Exclusive Interview With Mr. Podcamp

This weekend was Perth’s first PodCamp, which also happened to be my first PodCamp. I’ve been to other camps: BarCamp, DemoCamp, SummerCamp, etc. There’s plenty of other coverage, of course, on blogs like this one, this one, as well as this one and maybe this one. But having a blog comes with the responsibility of filling it with redundant crap, and I’m not one to break the interrules. My overall impression? Plenty of pod, but there could have been more camp.

I always enjoy unconferences, because I generally do not enjoy getting dressed up and behaving like a pretentious ass. I like the fact that anyone is free to do just about anything they want. As mentioned in one of the posts I probably linked to above, communication in the sessions was a little unidirectional. Certainly, most of the PowerPoint slides were much better than I’m used at these things. However, the spirit was there.

Looking around the room at the start of the day, I could tell that pods are indeed becoming fairly ubiquitous, even here on the backside of the planet. I saw roughly an even split between Apples and PCs — that’s a lot more Apples than I’m used to seeing. Clearly, support for R153 in Apple’s newest pods is making a significant splash in the marketplace. This is to be expected, I suppose, as enthusiasts have been demanding greater pod-pod integration for a while now. I hear talk of pod-pod-pod integration on the horizon — we’ll see.

The first session I attended was, roughly speaking, on the future of the pod industry. The presenter started facetiously, declaring that pods are dead. This is a familiar refrain by now, ever since Steve Evans announced that Podder would be shifting its business model from pods to vods. With all the attention going to wiki-vods these days, and especially with the recent success of VodVod, it certainly seems that pods might go the way of cowboynet and blogfisting. However, the presenter went on to aptly note that with the continuous advances in awesomedrive space, we can expect our very understanding of media to change in short order. The recent 300 terabyte trans-temporal Wikipedia recursion will fit onto our future pods a million times over, with room enough left to store a complete collection of ultaporn.

After that, I popped up for a bit to grab a snack, as I had to prepare for my own presentation. I was skeptical about the pecan tart at first, but it turned out to be reasonably tasty.

I presented on the latest advances in pod-hacking techniques. A lot has changed since Jeff Barnes brought the entire North American pod-network to its knees using nothing more than a zombie scriptlet, a phase inducer, and a spunky can-do attitude. These days, you have to pay attention to the psychic IP stack, as well as the podcops. To be an effective hacker these days, you need your rollerblades to be highly polished, and your hair can’t just be dyed one colour — you need a whole rainbow of colours, and the RGB values need to follow the RFC1U1Z algorithm.

More to come? Pod-ssibly!

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Wonderfully Unspeakable Horrors

I’ve been meaning to throw up a quick post about this for quite some time. Given that I… well, I didn’t exactly pan Eldritch Errors in a previous post, but I certainly said, you know, some words. In any case, I feel compelled to point out that the designers have since crafted a rather wonderful meta site that does a fine job of helping to jump in to the Lovecraftian horrors, thus resolving many of my earlier concerns.

However, what’s really got me excited is their behind-the-scenes blog, where they’ve been discussing what’s going into this thing. I’m actually pretty disappointed that I haven’t seen this mentioned on (m)any other blogs, because this is something fairly novel. Anyone who’s been involved in developing & running an ARG knows the toll it takes on those at the helm; so it’s no surprise that, to date, there is little documentation on this process. So a blog like this is an incredibly valuable resources to anyone interested in the genre.

This isn’t the only way that Eldritch Errors is breaking the mold, mind you. I’m keeping a very close eye on this one, and I’ll probably be writing about it plenty more in the future.

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Speaking of Chaotic Fiction

There’s this blog roundtable, right, and the topic du jour is chaotic fiction. Here’s the other post in the roundtable (we’re part of an exclusive club, I guess.) Also note that the somewhat mundane post title is not meant to imply that I am unenthusiastic about the topic — I just couldn’t think of a clever wordplay on “chaotic fiction,” and got frustrated. Chaotic diction? Erotic friction? No.

For the uninitiated, chaotic fiction is a term coined by Sean Stacey to define a space of participatory creative works. I guess if you were so inclined, you could call it Fiction 2.0 (except you would probably get punched.) Although Sean came up with the term in an attempt to contextualize the ARG-definition controversy (and get everyone to shut up about it I suppose), the idea is that it describes a space that contains a wide variety of genres, so it’s not strictly necessary to even bring up ARGs in this discussion… except I just did, so never mind.

Chaotic fiction is a nice framework, because it situates a number of hitherto discrete genres within a single conceptual space. Moreover, it recognizes the fluidity of that space. Second Life may be superficially distinct in nature from SFZero, but there is certainly something similar going on there — a truth that is manifested in the way that virtual games and live games are bleeding into one another. Cross-media entertainment is the big thing these days, and I would argue that it’s not because of interesting synergies between unique platforms, but because they’re all part of the same delicious pie. I expect the media theorists have known this for a long time.

While I like the idea of chaotic fiction, it’s really the aforementioned theorists I’m waiting to hear from. The idea is inherently academic, but I haven’t seen it appear on any academic radars. This is unfortunate because (a) there’s little doubt that Stacey’s thinking overlaps with a significant corpus of previous literature, so discussing chaotic fiction without the benefit of those insights is at best arrogant and at worst profoundly misguided, and (b) there’s not been a useful conceptual framework that entered the world fully formed; there need to be iterations, there needs to be a synthesis of viewpoints.

A brief synopsis: chaotic fiction inhabits a 3-dimensional space where the three axes represent authorship (centralized or distributed), ruleset (loose or strict), and coherence (less plot or more plot.)

Those are some good axes, but they don’t really represent the full space of possible variations between projects. Of course, the set of possible axes is infinite: How much of a project takes place online? How many participants does it scale to? How many cats were tangentially involved in the creation process? Etc. The question is, how do you choose which axes are salient enough to include in this sort of framework? Stacey might have had certain criteria in mind, but unfortunately, he didn’t explicitly share them. He sort of implies that he’s looking at properties that exist independently of specific media, and focusing mainly on abstracted patterns of behaviour rather than material details. That strategy makes sense, but it doesn’t exclude seemingly relevant properties like scale. Is a project geared to handle millions not fundamentally different from one geared to handle dozens? If someone were to really build on Stacey’s ideas, I’d say this is the way to do it: refine and justify the choice of axes.

One of the other interesting things about Stacey’s analysis is the way he situates the space of chaotic fiction as being connected to the larger trend of participatory online culture in general. This is certainly an apt observation. My question is, what exactly is the relationship between these spaces? Do they exist alongside each other, or is one within the other? How much overlap is there? Tellingly, if you treat “coherence” simply as a measure of structure, rather than a measure of plot, you get a space which very clearly includes projects like Wikipedia and GNU. Stacey has constructed a very thin barrier between what he calls chaotic fiction and virtually the entire sphere of participatory projects. In this model, all that distinguishes an ARG from a collaborative encyclopedia is the presence of narrative — and narrative being a fairly subjective concept, that’s not much of a distinction. Far from being a bad thing, all this means is that the ARG-definition controversy is inherently very silly, something which Stacey himself implied very strongly in his essay.

Enough theory. A framework isn’t very interesting unless you actually try to frame things within it, something that only Stacey has actually done so far (to my knowledge.) Stacey framed various projects within each individual axis, but when you’re in a multidimensional space what’s really neat is the interaction between axes. With 3 axes, you’ve got 8 sectors, each of which can be construed as a distinct category. Looking at each of these categories ought to be an interesting thought experiment. Of course, this is a ruthlessly mathematical way of looking at things, but I’ll save that critique for a later post wherein I refute everything I’m currently saying on the basis of postmodernity.

So, just for fun, let’s take a look at a few sectors in this space of chaotic fiction. In particular, those where distributed authorship lives, because that’s all that’s worth talking about anyway these days, right?*

1. Distributed authorship, loose ruleset, low coherence. People sort of just do whatever they want. Absolute anarchy is (arguably) not particularly worth exploring, but finding a magic balance with just enough rules and just enough coherence can lead to some highly empowering and compelling experiences. I’d argue that Second Life inhabits this space — it’s really quite chaotic, and despite the presence of a shared world, there is very little about the world itself that actually encourages any sort of normalized behaviour. There aren’t many examples of other scaled environments that allow users to do almost anything, probably because it’s hugely risky and challenging to give so many people so much freedom. On the other hand, there’s a plethora of small groups who create their own personalized spaces for these sorts of activities. Kupopolis, for example, is used by about 20 writers to write stories within a shared universe — there aren’t many rules because there aren’t many people. Unbounded freedom on a large scale is a tough thing to harness, but I’d wager that there’s a lot of room for Big Ideas that could pull it off.
2. Distributed authorship, loose ruleset, high coherence. It’s somewhat difficult to think of a system for distributed authorship that could facilitate high coherence without a significant set of rules. About the closest I can get are the “interactive story” communities like Kupopolis — a small group of authors trying to create something reasonably coherent, where strict rules are unnecessary because of participants’ like-mindedness. It’s an interesting concept, though: let users run free while somehow compiling their output into something that is greater than the sum of its parts. ARGs get rather close. They tend rather closely to centralized authorship and a strict ruleset, but one can certainly imagine an ARG with less of each. The trick, I expect, is finding a minimal but effective management/planning strategy that’s capable of coordinating emergent, unstructured behaviour without getting in its way. Well, duh, that sounds like a cinch. Arguably, something like Wikipedia does this well — but the extent to which that sort of output is coherent is debatable. Still, an ARG that borrowed patterns from Wikipedia would be rather intriguing.
3. Distributed authorship, strict ruleset, low coherence. This is pretty much the baseline for Webs Two Point Oh, and is consequently a space littered with the detritus of a million mediocre startups. Consider your standard YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Service): it’s built entirely on the users’ backs, you’re pretty limited in what you can do on it, and ultimately there’s not really much to it. The idea is to reach some sort of level of coherence — a point at which the swamp of unassociated data comes together into something magical, like when you look at clusters in Flickr. Most don’t succeed…
4. Distributed authorship, strict ruleset, high coherence. …but when they do succeed, it’s something to get excited about. Of course, the kinds of projects I’m talking about don’t strictly fit into the realm of chaotic fiction. But, as I argued in my previous overlong essay, there’s a lot to be learned from the internet at large.

*My other reason for not probing the entire space in detail is the fact that I wrote most of this post about a month ago, and only came back to it now. You ever try starting a lengthy blog post and coming back to it after several significant life events? It doesn’t work. No thanks.

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Day of the Figurines

(x-posted from Wero Notes)

Blast Theory is an artists’ collective in the UK that does a lot of work with pervasive gaming, amongst other things. They are mainly famous for their games Uncle Roy All Around You and Can You See Me Now, both of which are games played in cities in small groups of online players and street players who are equipped with fancy schmancy GPS-enabled PDAs. The games are very innovative and creative, but they are not consumer products and are not available for general consumption (not that that’s a bad thing, I’m just saying.)

The reason I mention them is largely because one of their other works, Day of the Figurines, has got me thinking. In this piece, there’s an actual miniature village full of figurines.

To begin the game, players are invited to create their own figurine: to name it, answer questions about its past and how it is represented to other players. They then see him or her placed in the town. Thereafter participation in the game is via mobile phone. Players receive a minimum of one text a day updating them on the progress of their figurine and are invited to make increasingly challenging decisions over the fate of themselves and other players in response to deteriorating circumstances. Players can join or leave the game at any time. One of the key aspects of this new form of artwork is that it is situated within players’ daily lives and can be accessed at any time.

This is interesting to me because players can participate in a narrative space through lightweight, structured interactions.

I love the idea of narratives that are molded through audience participation, and I love the idea of open source worlds like Saijo City. The problem in my mind has always been finding a model of participation that is relatively undemanding but still significant. On the one hand, very unstructured bottom-up participation, such as the kind practiced by fan-fic writers, is hugely compelling to those involved but ultimately pretty inaccessible. On the other hand, highly structured top-down participation, such as being able to vote for who the protaganist of a TV show should date, is cool but not very rewarding for the individual decision-maker. Day of the Figurines points to an interesting middle ground: participation that is structured and accessible, but still acknowledges the unique contributions of individuals. Despite the lowkey nature of participation, players still have a meaningful investment in the world, as manifested by their tangible avatar. Of course, there’s no reason to stop it there — you could have a sliding scale of interaction, moving from the structured to the freeform, so that engaged players who want to contribute more can do so.

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Academia Weighs in on Twitter

So I’ve been thinking, what’s the protocol for trying to build up my bloggery? Clearly I need to start making posts, but should I pretend that I actually have an audience? Am I writing to my future readers who will hypothetically probably not read my old posts? Is this a taboo subject? Does it matter?

In any case, I just came across the first academic paper (to my knowledge) to present some formal analysis of Twitter. Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities comes to us from the CS Dept at the University of Maryland.

In this paper, we present our observations of the microblogging phenomena by studying the topological and geographical properties of Twitter’s social network. We find that people use microblogging to talk about their daily activities and to seek or share information. Finally, we analyze the user intentions associated at a community level and show how users with similar intentions connect with each other.

Kudos to the authors for looking into a major new internet phenomenon and providing us with some hard stats (hooray for low-hanging fruit.) However, I feel that this analysis misses the point in the way that almost every paper in this genre to come out of a CS department misses the point. The authors drill down fairly deeply into certain kinds of behaviours, such as information-sharing and information-seeking. However, by their own admission, these activities make up the minority of Twitter usage. The real meat is in the casual “what are you doing”-type messages, which are glibly described as “daily chatter.” What’s actually going on in this traffic — why do users generate it? What purpose does it serve? Do people actually pay attention to it? Of course, answering these questions will require somewhat more than a statistical analysis of network topography. But until someone does so, we’re not going to know what’s really happening on Twitter.

(Of course I would be remiss not to plug Kate, who is writing her dissertation on these very topics.)

[via Smart Mobs]

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