The Wisdom of Crowds

 Posted by (Visited 18204 times)  Reading
Nov 012005
 

I just finished The Wisdom of Crowds. Thanks to Jamie Fristrom for turning me on to it.

Those of us who have been watching groups of MMO players already knew, of course, that the aggregated intelligence of large groups can be awesome and frightening. Those who have watched the burgeoning genre of Alternate Reality Games know that the players in those games can solve deeply complex problems cooperatively.

But that’s not the sort of problem-solving that this book is discussing.

In those other cases, it’s the presence of a wide array of specialists that generally makes the difference. In Surowiecki’s world, it’s the presence of a wide array of people, period, that allows startlingly accurate assessments to come forth.

Ask one person to guess how many jelly beans in a jar, and they’ll prove fairly unskilled–even if they are a jelly bean expert (the most notable quality of the jelly bean expert will be that they will overestimate their accuracy).

Take a crowd of random people, ask them all to guess, then average the results, and somehow you’ll get an answer that is remarkably accurate. Like, within a couple percentage points.

In other words, SirBruce should quit trying to get developers to leak numbers to him; he’d probably get more accurate results by just asking everyone who comes to the site to provide an answer, then averaging the results.

The problems with this sort of approach, of course, are that people influence each other. When monolithic blocks appear within the group, you’ll start to get inaccuracies. When apparently authoritative sources of information start broadcasting their impressions of reality, it’ll distort the result. The results in markets are bubbles and crashes. The result, perhaps, in democracies, is ideological partisanship.

Based on my reading of the book, the sorts of problems that this collective wisdom solves are complex but limited. A huge amount of the examples in the book involve examples exactly like the jelly beans–quantitative assessment. The bulk of them can be divided into

  • coordination problems, which are essentially forms of self-organizing behavior, many of which seem to echo the power-law observations in books such as The Tipping Point or my personal favorite explanation of small worlds phenomena, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s Linked. (Got email from him today, I need to reply… hmm.< ---gratuitous name-drop.)
  • cooperation problems which largely echo discussions about tit-for-tat strategies, trust networks, etc.

One thing where I was left hanging was whether or not this wisdom of crowds phenomenon can assist with creative problems. After all, the repeated creative story is very different from what is described in this book; it usually involves intersecting disciplines or schools of thought, and then someone who essentially integrates things. Breakthrough products are often created by teams that are very much infected by groupthink–what in this book is decried is described as an effective way to create a skunkworks team in Peopleware.

All in all, this is a valuable read that may well illuminate many aspects of decisions you see taken around you, the nature of leadership, and so on, but I’d definitely want to put it in context with other worldviews before letting it take on too much significance in your daily life. These days are exciting, because it seems like every few months or years, we get another good, solid description of a chunk of the elephant; but as usual, the way the world works is proving to be quite like the pachyderm of the fable: hard to describe except in isolate pieces.

How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days

 Posted by (Visited 47145 times)  Game talk
Nov 012005
 

Go read “How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days” at Gamasutra. Seriously. (I spotted it over at Game Girl Advance–thanks!).

To quote the article:

Handy Cut-Out List!

Setup: Rapid is a State of Mind

  • Embrace the Possibility of Failure – it
  • Encourages Creative Risk Taking
  • Enforce Short Development Cycles (More Time != More Quality)
  • Constrain Creativity to Make You Want it Even More
  • Gather a Kickass Team and an Objective Advisor – Mindset is as Important as Talent
  • Develop in Parallel for Maximum Splatter

Design: Creativity and the Myth of Brainstorming

  • Formal Brainstorming Has a 0% Success Rate
  • Gather Concept Art and Music to Create an Emotional Target
  • Simulate in Your Head – Pre-Prototype the Prototype

Development: Nobody Knows How You Made it, and Nobody Cares

  • Build the Toy First
  • If You Can Get Away With it, Fake it
    Cut Your Losses and “Learn When to Shoot Your Baby in the Crib”
  • Heavy Theming Will Not Salvage Bad Design (or “You Can’t Polish a Turd”)
  • But Overall Aesthetic Matters! Apply a Healthy Spread of Art, Sound, and Music
  • Nobody Cares About Your Great Engineering

General Gameplay: Sensual Lessons in Juicy Fun

  • Complexity is Not Necessary for Fun
  • Create a Sense of Ownership to Keep ’em Crawling Back for More
  • “Experimental” Does Not Mean “Complex”
  • Build Toward a Well Defined Goal
  • Make it Juicy!

A lot of these elements were things that became very apparent during the writing of AToF. As I wrote the book, I also spent a lot of time designing puzzle games and board games. The successful ones had some elements in common:

  • I limited my interface.
  • I had a strong central theme (“Make a game that looks and plays like a kaleidoscope feels.”)
  • I could prototype them myself in three hours.
  • I could prototype them on a piece of paper. I’ll write below about my game prototype kit.
  • I could polish the game over a weekend.
  • I always started with a “blue squares” demo of just the core mechanic–no graphics.
  • I spent my art time on feedback, not just dressing. When pieces are captured off a board on the screen, it’s nice to make them pop with a sound effect. It’s even nicer to have a ton of particles. Best yet is to have a gun slide in from off-screen, shoot the pieces into messy bouncing bits, and play a loud satisfying explosion sound.

To my mind, the practices described in the article are exactly how you learn the basics of game design. And losing sight of them is exactly how you lose sight of fun.

Raph’s game design prototype kit

  • Two decks of regular cards.
  • One deck of Uno cards.
  • One Go board.
  • One Checkers board.
  • A half dozen six-sided dice.
  • One full set of polyhedral dice.
  • A large stack of differently colored index cards.
  • Twelve pounds of differently colored beads. Go to the pottery aisle at your local craft store–these are the kind that get put in fish tanks and potted plants. It’s a bit more than a buck for a pound of one color.
  • Wooden pieces, also from the craft store. These are found in the aisle with the clock faces:
    • wood cubes, various sizes
    • colored flat squares, three sizes
    • dowel rods
    • ‘pawn’ pieces
    • wooden chip (circles)
    • assorted circles, hexagons, stars, etc
  • Blank wooden clock faces that you can draw boards on.
  • Wood glue
  • Dremel tool
  • Square glass chips (also from the craft store, asst colors)

I keep it all in a chest I bought for the purpose.

On the PC: I use BlitzBasic. Either Blitz3d or BlitzMax, usually BlitzMax. Lua is also good for the purpose, though it’s syntax drives me nuts.

Sorts of fun, sorts of kfun?

 Posted by (Visited 12235 times)  Game talk, Writing
Nov 012005
 

Only a Game: A Theory of Fun for Game Design is an excellent and detailed review of the book.

In keeping with past habits, that means I’ll do the improper and pointless thing and jump in and discuss it! 🙂

Koster’s view is that fun is another word for learning. However, in order to support this view, the author becomes forced into excluding any aspect of the word ‘fun’ that does not fit with his model. Koster is completely upfront about this – he suggests that taking a wider view of fun “renders the word meaningless”, and therefore focuses only on a specific definition of fun as “the act of mastering a problem mentally”. Since this is not how the rest of the world uses the word ‘fun’, I personally feel he would have done better to coin a different phrase rather than co-opting fun into a context that does not fit with how the word is conventionally used (this betrays my adherence to Wittgenstein’s thinking on language yet again).

This very much echoes a similar discussion on Grand Text Auto here and here (and my response to their review is here), and discussions I have had with William Huber.

To put this in context… I broadly define fun as the positive feedback given by the brain for cognitive learning, the process of building schemata for coping with the world. Only a Game calls this “kfun.” Along the way, I state that the following are not truly what I call fun:

  • aesthetic appreciation, which I call delight, which is more the process of recognizing a pattern in the world around us
  • visceral reactions, which are more about mastering autonomic reactions to stimuli
  • social status maneuvers, which are about determining, enforcing, and improving one’s status in a community or social group

Now, all of these generally involve cognitive challenges as well. For example, the subtleties of social standing are an immensely complex “game” involving many rulesets, much hidden information, constantly shifting positions… very paidia, not very ludus. So there’s no doubt that navigating this game can prove a complex pattern-building challenge and therefore strigger the emotion we call “fun.”

At the same time, however, there’s a whole host of highly specific emotions triggered by social standing maneuvers; schadenfreude, kvell, naches, fiero, protectiveness, etc etc. Fun can be present, but it not always (consider the host of these emotions you get when being dragged around by your kid to an amusement park, whilst you yourself may have no fun at all).

Similarly, there’s a host of activities in which we have visceral reactions (or as Nicole calls them, altered states) and yet do not have fun. The vast majority of the altered states that are typically discussed are in fact inner ear responses: vertigo, nausea, sense of balance, sensation of falling, and so on. Seasickness has much the same effect, as does falling off a balance beam.

Again, there is a clear cognitive challenge, one in which the opponent is your own body. Mastering this particular problem domain may well be fun–riding a bike, mountain climbing, and so on–but the core challenge that is being overcome is one of correctly interpreting your body’s signals (which are, like all autonomic reactions, happening without you thinking about them) and learning to put them in context so that you can act upon them. Again, “kfun” shows up, but only sometimes.

Lastly, the trickiest one, delight. My assertion, which I am sure many non-games folks who lurk in academic areas such as art theory would like to dispute, is that delight is primarily an act of recognition. While there are many things in life which the human mind seems instinctively aware are ugly, there’s plenty of evidence that a tremendous amount of what we consider beautiful is actually learned. One merely has to watch the shifting changes in fashion to see that.

For me, the ultimate in aesthetic delight is signaled by chills down the spine. I am not exaggerating when I say that a truly powerful moment of aesthetic appreciation can be almost orgasmic in its literal physical sensation; the release of chemicals down the spinal column gives a feeling of chills that travel in waves through the body, with a tingling sensation. It can come in multiple waves, or just one, and the wave may be of varying strength depending on the intensity of the experience.

Now, looking at when this particular experience is obtained, a few things stand out to me. First, it is generally but not always orchestrated by an artisan of some sort. Second, it carries with it a strong feeling of inevitability. Third, it carries with it a certain level of surprise, of pushing the audience to an understanding or perspective they did not previously have in the forefront of their mind.

Inevitability married to surprise–how does that work? Well, to me it seems that what is happening is a careful presentation of one pattern of reality, followed by a shift in perspective that puts that pattern in a different and yet still valid context. And this is why I say it’s an act of recognition.

Can it be accompanied by kfun? Absolutely. As you can tell, I tend to think that kfun lurks everywhere. That’s why I privileged it with being just fun. Many of those moments of recognition may come only because throughout the process of absorbing the pattern, you have been forced to add to it. The moment of the shift in perspective may be one where you must learn the new pattern, and not merely recognize it. It might “blow your mind,” which we might take as a colloquial statement of “it was both aesthetically appealing and it taught me something.”

Now, some minor points…

The review states that I equate Lazzaro’s concept of “hard fun” as being literally Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow.” Yeah, I shouldn’t equate them. Nicole herself does emphasize the importance of flow in “hard fun” but does not equate them. I am just tired of people saying that “flow” = “fun” so I probably overemphaiszed the point.

I am intensely curious as to the meaning of this comment: “…in accepting the value of the fun of learning (kfun) he rules out to some extent having fun just for the sake of it…” Can you clarify?

Lastly, I don’t see myself as being exclusively fighting on the front of “defend the industry against those who would muzzle it” nor “push the industry to expand its reach,” nor would I think that Sheri would think of herself that way either. In some fundamental ways, those are the same battle, though the tactics may differ.

In any case, I shall definitely have to hurry up and read 21st Century Game Design; the level of thought that went into this review definitely makes me look forward to the book.

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