January 22, 2007 by sean.

“Digg has a community of more than 600,000 registered users. They’ve gone far beyond the tipping point of creating a social networking site and some would argue they are spilling over with collective knowledge.” /newassignment.net/

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

January 6, 2007 by sean.

“Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and the New England Complex Systems Institute have discovered that social networks and the roles of the individuals that make them up vary drastically from day to day. Until now, scientists have largely thought of networks as fairly stable, changing only slightly over time–say, when someone makes a new contact… When they looked at the e-mail traffic on any given day, they found that some people were hubs just as they expected. The surprise was that the identity of the hubs changed from day to day. ” /smartmobs/

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

December 3, 2006 by sean.

wikipedia: “In preferential attachment, new nodes are added to the network one by one. Each new node attaches itself (creates a link) to one of the existing nodes with a certain probability. This probability is biased, however, in the sense that it is proportional to the number of links that the existing node already has. Therefore, heavily linked nodes (’hubs’) tend to quickly accumulate even more links, while nodes with only a few links are unlikely to be chosen as the destination for a new link. It is as if the new nodes have a ‘preference’ to attach themselves to the already heavily linked nodes…

“Preferential attachment is an example of a positive feedback cycle where initially random variations (one node initially having more links or having started accumulating links earlier than another) are automatically reinforced, thus greatly magnifying differences. This is also sometimes called the Matthew effect, ‘the rich get richer’, and in chemistry autocatalysis.”

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

December 3, 2006 by sean.

wikipedia: “A scale-free network is a specific kind of complex network (in which) some nodes act as ‘highly connected hubs’ (high degree), although most nodes are of low degree.”

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

November 19, 2006 by sean.

wikipedia: “One CI pioneer, George Pór, defined the collective intelligence phenomenon as ‘the capacity of a human community to evolve toward higher order complexity thought, problem-solving and integration through collaboration and innovation.’”

Henry Jenkins: “In the classic formulation, collective intelligence refers to a situation where nobody knows everything, everyone knows something, and what any given member knows is accessible to any other member upon request on an ad hoc basis. Levy is arguing that a networked culture gives rise to new structures of power which stem from the ability of diverse groups of people to pool knowledge, collaborate through research, debate interpretations, and through such a collaborative process, refine their understanding of the world. If Koster is suggesting that the “wisdom of crowds” works badly when confronted with the challenges of politics in a democratic society, Levy sees “collective intelligence” as a vehicle for democratization, feeling that it provides a context through which diverse groups can join forces to work through problems.”

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

November 13, 2006 by sean.

danah boyd: “a category of websites with profiles, semi-persistent public commentary on the profile, and a traversable publicly articulated social network displayed in relation to the profile.”

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

October 11, 2006 by sean.

Will Wright on Spore: “What you’re doing in Spore is layer by layer creating an entire world that at the end of the day is entirely yours: the creatures, the vehicles, the cities, the planets,” Wright explained. Those layers map onto different spatial scales that you advance through as you play: cell, creature, tribe, city, civilization and space.” /New York Times/

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

September 24, 2006 by sean.

numb3rs blog: Applying Social Network Theory (SNT), related to social network analysis, “you can make up your own network diagrams that tell interesting stories of communication, isolation, rivalry and power. SNT is yet another example of an application of mathematical reasoning which is not restricted to simply manipulating numbers or geometric relationships. Rather, it is a creative combination of these and other elements to illuminate hidden relationships around us. For more on SNT, search the web. Here is a good starting site: How to do Social Network Analysis.”

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

May 13, 2006 by sean.

Wikipedia: “A stochastic process is one whose behavior is non-deterministic in that the next state of the environment is partially but not fully determined by the previous state of the environment.”

Dictionary.com: “Involving or containing a random variable or variables”

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

May 7, 2006 by sean.

D. Rosen’s blog: “Flock theory models the network evolution of human interaction via communication using a combination of self-organizing systems theory, network theory, and emergence theory. Flock theory may be viewed as an emergent theory of decentralized human interaction. The throng of collective action between flock members exemplifies the self-organizing ability of individuals that, despite their complexity, can demonstrate cooperative evolution. The coordinating ability of birds is viewed as an exemplar that is used to elucidate structure, while simultaneously establishing mechanisms of interaction that serve as a foundation for several constructs, and extended application to the small world phenomenon (i.e. six-degrees of separation).”

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

April 27, 2006 by sean.

Wikipedia: “The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, first published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. The book presents numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument, and touches on several fields, primarily economics and psychology.”

Henry Jenkins summarizes Surowiecki’s “contexts where his ideas about the wisdom of crowds apply:

“There are four key qualities that make a crowd smart. It needs to be diverse, so that people are bringing different pieces of information to the table. It needs to be decentralized, so that no one at the top is dictating the crowd’s answer. It needs a way of summarizing people’s opinions into one collective verdict. And the people in the crowd need to be independent, so that they pay attention mostly to their own information, and not worrying about what everyone around them thinks.”

Cass Sunstein, author of the excellent Infotopia and Raph Koster qualifies the usefulness of the Wisdom of Crowds further: “Technically, Surowiecki’s conception of “wisdom of crowds” is ONLY applicable to quantifiable, objective data. The very loosey-goosey way of using it to discuss any sort of collective discussion and opinion generation is a misrepresentation of the actual (and very interesting) phenomenon.

“You can summarize the core phenomenon as ‘given a large enough and varied population offering up their best estimates of quantity or probability, the average of all responses will be more accurate than any given individual response.’ But this is of very narrow application — the examples are of things like guessing weight, market predictions, oddsmaking, and so on. The output of each individual must be in a form that can be averaged mathematically. What’s more, you cannot use it in cases where one person’s well-expressed opinion can sway another, as that introduces a subsequent bias into everything (which is why the wisdom of crowds doesn’t always work for identifying the best product on the market, or the best art, or the like).”

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

April 27, 2006 by sean.

Wikipedia: “The smart mob is a concept introduced by Howard Rheingold in his book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. According to Rheingold, smart mobs are an indication of the evolving communication technologies that will empower the people…

“A smart mob is a group that, contrary to the usual connotations of a mob, behaves intelligently or efficiently because of its exponentially increasing network links. This network enables people to connect to information and others, allowing a form of social coordination. Parallels are made to, for instance, slime moulds.”

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

April 27, 2006 by sean.

Wikipedia: “Reed’s law is the assertion of David P. Reed that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network.

“The reason for this is that the number of possible sub-groups of network participants is , where N is the number of participants. This grows much more rapidly than either the number of participants, N, or
the number of possible pair connections, (which follows Metcalfe’s law).”

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

April 27, 2006 by sean.

Wikipedia: “First formulated by Robert Metcalfe in regard to Ethernet, Metcalfe’s law explains many of the network effects of communication technologies and networks such as the Internet and World Wide Web.”

While Metcalfe’s Law descrbes the potential value of a network (=N^2 where N is the number of network nodes), it likely overestimates the true value of a network (see Numb3rs blog for more details).

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

April 27, 2006 by sean.

Wikipedia: “The network effect is a characteristic that causes a good or service to have a value to a potential customer dependent on the number of customers already owning that good or using that service.

“One consequence of a network effect is that the purchase of a good by one individual indirectly benefits others who own the good - for example by purchasing a telephone a person makes other telephones more useful. This type of side-effect in a transaction is known as an externality in economics, and externalities arising from network effects are known as network externalities. This is also an example of a positive feedback loop.”

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

April 27, 2006 by sean.

Wikipedia: “The study of the diffusion of innovation is the study of how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread through cultures.”

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

April 27, 2006 by sean.

MGTylor.com: “Weak Signal Research refers to those organizational traits and organic components that enable the enterprise to detect weak signals as a matter of course, build models and stories that illustrate the possible effects of whole sets of signals over time, and redesign itself efficiently to take advantage of these possibilities.”

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

April 27, 2006 by sean.

Wikipedia: “The small world phenomenon (also known as the small world effect) is the hypothesis that everyone in the world can be reached through a short chain of social acquaintances. The concept gave rise to the famous phrase six degrees of separation after a 1967 small world experiment by social psychologist Stanley Milgram which suggested that two random US citizens were connected by an average of a chain of six acquaintances.”

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

April 27, 2006 by sean.

Wikipedia: “Duncan J. Watts and Steven Strogatz (1998) introduced the clustering coefficient graph measure to determine whether or not a graph is a small-world network.”

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

April 27, 2006 by sean.

Wikipedia: “The so-called rule of 150, states that the size of a genuine social network is limited to about 150 members (sometimes called the Dunbar Number). The rule arises from cross-cultural studies in sociology and especially anthropology of the maximum size of a village (in modern parlance most reasonably understood as an ecovillage). It is theorized in evolutionary psychology that the number may be some kind of limit of average human ability to recognize members and track emotional facts about all members of a group. However, it may be due to economics and the need to track ‘free riders’, as larger groups tend to more freely allow cheats and liars to prosper.”

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

April 27, 2006 by sean.

Wikipedia: “Weak tie is a term suggested by Mark Granovetter in ‘The strength of weak ties’ (American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 78, No. 6., May 1973) as the ties in a social network that are not strong. Strong ties are those such as kin relations and close personal friends, while weak ties are loose acquaintances such as those connections made at a party.”

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

April 27, 2006 by sean.

Wikipedia: “Social capital is defined by international intangible standards as the value that is created through the application of social networks during non-organizational time. From this stance, social capital when added to human capital summate to define economic capital.”

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

April 27, 2006 by sean.

Wikipedia: “Social network analysis (also sometimes called network theory) has emerged as a key technique in modern sociology, anthropology, Social Psychology and organizational studies, as well as a popular topic of speculation and study. Research in a number of academic fields have demonstrated that social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals.”

IBM has a great article on social network analysis that is “first article in a series on collaboration, which is fast becoming recognized as an essential, yet often hidden, ingredient in working efficiently and effectively. This series focuses on tools and methods that can demystify collaboration and help IBM’s clients harness its power.”

For more info on the movement of ideas, influence and innovation through social networks, please check out my primary blog, the patternhunter.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

August 20, 2005 by sean.

“The rampant success of MMORPGs has already spawned pared-down versions for conventional cellphones… (T)he more powerful 3G phones and related networks - which can transfer data at hundreds rather than tens of kilobytes per second - will allow the emergence of increasingly complex multiplayer games (that) incorporate location-based phone technology and blend real video footage with computer graphics.” /New Scientist/

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

July 24, 2005 by sean.

“Game hackers have probed, tweaked and enhanced everything from Halo to The Sims 2 over the years without incurring the wrath of game makers — despite widespread click-wrap contracts prohibiting unauthorized modifications, and ambiguities in copyright law that make distributing the hacks legally uncertain.” /Wired News/

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

May 25, 2005 by sean.

“Ultimately we’re talking about creating characters, worlds and systems that have the flexibility and generative power of simulations, but are designed to temporally progress at a good pace, perhaps integrated with drama management, to keep the pace of the experience moving forward and avoiding play that devolves into repetitive, rote labor or long stretches of inaction.” /Grand Text Auto/

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

May 21, 2005 by sean.

In Will Wright’s new game Spore, “You start off as this insignificant bit of bacteria and you grow and evolve through advantageous mutation that the user determines through an engine that Wright has designed that has different parts (depending on stage of development) that you can add on and manipulate, like size for example. As the slide states, you go from being bacteria to a galactic god.” /Cool Hunting/

“When he fantasized about Spore years ago, Will Wright admitted, ‘My own imagination was my biggest bottleneck.’ He encouraged designers with ideas for games that are far outside the box not to give up on those ideas, but instead to cultivate them and revisit them later, when the time, the team, and the technology might be right. The demonstration of the ’stellar zoo’ that is Spore might have given hope to a new generation of game designers.” /GameSpot/

“The whole concept was dependent upon this technology that did not exist, what I’m calling procedural animation. The fact that the player can create any creature, and then we figure out how it would walk and move and behave.

“We went through all the research work in that field that we could find, and we ended up having to go several years beyond it to get to where we are, to where we felt confident that we could solve this problem to the level to where we can base a product on it.” /Wired News/

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

March 21, 2005 by sean.

“Recently I’ve been thinking about text-only work. It seems there are great opportunities here… of course, we could also use text-only interfaces such as SMS and IM. While I don’t know any SMS novel projects that encourage us to message back, it could certainly be an interface for these projects.” ” Grand Text Auto/

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

March 16, 2005 by sean.

“Do games tell stories? Answering this should tell us both how to study games and who should study them. The affirmative answer suggests that games are easily studied from within existing paradigms. The negative implies that we must start afresh.” /Games Studies 0101/

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

March 14, 2005 by sean.

“Greg Costikyan — the award-winning game-developer — recently brought down the house at the Game Developers’ Conference in San Francisco with a speech calling for games to be created outside the burgeoning, strangling ’studio system’ that’s cropping up in gameland. Now he’s posted a request-for-proposals on this — a public discussion aimed at mining the web to see what comes up…” /Boing Boing/

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

March 12, 2005 by sean.

“Alice continues to take fantastic, exhaustive notes at the Game Developers’ Conference in San Francisco. She’s just posted her notes from the closing panel in which eminent game developers were invited to rant about the state of the industry. What follows is lewd, hilarious, and very, very true” /Boing Boing/

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

March 4, 2005 by sean.

William Gibson asks, “If I give you my email, will you keep it a secret?” /KFX Studios/

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

March 3, 2005 by sean.

R. Garry Shirts wrote a great article on the Ten ‘Mistakes’ Commonly Made by Persons Designing Educational Simulations and Games.

“If someone were to ask me to identify the mistakes most often made by game designers, including myself, I would, after assuring myself that the questioner understands that game design is a very personal activity and that there are no right answers, reply in the following dogmatic manner…”

Shirts is also the author of Ten Secrets of Successful Simulations:

“The most satisfying experience in training or education, no matter what the subject, is the so-called ‘Aha!’ moment, that instant when sudden, spontaneous insight cuts through the tangle of loose ends in a learner’s mind to reveal a simple, memorable truth.”

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

February 15, 2005 by sean.

“I know it sounds like an ad for some sleazy writers’ school, but I really am going to tell you everything you need to pursue a successful and financially rewarding career writing fiction, and I really am going to do it in ten minutes, which is exactly how long it took me to learn. It will actually take you twenty minutes or so to read this essay, however, because I have to tell you a story, and then I have to write a second introduction. But these, I argue, should not count in the ten minutes.” /MikeShea.Net/

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

February 14, 2005 by sean.

“Instead of opening PowerPoint and diving right into the graphics, spend time working on your story. What is the setting, who is the main character, what conflict has happened to bring your audience there, and what do you propose they do about it? The more time you spend thinking about your story, the more interesting and engaging your visuals will be when you get around to bringing your own script to life.” /beyond bullets/

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

February 5, 2005 by sean.

“Night of the Hermit is one of many games available online that were created by fans of the dying genre. From Space Quest to Zak McCracken, fans determined to see the adventure continue have written their own chapters to the sagas.” /Wired News/

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

February 4, 2005 by sean.

“(A)nyone who uses a visual medium to communicate faces the same challenges as everyone else, whether they use PowerPoint, After Effects or Maya. You could argue that using PowerPoint is theoretically harder than other design challenges, because it’s a tool you use not just to compose graphics, but also integrate them with your physical presence as you deliver them real-time to a live audience. But in any case, the problem is the same — how do we communicate effectively with other people?  According to what was said at the event, the singular answer for motion graphics designers is: tell a story.” /beyond bullets/

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

January 27, 2005 by sean.

“Kids today don’t listen to music on the hi-fi or TV. They’re all into gaming and it’s by playing the latest hot video games that they discover new music and artists.” /cooltech.iafrica.com/

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

January 26, 2005 by sean.

Uplink is a game out of the UK about “High tech computer crime and industrial espionage on the Internet of 2010.”

I originally heard about this game via VirusFox: “And this goes for games as well. Some may or may not remember my fondness for a game by the name of Uplink. It’s a small game but it provides hours of entertainment. It might not seem like fun but if your into: computers, security, cyberpunk, etc. Do yourself a favor and buy the game.”

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

January 23, 2005 by sean.

“e23 offers game material, in digital form, from Steve Jackson Games, Issaries, and other selected publishers. Surf our site for the files you want . . . and get them instantly with a credit card or PayPal.” /e23/

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

January 20, 2005 by sean.

“There’s a new Interactive Fiction FAQ for those new the puzzly pleasures of these programs that are games, potential narratives, and worlds. Some of us put it together recently on ifwiki, which Dave Cornelson has installed as a resource (and collaborative writing space) for the IF community.” /Grand Text Auto/

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

January 18, 2005 by sean.

“One of the most hotly anticipated games of the new millennium has been R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk 203X, the third incarnation of the definitive Cyberpunk RPG. After some rethinking, restructuring and much grumbling by fans (myself included), it appears that there’s finally a neon light on the horizon. The R. Talsorian website is now featuring a 15 page PDF preview of the forthcoming Cyberpunk 203X. But that wasn’t enough for us–we went right to the source, and spoke with Mike Pondsmith himself, to get some insight into what went into the new game, and what’s to come.” /Gamegrene.com/

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

December 31, 2004 by sean.

“Façade is an artificial intelligence-based art/research experiment in electronic narrative – an attempt to move beyond traditional branching or hyper-linked narrative to create a fully-realized, one-act interactive drama. Integrating an interdisciplinary set of artistic practices and artificial intelligence technologies, we are completing a three year collaboration to engineer a novel architecture for supporting emotional, interactive character behavior and drama-managed plot. Within this architecture we are building a dramatically interesting, real-time 3D virtual world inhabited by computer-controlled characters, in which the user (hereafter referred to as the player) experiences a story from a first-person perspective. Façade will be publicly released as a free download / cd-rom in spring 2005.” /InteractiveStory.net/

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

December 5, 2004 by sean.

“We’re living in a science fiction world. The headlines of our newspapers trumpet cloning experiments, the teleportation of atoms, computers controlled by brainwaves, robots that walk and play musical instruments, private planes that carry passengers to the edge of space, space probes that rendezvous with asteroids, and implantable devices that restore hearing to the deaf. When miracles like these are the baseline, how can fantasy measure up? More simply put: Why on earth should we read science fiction? Here are some of the reasons…”/BusinessWeek/

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

December 5, 2004 by sean.

“We want to grow the eSeminars business, and our audience is clamoring for more editorial events,’ he said. ‘What better way to give them what they are asking for than to create a virtual tradeshow that isn’t just a one-hour panel discussion but focuses an entire tradeshow on the topic?” /eWeek/

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

December 5, 2004 by sean.

The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed. - William Gibson

Anyone who makes a distinction between games and education clearly does not know the first thing about either one. - Marshall McLuhan

The future of game-based learning has arrived; it’s in the Army.

Tell-Test / AFTRB = Another Fucking Three Ring Binder!

We have just now, ten minutes ago, made a partnership with Apple. We want to work with them. The Edge wants to work with their scientists. We want to play withh their design team. We want to be in their commercial … And next year, you will be able to go to a U2 show and download the commercial onto your iPod… We want to do this because we like their company. It’s art, technology and commerce colliding. - Bono, lead singer of U2

We need to commit to R&D, the practice of designing educational experiences and products, with the same intensity that we give to sales and marketing.

A WOW Project is the quintessential expression of personality and character. It is not for the faint-of-heart. - Tom Peters

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

December 5, 2004 by sean.

“The Connections 2004 Military Modeling and Simultion Conference was held on August 23-27, 2004, at and near the US Air Force Academy in Colorado.

The goal of Connections is to increase the defense utility of all conflict simulations by facilitating their evolution toward greater comprehensiveness and accessibility. Our concept for reaching that goal is to encourage the Defense and Commercial wargame communities to learn from each other and from subject matter experts in those areas of conflict that are typically not modeled well. Methods to accomplish this cross-feed include: lectures, seminars, DoD and commercial wargames demos and several social/networking events.” /DOD Game Developer’s Community/

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »