I was thinking about creative games that use player generated content, and the various schemes to share and remix and use that content.
There are various "small scale" methods where the players generate some content in a limited fashion that is then used in the world. Eve Online is a great example of this: the player generated content is primarily limited to factions and corporations, and if the players want to generate physical goods they are limited to the goods in the master list.
But I'm thinking of a "deep" method where the players actually generate the majority of the in-game content. Second Life is the canonical example, and there are precious few others (Spore, the Sims, etc).
Most of them follow a "massively single player" model, where one player creates the whole of a given thing (for example, a house or hat or monster) and distributes it to others.
But what of an actually multiplayer model? Where content creation is actively multiplayer, with several people working together on something?
As I see it, there are three methods to multiplayer content creation.
1) Simultaneous participation. This is where players are working on the same thing with loose and informal boundaries. This is extremely vulnerable to griefing, whether on purpose or just because the other player has a different idea/is incompetent.
To minimize griefing in these situations, it's common to reduce player investment in the product, reduce algorithmic reliance between areas of the product, and restrict the participants to invite-only. All three of these are things I want to avoid.
2) Walled participation. This is when players work on the same thing, but with extremely clear boundaries. For example, if each player designs one of the characters that will end up in the party. Or if one player designs the starship model and the other designs the code that makes it move and fire. Or one person builds the level and the other builds the NPC bots within it.
Walled participation has some good points and some bad points, and it's worth keeping in mind. But I'm also not interested in that for this post.
3) Asynchronous participation. This is when one player will do a bit, then let another player do a bit, then another, and so on.
This is less subject to griefing than simultaneous participation because you can do strict version control and roll back to before the griefer did anything, or fork it to allow the griefers their own version. This is much harder with simultaneous participation because the boundaries as to what changes are what becomes very, very blurry very rapidly.
Asynchronous participation has the downside that the maximum "intent chunk" is pretty low, because each player only maintains control for a short piece of the whole project. If your intent is to build a starship in a Star Trek Federation style, and you leave and come back to find a beautiful starship built in Star Wars Empire style, it's going to be impossible for you to enforce your own intent without undoing or ignoring huge amounts of useful work.
Still, I believe this asynchronous participation deserves more consideration.
One thing to consider is that we may actually be thinking about it wrong. We're thinking in terms of big projects. What if we think in terms of little projects?
Instead of thinking about it like architecture, what if we think about it like improv? What if each player's action leads to a response which literally builds on that action?
For example, let's say there's a shared town and someone blows up one of the buildings in it (perhaps for fun, perhaps in the course of some adventure). Instead of rolling back and considering that griefing, you can use classic improv methods and build on it.
Move a bunch of squatters from a marginalized neighbor state into the rubble. Reveal a magic door to an underground area full of monsters. Have the explosion break windows in all the houses for a mile around. Send out an insurance hit squad to collect payment from that nasty team of adventurers. Small or large, just use the classic "yes, and" , "yes, but", and "yes, then" statements. Make the other player's action seem like it was perfect, cleared the way brilliantly, or added a kernel of a grand idea.
The idea here is to let go of your pure and lofty intentions. You don't need to build a city that is exactly like you want it to be: you need to build a city that people live in. It's possible to take content from other players who are interacting and use that to springboard in a new and vigorous direction.
A key reason this matters is because most players are not virtuoso content creators. Most players are only going to create/manipulate content clumsily, and often only in the course of doing other things. To pull them into the world proper, you need to have a way for those clumsy newbies to get pulled in with interesting new details, a way to make their contributions valuable.
On the other side, you may wonder how the players capable of creating good content would benefit. The answer is that most of the high-tier creators wouldn't benefit. They are people who enjoy working for a long time on perfect things, and then releasing them into the wild.
However, there is a type of content creator not really tapped: the event/questline coordinator. These are players whose content creation skills are probably mediocre, and may mostly be about choosing what existing content to replicate and stick into an area. But these are very valuable players, because they tie the player base together into a fun mesh.
So, what I'm saying is that asynchronous participation can A) allow beginners to contribute meaningfully, B) not interfere with high-level content creation, and C) give rise to a new kind of content creator that serves to bind the players together and build a world.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Synesthetic Math Toy
I made a synesthetic math toy. You can find it here.
I'm interested in synesthesia. Many synesthetics see colors, shapes, and motion when they look at numbers. I decided that it would be interesting to see what a math toy that duplicated that effect would be like.
The toy I created doesn't attempt to closely simulate any kind of synesthesia, partly due to the limitations of working on a flat screen and partly because I developed it in a weekend. However, the dancing, colored, trailing numbers are reasonably similar to the sorts of things a synesthetic person might see.
My question was simple: how are numbers and math different if the numbers "speak" to you?
When you try the toy out, you may be very confused initially, but that's to be expected. Try playing with it enough that you begin to get used to the numbers, what the various permutations mean. There is no randomness in their colors or activities.
Let me know what you find, keeping in mind that this toy is definitely just a toy.
Caveats: it's untested. I made it in a weekend. There are no alternate sizes, use your browser's zoom function if it's the wrong size.
http://projectperko.com/Numbers/
I'm interested in synesthesia. Many synesthetics see colors, shapes, and motion when they look at numbers. I decided that it would be interesting to see what a math toy that duplicated that effect would be like.
The toy I created doesn't attempt to closely simulate any kind of synesthesia, partly due to the limitations of working on a flat screen and partly because I developed it in a weekend. However, the dancing, colored, trailing numbers are reasonably similar to the sorts of things a synesthetic person might see.
My question was simple: how are numbers and math different if the numbers "speak" to you?
When you try the toy out, you may be very confused initially, but that's to be expected. Try playing with it enough that you begin to get used to the numbers, what the various permutations mean. There is no randomness in their colors or activities.
Let me know what you find, keeping in mind that this toy is definitely just a toy.
Caveats: it's untested. I made it in a weekend. There are no alternate sizes, use your browser's zoom function if it's the wrong size.
http://projectperko.com/Numbers/
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Geeky
Unfortunately, due to a mishap involving a bar and a randomized playlist, I've had Cee Lo stuck in my head. The best way to deal is to make a geeky variant!
So here's the aging internet meme called a song: Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy", except this version is Geeky.
I remember when, I remember my first telescope
There was something so pleasant about deep space
Endless twinkling stars make galactic lace
When you're out there in the freezing cold
Yeah, watching the stars
Endless distance marked by the passing of light
Scale gives me a fright
Does that make me geeky?
Does that make me geekaaaayy?
Does that make me geeeeeeekay?
Probably
And I hope that you are
Aware that your life is made
of starstuff
And that's enough
Come on now, what do you, what do you
What do you think you are?
Ha ha, cells and anatomy
And you pull out life's tree?
Well, I think you're geeeekay!
I think you're geeeekaaaaay
I think you're geeeeekay
Just like meeeeee
My heroes have the brains
To see the stars on a galactic limb
And all I remember
Is thinking, I want to be like them
Ever since I was little
Since I was little
It looked like fun!
And it's no coincidence I've come
I'll fly when I'm done
But maybe I'm geeeeeekay
Maybe you're geeeeekay
Maybe we're geeee-eee-eeekay
Probably!
So here's the aging internet meme called a song: Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy", except this version is Geeky.
I remember when, I remember my first telescope
There was something so pleasant about deep space
Endless twinkling stars make galactic lace
When you're out there in the freezing cold
Yeah, watching the stars
Endless distance marked by the passing of light
Scale gives me a fright
Does that make me geeky?
Does that make me geekaaaayy?
Does that make me geeeeeeekay?
Probably
And I hope that you are
Aware that your life is made
of starstuff
And that's enough
Come on now, what do you, what do you
What do you think you are?
Ha ha, cells and anatomy
And you pull out life's tree?
Well, I think you're geeeekay!
I think you're geeeekaaaaay
I think you're geeeeekay
Just like meeeeee
My heroes have the brains
To see the stars on a galactic limb
And all I remember
Is thinking, I want to be like them
Ever since I was little
Since I was little
It looked like fun!
And it's no coincidence I've come
I'll fly when I'm done
But maybe I'm geeeeeekay
Maybe you're geeeeekay
Maybe we're geeee-eee-eeekay
Probably!
Monday, August 08, 2011
Travel Guide RPGs
I was recently reading an indie RPG rulebook when I began to get bogged down in endless pages of lists and descriptions. It got me thinking.
In a paper book, those lists are not so bad, because a book is fundamentally arranged into chunks. You can flip through a book. However, this was in PDF form. The endless pages broke my immersion completely. In my own works, I am also aware of this restriction.
I was thinking about the fundamental nature of this kind of data. Charts and tables and level perks and item lists. Let's think about them.
First, let's talk about it from the most fundamental level. We use these long lists and charts to inform the player of something. That something is a stack of specific and unique things within a given category. So let's think about that very thing: lists of specific and unique things.
I have seen plenty of tabletop RPGs that don't list specific or unique things. They rely on the players and the GM to develop unique things over the course of play. So it's possible to do it without lists.
But lists of specific things do provide an advantage. They provide a terrain of play. A bundle of experiences-to-be. They are a method for the author to plan out a party's experiences, highlighting interesting confluences the rules create, pieces of world ready for adventure, and the like.
The rules and setting provided by the game are rich with possibility, but the players and GM probably can't see them as clearly as the author. The design of an RPG doesn't end with rules and loose setting, but begins there: lists of unique things are stepping stones and landmarks to draw the players towards the interesting features of your game.
So we have lists. Critical hit charts to put color in your fights. Item lists to allow the players to weigh the pros and cons of various equipment. Monster lists to provide instant, prepackaged tactical mayhem. Race lists to provide options for a new character when the monster list gets a bit too unforgiving.
If we accept that a list of unique things is a landmark rather than a straightjacket, wouldn't that completely change the way we approach things, even if we still insist on a paper book?
"Here is a list of equipment" becomes "Here, these are balanced weapons". "Here is a stack of monsters" becomes "These are ingredients for your fights!"
I'm going to try to think of the bulk of a rule book - everything but the most basic setting and rules - as a guidebook to the dynamics of the RPG. Like any good guidebook, it doesn't tell you where to go, exactly. It just says "this place over here is interesting, and you can get a killer view of the waterfall on the way!"
But that doesn't change the fact that lists are total shit in PDF form. So... let's not use PDF.
Wouldn't it make the most sense to release a tabletop RPG as a wiki? Fuck the paper book. Give me a wiki, each list its own entry. A travel guide to your universe, wiki form.
Wednesday, August 03, 2011
Classes in RPGs
I've been thinking about class structure in RPGs. I mean classes like "warrior, mage, rogue", obviously.
Classes grow out of the kinds of resources and mini-conflicts that arise from the game's challenges. If games have similar challenges, they result in similar classes. D&D 4th is a notably refined version of this, where the classes are descended from super-clear tactical roles (controller, defender, leader and striker). But all games with classes have the same fundamental idea: every class addresses a particular opportunity or challenge within the game's framework.
This changes based on the framework in question. In early D&D, for example, you had clerics and thieves: both classes addressed the less combat-centric parts of the game. In modern D&D, these have been slowly co-opted into combat roles as the game has become more combat-centric.
Most modern games with classes revolve around a specific kind of challenge which I call "open combat". Basically, everything revolves around damage: giving and receiving and controlling it. The four roles in D&D 4th ed can be easily restated within in this framework. A defender excels at absorbing damage, a striker at dealing it, and a leader at increasing everyone's capabilities to do those things. A controller is probably better thought of as two classes - one which deals AOE/specialty damage and one which interferes with the enemy's ability to deal damage.
Some of you are probably holding up a hand and going "wait, that's not quite right...", but please don't get sidetracked by the particulars: I'm using D&D as an easy example, I'm not trying to analyze every nuance of a particular system. I'm saying that in general, classes exist specifically to deal with tactical challenges presented by the game rules, and D&D's classes are a good example of that. The thousand of other games which also revolve around dealing and receiving damage in open combat also divvy up classes in much the same way.
However, that's not the only kind of challenge which is available.
For example, in a game where range is an incredibly important factor and damage less so, you start to divvy up classes based on their optimal range, speed, and ability to interact with cover and terrain. This is significantly more limited in D&D, even using miniatures, because the damage dealt is still more important than the range it is dealt at. In military wargames the classes are often more delineated by their range and maneuverability rather than by health and damage characteristics. You have grenadiers, tanks, snipers, riflemen, short-range infantry for urban zones, and so on.
In fact, you could divvy it up the same way as we did before, only with "range and mobility" rather than "damage given and received".
A defender excels at surviving attacks from range - infantry, crawling along under cover. A striker excels at dealing damage at range - snipers, tanks, artillery. A leader enhances everyone's range and mobility - scouts, ATVs, command vehicles, etc. Controllers are either A) anti-tank/grenadier units or B) engineer corps to dig trenches and set up bridges and such.
Of course, this ignores things like air support, because I didn't include that kind of challenge in my theoretical game. By creating gameplay elements, you alter the nature of the classes required to cover them: if I added aerospace control, I now have to not only add in the classes for air-on-air challenges, but also the classes for gluing air and ground together (air infantry transport, anti-air ground vehicles, bombers, etc).
The more diverse your gameplay becomes, the more classes and the more specialized those classes will be. Hence the boringness of playing an old-style cleric or rogue: their specialties were outside of the "fun" part of the game, so they spent a lot of time just hanging around being bad at the fun stuff.
So... that's my design thought of the day. What sort of challenges will you base your game around? What sort of classes will be required to facilitate the strategy of those challenges? How fun is it to use those classes and manage the tactics required?
Classes grow out of the kinds of resources and mini-conflicts that arise from the game's challenges. If games have similar challenges, they result in similar classes. D&D 4th is a notably refined version of this, where the classes are descended from super-clear tactical roles (controller, defender, leader and striker). But all games with classes have the same fundamental idea: every class addresses a particular opportunity or challenge within the game's framework.
This changes based on the framework in question. In early D&D, for example, you had clerics and thieves: both classes addressed the less combat-centric parts of the game. In modern D&D, these have been slowly co-opted into combat roles as the game has become more combat-centric.
Most modern games with classes revolve around a specific kind of challenge which I call "open combat". Basically, everything revolves around damage: giving and receiving and controlling it. The four roles in D&D 4th ed can be easily restated within in this framework. A defender excels at absorbing damage, a striker at dealing it, and a leader at increasing everyone's capabilities to do those things. A controller is probably better thought of as two classes - one which deals AOE/specialty damage and one which interferes with the enemy's ability to deal damage.
Some of you are probably holding up a hand and going "wait, that's not quite right...", but please don't get sidetracked by the particulars: I'm using D&D as an easy example, I'm not trying to analyze every nuance of a particular system. I'm saying that in general, classes exist specifically to deal with tactical challenges presented by the game rules, and D&D's classes are a good example of that. The thousand of other games which also revolve around dealing and receiving damage in open combat also divvy up classes in much the same way.
However, that's not the only kind of challenge which is available.
For example, in a game where range is an incredibly important factor and damage less so, you start to divvy up classes based on their optimal range, speed, and ability to interact with cover and terrain. This is significantly more limited in D&D, even using miniatures, because the damage dealt is still more important than the range it is dealt at. In military wargames the classes are often more delineated by their range and maneuverability rather than by health and damage characteristics. You have grenadiers, tanks, snipers, riflemen, short-range infantry for urban zones, and so on.
In fact, you could divvy it up the same way as we did before, only with "range and mobility" rather than "damage given and received".
A defender excels at surviving attacks from range - infantry, crawling along under cover. A striker excels at dealing damage at range - snipers, tanks, artillery. A leader enhances everyone's range and mobility - scouts, ATVs, command vehicles, etc. Controllers are either A) anti-tank/grenadier units or B) engineer corps to dig trenches and set up bridges and such.
Of course, this ignores things like air support, because I didn't include that kind of challenge in my theoretical game. By creating gameplay elements, you alter the nature of the classes required to cover them: if I added aerospace control, I now have to not only add in the classes for air-on-air challenges, but also the classes for gluing air and ground together (air infantry transport, anti-air ground vehicles, bombers, etc).
The more diverse your gameplay becomes, the more classes and the more specialized those classes will be. Hence the boringness of playing an old-style cleric or rogue: their specialties were outside of the "fun" part of the game, so they spent a lot of time just hanging around being bad at the fun stuff.
So... that's my design thought of the day. What sort of challenges will you base your game around? What sort of classes will be required to facilitate the strategy of those challenges? How fun is it to use those classes and manage the tactics required?
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Degradation of Privacy
I guess this stance is an unpopular one - or, rather, an unfashionable one - but I really hate when companies gather data about me and my friends.
I'm bringing this up here because I catch a lot of flak about it from even fairly geeky friends. So let me explain why I am against corporations collecting and retaining information. More specifically, why I think it should be illegal for corporations to use facial recognition software or otherwise "deanonymize" information.
Let's start small.
Point one: corporations cannot be trusted to keep data safely. Corporate IT practices are notoriously poor, and there have been hundreds of examples of accounts (even ones with financial information such as credit card numbers) being stolen by the hundreds of thousands. Sony is the most recent loud example, but Citibank and others show it is hardly a black swan.
So, even before we get to things like privacy, corporations can't even be trusted to keep the data they actually need to operate day to day safe. There are plenty of practices that can keep user data safe even if the corporate database is hacked or leaked. These all involve not keeping data. Only keeping hashes, discarding the credit card number except perhaps the last four digits for identification, and so on.
Some data are less critical. It's a pain when someone steals 500,000 client email addresses, but it's probably not going to result in your clients actually being harmed significantly - just an uptick in the amount of useless spam being caught by the filters. Except that's not actually true: that data can help deanonymize other data, which is a problem most people don't bother considering.
Point two: Data give corporations advantages. Corporations are businesses, 99.99999% of which are out to get as much money as possible. Even without any information about you, corporations build their products to lock you in and drill your pockets as much as possible.
While I don't like this much, I understand that it's not feasible to magically make corporations stop doing that. So let's proceed with the idea that any advantage the corporation can get will go to mining its consumers as much as possible.
Normally, this is moderated by competition. If one company is too abusive, you can switch to a competitor that offers a very similar product.
However, data are nontransferable value. It's best to think of data as the on-line equivalent of "location, location, location!" The reason eBay is popular is because eBay is popular: the mass of data it has - the number of transactions, the ratings history, and so on - makes it more valuable to post your stuff to eBay than a smaller competitor. The only competitors likely to succeed are those specializing in very limited fields where the noise on eBay is actually a downside.
This is true of social data as well. A big difficulty for most people moving from Facebook to Google+ was the need to recreate their social network. Google+ reduced this difficulty by offering up suggestions based on your email history. Google was able to (somewhat) overcome the mass of Facebook's data by leveraging its own, similar data. However, a social site such as Appleseed does not have data to leverage, and is therefore at a tremendous disadvantage.
This is not simply value-add data, either. Having information about your users allows you to advertise to them as well as actually make their experience better. Amazon is a great example of this, where it will advertise hundreds of targeted ads at you every page - "also bought X" "if you like Y, try Z" "EVERYONE IS BUYING A KINDLE OH GOD WHY WON'T YOU BUY A KINDLE YOU BASTARD LOOK HERE IS EVERY KINDLE EVER JUST PICK ONE BUY IT PLEEEEEEEEAAAASE!"
And so on.
This is a business advantage. Better advertising of related services and products is an advantage. It can generate revenue via ad fees or via higher conversion rates on direct sales.
Summary: think of data as location. The more data someone has, the closer they are to your house. That means that you're more likely to shop there, and if they open another store in their mall, you'll be more likely to shop at that new store. Data are a direct business advantage, and you're not likely to drive an hour to go to some interesting new place no matter how fancy-pants it is in comparison.
Point three: data can be combined, and it is easier to do so if you have more data. Some of you may have noticed I've been sticking to "data as plural", normally a pedantic and irritating choice. This is because I think one detail most people miss about data is that it is plural. Data is not like a bouncy ball. Data are like water in a cup.
Companies can combine data. This is one reason why companies frequently sell data to each other. To date, 99% of the data on the web about you has been more or less the same: your name and email address are the details that can get sold, your home address and credit card information are the details that cannot be sold.
But these days, there are a lot more details out there than you might think. What movies you like to rent, where you shop, who you phoned, what topics of conversation are common in your emails and social network chats, what kind of porn you surf for, which aliases are yours and not somebody else's, what your political preferences are, what kind of stupid shit you said ten years ago.
Most of this data is pretty useless to most people. Most corporations don't even care about it. But it is out there. It is really easy to trawl your Facebook or Twitter or Google+ account to collect a list of everyone you talk to and who talks to you.
Right now, your Amazon.com account is tied to an email address. Your Google+ address, probably. So Amazon can automatically, with no humans involved, look to see who is in your circles and visa-versa. And, next time you go to Amazon.com, it'll say "Hey, Greg bought this book, you should buy it too!" Of course, Greg bought "Animal Sex and You: A Practical Guide", so it might be a popup you wish you'd never seen...
Think it's outlandish? Here's a fun experiment! Go to Amazon.com, and search for wishlist. Just randomly punch in people's gmail accounts. I got a hit rate of around 20%.
Point four: no, really, data can be combined. I'm not joking. I don't really think I stressed this enough. Data can be automatically aggregated and combined. Even if you're not involved.
For example, if one of my friends posts a picture of me and then labels my face, I am now in the datastream. Especially if he labels me by email address or other unique identifier. Moreover, with fun facial recognition software, it's possible to then go and find out other pictures that are likely to be about me. Even if I'm not in the system as a user, the system has information about me.
Ever link to someone? "Oh, my friend Jerry posted this on Facebook: kalinkylinky". Congrats, your friend Jerry has now been linked to you, even if he's not even on the same service as you. Even if he has you blocked because you're a creepy stalker.
Think making your privacy settings strict will save you? Nope, it's pretty easy for me to reconstruct your social network using your friends who do NOT have strict privacy settings.
Let me make that clear: even if you set your account to strict privacy or don't participate at all, if you have any connections to other people who aren't quite so strict, your data can be easily reconstructed.
This is the same concept as "deanonymization". It's easy to take data that is supposed to be private or anonymous and link it up to a particular person using data from another source (or from the same source but another vector - IE, your friends' accounts).
Point five: data may be used to discriminate against you. Assuming that you don't care about all that above, let me remind you that data can be used against you, and already probably is.
Most employers will at least perform a simple search on your name when you interview them. Many employ a "drilling" service that will trawl for all accounts that can be linked to you and then trawl through their posts, looking for references to things like drugs.
These are services which already exist and are used reasonably frequently. It's only half a step to finding your circle of friends and, even if your account posts are private, finding what THEIR posts are about and what kind of comments you've left to their posts.
I use this as an introductory problem because it is one most people realize exists already. However, it is flat-out minor in comparison to other discriminatory activities. And here I don't mean racial discrimination, but the more general term meaning "judgment based on details or categories".
For example, we've already seen a few cases where people have gotten in trouble for Facebook pictures showing them carousing when they should be unable to work. Posts about your health are apparently court-worthy evidence when it comes to not paying out health insurance.
You have a side of you that employers, parents, government officials, and Amazon.com shouldn't know about? Well, your aliases are a fragile anonymity. Once broken, pseudonyms disintegrate. If you posted pornographic Twilight fanfic as a high school student under a pseudonym, the minute that pseudonym is linked to your adult identity, you are forever labeled as someone who has really, really shitty taste forever.
To those of us in a pretty swank position of privilege, this seems like a rather minor inconvenience. A) It's not, it's a major lifestyle change to give up all privacy to everyone who might want to track you for any reason. B) People who aren't rich white guys are much more subject to problems due to this kind of privacy invasion, so their issues will be 10x worse.
Anyway, the only solution I can see is to make it illegal for companies to deanonymize data or leverage publicly available data on their consumers. Otherwise, this stuff will happen if even a few of your friends are lax in their privacy settings.
Of course, that illegality doesn't spread to things like foreign companies and governments. But it should slow the spread if most of the major players that normally accrue data (such as Google, Amazon, etc) aren't allowed to accrue it in ways that endanger you. Having to compile all that data themselves is a significant stumbling block to any oppressive foreign power seeking to crack down on, say, demonstrations against them.
Most of us live in a very cushy world where we can't imagine data being used against us in any significant way. "It's just ads!" That's nearsighted and egotistical.
I'm bringing this up here because I catch a lot of flak about it from even fairly geeky friends. So let me explain why I am against corporations collecting and retaining information. More specifically, why I think it should be illegal for corporations to use facial recognition software or otherwise "deanonymize" information.
Let's start small.
Point one: corporations cannot be trusted to keep data safely. Corporate IT practices are notoriously poor, and there have been hundreds of examples of accounts (even ones with financial information such as credit card numbers) being stolen by the hundreds of thousands. Sony is the most recent loud example, but Citibank and others show it is hardly a black swan.
So, even before we get to things like privacy, corporations can't even be trusted to keep the data they actually need to operate day to day safe. There are plenty of practices that can keep user data safe even if the corporate database is hacked or leaked. These all involve not keeping data. Only keeping hashes, discarding the credit card number except perhaps the last four digits for identification, and so on.
Some data are less critical. It's a pain when someone steals 500,000 client email addresses, but it's probably not going to result in your clients actually being harmed significantly - just an uptick in the amount of useless spam being caught by the filters. Except that's not actually true: that data can help deanonymize other data, which is a problem most people don't bother considering.
Point two: Data give corporations advantages. Corporations are businesses, 99.99999% of which are out to get as much money as possible. Even without any information about you, corporations build their products to lock you in and drill your pockets as much as possible.
While I don't like this much, I understand that it's not feasible to magically make corporations stop doing that. So let's proceed with the idea that any advantage the corporation can get will go to mining its consumers as much as possible.
Normally, this is moderated by competition. If one company is too abusive, you can switch to a competitor that offers a very similar product.
However, data are nontransferable value. It's best to think of data as the on-line equivalent of "location, location, location!" The reason eBay is popular is because eBay is popular: the mass of data it has - the number of transactions, the ratings history, and so on - makes it more valuable to post your stuff to eBay than a smaller competitor. The only competitors likely to succeed are those specializing in very limited fields where the noise on eBay is actually a downside.
This is true of social data as well. A big difficulty for most people moving from Facebook to Google+ was the need to recreate their social network. Google+ reduced this difficulty by offering up suggestions based on your email history. Google was able to (somewhat) overcome the mass of Facebook's data by leveraging its own, similar data. However, a social site such as Appleseed does not have data to leverage, and is therefore at a tremendous disadvantage.
This is not simply value-add data, either. Having information about your users allows you to advertise to them as well as actually make their experience better. Amazon is a great example of this, where it will advertise hundreds of targeted ads at you every page - "also bought X" "if you like Y, try Z" "EVERYONE IS BUYING A KINDLE OH GOD WHY WON'T YOU BUY A KINDLE YOU BASTARD LOOK HERE IS EVERY KINDLE EVER JUST PICK ONE BUY IT PLEEEEEEEEAAAASE!"
And so on.
This is a business advantage. Better advertising of related services and products is an advantage. It can generate revenue via ad fees or via higher conversion rates on direct sales.
Summary: think of data as location. The more data someone has, the closer they are to your house. That means that you're more likely to shop there, and if they open another store in their mall, you'll be more likely to shop at that new store. Data are a direct business advantage, and you're not likely to drive an hour to go to some interesting new place no matter how fancy-pants it is in comparison.
Point three: data can be combined, and it is easier to do so if you have more data. Some of you may have noticed I've been sticking to "data as plural", normally a pedantic and irritating choice. This is because I think one detail most people miss about data is that it is plural. Data is not like a bouncy ball. Data are like water in a cup.
Companies can combine data. This is one reason why companies frequently sell data to each other. To date, 99% of the data on the web about you has been more or less the same: your name and email address are the details that can get sold, your home address and credit card information are the details that cannot be sold.
But these days, there are a lot more details out there than you might think. What movies you like to rent, where you shop, who you phoned, what topics of conversation are common in your emails and social network chats, what kind of porn you surf for, which aliases are yours and not somebody else's, what your political preferences are, what kind of stupid shit you said ten years ago.
Most of this data is pretty useless to most people. Most corporations don't even care about it. But it is out there. It is really easy to trawl your Facebook or Twitter or Google+ account to collect a list of everyone you talk to and who talks to you.
Right now, your Amazon.com account is tied to an email address. Your Google+ address, probably. So Amazon can automatically, with no humans involved, look to see who is in your circles and visa-versa. And, next time you go to Amazon.com, it'll say "Hey, Greg bought this book, you should buy it too!" Of course, Greg bought "Animal Sex and You: A Practical Guide", so it might be a popup you wish you'd never seen...
Think it's outlandish? Here's a fun experiment! Go to Amazon.com, and search for wishlist. Just randomly punch in people's gmail accounts. I got a hit rate of around 20%.
Point four: no, really, data can be combined. I'm not joking. I don't really think I stressed this enough. Data can be automatically aggregated and combined. Even if you're not involved.
For example, if one of my friends posts a picture of me and then labels my face, I am now in the datastream. Especially if he labels me by email address or other unique identifier. Moreover, with fun facial recognition software, it's possible to then go and find out other pictures that are likely to be about me. Even if I'm not in the system as a user, the system has information about me.
Ever link to someone? "Oh, my friend Jerry posted this on Facebook: kalinkylinky". Congrats, your friend Jerry has now been linked to you, even if he's not even on the same service as you. Even if he has you blocked because you're a creepy stalker.
Think making your privacy settings strict will save you? Nope, it's pretty easy for me to reconstruct your social network using your friends who do NOT have strict privacy settings.
Let me make that clear: even if you set your account to strict privacy or don't participate at all, if you have any connections to other people who aren't quite so strict, your data can be easily reconstructed.
This is the same concept as "deanonymization". It's easy to take data that is supposed to be private or anonymous and link it up to a particular person using data from another source (or from the same source but another vector - IE, your friends' accounts).
Point five: data may be used to discriminate against you. Assuming that you don't care about all that above, let me remind you that data can be used against you, and already probably is.
Most employers will at least perform a simple search on your name when you interview them. Many employ a "drilling" service that will trawl for all accounts that can be linked to you and then trawl through their posts, looking for references to things like drugs.
These are services which already exist and are used reasonably frequently. It's only half a step to finding your circle of friends and, even if your account posts are private, finding what THEIR posts are about and what kind of comments you've left to their posts.
I use this as an introductory problem because it is one most people realize exists already. However, it is flat-out minor in comparison to other discriminatory activities. And here I don't mean racial discrimination, but the more general term meaning "judgment based on details or categories".
For example, we've already seen a few cases where people have gotten in trouble for Facebook pictures showing them carousing when they should be unable to work. Posts about your health are apparently court-worthy evidence when it comes to not paying out health insurance.
You have a side of you that employers, parents, government officials, and Amazon.com shouldn't know about? Well, your aliases are a fragile anonymity. Once broken, pseudonyms disintegrate. If you posted pornographic Twilight fanfic as a high school student under a pseudonym, the minute that pseudonym is linked to your adult identity, you are forever labeled as someone who has really, really shitty taste forever.
To those of us in a pretty swank position of privilege, this seems like a rather minor inconvenience. A) It's not, it's a major lifestyle change to give up all privacy to everyone who might want to track you for any reason. B) People who aren't rich white guys are much more subject to problems due to this kind of privacy invasion, so their issues will be 10x worse.
Anyway, the only solution I can see is to make it illegal for companies to deanonymize data or leverage publicly available data on their consumers. Otherwise, this stuff will happen if even a few of your friends are lax in their privacy settings.
Of course, that illegality doesn't spread to things like foreign companies and governments. But it should slow the spread if most of the major players that normally accrue data (such as Google, Amazon, etc) aren't allowed to accrue it in ways that endanger you. Having to compile all that data themselves is a significant stumbling block to any oppressive foreign power seeking to crack down on, say, demonstrations against them.
Most of us live in a very cushy world where we can't imagine data being used against us in any significant way. "It's just ads!" That's nearsighted and egotistical.
Friday, July 08, 2011
The Replacement Web
I've gotten a fair number of comments asking about why I think Google+ is not competing with Facebook, but with the internet. So I'll go into detail now.
Let's think about how people use the internet.
Discovery
You need to look something up, find something. A reference picture of a cat. A house painter in DC. How AC/DC conversion works.
Right now, there are two ways to do this. Google search and Wikipedia. Google+ offers to radically enhance Google search: your connections and interactions in your Google+ network will validate you, so your travels carry much more authority than any astroturfer. Moreover, your connections will allow Google to guide you to exactly what you're looking for because your friends' friends' friends' already went there.
As for Wikipedia, I'm sure Google's coming up with an alternative. Probably +iPedia.
Oh, and some of you might use CraigsList for the more local stuff. Thanks!
News and Updates
I suppose a lot of users still go to, say, Wall Street Journal's or New York Post's site for news. Just browse on over at 9:30 AM and see what Murdoch wants you to know about.
However, a lot of us get our news via less restricted feeders. Things like Twitter, various filter sources such as Gawker, and thousands of specialty blogs that cover any kind of news you like.
You can argue that these don't have the gravitas of a major corporation with political aspirations, but that doesn't slow them down any. Already Google is a pretty important player here, not just passively through their search rankings, but actively through their news search, "top stories" section, and so on.
Not just news, of course, but also un-newsworthy things that matter to me, such as whether a friend's startup succeeds, or whether Germany is increasing or decreasing investment in solar power, or whether somebody's getting married. These also come to me through feeds, but mostly through different ones.
Google+ offers to take this and centralize it. Through Google+ circles and the I'm-absolutely-sure-it's-coming "extended circles", Google can easily aggregate posts and links and topics right to your Google+ page. It's probably similar to the iGoogle home in nature, but much more contextual and intelligent, so it can give you a wider variety of The News You Want without getting exposed to The News That Makes You Uncomfortable and still getting The Irrelevant Crap That Your Friends and Celebrities Like.
IE, Google+ is Twitter, Gawker, and Facebook all rolled into one, plus a few more things too.
Videos, TV, and Entertainment
A lot of people use the internet as a TV replacement. Just cruise over to Hulu.com and see what Murdoch wants you to watch. What, you didn't know News Corp has fingers in Hulu?
Let's go to YouTube instead. Oh, Google already owns YouTube.
Outside of actual hosting, most of your entertainment links come from filters and friends. These are the same sources that pass you news and updates, so the same things that will allow Google+ to dominate that arena will allow it to dominate this one.
Shopping
A lot of people use the internet to go shopping. Buying books from Amazon, doodads from Etsy, shirts from Think Geek, and so on. Right now, a lot of us pop over to the store that we know carries what we want, and simply click "buy". The times we want a comparison on prices, we go to an aggregator site that trawls through a variety of stores, finds the pricing, and maybe rates them by reliability.
Google probably won't ever have warehouses full of shirts and books to sell you, but they do already have the "shopping search" which does all the rest. Combined with Google Checkout and, probably, a new service with a catchy name like "Google+ iNetCash Turbo", Google is perfectly capable of becoming the go-to for internet shopping, especially if they can break Amazon's grip on the books market by offering alternate sources.
Summary
Anyone who thinks Google+ is fighting Facebook is thinking way too small.
Hell, Google may even physically replace the internet, putting up fiber optics between Google-owned locations.
All of this is going to result in a much smoother, easier to use internet.
Owned by Google.
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