Micha informed me the other day of a conference taking place in Potsdam, Germany from the 8th to 10th of May on the philosophy of computer games. I find it to be a great opportunity for users and players to see games under a completely new perspective.

Jesper Juul and Ian Bogost, both theorists of video game studies will give keynote talks and more are yet to be announced. But the conference will not constitute solely on discussions. Scholars who take a professional interest in the phenomenon of computer games are invited to submit papers to the the international conference “The Philosophy of Computer Games 2008″.

I’ve read somewhere that games should NEVER take themselves too seriously. This conference and the theory of video games, puts this opinion under debate. Although the theory of games is relatively young, it certainly contributes in a discourse about:

action | space

Issues relating to the experiential, interactional and cognitive dimensions of computer game play.

What is the nature of perceptual experience in game space? How should we understand the relationship between action, interaction and space in computer game environments? How should we think about players’ aesthetic, emotive and(/or) rational responses to what goes on inside the game space?

ethics / politics

What are the ethical responsibilities of game-makers in exerting influence on individual gamers and society in general? What role, if any, can games serve as a critical cultural corrective in relation to traditional forms of media and communicative practices, for example in economy and politics?

Also: what is the nature of the ethical norms that apply within the gaming context, and what are the factors that allow or delimit philosophical justifications of their application there or elsewhere?

borders between play and reality

Terms such as “fictionality”, “virtuality”, “simulation” or “representation” are often used to indicate specific functions of objects in games.

But what is the nature of the phenomena these terms refer to in the interactive field of game play? And what is the structure of gaming-processes? What is the mediality of digital games?

We are especially interested in discussions that aim at how the notion of a self-contained “magic circle” - representing an imagined border between play and reality, or the internal and external limits of game-programs - is being challenged by forms of individual action and social inter action which tend to transcend such limits.

Open Invitation

These are just some subjects that will be covered in the conference. If you have any work regarding the topic, you are invited to submit it until the 15th of February.

I know, there is not much time left, but it is certainly worth it. This is an international conference with the collaboration of Universities from Germany, Oslo, Italy and Denmark. Your work will certainly be heard here.

Of course you are also invited to visit the conference. The University of Potsdam has started an effort to provide residence to visitors having a hard time finding a place to stay. Students and conference organizers are welcoming visitors and doing their best locating accommodation and even opening their own homes.

For more information about the conference visit gamephilosophy.org.

For more information about the philosophy of computer games take a look at: The Digiplay Initiative: A collaborative effort on understanding digital games.

Flash is a great tool to create stylish sites. Its strength is not only in its animation potentials, but also in its coding possibilities. And that’s where the problems start; the possibilities are literally countless, so you can easily get lost.
I’ve been working with Flash for quite some time now and always have the same problem. How can I design this site? What kind of graphics and animation should I use?
So here is a list with the necessary 5 steps every flash designer should make, before opening flash.

1. Study your subject

What is the site about? If it’s about cooking you might need brighter, warmer colors. If it’s about a hospital you should probably go with tranquiler, softer hues.
The ideal starting point is a small research. Google your subject and see what wikipedia writes. Sure, you know what cooking is all about, but just a single word might give you a bright idea. You’ll also see other sites about the subject. How is the cooking niche designed?
This first step will give you an impression about structure: should you comply with basic usability rules or start doing something more experimental?

2. Draw inspiration

The second step is about construction. There are thousands of flash sites out there; all of them potential inspiration sources. See what other designers have done with their work, you might get some great ideas. The resources I always take a look before getting into work are:

• 65 Excellent Flash Designs. This is a very thorough list of Smashing Magazine. It doesn’t get updated or anything like that, but it covers a wide range of styles; simple, 3d, interactive. Start from here and click your way around.
• Best Flash Animation Site. This one is really cool. It is updated constantly, with content voted by the community. Every week top flash sites are suggested. Be careful though; you might spend hours of your time here.
• The best designs. I guess the title says it all. It currently has a database of 788 submitted Flash designs and is constantly expanding. It is also sorted by designer, so check your favourites!

3. Typography

Flash designs are mostly visual experiences and you might think that text is not that important. I mean, dynamic texts are usually plain *.txt (unless you are a jedi and implement css styles). But exactly because flash is so concentrated on the visual you should concentrate on the typography.
The fonts you choose for your buttons can play a decisive role on the design of the site. So choose wisely.

• Urban Fonts. Huge list of free fonts and dingbats. If you’re having trouble finding something, there’s always a forum to help you out.
• Dafont. One more extensive list of fonts and dingbats. You can also search by author, an option that I personally like.
• Neat Fonts. A variety of interesting, strange fonts if you want to add a new flair to your site.
• I love typography. A great blog, which will introduce you to the basic rules of typography. Valuable resource.

4. Photography

Spend lots of time choosing for the image. I don’t say, that you have to use images, but if you do, spend lots of time choosing them. Remember flash designs are concentrated on the visuals.

• OpenPhoto. High quality photos for free. The site is still under development, but it surely has great stuff.
• Stock.xchng. Free stock photo site at its best. So many categories that you’ll start crying.
• Stockvault. They love to share photos and they show it!
• Everystockphoto. 2 million photos to choose from. Let’s hope it’s enough.

5. Learn the code

So you saw this great site, with this crazy 3d design, responding to the movement of the mouse and the movement of your eyes. You want to do that too!
The problem with flash, is that the code is hidden. If you don’t have the *.fla file, you can forget it. But before giving up, there are many tutorial sites, which can teach you that great stuff! Some of my favourites:

• Kirupa. Tutorials for novice or advanced programmers. Great starting point.
• Flashperfection. Tutorials divided according to your preferences. 3d, animation, math physics, games, etc. My absolute favourite.
• Gotoandlearn. Yes, go there now. That’s a videoblog with great tutorials. Great, great stuff.
• Actionscript.org. The forum on this site is also its strength. Actionscript can really get into your nerves. You try everything out and it just doesn’t work. Then you come to the forum and they say something like “try changing the instance name” - and it works. Join this community, it will help you out A LOT!

Two very simple games of experimental economics can decode the rules of the blogosphere and the web. They expose basic functions of the society - of any society - and consequently teach us how to be better bloggers, surfers, users, contributors.

The Ultimatum Game

A very interesting game in experimental economics is the Ultimatum Game. It takes place between two players, who play it only once.
An amount of money (lets say 100$) is to be shared between the players. A coin is flipped to determine which player will decide how the money will be split. The other player, the “responder” can either accept the deal and the money is split as the first player proposed or he can refuse the deal and neither player gets any money. The game is simple, but the results stand against any rational thinking:

• 2/3 of the experimental subjects offer between $40-$50.

• Only 4% offers less than $20 and

• more than the half of the responders reject offers smaller than 20% of the total.

The Public Goods Games

A development of the Ultimatum Game is the Public Goods Game.
In this game 4 participants have to decide how much to invest in a common pot. Each one has a starting amount of money and the option to keep what they don’t invest in the pot. The total amount invested (each decides without knowing how much the others invested), is multiplied and then divided equally among the players.
But this game is played in rounds and after each round the amount invested by each player is revealed.
Also in some of the games, players were allowed to spend part of their pool for the privilege of fining each other.
In other games, the players were rotated among different groups, so that individuals did not have the opportunity to encounter each other again.
The results of the game are intriguing:

• In the games, where fining was allowed participators made more generous contributions in the pot, but without the punishment collaboration collapsed.

• Even though there was no possibility for future interaction, very often players punished free riders and reported that they did it because they were angry at the cheaters.

The hidden rules of the games

Someone who knows and has studied the games can extract 3 simple rules in order to understand them.

1. People tend to be more generous than a strategy of rational self-interest predicts.
2. People will penalize cheaters, even at some expense to themselves.
3. These tendencies tend to influence individuals to behave in such ways that benefit the group.

But the reactions of the participants are not only to be seen in our ‘cultivated’ society. They seem to follow a universal pattern.

In some organisms and some human societies, individuals have been so willing to cooperate that they apparently act against their own self-interest in order to provide benefit to others. Why do antelope hunters in Tanzania and turtle fishermen off Australia expend their energy providing game for tribal feasts, even at the expense of their own families? Biologists think the answer is something called “costly signaling”: The hunters are letting others know that they are good citizens and good providers and therefore food husband and partner material.

Very often the hunters are sharing their catch at the expense of their time and their shares in order to send this “costly signal”. The others, who perceive this signal, tend to trust it because of the cost the hunters paid to signal it.
In the end this evolves to a reputation contest.

To biologists Pollock and Dugatkin, reputation evolved as a measure of an individual’s willingness to reciprocate, thereby raising the probability that the individual will be chosen as a partner in reciprocally cooperative activities like food-sharing, mating and hunting together.

So, a fourth rule emerges: reputation is the secret ingredient in cooperation.

The Cyberspace

It seems, that the way we react, when being part of a community is something coded in our DNA.
But is it really so?
The web is a place, where the conventions of identity, rules, society, space and time are very flexible. If these fundamental rules of collaborative societies would have value in the cyberspace, then we - the cyberspace inhabitants - could learn a great deal about our interactions in this non-world.

If we were to see cyberspace under the perspective of rational self interest strategies, then bloggers and users would:

• link only their friends or people who linked them first

• they would submit someones content only if he/she submitted their own

• never participated in any open source or free project

• they would never post in forums

Is there penalization in the web?
I can easily have multiple accounts in any community. I can promote my content tenfold, I can leave annoying comments on other blogs, I can delete wiki submissions and with a simple change of my IP address, remain unpunished. The only punishment is not even in the realms of the cyberspace; it incorporates the real world.

If the group behaves generously and penalizing, then this tendency will influence the individuals to be also generous. But if there is no penalty for any misbehavior, then - the game rules say - users have no reason to be generous. Instead, they act according to their self-interest.
Luckily, that’s where the stabilizing factor comes along: Reputation.

Maybe the punishment laws of the cyberspace are loose, but it works so well due to reputation.

Users with high reputation are highly acknowledged and trusted by other users. If a user has low reputation he is not trusted by many users, but it is a trust he/she can built with generosity. Similarly, when a trusted, popular user ‘misbehaves’ may not be directly penalized, but he/she will lose his/her popularity.

The lesson

If you have reached reading so far, then the lesson is pretty self-explanatory. Consider your goals when being online. Why do you participate in all these communities? Why do you blog?
To reach your goals, you have to first give something to the community. You must start building on your reputation. It is a slow process, because web users are very cautious (remember they can’t really punish you), but it is worth. In the end you will get back what you gave. Your generosity will be repaid. If you want:
…more traffic to your blog, then start by sending traffic to other blogs. Help other users start their blog, participate in their discussions.
…your submissions to reach the front page, vote other submissions first.
…better software, help the community develop better software. Send your feedback, the bugs you find,your code.

To succeed your goals in cyberspace you must be generous and patient.

They don’t know it but the comments of Terry and Paul inspired me for this post.

Howard Rheingold’s book “Smart Mobs” has been a valuable resource.

You might have noticed, that lately I don’t post that often as I did some weeks ago. Time runs short. I still surf and find new, interesting stuff, but it is at the moment difficult to daily write extensive posts.

You might have also noticed, that you get in your feed not only the stuff I write, but also the stuff I bookmark in del.icio.us. I try to write a small note for every site I bookmark, so that you can read a short description and see if you’re interested.

Do you like getting my delicious bookmarks in your feed?
Please let me know. If it just gets on your nerves, I’ll deactivate it.

In this blog, I have repeatedly discussed the subject of online privacy. Either by commenting on the current affairs of peer-to-peer networks like torrentspy or talking about the future of privacy regarding the data openness we are lately experiencing.
Yesterday, I visited one of my favorite annual exhibitions in Berlin, the transmediale, whose topic this time was “conspire”. Among other things, I attended a conference called “Web 3.0: Conspiring to keep the Net Public”, with the hope of discussing the evolution of the upcoming semantic web. To my surprise, the talk concentrated mostly on the privacy prospect of the web. To be honest, the overall conference didn’t blow my mind (it was hard to follow), but the presentation of Seda Gürses was a pleasant exception.
She pointed out some very interesting insights on privacy in cyberspace, which I would like to discuss here.

So what is privacy?

In her presentation, Seda showed a mathematical formula of privacy, which says that:

privacy = the right to be left alone / concealment of data x k-anonymity.

This means, that privacy consists of our fundamental need and right to be left alone, which can be achieved by concealment of data and k-anonymity. Lets get a bit more specific with the terms.

Concealment of Data

Whenever you subscribe in a site, there is always a login form with asterisks next to the fields you must fill in (your mail, your age, your zip code, etc); and there is always this little box you must click called “I have read the Terms of Service and agree with the policy”. Now if the service is a commercial one, it may provide these information to the so called ‘data-miners’.
They are marketing people, who collect vast amounts of information and then plan a corresponding marketing pattern.

They say for example: 50% of the Facebook users who have installed the vampire application are buying Dungeons and Dragons books in Amazon. And they put an ad next to the vampires applications about D&D.
Data mining vs. Privacy is an important issue covering not only the online world but also political subjects.

But it’s not, that there is no solution. Bruce Schneier noted:

there are many ways to analyze data without knowing details of the data, [...] it’s just that there is little incentive to use them.

Concealment of data suggests, that information such as name, age, location, etc. remain private. But how can this achieved?

K-Anonymity

That’s where k-anonymity comes handy. It keeps data miners and privacy advocates satisfied. K-anonymity simply says, that

A release provides k-anonymity protection if the information for each person contained in the release cannot be distinguished from at least k-1 individuals whose information also appears in the release.

K-anonymity can be achieved by two methods:

1. Generalization.
   Instead of saying: this subject is 26 years old, you say it is 20-30 years old. Instead of saying he lives in 10247 Berlin, you say 10xxx Berlin. And so on.
2. Another interesting way is perturbing the data. This means, that

The actual value can be replaced with a random value out of the standard distribution of values for that field. In this way, the overall distribution of values for that field will remain the same, but the individual data values will be wrong.

In other words, you can change the individual data in such way, that the collective data will still remain the same.

The right to be left alone

I left this one in the end on purpose. We all take this right for granted and in a way it is for granted. But if you think about it, its boundaries are very flexible. The issue of privacy is not only about concealing data, but also about the negotiation of what is private and what not. Years ago it was a debate if domestic violence was a privacy issue or not.

The best question ever

Seda Gürses stated in interesting theory (with a cute video), which concluded with the best question ever. It is a theory of a swedish scientist, whose name she didn’t remember (sadly).

If we really want to stay private and anonymous, concealing our personal information is surely not adequate enough. There are many parameters, which distinguish us from the others.

True and absolute anonymity can be only achieved when:

• Everyone would wear an identical box, which should be so wide and tall as the widest and tallest person on earth, so that our external characteristics wouldn’t be possible.
• Everyone would walk with the same pace, so that walking differentiation wouldn’t be possible.
• Everyone would go out of his house at the same time, so that noone could identify another.
• Each time someone went out, he should take a different route, so that a categorization would be impossible. etc. etc.

Also to avoid loneliness and isolation, people would be allowed to have a pet.

So in a world of true anonymity, the only distinction from one person to another would be his pet.
The question is: do we really want to live in a world of true anonymity?

I just read this post on rssHugger. In short it is about a new blogging service, where every blogger can submit his work and get tons of traffic. Now to do that you have 2 options:

1. Either pay 20$ to have your page listed     or
2. write a review on rssHugger.

(in both cases your blog is listed for 10years)

I have some objections here. What is so different on rssHugger from other similar services (let’s say bloggingzoom)? Reading the about page, it seems to me rssHugger works with basic viral marketing thinking. If only a 10% of the visitors would subscribe to a blog, then 11100 visitors subscribe to 110 blogs. I don’t think it works that way.

Let’s say it works that way. Would you advertise a service in order to get listed in their site? This sounds to me like selling out.