books

Cory Doctorow will be reading from his recent Little Brother at the ballard branch of SPL on may 19th. I’m planning to be there, the progreff of nature depending.

I went to the gaming session of Seattle dorkbot last night. I went to two of the sessions, and then spent the third in the bar. The third session was a real yawner, correctly identified as such by Ario, that made me sad, as I’m very interested in the topic of “Games for Social Change.” Here’s my notes from the thing, as it might be of interest to readers, I mainly took notes on Jordan Weisman’s session on Alternate Reality Games.

To some extent, it was a marketingish presentation, although as you can see JW is particularly rife with geek cred.

So, the notes:

ARGs tell stories interactively. The premise began for them, based on the Kubrick/Spielberg movie AI, because they’d been licensed to make a number of games based on the product, but the movie wasn’t particularly given to making games. Instead of making games based on the movie itself, they made it based on the universe that the movie took place in.

Their question was, how to tell that story. But they came up with an idea based on the narrative structure organic to the web.

I’m not sure I didn’t replace Jordan’s point with one of my own here: Different models of disseminating information have different methods of telling stories that are organic to them; bards, epic poetry (e.g. Iliad, Odyssey); books, novels; television, sitcoms; movies, summer blockbusters; What is the native activity of the internet at time circa now? JW says looking through a ton of crap looking for relevant partial pieces of information.

What if one were tell stories through scattered shards of information? Deconstruct a narrative, create all the evidence that the story had taken place, and then hide the evidence and throw away the story.

What is the device on which this story will be told? The ‘media sphere,’ which JW describes as ‘all devices with electricity and some without,’ but I think it’s easier to say all information-bearing objects, here, which is a metaphor from InfoSci that is similar in scope.

This is essentially a community effort, the people who take place in the exploration form a ‘hivemind‘ in response to finding shards, and tell stories to each other. The story goes from being the original narrative to being a consensus narrative that comes from the audience’s experience.

The community effect produced is that the hivemind has every skill on the planet, and it can go everywhere and do everything and anything. It has essentially any skill on the planet. It is also, by that same factor, smarter than the people writing the game.

Sample: Ilovebees

• Use life as a game board — it took place all over the world.
• radio drama told on payphones — fragments of the story were released as people talked
• Name of game… campaign for prerelease of Halo 2

This is, in its essence, pop culture hacking, it’s about about the audience crwating fiction and inseminating your references into their everyday consciousness. However, this is against the everyday experience of marketing staff — they want to put up as much collateral as possible and advertise it’s existence as widely as possible to get as many people to notice as possible. But that turns out to not work well with getting people to want to experience this, what you want to do is draw people down the rabbit hole.

How to get audience in? Spend time creating content, not telling them about it.
Allow communication about shards of content to draw people in… People will start looking with a few small clues.

highlights of their work
All of their big campaigns have led to marriages, because collaborate and share rahter than compete, story drives communities, competition drives individualism. This is, to a large extent, their goal — the building of a temporary community, possibly tied to awareness of some product or service that people make them make the game for. It’s an interesting balance between entertainment, advertising, and ‘using the real world as the gameboard.’

Pattern Recognition
William Gibson

William Gibson’s Pattern recognition was a tip of the hat to I love bees. I’m wondering if WG’s perception of ARG makes this a must-read for anyone interested in ARGs. I’m probably going to pick up the book in the next couple of weeks to find out. If anyone has any opinions on that, please feel free to let me know via email or comment.

One thing that JW mentioned at the end of his talk, and I suspect that this was a deliberate seed effort of his, was to say that if you were in front of the Bellagio during CES on 1/6/2007, you might see something interesting in the fountains. Anyway, in the spirit of thanking him for coming to the event, I thought I’d pass this on.

Technorati Tags: alternaterealitygames, community, deconstructednarrative, dorkbotsea, ilovebees, rabbithole, socialengineering, storytelling

Narrativization is a process by which we help provide the context that takes things from being a mere series of events to being story and history. However, this narrativization may not be limited to effects strictly within the text. It may, in fact, function as a version of hypnosis, according to Scott Adams, when it works in appeals to different senses and sense perceptions.

Certainly, there are some pretty good arguments for the unconscious mind affecting the conscious, but how far can you really take this sort of thing?

Neal Stephenson, who has used Bicameralism as a plot device, was the first person who came to mind, so I flipped through Cryptonomicon looking for stuff that met Scott Adams description of the techniques. A bunch of the lengthy digressions that sort of litter Cryptonomicon are full of the sort of appeal to the senses that Adams describes, which makes me wonder whether it was a deliberate technique for manipulation or just an accident of style. Some apparently would claim that Tolkein did something similar.

It makes me wonder how much of all this is tied to the overall topic of framing the message, though.

Technorati Tags: civilization, cryptonomicon, discontents, framingthemessage, hypnosis, lakoff, scottadams

The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization is somewhat heavy going, but it’s the definitive work about a lot of areas in information organization. A lot of people encounter information organization issues professionally in the technical fields, but a lot of these issues have been around for ages, appearing in business and libraries for a long period of time.

This book has a huge amount of information in a very small amount of space, and can be somewhat heavy going. It has something to say about almost every issue having to do with organizing information. I also highly advise reading it for anyone in a MLIS/MSIM program, I went and looked this book up today for someone whose class wasn’t reading it for some reason and I advise it highly. It requires an Information Architect or other web designer to be able to think in basic principles about the stuff that they’re doing to be able to use this book — looking for information about controlled vocabularies instead of what the latest buzzword is. However, the payoff from having done so is high due to the clarity of the information presented.

The writing in this book is in the ‘little red schoolhouse‘ academic style from the University of Chicago. I found it very easily digestable and understandable, and it had a profound affect on how I thought about information organization; I credit doing very well in my classes on the subject and being able to speak intelligibly on the subject outside of class to having started out by reading this book. I recommend it highly.