“My time is being squandered online because I’m not getting experience points,” Justin Hall declared, introducing the subject of his Masters project at the USC Annenberg Center. He was speaking at the November 16 seminar on DIY Media.
I could see from long acquaintance with his proclivities that Hall had decided to find a way to combine his long-time personal obsessions with gaming, chatting online, radical self-surveillance, self-publishing, and self disclosure: the New York Times magazine called Hall “the founding father of personal blogging” until he retired in 2005, after more than a decade, at the age of thirty.
Justin has fun online, works online, studies and loves and plays online — and on his phone and his Playstation. Why can’t the whole thing be a game — a social game and a knowledge game? While he goes about his day’s surfing, blogging, chatting, tagging, gaming, posting, uploading, downloading, Justin wants to experience the same visible sense of goal-oriented progress he gets in World of Warcraft when he looks at his screens and sees exactly what level his activities have earned him. What if you could get points of various kinds for various activities, and compete with your friends? What if you and your friends and their friends could constitute a sufficiently large population to add collaborative filtering to the mix — making recommendations for things to learn, see, hear play, do? What if you could add social media for p2p and many to many communication, add your location-aware mobile telephone to the mix, and add a productivity function that generates and displays to-do lists? We’re already being surveilled by police and marketers. Why not surveill each other and make a game of it? (”I reserve the right to fit the entire Internet in there,” Hall said, during the discussion following his presentation.)
Hall calls the notion “Passively Multiplayer Online Games,” and describes it as ” a system for turning user data into ongoing play. Using computer and mobile phone surveillance, a user and their unique history. These resulting avatars can be viewed online, and they interact with other avatars online. Examples of data: web sites visited, email addresses, chat handles, contents of email or messaging, contents of word processed documents, digital images, digital video, video game moves.”
Here is a mockup of how a PMOG might look on a mobile phone screen, via Jyri Engstrom’s Jaiku app:
In Helsinki in the summer of 2006, Hall described PMOG’s: Quicktime video.
Questions or suggestions, critiques, plaudits, brickbats for Justin? Want to push the design or question its premises? Post here and I’ll prod Justin to respond.
Bookmark » del.icio.us - reddit - digg - stumbleupon7 Comments so far
Leave a reply
I haven’t had time to watch the presentation so what follows is a reaction to the text above.
One of the dilemmas of a purely representational medium is that the tone of voice and the glint in the eye are absent, so firstly, I’d be interested in knowing quite how seriously Hall and anyone else engaged in such research are treating this idea?
My main observation regarding this idea, if I am indeed to take it seriously, is that much of what is being espoused in the above description invokes a very peculiar ethics.
Starting from a point of largely reneging a right to personal privacy owing to the notion that much of your personal life is already surveilled (a contentious and complex argument) seems to attribute extraordinarily little value to your personal details. By voluntarily logging your life using such a system you are significantly increasing your risk of such data being captured by malicious third-parties (incidentally, this is a key criticism of the incoming UK National Identity Register, the system of databases to be used with national ID cards). Should the State wish to exercise greater control of the citizenry, such a voluntary log of personal information makes coercion, exploitation and persecution an awful lot easier. For example it might show that you regularly go to the Mosque or the Temple, that you go to places associated with the LGBT community or, in fact, any other type of cultural, racial or social profile that might be targeted by those able to access such data and that harbour prejudice.
By conflating all ‘experience’ into one homogenous quantifiable scale such games also espouse peculiar notions of care and value. Participants must surely be asked to fashion an economy of experience whereby those activities in which they participate can be quantified by points. Such an economy would surely be a hectic and ongoing reflexive negotiation, as, just taking one example, what at first might have been ‘picking my daughter up from childcare’ becomes ‘hearing my daughter’s first word’. Such a quantitative negotiation seems incredibly difficult if not impossible. Alongside this, relations with other people or ‘players’ may very likely become quite mercenary as daily interactions become points-scoring opportunities, and where does this stop? How many points do I get for phoning my partner and telling them I love them? How would a picture posted by a player of a life-changing visit to a far-flung place be quantified? Or conversely, what about a picture of a humorously plump gerbil? (Apologies for the strange example!)
The idea of such games might be suggested to elevate technological mediation to a new primacy in life (if it is not already), tipping the balance of sociotechnical life firmly towards the technical, thus promoting a skew towards a peculiar quantification of values. I’d be very interested to hear of how these researchers propose to identify and quantify/ value ‘experience’.
Unfortunately I missed Justin’s presentation as I was at Henri Jenkin’s “Futures of Entertainment” conference at MIT, from which I just returned. I was happy to see Danah Boyd there (having herself made it to Boston right after the Annenberg talk) presenting her work on social networking and MySpace in the event’s penultimate panel entitled “Fan Cultures”, prior to a panel on gaming entitled “Not the Real World Anymore”. Following Danah’s presentation, Henri took the opportunity, no doubt with some level of irony, to lead a ceremonial New Years-style countdown in which we “officially” rang-in the birth of the much ballyhooed immersive Web3.0. When John Markoff wrote in the NY Times of the coming Web 3.0 he stated that its “goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion.” While some have questioned the value of this new meme, to me Justin’s concept seems very much in keeping with the new way of thinking about the future of the web as a kind of immersive guide and I look forward to following the progression of his ‘PMOG’ project.
Following on Marc’s comment: the Web 3.0 moniker is being brandied about largely as a joke (originally by the W3C) to counter the whole 2.0 silliness, and is meant to refer to “the Semantic Web”, hence “giving meaning to the data”. Data + context/relationship => meaning (some small portion). The Semantic Web does this by making relationships between data explicit.
The Immersive Web is not Web 3.0. (besides which I was ranting abut ImmWeb last year… I coined it!
That said, yes, social networks are definitly one of the most powerful and “easy” places to establish relationships in data, since we can roughly model them on the relationships between people. (Allowing of course the myriad complexities and minute permutations of human reltionships, which will likely never be entirely modeled in software.) The proof of this is that something like the third most widespread RDF (the stuff of the Semantic Web) “namespace” in use on the web, is FOAF (”Friend of a Friend”). (Remember, the address book is the center of every social network.)
Justin’s project would benefit greatly from a SemWeb approach. But I bet he already knows this. The DIY artisan stays ahead by keeping on top of tools, staying alert and knowing history. Or to put it another way: learn from the past, live in the present and think of the future.
Boris, I aware that the Web 3.0 meme is essentially a rehash of the SemWeb, Jenkins, however, connected it to what you cann an ImmWeb, and I think we agree that the two I think are relevant to Justin’s work. On the former, though, some years back, when SemWeb was a hot topic, and my colleague Jo Walsh was championing FOAF (this in the days before more, arguably “contextual” approaches to social networking had come to the fore) there was a real debate between the web 2.0-type taggers and the semweb people. I think Clay Shirky articlulated the claims leveled against SemWeb in his “The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview” where he claimed that The Semantic Web was essentially made up of assertions and therefore could be through of as a machine for creating syllogisms. But for Shirky, syllogisms aren’t that useful. He states: “Despite their appealing simplicity, syllogisms don’t work well in the real world, because most of the data we use is not amenable to such effortless recombination. As a result, the Semantic Web will not be very useful either”. I wonder then, in the case of Justin’s game, if this same logic may regarding the “real world’s” resistance against the SemWeb’s ideal of “effortless recombination” could, in fact, work to hinder Justin’s attempts at “worldbuilding”.
Fantastic comments! Thank you! Juicy stuff here.
I’ve been head down, designing and working with Duncan Gough to get this thing up and running to a state where I can play with the values of representation. So Sam, when you say the glint in the eye is lost in a purely representational experience, I hope to get to the point where a glint in the eye is the first thing that greets you. I’m not going to be listing every web site someone visits, I’m going to be parsing those web sites into game bits and compiling them into personal permutations. With a nudge and a wink, if you know what I mean.
Of course it’s a farce to imagine quantifying all experience in meaningful ways. And yet, is it not worth experimenting with? I’m not sure it’s going to be meaningful to give people points for writing email. Or for picking their daughter up from pre-school. Our rewards for making the “right” decisions in life are our own to savor, and our community’s to reflect.
And yet, the power of the computer to work with us, and not just for us is too tantalizing. I want to add some level of watchful care from the computer in front of me. There’s many projects in this area: Microsoft’s Clippy paperclip, OnLife, Jaiku, Twitter - programs that begin to give my devices a sense of context. Most instant messenger programs know that social context is a critical part of active life. Up until recently, computers have largely ignored a string of actions in favor of the current action. So what if we can empower them to understand where we’re going and where we’re from?
We might at least get a reflection back from the computer of some small fraction of what we make and what we don’t, how we work and how we play when we’re online. I spend so many hours on my computer, I guess you could say this project, this small personal consensual web surveillance is an attempt to make a tool that empowers me to play and interact online at a more expert level. The way tabs and del.icio.us has augmented the way I browse, I think points and goals and a shared public profile could augment the way I browse as well.
How do we pick those values and assign points? With Duncan I’m experimenting with a mix of authored systems and user-generated systems. There’s an increasing number of Firefox extensions, online social networks, web apps that attempt to knit together information in new ways. This is the Semantic Web discussion that Boris and Marc had here. I am not well-read enough on the Semantic Web to hold forth; I need to read Shirky’s Semantic Web essay that Marc mentioned, as well as the more general knowledge. (Thank you Marc, and Boris, for giving me some handles to read about PMOG in the context of the Semantic Web).
Sam, most of our online lives, as they have developed in the last two decades, have involved a increasing helping of technical in the sociotechnical. Yesterday, William Huber pointed me towards the Transliteracies Project which appears to propose increasing the technical in the sociotechnical act of reading. Similarly, it’s strange and alien to describe one’s friends in a computer context (MySpace has a crude mechanism, FOAF has a more complex mechanism; both are fundamentally broken) but still millions of people have found meaning in these experiments. I guess I have enjoyed an empowered position in this increasingly device-mediated society, and I want to see if it’s possible to use code to build systems of greater self-awareness, empathy, collaboration.
There are huge privacy issues here, of course. The more we share online the more we make ourselves vulnerable. Even as a reader we become vulnerable! I know a few people who surf without HTTP cookies, for example, because they don’t want their movements tracked. But most people don’t even know about cookies (let alone Web Bugs). They put their passwords in, they visit a few sites. And maybe those sites know if they are male or female, what their geodemographics are (thank you Marc Tuters) - all this is already being tracked across web sites and advertising networks. Same with IP addresses; cease and desist letters from the entertainment companies finding people at home who have been accessing illegal information - there is already some scary levels of Total Information Awareness in our everyday internets.
I hope this project can make those things obvious - “here is your trail.” To show people that their personal data is a continuous thing that can be kept. On a shallow level, the project is an exercise in mostly harmless judgement based on your web trail: “here’s what you look like based on your computer use.” Over the longer term I hope to build something that says, “if you manage and harness your personal data you can be more self-aware, and more empowered.”
I’ve been using a working web prototype for a few weeks now, and it’s already shown me that I do a ton of continuous research on video games. It’s also made me think more about what I surf when I’m being watched. Because I’ve built a system for watching myself surf! It’s like hanging a mirror behind the computer: at the very least I want to improve my posture.
The project is evolving, each week it takes on or sheds some characteristics. Currently I would say we’re mixing a playful parsing of your web trail with a hint of provocative productivity. The fledgling FAQ already makes it clear what information we keep about users, and what information we don’t. When this project is deployed, I think I have an obligation to link to discussions like these, to expose the systems of information recording, and to give people a chance to make or erase themselves within these temporary collaborative systems.
Will I be helping people feel more unguarded about sharing their private trails, and thereby make them more vulnerable to predators or fascists? I hope I would be making them more literate! At best, I hope this PMOG might be an exercise in increasing the literacy of online privacy, because it’s not that we want total information privacy (or else we wouldn’t surf the web or input anything of ourselves online). We want selective information privacy, we want the right to use our thoughts, our media, our trail as a tool to help other people and help ourselves.
Unfortunately for Shirky, if he carried his views through to the logical end, he’d have to pack up his pen and paper, and computer of course, and move out to the woods and never speak again. For language, all language, including the sciences, including analytic thought, itself is a system of categories and relationships.
From what I can gather, he fundametally misunderstands SemWeb (as it is a framework for describing the dataworld, *if and as* one wishes to do so, and not some magnum opus to codify it for the benefit of librarians.) Besides which, even the poster child for tagging, which is a wonderful system for some uses in some cases, has realised that “bundling” is not only necessary but also very useful for creating context. The smart players know this. (del.icio.us, flickr) And what is context but … a container of varying shape and size…
SemWeb’s core, Resources Descriptive Framework, is a tool designed to be extremely flexible in describing data objects AND the relationships between them. Nothing more. Yes that makes it complex. No that doesn’t make it a library project.
In any event, check out the Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities Project.
Justin,
Thank you for taking the time to reply to the various comments raised above, and in such detail. I am glad that in your unpacking of your concept and proposed implementation there is a central criticality with regard to levels of care and privacy. Firstly, I think the points you make about privacy are really interesting (you appear to have a much greater technical knowledge on this than me!) and I really like how you couch the possible (arguably) positive implications of your project with regard to awareness. Privacy and technical mediation seems to becoming increasingly important political discussion (certainly in the UK with regard to ICT and governance, e.g. the National ID card scheme and the impending National Health Service databases).
I struggle with how (and why) you intend to enfold the manifold and complex non-representational elements of the everyday into your system, such as a glint in the eye or the quiver of the lip. In my, slightly flippant, introductory point on the 23rd November I wasn’t attempting to devalue technical media, such as text-based communication, simply pointing out a difference between representational media and face-to-face communication. Which begs the question: do we want our technically mediated interactions to model or simulate all of the elements of face-to-face interaction? A difficult question!
I am pleased that you picked up on the differing levels of care already being played out on social networking sites like MySpace. Without being too self-serving - I have recently written on this myself, for a Masters degree, I don’t think it appropriate to go into this in detail here but you might like to read the abstract here. Your point about current systems such as MySpace and FOAF being broken seems, to me, important, perhaps the questions that prefigure your suggestion of investigating “systems of greater self-awareness, empathy, collaboration” are: what value has been ascribed to existing systems? What sorts of technically mediated relations of care does this nascent system of value suggest? How do we, as researchers, ethically investigate/ engage with such relations of care?
I look forward to hearing/ reading about the development of your project.