Askville to Questville
(Visited 26865 times) Game talk
Jul 052007
I don’t know if you have all seen Askville, Amazon.com’s post-questions-and-get-answers site, but it’s very very clearly inspired by games (XP, levels, etc!). Enough so that one blogger already wondered aloud if they were inspired by my ETech talk (I personally doubt it, but if it’s so, I’d love to get royalties 😉 Amazon gift certificates would do…).
Well, Virtual Worlds News is reporting that this system, which is based on winning virtual currency, is designed to hook into something called Questville which will launch this year. And that Questville will be a virtual world of some sort. Details are thin on the ground though.
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Quest gold shows everyone how active and helpful you’ve been, plus how likely you are to possibly earn a $100 gift card. Interesting. Tech Crunch took note of all this a year ago. Virtual World News made mention of it over the summer, whichcaughtsome attention among the virtual worlds blogerati, and recently Alice Taylor picked it up, then James Au from her, and then yesterday Nick Carr pointed it out. Carr says: “One thing’s for sure, anyway: If you can pay your workers with virtual money,
We had implemented XP and levels and such for members on http://www.RPG.net for doing reviews, ratings, and other user content, and jokingly wondered if they came up with it from us 😉
I love amazon.com! Raph Koster- Making the internet a better place, one site at a time.
After a cursory glance, Askville seems to be nothing more than a glorified bulletin board.
Askville launched in December, ’06.
It sounds like a game-site to me, but then I keep thinking Amazon is an online bookstore, so whadda I know?
I love Askville, it’s a lot of fun, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a game/social media thing that is actually *fun*. I like the way you can tack on books or maps or videos and it’s so much freer than Facebook where it doesn’t demand you to supply a college email to find your fellow college graduates.
Actually, I want to note that I’m finding some aspects of Askville common to all social media projects to be horrifying in the same way as they are everywhere else — only perhaps in accelerated, more mass, and more *thorough* fashion precisely because it’s a gigantic mega site like amazon.com
These horrors include:
o the presence of board queens or core groupies or top-ten leader board members or whatever you want to call it — people who run stuff, and hurry to “set straight,” or chastise or “keep order” — and interpret game dev actions and intents (though they have no legitimacy in doing so)
o the use of the secretive police informant method to “report abuse” without any accountability (I don’t notice that your coins are debited if you falsely report)
o threats that people make to you in private IMs that if you don’t answer their question better, or don’t take them more seriously with their question, or frankly, don’t answer their politically-biased and loaded question the way they like, they’ll “weaken” you by voting you down
o requests to the mob to come flash-mob a vote to “balance it” because they don’t like how it’s turning out
o belief that game features can be “voted up” or incorporated only if “everybody” or “the mob” or “most people” or “the heavy users” approve and want them — the notion that if you as an individual suggest a feature that might be a good thing, if nobody else votes for it, the game devs should ignore it (my God, I hope game devs have more sense than that!)
o belief by core users, heavy leaderboard types, programmers in RL, etc. that the user interface as it stands is absolutely perfect even if clunky or counter-intuitive
And many more things like that I’m starting to see as common not only to SL or certain social spaces, but all games and all worlds and all social media stuff — and by God, I find that humongously scary.
Askville’s devs have put hugely picky and parsey rules up on their blog adding to their already overreaching TOS. I’d love to see if when they call for respect of others and not chasting others they apply to their special game board queens. In fact, I suspect if you note aptly that board queens are rushing to “set you straight,” call on their mob networks to “balance your vote,” tell you your question and idea sucks and you’re stupid, etc. and that you just “have to accept what the devs have done for us and suck it up” basically, that you’ll be found by those devs as “violating the TOS”.
Within 24 hours, I find myself fighting for the soul of Askville, by merely posing a simple question about the incongruous user interfact.
I asked, innocently enough, why, under “My Askville” *my list of questions was not there*.
I mean, “my questions” should be under “my askville” as my prime sort of content no?
I’ve been mobbed and mauled by a dozen people telling me that essentially, I’m a newby assclown for not realizing “my questions” is under “history” (it is, but only clicking through and wading through menus and stuff — and “history” is sharing real estate with “recent activity” as a separate category, both of which are redundant and require extra click-throughs to get to questions).
I’ve actually had little lectures about how the Askville devs have already, in their wisdom, done everything absolutely right and perfect and no one should ever question it as they know what’s good for us.
I’ve actually had to listen to people tell me with a straight face that really, questions aren’t so important…they aren’t really what Askville is all about…it’s really *compliments* that are important.
Honestly, Raph, if you have just 7 minutes, go to Askville, log in, read my profile and the comments and such, and in a nutshell, you will see the history of gaming and virtual worlds and the clash of devs, FIC, and users in an absolute crystal-pure nutshell.
[…] Raph Koster’s a fan of the so-called “playful web”, in which game-like activities are incorporated into traditional websites and software applications. Recently, he pointed towards Amazon.com as an example of a company doing some interesting things in this non-game/game space with their Askville and forthcoming Questville services, who seems to have learned a thing or two from role playing games. […]
Oh Prokovy Neva, don’t forget the part where their competitors play copy-cat!
Heh.
And it gets better!
[…] the end of 2007. Askville is a friend question-and-answer website, that fits in with the idea of a ‘playful web’ that many people are keen to see developed. Questville, in whatever form it takes, has the […]