Meme circulation: Parking Wars

The “Parking Wars” application on Facebook was certainly one my favorite game two years ago. I gave it a shot for 3-4 months and then let it go (although one my friend is a “$28,699,245 (Parker Emeritus)”. Besides it may have been the only application that attracted me to log in on Facebook back in 2006.

The game, designed by Area/Code was actually a facebook app that was meant to promote a television show:

“ In Parking Wars, players earn money by parking — legally or illegally — on their friend’s streets. Players also collect fines by ticketing illegally parked cars on their own street.“

What was fantastic at the time was the fact that this simple games app took advantage of the FB social graphs in curious ways:

• The underlying logic is simple: you need to have friends to park your cars on their street. The point is therefore to maximize the number of friends who play Parking War… which leads player to participate in the network effect through invitations (on top of word-of-mouth).
• The game is asynchronous and turn-based so it’s good to find friends on different time-shift so that you could place/remove your car when they sleep (a moment during which you don’t risk to get any fine).
• When giving a fine you can send messages to other players, the dynamic here is highly interesting as people repurposed it into some weird communication channel that is public but that address a different audience than the Facebook wall
• Competition is stimulated with a peculiar kind of score board: you only see scores from other players within your network (who added the game). This is thus a sort of micro-community where each participants’ score is made explicit.
• The “level design” is also interesting with a “neighbor” feature that enable you to park on adjacent streets, which can be owned by people outside your network.
• The cheating tricks are also social: you can less-active FB users to add the game so that you’re pretty sure they won’t check that you’re illegally parked, you can create a fake FB account or benefit from streets created by people who stopped playing.
• … and I am sure there is more to it from the social POV

Interestingly, my curiosity towards Parking Wars came back up to the surface when chatting with my neighbor Basile Zimmermann who works as research scientist at the University of Geneva. In a recent project, he addressed how Chinese Social Networking Sites re-interpreted design concepts already used by existing platforms such as FB and turned them into something different.

Which is how he showed me a curious application he saw on a Chinese SNS called “开心网 / Kaixin001″ (“Happy Network”) that is a Parking Wars-inspired copy also called “争车位” (“Parking Wars”) which appeared in July 2008:

The layout is similar to the one created by Area/code, some cars are more fancy than others but the main difference lies in the presence of advertisement (as shown by the “LG” brand). As a matter of fact, the ad part was not included in the first few months of this Parking Wars version on the Happy Network and it appeared approximately around March 2009 according to Basile. From what I’m told, the game is evolving too with a system of maps that operates differently from the FB version.

More explanation in his upcoming paper about this topic:
Zimmermann, B. (forthcoming). “Analyzing Social Networking Web Sites: The Design of Happy Network in China” in Global Design History, Adamson, Teasley and Riello eds, Routledge.

Why do I blog this? dual interest here: 1) my fascination towards Parking Wars and its underlying game design mechanism based on social dimensions, 2) the transfer of this meme in another culture.

2.0

A reminder that the “2.0″ meme has not always referred to “user participation/sharing” (on the World Wide Web in the Web 2.0 trope or in other fields such as in “enterprise 2.0″, “city 2.0″ or “human 2.0″). And don’t get me started on that term…

Eric Rodenbeck at LIFT Asia 2008

Eric Rodenbeck (Stamen, design studio in SF) just gave a nice presentation in the “Beyond the Web we know” session. He indeed showed a less known part of Web, in the shadow of social media frenziness: rich data visualization. At his studio, Eric and his team work with flows of data (from the internet and the real world) and find way to represent that data so that people better engage with them. I actually saw only one part of his talk at O’Reilly ETech 2008 and thought it would be great to bring him to LIFT Asia.

(Picture of Stamen’s Digg swarm visualization)

Eric started with the work of Etienne-Jules Marey, a french hat-lover physiologist who studied movement (heartbeat, human walking and animal movement). His talk basically showed how Marey’s work could be turned as design principles for data visualizations. For example, Eric showed how Marey demonstrated how the flight of a bird is different than the flight of an insect by using representations of movements. Marey also designed hardware to represent different movements. What Stamen is doing, to my opinion is taking the same approach and use available tools (software in the present case) such as existing flows of data (taken from database for example or GPS sensors) or capture them and use Web technologies to represent/display them.

IMO the take-aways of his talk are the following issues:
- repetition and measurement allow to better understand how system works, as they can reveal phenomena hidden for the person who look at it.
- visualization can be very effective to tell you stories: to show patterns for example in the Digg swarm project.
- use your eyes instead of your brain.
- the visualizations are not always meant to find answers but they help to generate new questions
for example: in cabspotting (see example below), the white lines represent taxis. As one can see, there are taxi moving close to Bay Bridge in San Francisco but they are obvisouly over the sea… how this can be possible? The thing was that GPS working fine on the top of Bay Bridge, but not on the lower part (since the upper part block the GPS signal): so the lines next to the bridge reflect the cars with GPS which does not work.

(Picture of Stamen’s Cabspotting)

There’s no reason why WoW couldn’t be represented by anything other than an RSS feed

Gamasutra has an insightful write-up of Raph Koster‘s talk at the Austin GDC. The talk is about how the web is destroying games in terms of revenue and access and how to rely on the web model to design future playful games. Koster slides can be found here (pdf, 3.8Mb) (Another good writeup is here).

Some excerpts I found interesting:

“If you’re like me, you’re really tired of hearing about Web 2.0,” says Koster – but he maintains that the elements of the concept behind the buzzword are sound.
(…)
The net says the platform can be anything – there aren’t real hardware requirements or interface problems. The hot topic right now is the non-gamer. The hot feature is other people (as in YouTube), not the systems we write. The hot technology is connectivity and simultaneity. He added: “The hot game is a mini-game. Really small games.”

“When you look at the kinds of problems we ask people to solve, and the things we assume them to do, it’s like we’ve given them a PhD in mathematics. No wonder you sit mom down and she asks ‘how do I move?’”

If I look at that WoW screenshot,” says Koster, “I see a user interface begging to be simplified.” He calls for something along the lines of just showing the most pertinent information – and already there are hacks to do this. “Every time you make an assumption about inputs or output, you’re shrinking your user base. This is really the secret behind the DS and the Wii – it’s mapped to stuff we already know, which reduces the learning curve.”
(…)
“There’s no reason why WoW couldn’t be represented by anything other than an RSS feed, and if you could, it’d probably be doubled in users.”
“

Well, without the context the last quote might sound weird but there is an relevant point here. And I quite his description about what works on the web that can be transferred to gaming:

“- the system is the game, not the interface, not the presentation.
- any button will do.
- long phases take your time – response time is rough.
- be done fast, once you’ve made a decision.
- do it side by side. Has to be massively parallel.
- extended accumulated state – save your profile.
- no roles – classless – teams are deterministic.
- representation agnostic – draw it however.
- open data – change it however.“

Why do I blog this? preparing a presentation about how web practices (social web, web2.0) will change digital entertainment, and how to turn some of this into sound game mechanics. There is a lot more, especially about game grammar. If you take a look at the slides, their are also nice prognostication about the evolution of digital entertainment based on what he finds important in Web2.0:

“- Participation: trust, remix and mashup, cult of the amateur, Quality not required, distrust of centralized authority
- Abandonment of the publisher model: long tails, niches, duplicate content
- Different distribution channels: digital only, monetize passion not trials, slow openings, not big
- Services instead of products: data not code, perpetual beta
- 3R’s: Ratings (the participatory Web is premised on metadata on “content”), rankings (And metadata on “users”), Reputation (adding up to a user-driven system of surfacing user-created content)
- Run anywhere, common platform: “Above the level of a single device.”“

600,426,974,379,824,381,952 ways to spell Viagra

Not that I am really interested by research&dev about spam filtering, but this American Scientist article by Brian Hayes is quite interesting from a cultural point of view. It basically describes spam as a social and economic phenomenon rather
than a technological one and take an an immunological metaphor to explain it (“where the contest is between a host organism and pathogens or parasites, and where both sides have to adapt and evolve in order to survive“).

“If e-mail containing the word “Viagra” is blocked, there are other ways of getting the idea across, including synonyms and circumlocutions (“sildenafil citrate,” “impotence meds,” “the little blue pill”). An adaptive filter will soon flag these terms as well, but by then the spammer can move on to other options. For some kinds of variation—such as obfuscatory misspelling along the lines of “V1@gra”—computational methods could automate the generation of random variants.
(…)
So how many ways can you spell Viagra? The question is addressed directly by an amusing Web page, created by Rob Cockerham of Sacramento, whose title announces: “There are 600,426,974,379,824,381,952 ways to spell Viagra.”
(…)
When I first noticed spam with aberrant spellings, I assumed that someone out there in the murky world of spam service providers had written a program to generate random variants
(…)
I still suspect that such random-spelling generators exist in the spam world, but the evidence of my own inbox suggests they are not widely used. The telltale mark of their use would be a peculiar abundance of hapax legomena—the lit-crit term for words that appear only once in a corpus“

Why do I blog this? cultural aspects of “teh web”.

Pondering user-generated content frenziness

An interesting comment by Pete Mortensen on a post by Bruce Nussbaum about the very low number of participation on user-generated content platforms:

“tools that allow people to be designers or broadcasters have been around for years, and they have been niche. What YouTube has done is create a single repository that can find relevant video for virtually any subject you want to know about, and then provided a cross-platform, speedy solution to deliver it. The role of the people posting videos, let alone storing them, is a mechanism to this bigger goal, a place to find the videos you want when you want them. If all the clips were put up by an automated computer, most people wouldn’t care.

This is the great myth of Web 2.0, that its revolution has come from people creating things. It has actually changed the Internet by putting people in control of how to measure popularity and identify your own interests. The actual content is generally from professionals. And that’s a more sustainable view to take, I think. We don’t become creators of entertainment, we become curators for the entertainment of ourselves and others. That’s a very different kind of participation.“

Why do I blog this? some quotes to be used in a presentation about web2.0, user generated content and how this can of interest to the video game industry. I may not entirely be okay with “The actual content is generally from professionals”, the rest of the assertions are interesting. Reminds me of this Guardian article last year: What is the 1% rule which describes that “50% of all Wikipedia article edits are done by 0.7% of users, and more than 70% of all articles have been written by just 1.8% of all users” or that on Yahoo! Groups “1% of the user population might start a group; 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content, whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress; 100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups”

Although this hard figures are tough, it does not dismiss the “user-generated content” meme (aka craftware), the situation is just different and there are some design opportunities anyway based on these.

Share your life

I already blogged about onlife, this program now called Slife that tracks and help you to visualizes traces of your interaction with Mac applications. There is now a “social component” called Slifeshare:

A Slifeshare is an online space where you share your digital life activities such as browsing the web and listening to music with your friends, family or anyone you care about. It is a whole new way of staying in touch, finding out which sites, videos and music are popular with your friends, meeting new people and discovering great new stuff online. Take it for a spin, it’s free, easy to set-up and quite fu

The “how page” is quite complete and might scare to death any people puzzled by how technologies led us to a transparent society (a la Rousseau). Look at the webpage that is created with the slife information:

Why do I blog this? Slife was already an interesting application, in terms of how the history of interaction is shown to the user. This social feature add another component: using Jyri’s terminology (watch his video, great insights), it takes people’s interaction with various applications as a “social object”. This means that designers assume that a sociability will grow out of the interaction patterns (in a similar way to the sociability of Flickr is based on sharing pictures).

web/internet

I am often mesmerized by how people use the terms “Internet” and “Web” interchangeably, as if they were synonymous. Sometimes even in meetings at work, the discuss ends with the differentiation pointed by a person fed up with this (taken from weboepedia):

The Internet is a massive network of networks, a networking infrastructure. It connects millions of computers together globally, forming a network in which any computer can communicate with any other computer as long as they are both connected to the Internet. Information that travels over the Internet does so via a variety of languages known as protocols.

The World Wide Web, or simply Web, is a way of accessing information over the medium of the Internet. (…) The Web uses the HTTP protocol, only one of the languages spoken over the Internet, to transmit data. Web services, which use HTTP to allow applications to communicate in order to exchange business logic, use the the Web to share information. The Web also utilizes browsers, such as Internet Explorer or Netscape, to access Web documents called Web pages that are linked to each other via hyperlinks.

The Web is just one of the ways that information can be disseminated over the Internet. The Internet, not the Web, is also used for e-mail, which relies on SMTP, Usenet news groups, instant messaging and FTP. So the Web is just a portion of the Internet, albeit a large portion, but the two terms are not synonymous and should not be confused.

Why do I blog this? Even though this is a mistake and a common one, it’s interesting to see how people name things and it seems that this mistake is made in english or in other language (for example my mother tongue: french). However, I am not nerdy enough to take the piss when people interchange the words, what is rather intriguing is the underlying reasons for that.

Besides, I really prefer the term “information super-highway” which definetely rocks (“les autoroutes de l’information” in french) because it can lead to tremendous wording such as “having a homepage on an information superhighway” or “traffic jam on an information super-highway”.

This also reminds me the discussion Julian Bleecker had about “being in the Internet” or “on the Internet”, or saying “the InternetS”.

Mapping the world wide web circa 1995

Working lately on visualization of coordinating agents, I ran across old work about cyberspace visualization that struck me as very intriguing. See for instance Cyberspace geography visualization: Mapping the World-Wide Web to help people find their way in cyberspace by Luc Girardin (bro of fabien).

The central goal of this paper is to give information about virtual locations to the actors of cyberspace in order to help them solve orientation issues, i.e. the lost-in-cyberspace syndrome. The approach taken involves low dimensional digital media to create the visualization that can guide you. (…) To perform this task, the self-organizing maps algorithm is used because it preserves the topological relationships of the original space, conjointly lowering the dimensionality. (…) By geometrically approximating the vector distribution in the neurons of the self-organizing maps, this method provides a means to analyse the landscape of the mapping of cyberspace.

Here are maps of three websites:

Why do I blog this? The aim and the viz are interesting. At that time, there was this navigational issue of how people would navigate in the hypertextual virtual world. Now things changed a bit actually and it seems to me that the hypertext has been either forgotten or taken for granted (well the wikipedia is a cool hypertext isn’t it?). More here

AOL dataset plots

Some folks already plotted stuff coming form the super-quickly-available-and-vanished AOL datasets. See for instance u500k.erinye.com, who calculated various indexes and plotted some data (below is one of them that I picked up randomly). If you’re one of the 10,000 users, this is a glimpse of your private life: