Gravity7: Social Interaction Design By Adrian Chan

by Adrian Chan and Andreas Weigend

This post has been translated into German (GDI Impuls 2/2010), Spanish, and Chinese (simplified).

The social data revolution

We live in an age in which social data has become the air we live and breathe. As individuals, our actions, preferences, habits, and even friendships, leave behind a wake of data. Not only data about us, but data that captures our communication and connections. Even our conversations are now data. Conversations that can be captured, stored, and re-distributed as data. Data that connects to us, and is shared with companies and brands with whom we have relationships. Like it or not, the social data revolution is the new business environment. Smart analysis of this social data demands a new mindset.

Business in this new environment has already been profoundly affected by the new datascape. Adaptation is an imperative. But for those who will do more than survive and actually thrive in this environment, the question is not one of adaptation. It is a matter of how best to respond to the world of social data, how to metabolize it, and incorporate it as if it belonged to the very company DNA.

If social data powers the new business ecosystem, then we must ask how it affects company fortunes. The business climate today is tough. It is highly competitive, customers have more choices than ever before, and loyalty is fickle, if it exists at all. Power has moved to the consumer side of the equation. Purchases and consumer power are no longer a matter of branding and brand image, but a matter of customer choice and decision-making. Consumers drive company fortunes today, and they do so with the help of an open marketplace that is overflowing with information. Consumers are empowered by their knowledge.

If we live in an era of social data, it is in part confirmation that the original age of information is behind us. Our technologies have evolved, and with this evolution, what we know and how we know it have changed. Where in the past we produced information, we now produce communication. The history of the information age began with information processing. It continued with machine connectivity, and then document connectivity. Today, it is not only machines and documents that are connected, but people. Information alone may be informative, good for discrete transactions and closed systems. Today, it is conversational, deeply relational, and open.

Self-constructed identity

The era of social data era is marked by a self-empowered consumer, and a consumption-empowered Self. Self, not society, is the new social construct. So the individual today is no longer simply a reflection of social currents and trends, a walking manifesto of cultural forces or a tidy representative of social norms and values.

The self is not an externally-constructed identity, a reflection of social forces, but is a self-constructed identity. The Self of today discloses, shares, contributes, and creates. The value produced by the individual today is visible, is public, is social, and conversational.

Society may be made up of individuals, but the great paradigm shift in consumer trends today is not manifest in the steady march of consumers falling in line with mainstream trends. Individuals are not socialized. Society is now individualized.

Social data is data socialized

The consumer is empowered by the knowledge with which to make his or her own decisions, to share them with friends, and become a public and social identity through them. In sharing, today’s consumers validate their social relevance and capture the attention of friends and peers. These and other efforts facilitated by the use of social media center on the individual. Social data is not data about the social. It is data socialized. Data that may represent social interests, but always starting as individual selections and interests. Data become social through actions and choices shared across social connections.

Brands, businesses, and institutions no longer control their own markets or messaging. They are not even in control of their brand image. All of these belong to and are defined increasingly by the consumer. For the consumer knows as much as he or she needs to know about the brand already. And connected communities know more about company products than many companies do themselves.

GetSatisfaction is an example of a site that handles customer feedback, comments, and questions. It is a site on which consumers tell brands what to do to improve and repair their products, reputations, and even their values. It is an example of how power has shifted to the consumer – for on GetSatisfaction, reputation has moved to the medium.

Transactional media

Transactions that used to entail a high cost of production and distribution, both of products and information, now take place over a medium that is virtually frictionless. We could say that where physical transactions used to distribute consumer media, consumer media today conduct transactions. Social media are the production and distribution of brand image, messaging, of product, and even its consumption.

In the age of social data, the distance between production and consumption collapses because both occur in the same place: online. Music is discovered, purchased, played, and recommended, all in the same place. Television, movies, and videos are discovered, rented, viewed, and shared in the same place. Content is also consumed in more places than in the past, when sound and image were bound to the physical medium on which they were pressed.

We might say that media today are media of transactions, and mean it as a metaphor. But we mean it literally and very concretely indeed. Media that in the past were the physical storage of content mass produced and consumed compete today with an entirely new mode of mediation. Social media not only capture and transmit content, but mediate the social connections along which it is so often distributed. The medium is not only the message. It is the messenger, too.

Content today can be consumed immediately after its production. This is one source of the transformative power over which social media presides. Note that we say “immediately.” Content available immediately is content already here – delivery is not an obstacle. Mediated transactions provide immediacy: what we want, when we want it, here, and now.

Attention is interest

Of course not all consumption occurs online. But even offline, the social data revolution is driving a transformation. Because what the consumer wants, starts not with your brand or its image, your products or their utility, but with the interests that frame the consumer’s decision-making. If it is said that social media create an attention economy, it is because consumers pay attention to what interests them. They pay for the brand experience with their attention, and on terms that are theirs alone to negotiate.

Consumers have the choice, and the consumer is always right. Interest and attention precede the discovery, precede the comparison, the sale, and the relationship. All of these are anchored in the consumer and the consuming Self: interested, engaged, rational, irrational. But most importantly to us, connected.

What matters to today’s consumer is this freedom of self-determination. An ethos of choice, and an ethic of freedom, for an age in which companies no longer drive their markets. Consumers do the driving. Companies today are driven by customer demands, expressed through social data. This is to say that the enormous power harnessed by connecting machines to machines, documents to documents, and people to people – in short, the socialization of data – now presents us with an indisputable paradigm shift.

Everything changes: the consumer produces, impressions express intentions, brand image has become talk, segments are individuals, communication is listening, sales is service, and transactions are conversation.

The relational economy

At the heart of the social data revolution is the relation. For the new rules of the social data economy are relational. Data in the social age does not just capture value, it captures a relation. By its connections with the intentions, attention, and conversations through which it is shared and distributed, data has is socially connected.

Companies did not bring this about, consumers did. Consumers chose to share, to connect, and to communicate. And on this basis, we can say that the relational economy is the choice of consumers to express themselves not as market segments, but as individuals.

In the relational economy, relations that matter to consumers express interests. Social data captures the interests consumers relate to. Interested, engaged, and knowledgeable consumers relate to what they want, what they like, and what their friends like. They relate because it is through communication and shared connections that they build and maintain relationships.

If an individual wants to share his or her credit card purchases through a site like Blippy, then this is not because they are just a fanatic for sharing data. It is because in sharing data, and in socializing it, they relate. Atomic actions, perhaps, in the form of discrete purchases and transactions. But atomic actions with the valence of social bonding. No company will be as smart at designing the relational bonds among products and brands that matter to a consumer, as the individual consumer is in expressing those relations in the first place.

Consumers disclose their interests and relate their preferences in actions captured in realtime. Forty-thousand tweets per minute, half a million items on Facebook, four million searches on Google. At a rate that doubles every one and a half years, consumers produce enough data about themselves to soon dwarf everything that has until now been so carefully studied by marketers, analysts, and researchers. The bullhorn has flipped, and if there’s any marketing message worth paying attention to, it is the one bellowed by the connected consumer.

The new mode of production

Conversation is the new marketing. Markets are no longer made by the brand, around brand image, and by means of brand messaging. Markets are made by consumers, through their connections, and interests as related in conversation. Distribution through conversation is the new mode of production.

Markets do not make conversation, conversation makes markets. Again, the social data revolution inverts and reverses the relationship of brand and consumer, placing the burden now on brands to behave transparently, honestly, and on terms that interest the consumer. To this end, we encourage brands to listen. To listen to what consumers have to tell them, and to get engaged with what consumers are saying to each other.

It used to be the case that brands had to struggle to supply consumers with information. But the coming age of the internet practically erased the cost of communication. What was once scarce – information – is now available in surplus. Through online access, a vast web of product names, sites, pages, reviews, and other searchable results, consumers face little difficulty learning about the products that meet their needs and interests.

Conversational marketing

The new marketing, then, listens to the conversations in which consumers express and share their interests through social data. It listens not just for mentions of itself, hoping to see itself and its brand reflected in the consumer. It listens to what consumers share about themselves, in how consumers brand themselves and their identities. The new marketing recognizes the power in helping consumers see themselves reflected in the brand. This is not about image, it’s about interaction. For consumers will recognize themselves in brands that repay their attention and reciprocate their interest.

The social graph and the many sites that tie into it are where much of this interaction is possible. Examples are numerous, from Facebook Connect and its new Open Graph, to twitter, realtime search and more. All of these point to an ever-expanding distributed conversation. One in which the mode of distribution is friends talking to their friends, and brand engagement is mutual, genuine, and reciprocal.

This is not just a matter of the eyeballs having turned from one screen, the TV, to another. It’s not just a matter of changing medium – it’s about talking now instead of looking. And this is new, even still, to many brands. Of course brands like to see themselves mentioned and reflected in consumer opinion. But then so, too, do consumers. Consumers are the new brands, and they do their branding in person. Conversation is the highest form of shared value, individually produced, and mutually engaging.

Conversation is the new marketing because it is the right way to engage with the medium. Indeed, social media carry so much conversation that it is the consumer’s attention that presents the new bottleneck. We have left the old paradigm, in which information presented the bottleneck for its scarcity and unavailability – a problem now solved by search. Today’s paradigm is marked by the scarcity of consumer attention. So much information is now available, in the form of blogs, comments, reviews, recommendations, status messages, and tweets, that the greatest challenge facing the marketer is capturing the consumer’s attention.

Consumers do the branding

When conversation replaces image-making and messaging as the new marketing, old techniques of market segmentation and targeting fall by the wayside. Communication becomes relational. Social networks and online social spaces, including those carved out by streaming applications for status and short messaging, replace display spaces and screens. Marcom and online social interaction are fundamentally different. They engage consumers by means of the interests that consumers take up in brands and companies. Products valued not just for image or function, but for the values expressed by the companies that make them.

In any marketplace, sharing is of the essence. Sharing builds relations that communicate to friends and across social circles. Shared values, interests, and pastimes spark and engender conversations that are more meaningful to consumers than at any time in the past. Because what consumers share is always within a context that is relevant to them, through a medium that has become a daily habit, and at a time when it counts. Consumers create conversation around their tastes and interests that is rich in social utility. The ways that consumers identify themselves in their talk weaves a web of personal and social interests in which the relationships in data can be deeply human and meaningful.

It is the brand that now wants to be seen in the proximity of the consumer, not the consumer who desires to identify with the brand. The social self is now so self-constructed and socially connected that consumers expect to see themselves reflected in the brands they relate to. Consumers make brands in their own image, revealing this in their own words and interests. Brands that adopt a conversational approach to marketing will benefit from this shift the most. For it is then that brands can best anticipate, respond to, and engage with consumers.

The relational economy comes to life across the many screens and through the many channels that social media make available today. At the present time, mobile devices promise perhaps the greatest set of new opportunities. Mobile devices belong firmly in the hands of the consumer, and involve deeply personal and habitual uses and practices. They are the closest to the consumer and provide honest and accurate social data. Increasingly, this data tells us where a consumer is, and what he or she is doing, and sometimes even with whom. Conversations held in public and across services like Foursquare will soon unfold across and around Facebook and twitter.

Join the revolution

With the participation of savvy merchants and brands, consumers embrace deals and offers that they receive dynamically, socially, and situationally. Situational awareness in fact represents an entirely new frontier to the socialized brand. For it provides the opportunity for the salesperson to greet consumers before they have even stepped into the store. Street-aware marketing, not on the basis of the guerrilla tactics of past viral agencies, but using relational and personal sensibility. Imagine a day when marketing may not have to approach the consumer, because it will instead be able to anticipate the consumer’s approach. Many consumers may willingly disclose that they are on their way, with products on their mind, and with a little company from their friends.

If service is the new sales, helping customers serve themselves is the new customer service. With social media today providing consumers the means to get their satisfaction, brands are realizing that the new consumer not only helps him or herself, but helps others, too. Service is leaving the call center and joining the web, driven not by corporate headquarters, but by consumers themselves. Service of this kind happens whether you like it or not, for it is in helping others that proactive consumers find their motivation. Smart brands will connect these consumers, will listen in, and provide expertise when needed and gratitude when it is not.

Mobile devices will bridge the digital divide between off and online, providing a view of the customer rich in dynamic perspectives onto their interests and interactions. In such a realtime environment, the challenge of social data becomes not one of how to obtain it, but of how to extract meaning from it. Yesterday was the best time to start learning from this data. Today is too late, and tomorrow will belong to your competitors. Data sourcing and measurement, data analysis and metrics, these are the new marketplace. Success will come to those companies that have learned how to use it.

So join the social data revolution. This one, for sure, will not be televised.

Andreas Weigend is former Chief Scientist at Amazon.com, and teaches at Stanford and UC Berkeley.

Techcrunch this week posted a copy of a social gaming playdeck used by SCVNGR. Social gaming is indeed hot these days. But there’s some confusion around game mechanics and social gaming dynamics. I don’t see any social in the playdeck provided below. So I’ve added my own commentary to each of the deck’s 47 points.

My apologies to its author, but the descriptions completely and entirely miss the socio-logical factors that make social gaming what it is. The deck, instead, describes individiual game play and spectacularly misinterprets connections between game play and player behavior. It reads as a Pavlovian exercise in attributing behaviors directly to a small number of game design elements, expanded here unnecessarily into distinctions that are redundant, disorganized (in fact they’re alphabetical), anti-social, illogical, and hopelessly blind.

In fact the disclosure of a deck such as this one might cause one to wonder just who the hell designs our social tools — and whether they are even qualified to execute on the subtleties of social interaction and shared online practices. A deck such as this one demonstrates quite clearly the inadequacies in social thinking and is a testament to the object and reward paradigm that seems to have taken over many game-like social platforms. These are nearing mythical status now as game-ification is installed as the new organizing principle for the design of social tools. A welcome counterpoint to which is the recent revelation from Foursquare that tips and recommendations will feature more prominently in their redesign (at last, we may have a real reason to checkin!).

Where, in this document, is presence? Where is reputation? Where is credibility? Where is there any sensitivity to the many different types of users, whose motives and motivations vary by personality and whose styles and habits of using social tools are distinct? Where is the recognition that social tools are embedded in real social practices? In fact, where’s the user-centric appreciation of experience that has served us so well in the past? At what point did we become so invested in design that began to view user behaviors (and presumably social outcomes) as a direct response to product features? But I digress. I’ll let you be the judge.

From SCVNGR’s Secret Game Mechanics Playdeck, with my commentary added.

1. Achievement

Definition: A virtual or physical representation of having accomplished something. These are often viewed as rewards in and of themselves.

Example: a badge, a level, a reward, points, really anything defined as a reward can be a reward.

My commentary: Achievement is but one of the relations users form to reward representations. In fact, achievement-reward is tautological. It belongs to the very definition of reward that it proves achievement.

At stake is how does the user relate to the representation. Note that these involve relations not captured as achievement, but having meaning for the user nonetheless. Also note that the meaning of these for users may be social: they are a reflection of the user’s sense of his/her social position, status, rank, membership, etc — all of which are validating but which bestow meaning not just for reasons of achievement. In fact some of the highest forms of validation result from receiving gifts, from recognition by peers, and other attributions obtained not from direct achievement but from indirect acknowledgment by community.

• The user may identify with it: user is a winner, a mayor, an expert, number 1.
• The user may feel s/he possesses it: the representation is a thing, a quality, an attribute of personality, a sign of social status, a symbol of membership, etc.
• The user may identify with the group the representation symbolizes: the user now feels a sense of membership and belonging, as in a fan-team insignia relation.
• The user may want it or aspire to it: the user relates to a reward because it represents an image of what the user wishes for, including wishes to be perceived as. Luxury goods represent social status to individuals, allowing them to feel “rich” even if they are not.

Achievement is an accurate description of one type of activity-response relation, but only one. It misses the social dimensions of partnered and social play (two or more players). It misses the motivations associated with beating an opponent, and fails to distinguish between the “reward” of beating one’s own game play vs beating the game. It assigns too much of the experience to a linear and direct outcome of individual activity, where in social gaming much of the pleasure and motivation comes from activity mediated by social perceptions and dynamically changing social orders.

2. Appointment Dynamic

Definition: A dynamic in which to succeed, one must return at a predefined time to take some action. Appointment dynamics are often deeply related to interval based reward schedules or avoidance dyanmics.

Example: Cafe World and Farmville where if you return at a set time to do something you get something good, and if you don’t something bad happens.

My commentary: This is not a dynamic, but a basic form of episodic framing. It states, simply, that in framed activities, some actions may be coupled to temporal intervals or to episodic markers. “Time” as mentioned here actually should be subdivided: time as in a specific point in time (friday, noon) and time as in sequence (after steps 1, 2, 3 have been completed). (All games are an experiential frame: they are structured and organized, have rules constraining behavior, enabling participation, and shaping both imagined, real, and expected outcomes.)

There is no social dynamic suggested here. Nor is there a behavioral dynamic, such that there’s no motivation explained or observed. Just a user’s necessary response to a temporal or sequential contingency. All games take time and all game events happen in order as set by game rules and design.

3. Avoidance

Definition: The act of inducing player behavior not by giving a reward, but by not instituting a punishment. Produces consistent level of activity, timed around the schedule.

Example: Press a lever every 30 seconds to not get shocked.

My commentary: I take umbrage at the claim that behavior is induced by the withholding of game rewards and punishments. Player behavior is sustained by user interest and that interest belongs to the user. In social games, activity levels of other users can be as compelling to users as the provision of game rewards. Among many other factors that may explain why a player plays, and with what degree of conscious and subconscious interest. Avoidance is a non-rule and explains nothing.

4. Behavioral Contrast

Definition: The theory defining how behavior can shift greatly based on changed expectations.

Example: A monkey presses a lever and is given lettuce. The monkey is happy and continues to press the lever. Then it gets a grape one time. The monkey is delighted. The next time it presses the lever it gets lettuce again. Rather than being happy, as it was before, it goes ballistic throwing the lettuce at the experimenter. (In some experiments, a second monkey is placed in the cage, but tied to a rope so it can’t access the lettuce or lever. After the grape reward is removed, the first monkey beats up the second monkey even though it obviously had nothing to do with the removal. The anger is truly irrational.)

My commentary: This one is also tautological. Behavior is the manifestation of psychology. Behavior is expectations. To say that behavior changes with changed expectations is making up a rule where there’s nothing but what’s already perfectly obvious. It’s like saying that people make new choices when they change their minds.

5. Behavioral Momentum

Definition: The tendency of players to keep doing what they have been doing.

Example: From Jesse Schell’s awesome Dice talk: “I have spent ten hours playing Farmville. I am a smart person and wouldn’t spend 10 hours on something unless it was useful. Therefore this must be useful, so I can keep doing it.”

My commentary: Again, a platitude of a rule. There’s no game rule in the observation that sometimes people continue to do what they’ve been doing. Habit would be a better term, and would permit one to at least account for game playing habit, social habit and pastime, routine, addiction, and distraction. Those, at least, are behaviorally differentiated and user-centric.

6. Blissful Productivity

Definition: The idea that playing in a game makes you happier working hard, than you would be relaxing. Essentially, we’re optimized as human beings by working hard, and doing meaningful and rewarding work.

Example: From Jane McGonical’s Ted Talk wherein she discusses how World of Warcraft players play on average 22 hours / week (a part time job), often after a full days work. They’re willing to work hard, perhaps harder than in real life, because of their blissful productivity in the game world.

My commentary: Who says we are optimized by working hard? Are we then confused by distraction? How about when we get lost in distraction? And can’t distraction be unproductively compelling? This makes no sense to me at all, and worse, makes a grand claim to human psychology that is at once deeply biased, culturally insensitive, non-specific (to psychological and personality differences), assigns personal motives to game participation, and even manages to establish a contradiction between what is work and what is play.

7. Cascading Information Theory

Definition: The theory that information should be released in the minimum possible snippets to gain the appropriate level of understanding at each point during a game narrative.

Example: showing basic actions first, unlocking more as you progress through levels. Making building on SCVNGR a simple but staged process to avoid information overload.

My commentary: Ridiculous, and ignores everything we have learned from narrative/story theory, besides which it also insults learning theory, learning modes, and conflates all game events to “snippets of information.” Information provided to a game player that s/he has leveled, has been awarded points, has a new team role, is being attacked are each meaningful only in context. Context, not information, frames the meaning of information, and defines what and how much information serves the purpose of sustaining game involvement. Information provided within a game is a game event.

8. Chain Schedules

Definition: the practice of linking a reward to a series of contingencies. Players tend to treat these as simply the individual contingencies. Unlocking one step in the contingency is often viewed as an individual reward by the player.

Example: Kill 10 orcs to get into the dragons cave, every 30 minutes the dragon appears.

My commentary: Besides being redundant (both “chain” and “schedule” imply serialized activity or events), this rule seems to say that players understand game play sequences. I think we got that when we were toddlers. All game play engages users in serialized activity for which there are proximate actions and contingent events. That’s the nature of a game — it’s a fiction understood. Game players may like to know what happens, or may welcome surprises. In social gaming, the involvement of others, especially when their communication is part of the play, adds to the experience. And communication cannot be accounted for by scheduling.

9. Communal Discovery

Definition: The game dynamic wherein an entire community is rallied to work together to solve a riddle, a problem or a challenge. Immensely viral and very fun.

Example: DARPA balloon challenge, the cottage industries that appear around McDonalds monopoly to find “Boardwalk”

My commentary: Episodic involvement of an audience, or part of an audience, is explained best on sociological grounds, not by means of the discovery concept. What is discovery for some is mob rule, action, suspense, or teamwork to others.

10. Companion Gaming

Definition: Games that can be played across multiple platforms

Example: Games that be played on iphone, facebook, xbox with completely seamless cross platform gameplay.

My commentary: No comment but that it’s poorly named, since “companion” suggests partnered play. In either case this is a product feature, not a dynamic.

11. Contingency

Definition: The problem that the player must overcome in the three part paradigm of reward schedules.

Example: 10 orcs block your path

My commentary: All activity that hasn’t finished is contingent. Better would be to differentiate among contingencies. Those would include coupling (of user action to response); proximate contingency (what’s next); distant contingency (what happens later); social contingency (change affecting all players); etc.

12. Countdown

Definition: The dynamic in which players are only given a certain amount of time to do something. This will create an activity graph that causes increased initial activity increasing frenetically until time runs out, which is a forced extinction.

Example: Bejeweled Blitz with 30 seconds to get as many points as you can. Bonus rounds. Timed levels

My commentary: Time constraint. That players behave increasingly frenetically is a supposition suggesting a relation between user experience (frenetic) and activity intensity (speed of activity). I don’t think we all experience time constraints in the same way. Some potential players may in fact avoid games because of the stress-inducing panic that comes at the end; others may live for it. Again, not a dynamic, just a game design choice to involve a clock and to constrain the play to a set time frame.

13. Cross Situational Leader-boards

Definition: This occurs when one ranking mechanism is applied across multiple (unequal and isolated) gaming scenarios. Players often perceive that these ranking scenarios are unfair as not all players were presented with an “equal” opportunity to win.

Example: Players are arbitrarily sent into one of three paths. The winner is determined by the top scorer overall (i.e. across the paths). Since the players can only do one path (and can’t pick), they will perceive inequity in the game scenario and get upset.

My commentary: Awkwardly phrased but accurately observed. Perhaps the perceived or experienced social inequality could be captured in the dynamic as intentional unfairness. Still, this is less a dynamic than a reporting problem: game state or status can be reported equitably to its players, or not. At issue is whether design or reporting creates advantage. Advantage can itself be structured into game play as a form of reward (as in qualifying rounds in many sports that reward players with advantageous starting positions).

14. Disincentives

Definition: a game element that uses a penalty (or altered situation) to induce behavioral shift

Example: losing health points, amazon’s checkout line removing all links to tunnel the buyer to purchase, speeding traps

My commentary: Disincentives are used in game mechanics, but are not the same as punishments. Punishments would be better called “penalties.” What matters more than the disincentive (what happens if you’re bad) is the rule that articulates the right and wrong ways to play. These rules should accommodate individual experience of play as well as game design and also the society of players. Red cards for tackling in soccer protect players from injury as well as disincentivize hacking tackles as well as improve play for soccer players and fans overall. Ask what function the disincentive plays and at what level of game play.

15. Endless Games

Definition: Games that do not have an explicit end. Most applicable to casual games that can refresh their content or games where a static (but positive) state is a reward of its own.

Example: Farmville (static state is its own victory), SCVNGR (challenges constantly are being built by the community to refresh content)

My commentary: I prefer the term “open” to describe frames that are open ended. Endless suggests a tedium. This dynamic risks missing the user experience, wherein “endless” may just be a fun personal habit. (I’m playing again. I like it.)

16. Envy

Definition: The desire to have what others have. In order for this to be effective seeing what other people have (voyeurism) must be employed.

Example: my friend has this item and I want it!

My commentary: Envy is undifferentiated here. Envy is the relation of Subject : Subject (Attribute). Voyeurism is entirely different and not needed here. All that’s needed is a value system that attributes value to the Attribute which gives envy its pitch and tone. In this way we become envious of wealth, looks, power, ability, and what have you. All are different and all are explained as much by what the observer relates to (desires) as by what the perceived possesses. I do not envy political power and a politician does not make me envious. Voyeurism is a distinctly different social relation comprising parts anonymity, privacy, ethical norms, fantasy, and image.

17. Epic Meaning

Definition: players will be highly motivated if they believe they are working to achieve something great, something awe-inspiring, something bigger than themselves.

Example: From Jane McGonical’s Ted Talk where she discusses Warcraft’s ongoing story line and “epic meaning” that involves each individual has motivated players to participate outside the game and create the second largest wiki in the world to help them achieve their individual quests and collectively their epic meanings.

My commentary: I like the term and I have a lot of respect for McGonigal (misspelled above). But this could be differentiated further. There is no epic meaning. There may be situations in which players are highly motivated by a higher cause or calling; or by crowd psychology (action, thrill, spectacle, synchronicity); or by abstract principles (doing right, being good, giving back); and so on.

Meaning may be meaningful because it is spontaneous, or because it responds to a situation. The concept of epic as grand narrative arc normally involves a situation that calls an individual to exceed him/herself in their response as action. But may also be the emergence of higher power within the individual. This is epic as England winning the world cup in 66 or epic as in Gandhi.

18. Extinction

Definition: Extinction is the term used to refer to the action of stopping providing a reward. This tends to create anger in players as they feel betrayed by no longer receiving the reward they have come to expect. It generally induces negative behavioral momentum.

Example: killing 10 orcs no longer gets you a level up

My commentary: Woah. I think this one describes what happens when players quit. That players quit is obvious, but hopefully we’re a bit more sophisticated than the Pavlovian description here suggests. Some try again. Some create new accounts and user name and play even harder next time. I guess they’d have to be described by the Lazarus dynamic. Also known as the Resurrection dynamic, and not to be confused with the Easter Egg.

19. Fixed Interval Reward Schedules

Definition: Fixed interval schedules provide a reward after a fixed amount of time, say 30 minutes. This tends to create a low engagement after a reward, and then gradually increasing activity until a reward is given, followed by another lull in engagement.

Example: Farmville, wait 30 minutes, crops have appeared

My commentary: Why not cal them timed rewards and scratch the part that tries to explain rhythm as a directly-induced behavioral response to timed game intervals.

20. Fixed Ratio Reward Schedule

Definition: A fixed ratio schedule provides rewards after a fixed number of actions. This creates cyclical nadirs of engagement (because the first action will not create any reward so incentive is low) and then bursts of activity as the reward gets closer and closer.

Example: kill 20 ships, get a level up, visit five locations, get a badge

My commentary: I’m beginning to wonder if the author of these game mechanics is OCD, ADD, or both.

21. Free Lunch

Definition: A dynamic in which a player feels that they are getting something for free due to someone else having done work. It’s critical that work is perceived to have been done (just not by the player in question) to avoid breaching trust in the scenario. The player must feel that they’ve “lucked” into something.

Example: Groupon. By virtue of 100 other people having bought the deal, you get it for cheap. There is no sketchiness b/c you recognize work has been done (100 people are spending money) but you yourself didn’t have to do it.

My commentary: This one could be differentiated further. There are serendipitous events which may be well described as a free lunch. But there are also gifts. There are also shared benefits. There are targets achieved by means of collaboration (in which work is often not equally shared and results not equally deserved). The dynamic seems to want to identify a relation between effort and conscience, but if this is the case then social factors have to be considered.

22. Fun Once, Fun Always

Definition: The concept that an action in enjoyable to repeat all the time. Generally this has to do with simple actions. There is often also a limitation to the total level of enjoyment of the action.

Example: the theory behind the check-in everywhere and the check-in and the default challenges on SCVNGR.

My commentary: I’m thinking OCD. But the focus on simple actions still has me wondering if it’s ADD. The somewhat poignant remark at the end about a limited total level of enjoyment has me thinking OCD. Possibly a game tester.

23. Interval Reward Schedules

Definition: Interval based reward schedules provide a reward after a certain amount of time. There are two flavors: variable and fixed.

Example: wait N minutes, collect rent

My commentary: I’m beginning to sense a real problem with this author’s experience of time. But it does seem that he or she has figured out when the rewards come. That’s good. Because apparently these games are completely lacking in content and other people.

24. Lottery

Definition: A game dynamic in which the winner is determined solely by chance. This creates a high level of anticipation. The fairness is often suspect, however winners will generally continue to play indefinitely while losers will quickly abandon the game, despite the random nature of the distinction between the two.

Example: many forms of gambling, scratch tickets.

My commentary: Oops I spoke too soon. Add to fixed and variable: surprising. And there are other people now, too. It’s nice to know that their behaviors predictably group them into winners and losers (those being people who play and those who quit). I have to agree that fairness is suspect. Nothing’s fair. You’re playing and playing and it’s regular and timed and then it gets a bit more rhythmic and suddenly BLAMO the lottery rule delivers a punishing blow. Sigh.

25. Loyalty

Definition: The concept of feeling a positive sustained connection to an entity leading to a feeling of partial ownership. Often reinforced with a visual representation.

Example: fealty in WOW, achieving status at physical places (mayorship, being on the wall of favorite customers)

My commentary: Loyalty is not related to ownership any more than betrayal is an attribute of the dispossessed. If loyalty is reinforced with a graphic or icon then something is represented. If something is represented it must have been achieved (rule 1). If it was achieved, there is no loyalty, but only an individual sense of achievement (rule 1) owing probably to extended bouts of serialized game play sustained by varying levels of intense anticipation of fixed and/or variable rewards obtained by the successful selection of contingencies. The word “addict” as substitute for loyalty comes to mind.

26. Meta Game

Definition: a game which exists layered within another game. These generally are discovered rather than explained (lest they cause confusion) and tend to appeal to ~2% of the total game-playing audience. They are dangerous as they can induce confusion (if made too overt) but are powerful as they’re greatly satisfying to those who find them.

Example: hidden questions / achievements within world of warcraft that require you to do special (and hard to discover) activities as you go through other quests

My commentary: It’s the trap door in LOST. He’s down there pushing the button every 108 minutes. Here’s a meta game for you. Sports on tv are played by players whose skill playing the game is required by their teams to play the game which is watched by fans for whom it’s a game and by tv audiences at home, who listen to the game play narrated by commentators who often play games with their analyses. About 98% of the people who enjoy sports get this. Any frame can be embedded in other frames. Re-framing is what makes social games fun to play with friends: the game is played as a game (player against himself/herself and the game) as well as against others as well as having meta social meaning for its being a social pastime.

27. Micro Leader-boards

Definition: The rankings of all individuals in a micro-set. Often great for distributed game dynamics where you want many micro-competitions or desire to induce loyalty.

Example: Be the top scorers at Joe’s bar this week and get a free appetizer

My commentary: Micro is unnecessary but I like the idea of sets.

28. Modifiers

Definition: An item that when used affects other actions. Generally modifiers are earned after having completed a series of challenges or core functions.

Example: A X2 modifier that doubles the points on the next action you take.

My commentary: Not a dynamic but a game rule.

29. Moral Hazard of Game Play

Definition: The risk that by rewarding people manipulatively in a game you remove the actual moral value of the action and replace it with an ersatz game-based reward. The risk that by providing too many incentives to take an action, the incentive of actually enjoying the action taken is lost. The corollary to this is that if the points or rewards are taken away, then the person loses all motivation to take the (initially fun on its own) action.

Example: Paraphrased from Jesse Schell “If I give you points every time you brush your teeth, you’ll stop brushing your teeth b/c it’s good for you and then only do it for the points. If the points stop flowing, your teeth will decay.”

My commentary: Some confusion here manifest in whether players play for the game play, or for the outcomes of game play. Both are always worth taking into account. But I fail to see how this becomes moral hazard.

30. Ownership

Definition: The act of controlling something, having it be *your* property.

Example: Ownership is interesting on a number of levels, from taking over places, to controlling a slot, to simply owning popularity by having a digital representation of many friends.

My commentary: You guys with me on this? *One ring to rule them all*? Yes? I’m glad to see it finally confirmed that Wall St is a game.

31. Pride

Definition: the feeling of ownership and joy at an accomplishment

Example: I have ten badges. I own them. They are mine. There are many like them, but these are mine. Hooray.

My commentary: Three things that are themselves distinct, two of which are already defined here as dynamics (rule 1, rule 30), inversely related to rule 16, possibly as precondition for rule 25? Completely ignores the social recognition conventionally associated with pride. But perhaps that social recognition is mediated by means of rewards and representations. In which case we would have a nice attachment theory of mediated social recognition, achieved not through interaction but through substitutes: socially visible representations and awards.

32. Privacy

Definition: The concept that certain information is private, not for public distribution. This can be a demotivator (I won’t take an action because I don’t want to share this) or a motivator (by sharing this I reinforce my own actions).

Example: Scales the publish your daily weight onto Twitter (these are real and are proven positive motivator for staying on your diet). Or having your location publicly broadcast anytime you do anything (which is invasive and can should be avoided).

My commentary: Not a dynamic, but a system constraint. Visibility of players and play is a product choice. Its influence on player experience and play will be explained by the user’s personal and social investments. In either case, the act of sharing one’s play socially is not for the reinforcement of one’s own actions. That would be anti-social.

33. Progression Dynamic

Definition: a dynamic in which success is granularly displayed and measured through the process of completing itemized tasks.

Example: a progress bar, leveling up from paladin level 1 to paladin level 60

My commentary: not a dynamic but a design choice.

34. Ratio Reward Schedules

Definition: Ratio schedules provide a reward after a number of actions. There are two flavors: variable and fixed.

Example: kill 10 orcs, get a power up.

My commentary: I’m beginning to think that instead of variable and fixed we just say regular/irregular. Either way we’ve got temporality covered here. More than covered. Completely nailed to the floor.

35. Real-time v. Delayed Mechanics

Definition: Realtime information flow is uninhibited by delay. Delayed information is only released after a certain interval.

Example: Realtime scores cause instant reaction (gratification or demotivation). Delayed causes ambiguity which can incent more action due to the lack of certainty of ranking.

My commentary: See prior comment.

36. Reinforcer

Definition: The reward given if the expected action is carried out in the three part paradigm of reward schedules.

Example: receiving a level up after killing 10 orcs.

My commentary: See prior comment on rule 31.

37. Response

Definition: The expected action from the player in the three part paradigm of reward schedules.

Example: the player takes the action to kill 10 orcs

My commentary: Ditto.

38. Reward Schedules

Definition: the timeframe and delivery mechanisms through which rewards (points, prizes, level ups) are delivered. Three main parts exist in a reward schedule; contingency, response and reinforcer.

Example: getting a level up for killing 10 orcs, clearing a row in Tetris, getting fresh crops in Farmville

My commentary: Help me, I’m melting.

39. Rolling Physical Goods

Definition: A physical good (one with real value) that can be won by anyone on an ongoing basis as long as they meet some characteristic. However, that characteristic rolls from player to player.

Example: top scorer deals, mayor deals

My commentary: Complete mental paralysis threatens as I try to distinguish between goods and rewards, and between the pride of ownership and the reward structure of having an actual physical good (real value).

40. Shell Game

Definition: a game in which the player is presented with the illusion of choice but is actually in a situation that guides them to the desired outcome of the operator.

Example: 3 Card Monty, lotteries, gambling

My commentary: Not a dynamic, but basic game design. The game player will always experience choice as choosing. The designer has designed the game’s play, its rules, and outcomes. Illusion doesn’t enter the picture because we’re talking here about playing games.

41. Social Fabric of Games

Definition: the idea that people like one another better after they’ve played games with them, have a higher level of trust and a great willingness to work together.

Example: From Jane McGonicgal’s TED talk where she suggests that it takes a lot of trust to play a game with someone because you need them to spend their time with you, play by the same rules, shoot for the same goals.

My commentary: Games are a social pastime. Glad to see that noted, even if it took 40 preceding rules to get to it. It should be noted that in 1969 El Salvador and Honduras went to war for 106 hours after playing each other in a soccer match. It is known as the soccer war.

42. Status

Definition: The rank or level of a player. Players are often motivated by trying to reach a higher level or status.

Example: white paladin level 20 in WOW.

My commentary: Rank is fine. “Status” is unnecessary and in the day and age of status updates, confusing. Possibly explained by rule 31.

43. Urgent Optimism

Definition: Extreme self motivation. The desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success.

Example: From Jane McGonical’s TED talk. The idea that in proper games an “epic win” or just “win” is possible and therefore always worth acting for.

My commentary: Neither a dynamic nor an accurate description of human affect. Cautious optimism better modifies optimism. Urgency is useful in characterizing need. Would be difficult to distinguish from “desperately hopeful.”

44. Variable Interval Reward Schedules

Definition: Variable interval reward schedules provide a reward after a roughly consistent amount of time. This tends to create a reasonably high level of activity over time, as the player could receive a reward at any time but never the burst as created under a fixed schedule. This system is also more immune to the nadir right after the receiving of a reward, but also lacks the zenith of activity before a reward in unlocked due to high levels of ambiguity.

Example: Wait roughly 30 minutes, a new weapon appears. Check back as often as you want but that won’t speed it up. Generally players are bad at realizing that.

My commentary: Totally redundant with rule 23, and conflates the two kinds of time: duration and sequential (time it takes for Z to happen, and sequential ordering of X,Y,Z).

45. Variable Ratio Reward Schedule

Definition: A variable ratio reward schedule provides rewards after a roughly consistent but unknown amount of actions. This creates a relatively high consistent rate of activity (as there could always be a reward after the next action) with a slight increase as the expected reward threshold is reached, but never the huge burst of a fixed ratio schedule. It’s also more immune to nadirs in engagement after a reward is acheived.

Example: kill something like 20 ships, get a level up. Visit a couple locations (roughly five) get a badge

My commentary: Again, conflates the two kinds of time. An “unknown amount of actions” simply states that the sequence is unknown. Is a again a game rule.

46. Viral Game Mechanics

Definition: A game element that requires multiple people to play (or that can be played better with multiple people)

Example: Farmville making you more successful in the game if you invite your friends, the social check-in

My commentary: Completely misses viral distribution dynamics, which are part distribution system, part communication, and part social graph.

47. Virtual Items

Definition: Digital prizes, rewards, objects found or taken within the course of a game. Often these can be traded or given away.

Example: Gowalla’s items, Facebook gifts, badges

My commentary: And I think we’re back to rule 1.

Many have noted the decline and fall of print and professional journalism. Some point their fingers at social media, or at the internet in general. There’s truth to this, although there are economic and business reasons, too (for which the internet gets some share of blame).

But if social media, and the internet in general, have sped up and socialized news distribution, rendering print a relative dinosaur in an age of accelerated media consumption, we should ask the deeper cultural question: What value is created by social media’s role in the production and distribution of news? What is the value, social and cultural, of faster news, of the vast system of headlines and citations (e.g. sharing, retweeting, etc), of one-click votes and Likes, and of realtime awareness?

I have written on this in the past, but not with an eye to the relationship between news and knowledge. Not with an eye to the role played by social media in the production of information and the transformation, by social means, of information into a stock of cultural knowledge.

Social media, because they distribute news by means of social activity (thin as it may be, and self-centered as it often is), transforms information into talk. But there are may kinds of talk, from gossip and hearsay to discussion and even argumentation. The world of social media is a very affirmative world — Likes but no Dislikes; votes but a bias to the trending and the popular; comments but little conversation.

The intrinsic relationship of talk on social media to the attention seeking efforts of its users introduces a bias: a bias mitigated by the brand authority of print, and the separation of journalism from the business of circulation. In social media these are conflated. The very act of tweeting is at the same time an act seeking circulation.

Does this bias undermine the medium’s ability to create value, to make us smarter, wiser, or more knowledegable? Does it undermine our ability to think, or better, to relate our thoughts, conceive of new ideas, and most importantly, make the decisions that result in a higher quality of life, and a culture that nourishes it?

….

The acceleration of news delivery towards its degree zero — instantaneity — is a historical and technical inevitability. It belongs to the very reality of news itself. The newest news is the news that just arrived now. No news could be sooner, or faster, than this news now. Now is the zero point of news. When it comes to news, realtime is just another way of saying Now.

News seeks ever faster speeds. “This just in” announces new news, redundant as it may sound. Our culture, for better or worse, places a high value on the novelty of news, the newness of news, the “newsworthiness of now.” As the media’s staple ingredient, however, it’s an empty calorie. Fuel good enough for baseline metabolic functioning, but little more.

News value begins by selecting information that is newsworthy. When deemed to be newsworthy, news is issued as news and its novelty makes it so. In this way a piece of information acquires an additional value, a cultural valence (it’s news!), from which it attracts attention and by order of which it is set into distribution. The audience — that’s us — which receives or observes news, circulates it further, in a fashion as old as the art of storytelling itself.

In the mass media, this news has authority, as news told by news-making authorities. It is not truth, goodness, virtue, help, or some other value that makes it authoritative (worth attending to, and accepting as real and valuable). But in social media, this news becomes social fact. It becomes a piece of content (information) whose additional value is its social facticity: a claim raised by means of mediated speech or talk, but just that — a factual claim.

A social fact is information that, by being news validated socially (by its travels through social media), exists as fact because it has been observed. Social observation online involves posting, tweeting, re-tweeting, linking, and so on — but first, observation (paying attention). Social facts come into existence in this way — and once in existence, can accrue a life story according to their ability to survive and persist past being new news.

The social fact established in social media makes no claim to authority but instead, having been spoken (tweeted), inherits the value added by its speaker. This is why we believe in influence, as followers or as those invested in having it.

Media, by definition, create reality. They do this in part by covering real events, of course, but in their coverage they produce a reality of their own. One that is observed, interpreted, and narrated by the medium in the course of production. And observed, interpreted and narrated in turn by audiences tuned in.

The question then becomes: If mass and social media both serve to produce and circulate news in realtime (their respective means of doing so being increasingly less distinct), what is knowledge? What is it to be informed, and what is the relationship between information, being informed, and being knowledgeable? Having more information does not make us better informed. Having more information sooner only makes us more quickly informed, but again, not necessarily better.

At what point then does a culture produce knowledge from information? How is knowledge created from news?

It would seem that knowledge should be more than fact, more than news. That it ought to have validity for what it claims. That it make a claim upon the individual on the basis of being valid, for reasons that connect to more than what has been claimed. This is a philosophical point, and if you don’t believe in the value of rational thought, is but a footnote.

Speaking philosophically, however, the value of a claim raised is in its validity for speaker and listener. The validity of a claim to which speaker and listener accept, if not agree to, the reasons that validate the claim, not only results in an acceptable fact. It results in a relationship between speaker and listener. This is immeasurably valuable, for it raises talk from idle chit chat to a form of interaction that can bind its participants to one another. It makes the magical art of conversation.

Only claims that can be accepted or rejected as being agreeable fall into this category — statements not of fact (which are true or false), but of validity (which are right or wrong). Knowledge would be information that is not just true, but which is useful because it can bind people by means of agreement about something beyond the recognition of fact.

That something is the mutual recognition of individuals engaged in a tradition without which we would wither: talk that not only creates its content but which also supplies feelings exchanged voluntarily between people who agree to spend some time giving each other their attention.

This experience is not merely valuable because it is social. In binding people for a stretch of time, and in producing a sense of mutual acceptance (if the claims are valid, speaker and listener are validated also — hence the magic), the interpersonal and social relations formed accrue value valid in the future. We create a future, project our hopes, anticipations, and expectations, and involve others in them, because of this. Not because of information, content, or fact. But because of a kind of claim (to shared validity) by means of which we can now make choices.

This is all there is to society. Individuals capable of getting along, on the basis of what they know, knowing too that others can accept what they know and thus accept them, too. All of this comes about by means of communication, or talk.

If talk is essential to society and its reproduction, does the talk enabled by social media raise the value of of shared cultural stock of knowledge? The stuff in which we trade in order to also maintain our relationships? The stuff whose value not only makes us a specific society, and its cultures and subcultures, but also the all important trust and respect that make us capable of choosing and acting?

In the midst of the realtime revolution, and the rapid acceleration of news, do we become more knowledgeable? Does the realtime web accelerate the production of knowledge? Or does it just speed up the distribution of news, and lend a hand in surfacing and establishing what constitutes the social facts of our online worlds?

We might conjecture that realtime detracts from the sustained attention and effort demanded of knowledge production, by distraction as well as by sheer noise and confusion. Or we might suppose that realtime is simply the power law at work, and a means in some cases of vetting and surfacing the social facts that matter — after which perhaps knowledge forms along the tail.

This is an open question, and I don’t take sides and can see the merits of either perspective. But there is also a third possibility. It is that the distribution of news in realtime, rapidly and broadly laying down layer upon layer of social sediment not only grounds mediated social realities but also supplies communication with opportunities for connection. It would then be the case that connections among social media users matter as much as what they talk about. The question would then be: how strong are the connections? For the question to raise about any audience is always: How can it be moved, and what is it capable of?

Perhaps, by means of this third possibility, social news serves as a vehicle for relating and connecting. A common stock of information with which to discuss the stuff that really matters. The notion would then be that news has value as a form, for it is helping to build a shared cultural language — a requirement all the more acute in open and diversified populations like those of social media. Such that when events and of consequence occur, communication already has its legs.

But it is also possible that social media creates its own reality, one valuable for those engaged with it, marginally valuable to those who don’t, and worth observing by mass media and institutions for whom general and topical news needs to be monitored. Personally, I would be more comfortable with what we have built if there were more “real” conversation. And if the medium were designed to sustain this.

The bias introduced by the medium’s unique way of engaging and separating us in the sustained activity of paying each other attention can get in the way. This may be a passing phase, a consequence of how today’s tools function (twitter, in particular), and one that we are moving through as connectivity and mediated interaction become ubiquitous. But if this is the case, new tools are needed, and prior to that, demand for them must exist.