How To Break Anything

4

29 Aug 2010

The potential for games to inspire collective action towards a common goal
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No, Human Gameplay Trailer from woodn on Vimeo.

The above game No, Human looks interesting because it has this story that's something about doing your part as a human to save humanity (or work to destroy it?? I can't really tell from the above...).

And as in the screenshot below, the game even collects the total scores from all players over time:

There's no indication of this from what I can tell so far, but it would be very interesting to see these points applied to some common, collective goal. Especially considering the backstory, which seems to naturally lend itself to this kind of concept. Imagine a system with normal in-game goals just like any other game, but also meta-level goals where players are working to accomplish something larger through the collective actions of all others playing.

Perhaps the human race is only saved when a certain number of aliens are destroyed - and individual players can only combat a small number of them on their local copy of the game. I'm picturing a system where each player has a small part of the universe to defend, generated for them upon download; perhaps they can even see where their small piece of the world fits in relationship to other players nearby?

This reminds me of something I remember hearing a long time ago, regarding Katamari Damacy. If you're not familiar with Katamari Damacy, its a simple game where the goal is to roll a sticky ball (Katamari) over stuff (really, just anything), collecting bigger and bigger stuff as you go on to create a bigger Katamari.

When the Xbox Live/PS3 version was in development, I vaguely remember hearing that it would feature some kind of online multiplayer feature where the sum of all players' Katamari sizes would be totalled somewhere. And when that size reached a certain astronomical threshold, some new content would be unlocked. Looking around online I see that the total is collected, but I'm not sure that the unlocking of a new level or other content actually came to fruition.

I can see this concept also being applied to the above humans vs aliens game to create this sense of collective action with other players, working towards a common meta-goal. Maybe when enough players accomplish some goal a new weapon is available. If there's one thing compelling to humans its the idea of belonging to a group - I expect to see someone innovative to fully take advantage of this to create some kind of compelling collective/social game sometime in the future.
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10 Aug 2010

[weak signals] I Move You- microfitness built on expected reciprocity with friends
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"The influence friends have over each other is ridiculously powerful—more than 50% of challenges get completed by both friends, even more if you're persistent! Let's use this opportunity to make each others' lives better (or at least more fun)."
via imoveyou.com
via weaksignals.posterous.com
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5 Jul 2010

"Versions" by Oliver Laric, and a few thoughts on considering the value of images, mimicry, and 'realness'
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“Versions” is a visual essay by Oliver Laric, investigating the re-appropriation and manipulation of images in our culture.

Watch the video here.

via booooooom.com

Oliver Laric does a lot of good thinking on the nature of images, in the "images as reproductions of 'real' things" sense. Click the link above for the video essay in full.

One question to ask here is: given the nature of how humans engage in and and experience the world (primarily through mimicry, the social creatures that we are), how should we measure the relative values of things like authorship, creation, motivation (in the "foundation of copyright law" sense), volition, experience and individuality?

These things (and surely there are plenty more) seem to all point to why we intuitively think some things are more "real" than others. Like Oliver and many others I find myself exploring the validity of these instincts a little deeper as well.
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23 Jun 2010

Social Conditioning Through Clothing: early signals of devices physically shaping interactions
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Designer Lauren McCarthy of the UCLA Design / Media Arts program has developed a set of wearable devices intended to inspire thought on integrating technology into our social interactions. Within this project, social behaviors changing through negative reinforcement is the general operating principle; each device is programmed to deliver some kind of intense stimulus in response to various social inputs, and wearers are forced to adjust their behavior to reduce the stimulus. In the case of the Body Contact Training Suit, the wearer is subjected to static white noise if they are not in physical contact with other humans for too long of an interval. The Happiness Hat trains wearers to be more expressive, delivering a sharp metal point if the wearer is not smiling. The Anti-Daydreaming Scarf vibrates to remind the wearer to pay attention when in conversation.

Watch a video explanation below:

On some level, the concepts may not be directly practical, given that they primarily assume that this kind of negative reinforcement is a lasting way to influence behavior. Judging by the subtext of the video one suspects McCarthy is aware of this as well, and hopes to inspire deeper conversation on how physical technology can work its way into our interactions in general.

This is becoming more the case as devices are driven by increasingly accurate, responsive, and intelligent sensor systems. To help give some context for how these kinds of devices will work their way into our lives, it helps to consider how present-day digital/social platforms are integrating into our lives ever more seamlessly. Twitter, Foursquare, and any number of other networks subtly guide the contexts in which we communicate, and our behaviors, by extension. This is evident anytime we first look up an unknown contact in Facebook/LinkedIn, and then change our response behavior accordingly. The idea that physical/ubiquitous computing devices will begin to do the same, helping us determine how to best interact with others through physical cues, is not far-fetched.

Lauren McCarthy

[via Talk2MyShirt]
[this originally appeared on psfk.com]
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1 Jun 2010

Badges are social objects, and experiences are interconnected with things
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Subaru has created a free Badge of Ownership program as a way to recognize their owners loyalty and encourage them to promote their interests. The badges attach directly to the owners vehicle The main badge denotes the number of Subaru’s owned. Additional merit badges can be added including the 100,000 mile club, outdoor sports, environmental, and music/arts. In order to get any of the badges, proof of ownership must be provided in the form of a vehicle identification number.

via psfk.com

The above reminds me that people rarely buy things for purely functional reasons. People almost always buy something for what it says about themselves.
In fact, have been having a couple of conversations recently about the idea of "people are increasingly wanting experiences more than things."
I think this is true. But it requires a bit of thought on what the difference is.
A car is a thing, and so is an iPhone. Both provide the foundations for experiences. The car both takes me places and allows me to share some experience about myself with others (generally passively, but explicitly in the above case through badges), and the iPhone lets me coordinate experiences with others. So it's hard to separate the thing from the experience.
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4 Feb 2010

Insights From IDEO’s Humanizing Social Media Event - PSFK
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As part of Social Media Week in NYC, design firm IDEO hosted the event Humanizing Social Media. Check-in to the event required attendees to leave their mobile devices behind with their coats, setting the stage for an experiment in human interaction. Participants were given a large blank white t-shirt to cover whatever they were wearing, and their choice of a range of buttons with which to express interests and identity. Below are two brief perspectives and insights on human social behavior that team PSFK walked away with:

Kyle Studstill:

The event was framed as an experiment in bringing social interaction back to its basics, in the face of complex digital platforms like Facebook, foursquare, Twitter and the like – the idea being that impersonal nature of these networks take something away from the simplicity of face-to-face interaction.

What I observed reflected the idea that all social interaction – digital or not – is an exercise in individuals using whatever they have at their disposal to say something about themselves. The buttons were an obvious example of this, but it was also clear in the vastly varied ways participants placed their buttons or even wore the blank t-shirt itself. The entire event begged the question “what parallels can we draw between what happens here in this experiment, and what happens in social networks?”; one clear one that emerged is that the expression of identity through carefully (and often subconscious) curated details of one’s personality applies both online and off.

As far as the digital disconnect (no one knew they would be without their phones for two hours until they walked in the door), I don’t think I had that feeling of ”everyone is paying more attention now” that one might expect. Perhaps the rest of the crowd did. But it has been my experience that we are getting better at dipping in and out of both digital and offline conversations, pulling ourselves away from a casual group to share an idea on Twitter and diving back in seamlessly; I haven’t experienced the feeling that people being connected to their mobile devices has made them any less “social,” even in the physical space.

Francisco Hui:

Kyle makes a good point that the lack of phones didn’t particularly change how we socialized for those two hours. The blank t-shirts, like current social media platforms, placed everyone on the same footing, regardless of their age and what they came in wearing.

Learnings from the discussion alluded to an interesting group dynamic that occurs in real life that hasn’t been replicated in social media. While you can broadcast messages to your followers, it’s still an individual act that is occurring in on your phone or at your desk.

From another conversation, we learned that current status updates are very much about the past tense; what you did yesterday or earlier during the day, but we’re slowly moving towards the present and future tense, what you’re doing right now, and what you plan to do.

via psfk.com
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