favorite “wow, people are still looking at this” post from your site.

: Zubon

2011 – Hopes, Dreams, Fears

I am too antsy to work. Most community managers on the West Coast aren’t even awake, but it is the first business day of 2011. The 2011. The Year of the MMO. It feels like something should be coming any second, but I have to tell myself that things were not so different a week ago. All morning I have been trying to write this post. What are my baseless speculations on the MMO genre this year?

Continue reading 2011 – Hopes, Dreams, Fears

From Personal to Civic Value

Increases in personal satisfaction, though, are not all that’s at stake. In terms of social, as opposed to individual, value, we care a lot about how our cognitive surplus gets used. Participating in [crowdsourced crisis information] creates more value for society than participating in [making lolcats]; making and sharing open source software creates value for more people than making and sharing Harry Potter fan fiction. The value from Ushahidi or open source software is more than the sum of the personal satisfactions of the participants; nonparticipants also derive value from the effort. You can think of this scale of value as rising from personal to communal to public to civic.
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One such form is personal sharing, done among otherwise uncoordinated individuals; think ICanHasCheezburger. Another, more involved form is communal sharing, which takes place inside a group of collaborators; think Meetup.com groups for post-partum depression. Then there is public sharing, when a group of collaborators actively wants to create a public resource; think the Apache software project [or Wikipedia]. Finally, civic sharing is when a group is actively trying to transform society; think Pink Chaddi. The spectrum from personal to communal to public to civic describes the degree of value created for participants versus nonparticipants.
— Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

Our MMO world tends strongly towards communal sharing, where even our public sharing (a wiki for every game) is mostly of value within the community, but see tomorrow’s post about how that value expands.

: Zubon

Understanding the Meta-Game

Numbers and arithmetic seem to be introduced as arcane games of memorization rather than the useful tools they are. Children are especially in need of math, often being intuitively confused when size and number conflict with value. A nickel is larger than a dime, so you want a nickel, yes? And four pennies would be way more than one little dime, right? Those of you who saw small children in recent gift exchanges understand the perceived value of large blocks of colorful plastic versus tiny devices.

Your barber wants to introduce you to the dumbest kid around. He sees the little boy going by, calls him in, and offers him a simple game. In one hand, the barber has a single, beat-up dollar bill. In the other, he has two shiny quarters. Which does the little boy want? He happily takes the two quarters and goes on his way. The barber laughs uproariously. “I must have done that two dozen times, and that little idiot never learns.”

Later you catch the boy coming out of a candy shop. You ask him why he takes fifty cents instead of a dollar. Surely it cannot be because two (quarters) is more than one (dollar)? “If I take the dollar, the game is over. I must have made twelve dollars off him, and that big idiot never learns.”

: Zubon

joke adapted from

ISO Tales Recommendations

TV Tropes has recommended the Tales (of Phantasia, of Destiny, of Symphonia, of Vesperia…) JRPG series to me with the statement that the games start out with cliches and then brutally, horribly subvert them.

TV Tropes also tells me that the series has more than a dozen games on various systems, most of them without localization but several with fan translations in various states of completeness, and then region-specific issues of release, localization, and region-specific DRM… Maybe I should brush up on my Japanese. Does anyone have a recommendation for how someone new should try approaching the series (in English)? Do I want the history from having gone through the earliest games, does it make more sense to jump in at Tales of X, will I be unable to appreciate X without having played Tales of Y…?

Not that I have gotten through all the other games I already own…

: Zubon

Zubon likes ellipses today…

Holidays, etc.

Just dropped by real quick to wish our readers, commenters and writers a super fun 110% happy time holidays. Hope you get a lot of presents, be safe from evil fireworks and the whole lot.

2011 can’t be anything other than better.

Personal Value

Personal value is the kind of value we receive from being active instead of passive, creative instead of consumptive. If you take a photo, or weave a basket, or build a model train set, you get something out of the experience. This energy drives the world’s hobbyists. However, as [a medical advocate] notes, there’s great value in seeing that we are not alone. Adding the social motivations of membership and generosity to the personal motivations of autonomy and competence can dramatically increase activities. Now that people can share videos on YouTube, far more people make such videos than ever made them when sharing was harder and the potential audience was smaller. Because humans have fundamentally social as well [as] personal motivations…social motivations can drive far more participation than can personal motivations alone.
— Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

: Zubon