Metagames

February 17, 2010


When I worked in CallCenterLand, dutifully typing conversations for the deaf and hard of hearing, I would count my time by a not-too-complex system of circles and Xs.

My ten hour day would be broken into 40 15-minute parts, each represented by a circle. I would cross them out, one by one, until it was break time. Upon my return, I would dive into the next set of circles. Each 15-minute period graphically represented, I would find myself with a visual reminder of how far I had come. Circle. Circle. Circle. X. X. X.

Even earlier, on my walks home from grade school, my route would be broken into one-block segments. How fast could I reach the end of stage one? Could I beat my record for stage three? The sixth block was extra long – like a par 5, I suppose – and it would be the biggest challenge.

This is the thought behind creating lists – not just to determine what needs to be done, but also to physically rid yourself of yet another stage, the dark black line crossing out a completed task signifying accomplishment like no other form of communication ever has.

Large or small, these are a form of metagame: namely, creating tasks within larger tasks. I suppose the true definition comes from true games; mini-games inside of ordinary tasks, like time trials during dishwashing or not touching the sidewalk during stage seven of your walk home, are now seen in today’s videogame world with increasing abundance. But for me, the idea of a metagame is just as much the way we spend time separating our everyday accomplishments into more palatable pieces.

No one can eat a sandwich all at once, or do the laundry in one load. Yet, we try to tackle projects in lumps – we look at writing books, not chapters; we look at writing campaigns, not individual print pieces. We take in the whole, even when it’s human nature to chop things up into pieces. It’s human nature to want completeness, even if it’s completing just one portion of a larger body.

I could talk more about metagames – and the issue of completeness – but I’d be entering into the territory of a fantastic article by Sleepover, San Francisco. An excerpt:

When a game has built-in achievements, explicit hidden items, and other layered-in experiences, it’s usually pitched as added value. In reality, they’re only adding in time consumption — a measure of value most likely derived from the era of arcades.

I believe the main reason games like Farmville maintain a huge player base is the enticement of the metagame. The actual game mechanic of farming — which comprises most of the game — is unfathomably dull. It’s the abstracted layer above the farming that creates the primary motivation: ribbons (achievements), new items, leaderboards, etc.

But the blur of time-consumption and value is simultaneously damaging Farmville. Because satisfaction is derived only from the metagame, success is a measure of how many hours you’re willing to play, not your abilities. Players who have invested a lot of time into the game end up feeling bitter about the fruits (or vegetables) of their labor.

You have to see the page for yourself. The article is a series of metagames of its own.

(Via someone, from his or her blog. Can’t remember. Sorry.)

Tags: Technology, What I've Been Reading, Words, Writing |

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Tuesday’s MousePath

February 10, 2010


There’s a kind of simple art in following your mouse path for an entire day.

My Mouse Path

This was taken with MousePath, from 8:00 am to 5:40 pm yesterday. Interesting notes: a lot of fast, straight lines up to the right corner (where I have my OSX 10.4 “All Windows” shortcut) and a lot of black dots (where my mouse rested - the larger the dot, the longer the rest) in the middle of the page, where I often drop the cursor as I’m typing in everyone’s favorite program: Word.

Even cooler: you can faintly see the top of my browser, thanks to a darker horizontal line along which my favorites sit.

UPDATE! They’ve moved MousePath to a new site - and renamed it iographica.

Tags: Technology |

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Two quick interviews for people not going to SXSW

February 3, 2010


I’m not going to SXSW.

To remedy that, I’m living vicariously through pre-SXSW launch by boning up on the panels and interviews supporting it. Like a new series of short interviews with scheduled SXSW speakers at Scatter/Gather.

Not quite the same thing, but it’s making me feel not so bad. For now.

So far, they’ve posted interviews with Rich Ziade on article mills…

“I love the Web and I love how dramatically it’s lowered the barrier to publish (even the word ‘publish’ feels outdated). Everybody can talk into the channel today. It’s an awesome democratizer. At the same time, it’s getting increasingly difficult to really find things that I value.

…

I need to be able to lean on people I trust and respect to better present information for me. I don’t want a ’stream’ or a ‘river’ of anything. I want to stop drowning and I want quality to win over quantity.”

…and Margot Bloomstein on content strategy (answering the question, “What’s the difference between content strategy and copywriting?”).

What’s the difference between a nutritious dietary plan and a bunch of carrots? Carrots are great–but they may not even be part of the bigger picture if, say, your family doesn’t like them or you need to figure out how to get more protein into your diet. Content strategy and copywriting face a similar sort of carrot confusion. Content strategy addresses the what, why, by whom, at what frequency, how–all issues that may affect copywriting, but aren’t synonymous with it. Copywriting is just one aspect of the tactical execution of a content strategy. And for most of us, carrots are just one small part of a healthy diet, into which we also bring recipes, other ingredients, and preferences.

Okay. That’s all. Sorry about the marketing/Web industry-tinged blather. Go back to listening to music from my last post, if you’d like.

Tags: Content Strategy, Technology, Writing |

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I know what you did last summer (because you told me your location at all times on Twitter)

February 1, 2010


I was in both St. Cloud and Minneapolis this weekend. Most of you didn’t know that. On purpose. Because I don’t tweet my location. On purpose. But man, it can be hard to hold it back.

See, I know everyone’s jumping on the FourSquare bandwagon, just like everyone jumped on the BrightKite bandwagon, just like everyone will jump on the LocalJump or Designatr or MyPlacez bandwagon when those unfortunately named start-ups finally start up. I get it. People can connect. “Oh, you’re there? Well, I’m here. Let’s hang, dawg.”

And, I’ll admit. While I haven’t decided that location-based social networking is valuable or necessary or wise for myself, I have signed up for both FourSquare and BrightKite. (I had to. There’s a username involved, and I wanted to collect mine.)

That being said, I won’t use them. It’s already enough that I constantly give out my thoughts and my motivations and my activities; I simply don’t feel right doing all of this and tagging it with my EXACT LOCATION AT THIS EXACT MOMENT.

There was a point in which my own safety and the safety of my family (who may or may not be with me when my location is given off) outweighed my need to relay yet another part of my life. It can get hard - after all, two years of constant lifestreaming can develop a habit, leaving me mindlessly exclaiming, “OH MAN I’M IN ST. CLOUD AND DIVISION STREET STILL SUCKS!”

When, in fact, what I’m saying in that case is, “OH MAN I’M IN ST. CLOUD AND MY FAMILY IS HOME ALONE SO NOW YOU KNOW!”

And that’s why I don’t BrightKite or FourSquare or WhateverWhatever. Because, as Aaron said a few years back, “I think we got caught up in the excitement of lifestreaming and forgot to really think about who might be following those streams. Maybe some of those people are crazies.”

Tags: Technology, Travel |

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RT @UserName Tweets are real content, you guys #srsly

January 26, 2010


The following post touches on three things: Twitter, overreaction and a tidy little moral.

On Twitter, and its Place as Serious Content

There are two schools of thought on the validity of Twitter’s content. One school sees Twitter comments as banal, throwaway lines, not worthy of archiving or protecting. They’re the bottom of the barrel, resting comfortably next to Facebook updates and MySpace pages.

The other understands that Twitter continues to serve as a micro-microblog. There may only be 140 characters, but that limit doesn’t downplay the merit of the thought. In other words: you say it in 140 characters or 140 paragraphs – there’s no difference in the hierarchy of importance.

Those that tweet about breakfast are in the first group. Those that spend time crafting brilliant non-sequiturs are in the second. Those that pooh-pooh Twitter as a waste of time are in the first. Those that see Twitter’s value as a depository for new information are in the second.

I’m in the second group.

Which is why I get so upset when a tweet is mishandled. My tweet. My words. My thoughts.

My Overreaction

See, it was cold outside. It was snowing. It was a blizzard; as in, the snow was blowing sideways. And I could have said this. I could have said, on Twitter, “THE SNOW IS BLOWING SIDEWAYS,” and gotten on with my life.

I didn’t. Because I’m in that second group of Twitter users. Instead, I wrote this.

Not high on the LULZ Meter, but still, better than just saying “THE SNOW IS BLOWING SIDEWAYS.”

I continued on with my day. And then, I was re-tweeted.

A subtle change – and a change made in good faith – but enough of a change to upset the timing, lose the sarcasm and render my former tweet spayed and neutered. Just like that, my mood went black. Tired of being nice, I respond with this passive aggressive gem.

I felt better. For a while.

And Here’s Why I’m a Cranky Twitter User

If I write a blog post and someone wants to link back to it, I expect to be quoted accurately. Not out of context. I expect that what I say will be represented just as well on someone else’s blog as it is on my own – in fact, maybe even more so, since my work is being passed along with additional helpful comments attached.

I expect this because it’s what should be done. It’s what you do in print. It’s what you do at newspapers and magazines. It’s what you do when you’re blogging. It’s good, clean attribution.

On Twitter, however, things are still rolling like the Wild West. Tweets are seen as a thought, not a carefully worded message. That I wrote my original in a certain tone, with specific punctuation, isn’t taken into consideration. After all – it’s just a tweet, and it’s free to be passed along, truncated to allow for a RT and a hashtag and attribution even though, if you think about it, the tweet no longer represents what I said in the first place.

It’s why I don’t care for re-tweeting “with comments,” and why I rarely do it.

I’ve since apologized for the passive aggressiveness. The person who RTed me didn’t mean harm. It’s just that the perception of Twitter as a playground for creative content is still in its infant stages. And, thanks to its ever-expanding use, it may never reach that point.

Which is too bad. One spin through the old Favrd (now Favstar, I guess) community is enough to see the promise that Twitter holds in the form of one-line, creatively penned tweets, as valuable as any long form blog post or magazine article, whether for information, humor or truth.

Until that day, I’ll be over here, fighting for Twitter standards and burning bridges I never knew existed.

Tags: Annoyances, Technology, Words, Writing |

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What I’ve Been Reading - Furthering Education

January 25, 2010


What I’ve Read:
On Writing – Stephen King
Content Strategy for the Web – Kristina Halvorson
The Elements of User Experience – Jesse James Garrett

On WritingSelf-improvement is a multi-billion dollar industry.

Okay. Just kidding. I don’t actually know how much money the industry makes. One thing’s for sure: it’s got a monopoly on annoyance and self-importance, and if you could put a price on those two traits I’m sure the industry would be somewhere in the multi-billions. AMIRITE?

I prefer my self-improvement to be self-driven. And for me, it often is.

It’s driven by a nagging feeling that I’m quickly being driven in to obsolescence by content mills and marketing directors who feel they can cut corners by writing their own copy. Driven by the knowledge that getting published requires an insane amount of collaboration between luck and circumstance, not to mention an actual amount of talent. Driven by the demons of self-doubt. By a writer’s constant sense of impending failure. By whatever it is that drives writers to write whatever it is they write.

So sometimes I read books about writing. And, because I like the Web and writing for the Web and learning about the Web and adding skills and adding to the multi-billion dollar self-improvement industry, I read books about things that aren’t writing.

In terms of those books about writing (and I’ve read a few – see: Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott and Elements of Style Illustrated by Strunk and White), Stephen King’s On Writing is easily the best. For real.

It’s easy to pass Stephen King off as mass-market pulp purveyor – the type of tripe you find on the stands at the airport – but, come on. The dude’s a very good writer.

How can you tell? Easy: he wrote an entertaining book on writing. As in, I’d recommend it to people who aren’t writers. I’d recommend it to writers who feel they’re too cool for Stephen King.

Elements of User ExperienceThe book actually splits itself into two parts: one part life story, one part “how to write.” The two play off of each other rather well – the “how to write” part driving his life story, the life story giving a human quality to his “how to write” part. Some things you’ll learn: how to edit, how to drink a lot and recover, how to forget a large part of your career thanks to alcoholism, how to stop over-explaining, how to hole up and just write, how to have a near death experience, how to start your own newspaper as a grade-schooler, how to submit stories and expect nothing, how to be humble, how to understand that writing fiction is about as scientific as Intelligent Design.

Sure, it was inspiring. So inspiring that I took all of the lessons and jumped headfirst into another field: User Experience. And, once I had finished that, I jumped headfirst into yet another field: Content Strategy. (Which, I now realize, takes the craft of writing (featured in King’s On Writing) and applies it to the Web by way of User Experience. So, really, everything came full circle and this trio of books made perfect sense without making perfect sense at all.)

Content Strategy for the WebA bunch of other people can discuss Elements of User Experience better than I am able to. And I’ve already touched on Content Strategy for the Web – or, at least, my newfound interest in the field. The books themselves don’t matter that much when it comes to a “What I’ve Been Reading” post; in fact, the three books featured serve as one entry, one stage in my life when I understood that I needed to become better at something and I accepted all available resources to make it happen.

Kerrie bought me On Writing for my birthday. Knowing that I’m always three days away from finally starting a short story, she may have figured it would serve as a kick start. Instead, it made me more introspective, pushing me toward redefining what I want my writing career to be.

It may not have made me a better writer – just as the other books may not have made me a better Web person – but it did help me focus on simply being a writer, for better or worse.

Tags: Books, Content Strategy, Education, Literature, Technology, What I've Been Reading, Writing |

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On the wrong side of history: an ode to the Sega Dreamcast

January 18, 2010


I was a Sega Dreamcast devotee, which is to say I was one of those guys who fanatically defended a system that was, from the beginning, doomed to fail.

Here’s why: it was the best system on the market, and if you don’t believe me you’re an absolute fool who knows nothing about video games. Oh, man, don’t tell anyone, but I just GEEKED OUT on you right there.

The Birth of Dreamcastness

This was the winter of 2000, about a year after release and a few months into my job at the St. Cloud FuncoLand, a trashy yet endearing video game store that specialized in hoarding valuable Super Nintendo games and hounding Playstation 2 fans. The store was a comic book cave without the comic books, replaced instead with their more expensive and more acceptable counterpart, and we held our opinions high and our rants even higher.

And we were all Sega Dreamcast devotees. We were enamored with the little system. Its awkward controllers (which we defended, despite hypocritically hounding Xbox owners for their system’s too-small paddles), its optimized-Windows operating system (which allowed for countless imports), its NFL 2K series – it was all a dream, representing the future of video gaming.

But it wouldn’t last. Another two years and it was done. Gone forever. Its final coffin nails were hammered in by Sony’s grasp on a key video game truth: a good system is key, but great games are crucial.

The Death of Dreamcastness

I, and the lot of us, landed on the wrong side of history. In doing so, we also saw a legion of like-minded customers – people who came to us for advice, who we coaxed into like-mindedness – landing on the same side. The wrong side. The losing side.

When new technology is released to the world, we’re blinded by what’s happening now. We can’t help it. There are no rules. There are no trends to follow. There are no clues as to which technology will ultimately win out. Simply put, the landscape has yet to be mapped out.

This leads to a costly choice. We hyped the Sega Dreamcast – and, doing so, convinced hundreds that it would be worthwhile, costing them a good chunk of money and (eventually) agreeing that, while the Dreamcast was the better system, it wasn’t the most successful. And a non-successful system isn’t going to make games, rendering the “better system” argument null.

The Moral

So there we sat. The wrong side of history, hanging out with betamax, the Sega Game Gear and the ABA, patiently waiting for HD DVD to join us in a few years.

But it wasn’t all for naught. When the Nintendo Gamecube was released, I had learned my lesson. I sat back. I waited. And, despite the pro-Nintendo leanings of our store, I correctly predicted it would fail.

I had been burned before. I now understood what it was like to be on the wrong side of history. I now understood the importance of waiting a few rounds before entering the fight.

—

(Oh, BTW. This longish Dreamcast soliloquy was inspired by Consollection, a fantastic, probably totally exhaustive timeline of the video game console.)

Tags: Career, Technology, Vilhauer |

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