How can design help us make better decisions?

Speaking of the rhythm of games and epic meaning, here’s a neat window on the culture of the most hardcore of hardcore gamers. The commitment, jargon and organization of these guys is much closer to that of a hacker collective like Anonymous than what you’d expect of game players.

The occasion was the fruitless and epic eighteen hour attempt by Beyond The Limitation, a Final Fantasy XI clan (or linkshell), to topple a quasi-invulnerable boss called Pandemonium Warden. They had been the first to down the previous uber-baddie, Absolute Virtue, a boss so hard that others had fought him for over 30 consecutive hours, only to be devastated by his power to restore every bit of his lost health.

Beyond The Limitation soon found themselves overwhelmed.

From the LiveJournal post where they describe their Sisyphean ordeal.

Most members took no breaks at all outside of waiting for weakness to wear if they died. Personally, I never even went to piss (adrenaline covered up everything for me).

Finally, vomiting and fainting forced them to admit defeat:

The sickness was a combination of the ultimate failure with what the last 18 hours has done, and the physical/mental effects of playing that long hitting us after the adrenaline and motivation wore. It wasn’t just simply a cause of 18 hours of play, nor was it just the cause of failure.

Willpower, supported by some deep organization. Just look at the sophisticated, highly compressed jargon used to encode the experience:

This fight was nothing like what anyone expected, both in BtL and to the FFXI community. It takes literally weeks of work and effort to build a single pop set for one attempt at this NM, and that’s only if you’re lucky. It takes 9 NM fights to make a T4 NM set, and each T4 NM has about a 10-20% chance of dropping a PW item… And you need three of those PW items.

More from The Escapist and the Final Fantasy Wiki.

This reminds me of a great talk I heard at last year’s GLS Conference: Kristine Ask imparting her year of ethnographic research on a theorycrafting guild (Scientific Play: How Players Remade World of Warcraft as a Game of Numbers). What’s that, you say?

Theorycrafting is the attempt to mathematically analyze game mechanics in order to gain a better understanding of the inner workings of the game. (WoW Wiki)

Guilds who practice this are meritocratic to a fault. Players submit their game logs to be mathematically analyzed with professional tools like Matlab and custom built dashboards. Entry into the guild is based on measured performance, and constantly re-evaluated. If you’re not keeping up, you’re out – it’s not personal, just science. The only loophole: if you suck at playing you can also get recognition by being a great analyst.

If you’re building around the quantified self, that ethnography should leave you absolutely buzzing.

What gets me about this culture? Perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise after working in finance and seeing this in QS Meetups, but I’m blown away that the ability to analyze data, instead of just accelerating existing social trends, has become a form of social currency in its own right.

Good ol’ Feltron may have been the first online quantification celebrity, but how long until a household name like Wayne Rooney, Lebron James or Brad Pitt publish detailed life logs just like theorycrafters do? (That would sure flip the tabloid model)

Oh, and if you’re wondering about Pandemonium Warden: nobody ever beat him in the form our heroes saw, because Square Enix reacted by crippling him (it?). I guess that’s a greater blow than any player could have delivered.

{ 0 comments }

Joystiq’s Rowan Kaiser writes a thoughtful piece on the rhythm of RPGs, contrasting the on-off rhythm of a linear Gears of War with the quest hubs of modern RPGs like Fallout or Knights of the Old Republic.

Every game has a certain rhythm, but just like a good song, the best moments catch you by surprise, as he discovers when he unintentionally goes to the hardest part of Fallout 3 first:

My journey into D.C. disrupted the rhythm […]. It took the basic form I’d begun to learn, and it changed it. It added length and difficulty. Instead of spending half an hour clearing a Vault, I was spending three or four hours struggling against a seeming army of Super Mutants, underground. A relatively straightforward game became a much bigger challenge, forcing me to play in a fashion I hadn’t anticipated.

So many of those great gaming moments are built out of disruptions. It’s like the first scene in “The World Of Ruin” in Final Fantasy VI, with Celes on the beach, or one of the fights in Gears Of War that lasts four or five times longer than a normal clash, with multiple waves of enemy reinforcements from different directions. These are the moments where the song breaks down, where the band devolves into handclaps and chants, or the rapper drops the beat but keeps the soulful vocal sample for a bit. They’re the moments that force you to pay attention.

He mentions Kotaku’s Kirk Hamilton’s writing on this. For Kirk, the rhythm is what stays after after the rest of the game has faded. Remembering the horseback shootouts of Red Dead Redemption give Kirk:

“a physical sense […] that all the screenshots and story synopses in the world can’t touch. The game had its rhythmic failings—most notably the dueling system—but even a year later its horseback gunplay stands apart as an example of uniquely satisfying rhythmic design.”

A bad game might have no rhythm, too broken up with quicktime events and random pacing, or, just as bad, a rhythm that’s plain boring. When it works, though, it does so in layers. The rhythm is infectious at the scale of seconds (to take Skyrim; the thwack and forth of a duel), minutes (clearing rooms of enemies, collecting treasure, exploring deeper), hours (completing a quest, clearing a dungeon, and heading back home to stash your loot). All those different scales weave together to keep you motivated in small, medium and longer loops.

It reminds me of the structure of long form improvisation, where you have to simultaneously focus on the moment while trusting your form. (A form is a rough structure of scenes and acts that you follow in a twenty to sixty minute set, for example the Harold, a Chicago staple where the teams performs 3 ‘acts’ of 3 scenes, with a freeform scene at the start and between each ‘act’.)

When you’re training improv, you drill the details of the scene – body language, listening, voice work, etc… – and you separately drill the larger structure. How do those mesh? Noah Gregoropoulos, Obi-Wan Kenobi figure in the Chicago scene and coach of the final level at IO, had a simple mantra:

“look out for the musical edit point.“

That’s when a scene should end to trigger a new one. It comes from instinct, and is hindered by attempts to consciously analyze show (seeking “the narrative edit point”). A good show flows so musically that the performers and audience are sublimely in sync, barely conscious of time until the lights go out right when they should.

Time only drags when the the moment-to-moment interaction breaks down, or a good scene sprawls in a show with an unsatisfying structure.

Perhaps this is too big an ask, but isn’t this what a well designed gameful system should strive for too? Sticking with fitness, I’ve seen that same musicality watching the Oakland A’s rise in Moneyball, or watching Manchester United duke it out with Man City this year. In my personal life, I can see those same loops in rock climbing: fighting over a single move, sending a whole route and feeling your strength increase over time. With indoor climbing, too, completing the routes at your level in the room before they are replaced by new ones every few months. It’s the contrast between my daily Fitbit readout, the longer trend given by my Withings scale, and the ebb and flow of a few old sports injuries.

That’s the small, medium and longer loop of the piece. An analysis based on these loops should help determine what blend of devices and services to use to get a truly satisfying experience of quantifying yourself.

{ 0 comments }

Good example of a second order effect: software architecture, which Bob Martin believes (or did in 2007, at least) arises out of a good test suite, not as a goal in itself.

Can I be absolutely sure that the green light means that the system works? Certainly not. But given the coverage of my test suite, I am reasonably sure that the changes I make are not introducing any bugs. And that reasonable surety is enough for me to be fearless about making changes.

This fearlessness is something that needs to be experienced to understand. I feel no reluctance at all about cleaning up the code in my system. I frequently take whole classes and restructure them. I change the names of classes, variables, and functions on a whim. I extract super-classes and derivatives any time I like.

In short, the test suite makes it easy to make changes to my code. It makes my code flexible and easy to maintain.

There you go, a good persuasive system is not unlike a good test suite, particularly if we’re talking about the programmable self.

{ 0 comments }

Just re-reading that Daily Beast article, I was struck again by this phrase:

Since repeated behaviors eventually turn into habits, improving willpower long term requires a unique strategy—a habit of changing habits, of continually expanding our zones of comfort.

Reminds me of a Steve Jobs quote:

When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.

That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is – everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

I can’t think of many skills more fundamental than the ability to recognize the rules of the game you’re playing and when to try to change those rules. The future belongs to people who see second and third order effects where others just see the first.

{ 0 comments }

Science News’ Bruce Bower reporting on a new study by University of Chicago psychologist Wilhelm Hofmann, who had 205 German adults track their desires throughout the day, for a week:

After having resisted one or more urges, volunteers’ average rate of succumbing to new temptations rose from 15 percent early in the day to 37 percent late in the day.

Participants routinely reported no awareness of when their resistance to desires had ebbed. “There appears to be no signature feeling of when willpower is low,” Baumeister said. For instance, his work has found that fatigue alone doesn’t account for the depletion of resistance.

In line with previous work like Roy Baumeister’s work with decision fatigue (good coverage by the New York Times and the Daily Beast), now captured in his and John Tierney’s book Willpower.

To me, this points to one of the major ways to screw up a persuasive system: just dumping information on people and asking them to make more decisions than they can physically handle.

{ 0 comments }

I wish there was a word for the act of unexpectedly connecting with a stranger over something awesome mentioned in passing. (Most recently Skyrim, and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces).

{ 1 comments }

Via Stefanie Fogel on VentureBeat, covering a new report by market research firm Parks Associates:

The number of people playing video games in the U.S. has risen 241 percent since 2008, according to a new study from market research and consulting company Parks Associates.

The study, Trends in Digital Gaming: Free-to-Play, Social, and Mobile Games, claims 135 million people play at least one hour per month compared to 56 million in 2008. Seventeen percent of all gamers have downloaded a title on their smartphones, up from 7 percent in 2008. About 80 percent play free-to-play (F2P) games on the PC or log into Facebook to spend time on the farm or frontier.

Whitepaper available here, though the deeper analysis is in the paid reports.

My question is this: how many hours a month does it take to make you a ‘gamer’?

What does it do to a complete non-gamer to start casually adding even an hour of gameplay a month thanks to Facebook?

For this statistic to be relevant to the larger idea of making the world more gameful, it’s not enough to know how many people play an hour a month. The doubling in players seems to have been driven mostly by free-to-play games; casual, simple, transient. What I’d like is a better sense of the penetration of the gaming mentality (the kind that Jane McGonigal talks about), as that’s what we can most easily exploit in designing gameful systems.

{ 0 comments }

Just found this massive list of sensor based health & fitness companies maintained by author/strategist Bruce Kasanoff on his blog. It’s an alphabetized grab bag, but lots of names from front-end consumer facing (e.g. Fitbit) to consultancies to manufacturers of the sensors themselves.

From a quick scan, here’s a few interesting ones I hadn’t heard of, illustrating three areas currently at the more extreme end of the health & fitness space:

WRAPT: Archinoetics’ comprehensive system for measuring the “physical reserve of war fighters”. I’m fascinated by the way these military solutions so clearly want to get to that first person shooter health bar.

Zephyr BioHarness. Another military grade physical condition monitor, which has been used in some really cool situations (check out the case studies page), including the rescue of the trapped Chilean Miners (the other case studies are great too):

“…doctors could manage each individual’s exercise routine and establish a baseline for each individual based on a stress test as well as other normal parameters such as resting HR/BR, tracking skin temperature, as well as a baseline for blood pressure levels for each individual. All baseline data collected was used to create a profile for each individual, so it would be clear if at any time an individual was going beyond their normal thresholds due to stress, anxiety, fatigue, malnourishment, heat stress, hypothermia, hypoxia, or many other common problems that the miners were susceptible to.”

Also intrigued by their data analysis tool, Omnisense, particularly the whole squad reduced to a few color coded rectangles. Overall, I’m impressed by Zephyr’s focus on monitoring multiple users at once.

Sonamba: The incredibly comprehensive Sonamba digital picture frame / communication device / health monitor / automated medication reminder / personal emergency response system. Particularly dig the subscription model. Wish the design wasn’t so… homely. Old people have taste, too, and are less likely to want to engage with a device that looks halfway between a toy (condescending) and a medical device (makes you feel more sick).

WellAWARE: A mashup of Zephyr Omnisense and Sonamba, this is a wellness dashboard that helps care homes track their resident’s health by integrating a whole array of sensors. I’d love to know more about the way these dashboards change care, particularly if care homes start to feel that they can replace human caregivers. With money at the forefront, harder to quantify conditions might become undervalued if they can’t easily slot into the system.

Disturbingly, this makes me think of the way it takes just a handful of people to crew a massive modern cargo ship. Progress?

Pear: Oooooh, audio coaching. A big weakness of most workout apps is their focus on the visual, which gets in the way of real time coaching.

Right. Now let’s put all those things together. It may seem obvious, but I find it interesting how closely these systems mirror our own physical state; the slower and sicker we get, the more we can rely on our environment to report on us, whereas the young and fit need to be instrumented directly.

{ 0 comments }

I’ve always thought that online dating is a great living lab for the quantification of social relationships, which makes this report by the University of Rochester so interesting.

A few highlights from Ars Technica’s writeup:

I’m not sure yet how this fits into the bigger behavior change picture, but I can think of three things:

Firstly, contrast the importance of social factors for behavior change (e.g. the Framingham Heart Study) with the potential for structured social matchmaking tools to connect people who might otherwise never have met.

Secondly, I’d guess that just the act of creating online dating profiles (and social media profiles in general) stimulates self reflection in some people who might not have been as introspective otherwise. Self-reflection is the gateway drug to self-quantification.

Finally, I think that in a broader sense, behavior change tools will eventually have to start using judgements about their users’ personalities and dispositions to better tailor the help they give. The closer they get to helpful personal trainers, the more we’ll be able to learn from sites that have been actively studying what makes people compatible.

Interesting & related:

{ 0 comments }