gewgaw

A picture may be worth a thousand words – but captions (in this case) added some serious grins. Partly because so many of them are so wrong. What is it about mean-ness and cute-ness that make them go so well together?

:)

What really amazed me about this post was how quickly the little captions started to form a narrative in my mind. Little people, doing their own little thing… and suddenly, you’re clicking ahead to see what happens!

I am looking forward to the next episode already!

But the movie isn’t really about science.

As Mr. Chen, the director, said, “It’s about power, in a way.” That would be the nearly feudalistic power that a graduate adviser has over his student, who after 16 or more years sitting in a classroom listening and regurgitating information must now change gears and learn how to produce original research. That grueling process has been the crucible in which new scientists are made ever since Plato mentored Aristotle, and although it rarely leads to murder [adjoining article], it can often lead to disaffection, strife and lifelong feuds.

“The film did a really good job of capturing the atmosphere of a research lab,” Dr. Greene said.

“Graduate students are like apprentices,” said Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago. “It’s from another era. It’s something we don’t do well anymore, hand-crafted training.”

Advisers, he noted, write recommendations, decide when it is time for a student to defend his or her thesis and divvy up credit for the work that gets done together. Astronomers still argue about whether Jocelyn Burnell-Bell, who discovered the first pulsar while a graduate student at Cambridge University in England, should have shared in the subsequent Nobel Prize given to her adviser, Antony Hewish.

Janet D. Stemwedel, a philosopher at San Jose State University, recently wrote on her blog, Adventures in Ethics and Science, “It’s hard to understand just how powerless you can feel as a graduate student unless you have been a graduate student.”

Dr. Turner said: “The bond between student and adviser is almost like getting married. You’re going to be working and interacting with this person the rest of your life.”

From this article on “Dark Matter” – a film about graduate studies in physics based on startling events, which recently won a prize at Sundance.

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On the other end of the spectrum… see this piece on creating passionate user communities.

* Have levels and rewards for participating (but again, not money–that totally changes the motivation, or at least the perceived motivation). The rewards can simply be status, early access to betas, and especially restricted access to the developers where they can discuss their ideas or at least listen to the engineers and designers describe why they made the choices they did, etc. [Don't reward people for post quantity alone... if post-count is the only criteria, you end up with a zillion useless posts]. Study successful user group communities for examples (like, say, javaranch.com–3/4 million unique visitors a month).

* Teach users how to help other members by creating documents (or getting other users to write them) on how to ask and answer questions in the most productive way.

* Include some just-for-fun activities in your community, like one (usually ONLY one) totally off-topic forum.

* Make sure there are interesting, easy-access ways for users to get to know more about one another. Be SURE to have user profile pages that include gender, photos, and some other personal info in addition to the specifics related to this particular community. Which leads to…

* Encourage members to meet offline! Hold a dirt-cheap User’s Conference, ideally in more than one city, to get things started. Start a forum from the people who sign-up for the conference, and offer user group or forum leaders free entry to the event (and be sure to have a private user group or forum leader cocktail reception). Tips for that are in this recent post on face-to-face). Create a document on How To Start A User Group, and make sure users know how to get it. There is a great series of posts on how to start a user group written by the guys behind the Edmonton .NET User Group. (Thanks guys)

* Encourage forum moderators or other community leaders to have their own private discussion space.

* Don’t tolerate abuse of the beginners, but don’t force the experts to have to put up with newbie issues. As any community matures, you must provide separate areas for newbies and experts… if the community culture is one of generosity and motivation, there will still be enough experts who want to spend time helping newbies.

* Why not help your top community leaders get a book deal? You never know… if it’s a tech topic, direct them (or yourself) over to Wiley publisher Joe Wikert for some excellent and candid advice (search his archives, and you’ll find everything from how to write a proposal, whether you need an agent, etc.)

Consider: How can these exact same tips be used to create passionate work environments? Some of them seem too “extereme” but when you look at them a bit longer… they make sense, in a way. Are they used in your team/company? If not – why? If so – have you been successful in following the rules for integrating new hires into your culture? Thanks for the great link, Raph!!

To follow up on the last post, my friend Joe recommendeds this paper on happiness and economic growth factors.

SUMMARY—Policy decisions at the organizational, corporate, and governmental levels should be more heavily influenced by issues related to well-being––people’s evaluations and feelings about their lives. Domestic policy currently focuses heavily on economic outcomes, although economic indicators omit, and even mislead about, much of what society values. We show that economic indicators have many shortcomings, and that measures of well-being point to important conclusions that are not apparent from economic indicators alone. For example, although economic output has risen steeply over the past decades, there has been no rise in life satisfaction during this period, and there has been a substantial increase in depression and distrust. We argue that economic indicators were extremely important in the early stages of economic development, when the fulfillment of basic needs was the main issue. As societies grow wealthy, however, differences in well-being are less frequently due to income, and are more frequently due to factors such as social relationships and enjoyment at work.

So *why* was I looking for a team-wide YOU ROCK picture on Google yesterday? Because we had a big hands-on event, and in preparing for it they all rocked so that it could too. Each month the team gets better and better – clearly communicating about goals, quickly reaching consensus about plans of action, and getting things into the build. It is beautiful to behold.

Of course, the biggest reward for all that hard work is seeing people play the game, smiling and laughing. As Miyamoto said in his keynote, it’s about the giggles. For us especially – it’s about creating a special combination of exploration, expression, and joy in everyone who plays the game.

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Sadly, there was a price to pay for seeing so many smiles at the event. Post-demo, I was hanging out with a bunch of folks at the Ha-Ra Club – a totally divey dive Tenderloin bar. While it was fantastic, at some point, my wallet disappeared. ID, credit cards… you name it. So I had a day of phone hold muzak, bank lines, and DMV benches. Woo hoo.

More annoying: I found myself at a mental standstill about where to put the money I got from the bank. There I am, just past the teller, looking into my bag. “I’ll just put this in my… D’OH!!!” The lost wallet *as container* was actually bothering me more than the missing (now worthless) cards and the (not so worthless) cash I’d had in it. So after the DMV I stopped off for a replacement.

I don’t like shopping in big malls… nor did I cherish the idea of paying a ton for a fancy new wallet at some boutique in the city. My last wallet was super – a bright green LODIS beauty that I got for a bargain at Marshall’s in LA, when shopping for an impromptu pair of beach-going flip-flops. Since it worked so well (I’ve had the wallet for over 3 years and it still looked brand new!), I decided to see if the one near my house would bear similar fruit.

As it turns out – the Marshall’s didn’t have anything reasonable (there is a trend in women’s accessories that involves huge, bulky fasteners, buckles and studs which seems to get worse with the presence of plastic. That just doesn’t seem right in a wallet-sized item)… but the Nordstrom Rack just down the street had lots of choices. Lots.

In fact, and I kid you not – I spent about an hour looking at all the wallets they had crammed into these 2 rounder displays. Short wallets, fat wallets, ones with coin purses, ones without. Each new option introduced a bunch of questions, doubts and anxieties.

Should I get something that held coins? I usually just dump them in the piggy (ok it’s a Froggie) bank when I get home. Should I consider a larger-format wallet which would include my checkbook – or perhaps one of the nice square types that are perfect for European bills? The more I looked, the harder it became to choose. I considered, reconsidered… and then just decided on the simplest, smallest thing I could find. Lo and behold – it was another LODIS (only this time, it’s red!). Would a quick trip to their website (foregoing the 50% discount) have been a better use of my time?

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Waiting in line (there were a lot of folks there – it is a large store chain), I began to think about all the crap that was on sale in the Nordstrom Rack. From my vantage point I could see piles of Juicy Couture clothing (Logo: “Only 10 Calories! Won’t make you fat! Original Couture Pie ! Juicy!”) , designer sunglasses (Diesel! Dior! Kate Spade! Armani!), jewelry (racks and racks of it), handbags, perfume, oversized “fashion” watches (spilling out of chunky plastic containers on a table alongside the queue)… it was a sea of choices. None of which I was particularly thrilled to make.

We have so much crap now, it’s as if it spills out of every corner. At my local grocery store – balloons tied to magazine and candy racks that also sell batteries and cure-alls. Flowers, lawn chairs, everything you need for Easter including plush bunnies! Does this stuff ever get bought? What happens to the leftovers? Is there a Nordstrom Rack in the sky, where all warmed-over trends and 3rd-rate markdowns go to die? It’s just depressing.

And then back in the car, on the radio – Vandana Shiva spoke about the environmental costs of globalization, the human costs (in terms of positive life experiences), and choice. The interviewer sounded incredulous at times. Hostile.

Choices. Do we need so many? Are the ones we make leading to results we want, can justify… or believe in?

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I have always been curious about the core loop of the Sims base game, and its ties to the consumer mentality mentioned in the articles above. “The formula for human well-being used to be simple: Make money, get happy. So why is the old axiom suddenly turning on us?” we now ask. In a way – that’s exactly what the Sims is about, if you look at it in the meta.

Having more objects, bigger homes and even more Sims means having more to deal with – and that doesn’t always make the Sims (or you) “happy”. The grind is compelling, on some level – because it is a familiar one. I for one cannot help but self reflect after playing.

In some key ways, MySims moves away from the jobs/money/happiness cycle.. attempting to focus more on notions of community and economy, individual and group expression. By encouraging people to build up little villages of interlocking parts, can it help them explore issues on par with those touched upon by the base game? Can it lead to discussions about our society, how it is – and how it might be?

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When I got home from shopping, there was a note in my inbox from one of the team’s engineers – about choice and UI. At first it might seem snarky – but if you read all the way through, you find yourself nodding vigorously. At least, I did.

In trying to create a new kind of Sims game, have we focused on keeping it simple? Absolutely. Is there room to improve? Definitely! Wii seems to be making a strong show with both the younger and older – people who will see (and use) the controller differently than the devteam. This cannot be overlooked – even if it means that less gets into the game, in the short run. A focus on usability is key for titles on the platform, period.

More importantly, how much content do we really need to get into the game? Last night several people asked me “How many different Sims is it possible with the current set of options in this mode? How many buildings can you build with the pieces in the design? Objects?” When I look at those numbers (which are … substantial, to put it mildly) – is it a good thing? Will new (and potentially inexperienced) players really want to know on the front end how many choices they have? Perhaps not.

In an industry where those numbers are usually listed directly on the back of the box – it takes a little time to adjust to the notion that less… just might be more.

I Googled “rocker” today for a team-wide “You Rock!” email – and found this:

Could it rock any more than it does? I don’t think so.

When I agreed to speak at SXSW on “Web 2.o to Web 3D”, I wasn’t sure exactly how to approach the topic. I considered some sort of speculative mumbo-jumbo about how online gaming might lead people to expect some sort of 3D fidelity in their everyday web activity… but I don’t really believe that it will, so that was a no-go.

I also contemplated the game affordances of Web 2.o activities and how they might translate to the immersive environments of a future web… but that seemed kind of poncy. Who am I to stand up in front of a bunch of web developers and talk about how games can inform their work? No one likes a know-it-all. So I asked around at GDC to see what *other* developers thought about the proposed shift from 2-3D online.

For the most part, the immediate reaction was negative. There were the usual arguments about our failure to solve usability issues in 3D (remeber VRML?) and discussions of information overload… very similar to this thread on Dana’s blog (thanks Darius!). In talking through the various arguments and angles, I kept coming to the same conclusion: none of these discussions were really adding value. If you are pro-metaverse, then you’re pro – and design discussions about why it won’t work are pretty useless to you. If your against – the design issues alone are an easy crutch. Hrm.

Then there were discussions about cost. Moving to 3D has introduced tons of production challenges to gaming… things that can railroad even the best designs. If suddenly all web apps were trying to layer on top of (or embed themselves in) some sort of 3D metaphor – how would that impact the flexibility of those apps, from a production standpoint? What would these costs do to the overall quality and variety of available experiences?

Costs. How much does the web cost now? How much would it cost to produce a 3D web? Googling around, I found this BBC article from December – and was pretty much stunned.

“According to research carried out by office equipment supplier Canon, based on figures from the National Energy Foundation and Infosource, more than six million PCs will be left on over Christmas, consuming nearly forty million kilowatt hours of electricity.

Together with the printers and other hardware they will waste enough electricity to microwave 268 million mince pies, pumping 19,000 unnecessary tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, at a cost of around £8.6m.

To a large extent this waste is a result of carelessness and a failure to think, as few machines need to be left switched on when they aren’t in use. We have, as a society, been too lazy about this for too long and it is time we became much more aware of the energy costs of our hi-tech lifestyle.

However, there is a wider problem since many of our beloved technological toys are remarkably inefficient and use more electricity than they really need to. ”

I will assume that most of you have already read up on the feasibility of our current digital consumption (particularly maintaining current tech given rising energy costs). But I hadn’t. And I was totally blown away. Especially about the costs of replicating our real (and increasingly polluted world) in the digital realm:

“As well as the computers in our homes and offices, it is also important to think about the energy we are using – and the carbon we are producing – by creating and maintaining a presence online.

The virtual server that hosts my weblog is on all the time, even when nobody is viewing my pages, and although its energy use is negligible, multiply that by 55 million or more blogs or 100 million MySpace profiles and you get some significant numbers.

It gets even worse with avatars. At the moment Linden Labs, who host the popular Second Life virtual world, has around 4,000 servers. Although they have two million signed up users, at any one time only around 15,000 people are logged on.

Blogger and technology writer Nicholas Carr did some rough calculations, based on the power consumption of each server being 200 watts and the power consumption of the logged-on user’s own PC being 120 watts, and reckons that each avatar uses 1,752 kilowatt hours of electricity – or about the same amount as an average person living in Brazil.

This works out at 1.17 tons of carbon dioxide per year, per avatar, or the same as driving a large car 2,300 miles. ”

Web 2.0 to web 3D? Perhaps we could – but should we? That was the question I decided to ask. Since giving my talk, I’ve been thinking a lot about the desirability of more immersive web presence… and just of computing in general. In theory, computers and computing technology are just a small part of the total burden we put on our environment. But if shutting off my computer and cube lights at the end of the day will make even the smallest dent in my own personal footprint… then I’m doing it.

I’m also writing about my experience to get a dialog started about conservation in this area – with friends, colleagues and whoever else I can reach. Is the network – worth the potential costs to our environment (and wallets)? What could you do personally to reduce the demand for the digital – and re-focus on what’s just outside your window?

And on a less grand scale: how can you conserve power each day? Do you find yourself leaving your work machine on over night for the convenience of not re-opening a few application windows? Devkits? Televisions? Lamps from Ikea? Could you turn off the desktop or laptop you have running at home when you’re at the office? Sure – your refrigerator and gas consumption are still big additives to your overall footprint. But simple, small steps make a difference, too.

PS: Know of supporting/conflicting/interesting data on the topic of digital worlds, computer work, games and greening? Please send them to me via my NU account!

Ha Ha Ha

Sim City DS!!!!!

Will has been working out that non-broken arm. Kudos and much love to Souris and the SXSW dusers (or is it doozers?) – a fantastic way to celebrate one more year and hook up with lots of great people!

:)

For those of you who missed it or could not be there: Clint has posted his awesome GDC talk along with some discussion of edge cases/sticking points. When Randy and Chaim’s presentations go up I will post them as well.

I heart GDC.

Mucho travelling in the last few weeks !

Gist: At the end of February, attended a Microsoft event for academics teaching games to students in CS programs. Then spent a week preparing for GDC. Taught the Game Design & Tuning Workshop once again (7th year now!), recorded/archived Experimental Gameplay Sessions (we had a great set of speakers this year!) and then gave my talk on Friday (will post slides and recaps of both the MS event and GDC talks later in the month).

Post GDC, attended Lulu’s kick-ass party (that’s Randy at the DJ station in the center top of the image) which was as always, totally amazing. Drank champagne, had a Loco Rocco birthday cake (thanks Ross and Heather!!! It was so cute and so tasty!), and danced the night away.

Now I’m in Austin for a day at SXSW, hanging with friends and having a second pseudo-birthday here in the coolest town in Texas. Can not wait to get my hands on some BBQ. Updates and details about the workshop, conference and so on when I get a little time to myself. Almost home!