Week of Feb 29, 2004

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How to Make an Oldsk00l Text Adventure Game

design

March 06, 2004, 05:12 PM

I came across an interesting article on the history and craft of text adventure games (or "interactive stories" if you want to be high-falutin'). It's fascinating stuff in it's own right, especially if you're interested in game design, but there's also some nifty little nuggets of design wisdom lying about, as there are with any well-written design case studies and instruction pieces. For instance, there's some thoughts on using design research for inspiration, a suggestion to start coding early so as to not get caught up in developing a perfect design and losing all your gumption, and the admonishment to think of the game from the point-of-view of the gamer, rather than that of the designer, if you want your game to really be any fun.

Whoever I got this from, I'm sorry I forgot you. I guess I'm just as bad as the next weblogger at crediting my sources...

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Making Web Log Analysis Tools Better

design, information, internet

March 05, 2004, 12:22 AM

We're starting our final project in Mapping and Diagramming, which is self-defined. I've decided to focus on designing visualizations of web log data (not to be confused with weblogs, although webloggers are my primary user group), since I've always been of the opinion that the visualizations generated by most current tools tend to suck. So far I've come up with a few sketches and a description of the project.

Some things I want to explore include:

• Better maps of what paths people took through the website (including most frequented paths).
• Information on how long people spent on each page.
• New ways to diagram other important web issues, like page bandwidth consumption, where people come from (referrers), etc.
• Interaction designs for mechanisms to show how these usage trends change over time.

And possibly others as well. I'd like to check out more existing web analysis tools as well as look over some of the relevant research that's been done on the subject, so if anyone has some good pointers, let me know.

Oh, and Dan is doing something wacky with linking together the music people buy, or something.

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IBM's Social Computing

information, society & sociology

February 29, 2004, 11:26 AM

Wendy Kellog from the IBM T.J. Watson research center, gave a talk at the HCII seminar series last Wednesday on research directions in social computing. It was one of those "look at all the cool stuff we did" talks, but there were some fairly interesting ideas underlying the mishmash of technologies.

IBM research have moved from developing funky visualizations of social phenomenon to emphasizing technologies that universally represent users in the computing environment. They call them "people proxies", but they are essentially a form of digital identity. For instance, one of these technologies, Grapevine, was an intelligent electronic business card that allows recipients to contact you via multiple mediums (phone, email, IM, etc.) without disclosing your actual phone number, email address, etc. Another, Rendezvous, aimed to make conference calling more transparent by making it easier to bring in more people without hassling with special phone numbers and the like. IBM are also interested in personal middleware, the idea that individuals should be able to create and manage personal web services which rove inter- and intranets to locate information and perform other tasks for them, and that these services (dare I say "agents"?) should be sharable (although the really hard question, how everyday users are supposed to create these services, was completely skirted by Wendy). The theory behind all these approaches is that the vast majority of a company's information assets exists in employees' heads, whereas only 4% exists in enterprise database systems. So currently, 80% of a company's IT budget is spent managing that 4%. These technologies aim to facilitate sharing the remaining information.

I ran into my friend Cristen Torrey in the hall last Friday and we had a short discussion about the talk. She was concerned about privacy issues, which always rear their heads when the subject of consolidated online identities comes up. IBM assumes that making certain information transparent will improve productivity and enhance communication, but it could also increase the power of those on top of the management (or government) chain, encourage micromanagement, strip us of the right to choose what details of our lives are public and which are not, as well as a host of other unintended consequences. Where are the guarantees that we will have control over our digital selves? Where are the researchers that are bringing these issues to the table? I have yet to see them.

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