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How did it get to be Wednesday already? I’ve fallen behind in my SXSW blogging, so i’ve got to catch up this week with some quick posts. One of the posts i’ve been wanting to do is about the “Getting Girls Into Games” panel, which offered some insight into the struggles of the game industry that I hadn’t really given thought to since TEN became Pogo.com (come to think of it, maybe i’ll spin some yarns about that in another post).

Anyway, the main insight that I had from this panel was an interesting inversion of attitude that the panelists invited the attendees to take. Instead of wondering how to get girls to (buy/subscribe to) games, they asked instead for us to wonder about which obstacles really got in the way of the female market getting into games?

They brought up the following as the main things that the female market tended to favor as a whole: teamwork/cooperation over competition, narrative/storyline with interesting plot, a preference for directed environments, and also, strong, basic tutorial elements. According to them, the absence or lack of care towards these important parts of good game design was a strong contributor towards lack of growth in the female market.

I’m not sure that I was convinced that it was a simple pitch for better, more holistic game design. I’m not certain that there’s any magical feature that needs to be checked off before the female market checks in. At the same time, I definitely got the sense that getting outside of the traditional insular “hardcore” games market is a good thing, and that creatively made titles that offer universal fun, such as Katamari Damacy, tend not to erect the same barriers; perhaps because they haven’t had time to get harassed by the “hardcore” sect demanding more and more features at the cost of broader appeal.

I think that the absence of the game emphases they discussed aren’t really what prevent girls from getting into games. I think they’re probably symptomatic of copycat publishing in established genres, where old concepts like the revered FPS or RTS are just rehashed without much thought to creative design, broad appeal, or strong storyline. This is the bulk of what gets presented to the games market at this point; in the same way that Web2.0 copycats are the bulk of what gets announced at TechCrunch.

Still, I think the philosophical shift is useful. To go from thinking about features needed to gain markets to thinking about barriers to entry that one creates by assuming familiarity with a platform is a natural progression. To step outside of the original mindset sounds like an exercise in seeing Negative Space – an artist’s trick for fooling our perceptions so that we can really see the shape of something. And I definitely believe that an industry full of men that play the same games can benefit from stepping outside of its own viewpoint every once in a while.

Tech, sxsw

The following is a selection of samples of avatar usage within games and social media, culled from throughout the web. It loosely follows the examples cited and linked from within part one in this mini-series, and i hope it helps in illustrating the usefulness of the model I described in part two for understanding avatars, especially as an important component of both games and social media.

One inconsistency that I encountered in my model is regarding the topic of textual achievements. I found that if a system didn’t provide the ability to automatically describe or summarize pertinent achievements or possessions, users often care enough to list them on their own. Although one might guess that these achievement summaries might not be as trustworthy as system-maintained ones, there might be enough community pressure to keep people from exaggerating these sections.

Anyway, I’ll start with the most obvious, accepted uses of the term “Avatar” and try to experiment with this model by explaining the examples in context.

The well-documented MMORPG scene’s king, World of Warcraft, probably presents the best example of what we normally think of as an avatar. Here, we can see three player-customized three dimensional models of characters they play in the game world, with their character names floating above their heads. Also present is a guild tag, implying membership in a group of characters. I’d consider these all marks that efficiently communicate identity in a standardized visual format, which would put them at the top layer in the model. In addition to the player-controlled customizations, the game also may adapts your character’s appearance depending on what items, armor, or weapons you have equipped (although i’m told headgear is an optional one). This communicates efficiently what level a character is through the visual medium — kind of like status symbols in the real world, and for that purpose, i’d consider them as Visual Achievements.

In Battlefield 2, a popular team-based first-person shooter that emphasizes multiplayer play, the player appears in-game as a random avatar picked from a library of models corresponding to that person’s class and team choices. However, the username appears above teammates’ heads, alongside a visual icon that represent’s the player’s class. This gives us a quick, reliable of the experience level of the person the avatar represents, and is a clear example of a system-maintained visual achievement icon.

In Flickr, a buddy icon list can also be understood as the presentation of groups of avatars Recognizable Marks. Screen names on Flickr, in combination with buddy icons, help us identify those who we know, those who we don’t know, and those who we might be attracted to and therefore whose photos we should go check out. Kidding aside, Flickr is definitely a step apart from World of Warcraft in its use of these avatar elements, because you can easily change your screen name or buddy icon at any time. Perhaps it’s the relative stability of profiles that you encounter in a Flickr experience that make this a non-issue… in any case, the usage still performs a similar role.

MySpace, arguable the most notable social software application in use today, can be used to demonstrate the difference between the layer of recognizable marks and the layer of autobiography.

Above, we just see a MySpace buddyicon and username. This is how all users appear in each others’ friends lists and comments made on other users’ profiles.

Clicking into that username reveals the full profile, the home to the greater amount of information that acts as more of an autobiography. This is where users have come to expect greater customization possibilities, and the ability to fully express themselves. The boundary between the two is pretty straightforward, yet both are elements of avatars.

Moving on to more mainstream web (but still social media!) uses of the avatar, let’s take a closer look at these three examples of messageboard-style avatars. I’ve found that messageboard-style avatars typically combine Recognizable Marks such as username and graphical buddy icon, as well as a few Textual Achievements (Member Since, # Posts being the most common), and will often encourage the use of a user-modified signature.

In the first example, from SomethingAwful forums, we can see the use of graphical avatar along with username, Member Since, and a small slogan snippet of text. It’s a very old, well established messageboard, and we can look at it as an example of the classic style of messageboard avatars.

In the second example, taken from Woot.com, we can see that graphical avatars aren’t present, but the user has added in his own small picture, and also appended a custom signature that lists his “achievements” on woot; namely, those items that he’s managed to buy. Impressively, he has racked up 3 Bags of Crap (“Bandolier of Carrots”), which can earn him some definite credibility within this community. Although this sig is user-defined, he’s chosen to take the approach of listing Achievements instead of writing a bio or similar info; this may be a clue to the suitability of Achievements (visual or textual) to this communication space.

PelicanParts, being a car community where grease-monkeys help one another, has a few interesting twists on the recognizable marks being shown in the profile. Since trust does play a bigger role in deciding whose mechanical advice one should follow, the Textual Achievement of number of posts is definitely a key metric to look at. The “Senior Member” that appears probably also gives more trust in combination with the # of posts, but unfortunately, those titles are member-defined. Still, i’m sure that community mores enforce the accuracy of that title. Additionally, geography is an important thing to consider, because members will often ask for recommendations, or reach out to other forum members in need. That helps to explain why the additional information of “Location” is available in that compressed area. We can also see a glimpse of the Autobiographical / Textual Achievements written in the user’s signature below.

Now, I’d like to spend a little time showing examples of dynamically generated visualizations of user participation in games or social media. These aren’t often considered a “part” of a user’s avatar, but in the discussed model, it can definitely play a large part in a user’s identity! It’s not totally mainstream yet, as in the following examples, these presentations are mostly generated by third parties.

In this example, raw WoW play data is compiled for a single user, and then gets represented in this syndicated, visual form.

In BF2S, a popular 3rd party statistical website covering Battlefield 2 accounts, offers a great deal of statistical insight into a player’s raw play data, going as far as to analyze every shot ever fired during a ranked game.

This information can also be presented in a format suitable for signatures placed on forum postings. It’s interesting to note that making statistical information available to 3rd parties allows users to syndicate out these visual and textual achievements in various visualizations themselves, and still retain the trusted nature of presenting dynamically updating game data.

Yet again, we can find a clear parallel going on in Flickr, as statistics easily available via the Flickr API can be reformatted in a visually appealing treatment, and resyndicated back to a user’s profile to become a part of their avatar.

An interesting and progressive approach to system-controlled visual achievements is Fable, a game for Xbox that gradually changes the entire appearance of your avatar depending on the actions your character takes during his life. It makes one wonder what else might be possible for highly dynamic games and social software to adjust, based upon your actions in the community!

One of my favorite examples of visual achievements is actually quite revolutionary — the Xbox Live platform has actually fully adopted achievements throughout its games.

These are some examples of achievements you can get in Gears of War. Not only are these available just within the game, they show up in your Xbox Live account, and provide insight into depth of usage across titles for a particular user in a fun, graphically catchy way. Microsoft’s name for this platform program is Gamertag. It can’t be discounted that it turns the user profile into social media of a sort, and makes collection of identity across a game platform into a game of its own.

And yet again, we can find a quick example of 3rd party syndication of this data. Here, we can see small icons that represent games the user has played — again, information that takes a while to digest textually, but is relatively quick and seamless to glance over visually.

That’s pretty much all i’ve got time for! I definitely covered a lot of examples here, touching on all of the parts of the Understanding Avatars model that I threw together. One conclusion we can draw from this as social media or game developers is that providing raw statistical game data gives users trusted ways to express their identity within a particular community. At the least, this will allow third parties to provide ways for users to include these aspects of identity more easily within their avatars. Our consistent use of games and social media is actually what builds our reputation over time, and creating simple ways to express this part of identity creates a feedback loop that can dramatically change the nature of engagement with our products.

For anyone following my post-per-business day from the ol’ SXSW notes strategy, i’m gonna give myself a break tomorrow so I can catch up on sleep. Today’s was a really long one. Seeya on Thursday!

Tech, sxsw

In addition to clarifying that “post-per-day” is turning into “post-per-business-day,” i’m going to spend today’s blogging time going over a quick diagram I made that helped me get together my thoughts about the various layers of information presented via avatars (discussed in my last post, Understanding Avatars in Games and Social Media).

The big differentiator between top and bottom layers is whether a user has direct, explicit control over that portion of the avatar. This is a key distinction, as the presence of information in either side spreads information about that avatar’s community presence via different mechanisms. For example, a well-written biography and interesting external appearance (say, like a buddy icon in a forum) may give me a good sense of that avatar’s personality. However, when it comes to issues of trust, the bottom half of the information diagram become more crucial — what experience does the system tell me that the user has? These parts of an avatar are harder to fake, and therefore are more valuable in many contexts.

Within those two groups, I tried to distill each layer into different areas. First, we see Recognizable Marks, which are elements such as username, buddy icon, and/or directly controllable elements of a 3D avatar in a MMORPG. These are elements that can help one be identified easily as one participates within a community. They’re not always immutable or necessarily unique, as sites like Flickr allow easy modification of icon or username; however, they’re typically the kind of thing that individuals attempt to protect strongly within communities.

The second layer, Autobiographical Content is where the majority of the user-written narrative takes place, often in a profile page. In MMORPG’s, it’s what you see when you look at someone. These elements are not part of an everyday experience with people, but instead tend to be seen in close interactions with others, and so serious users in a community tend to spend a lot of time making these elements work well.

The bottom half of the diagram was pretty well explained in my last post. Visual Achievements are depictions of medals, trohpies, awards, items, etc. as icons or 3d objects that can be spotted easily, are aesthetically pleasing, and give us a visual cue as to the experience of a person within a community. Textual Achievements are more like dynamically updating signature images that give us a presentable summary view of a person’s data. And lastly, the Raw Play Data is usually less visible, but gives us the most detailed look into a user’s community participation.

I hope that this diagram helps explain what i’m getting at, and also partially why. Avatars can play a large role in improving participation in games and social media, and can arguably go a long way into transforming one into the other. Building these layers into a community system can definitely result in game dynamics, and I’d bet that it would improve network engagement, as well.

Tech, sxsw

In my last post, I briefly mentioned the parallels that exist between the games industry and social media world. It a kind-of-obvious thing that dawns upon a web programmer who walks into a Games panel at SXSW. There’s definitely lots to consider regarding avatars, but I’m still engaged in grappling with the concept itself. Today i’m going to write about a framework brewed in my notebook that (so far) has helped me understand the scope of avatars as they’re used in games and social media.

It’s definitely a fear of mine that this post is a bit scattered, because there are an infinite number of examples I could use. Hopefully, i’ve picked a few clear ones that can help get the discussion rolling.

We all know avatars in some form or another. They’re elusive to define, and have existed in so many forms that they’re difficult to evaluate or understand when you’re pondering and enhancement bug called “Add Avatars” in a project queue. It seems like modern games handle avatars in various interesting ways that we in social media can learn from.

MMORPG’s are probably the foremost types of customizable avatars that modern gamers are familiar with. They’re alter-egos with vast customization possibilities — you can easily change the appearance of one’s body, gender, face, hair, etc. within most of these games fairly simply. In some of them, part of your activity is going forth into the world to get new items, armor, and weapons that you can adorn your avatar with. In certain RPG’s, the body itself changes as your alter-ego gains experience in the game world, appearing stronger as the character itself gains strength.

In multiplayer first-person shooter games, avatars have also gone through many evolutions of customization. In the Quake series, custom skins that completely replace the texture mapped to your avatar have had a long history. In newer military sims, such as Battlefield 2, the military rank of a friendly player appears by his name in the game world.

So, clearly, some of these games are taking your in-game activity or history, distilling those into graphical or visual concepts, and automatically enhancing or marking up your avatar. This is actually a key concept that i’ll return to, right after I talk about how some of this in-game activity data is also being collected and distributed in a more raw or statistical form.

In World of Warcraft, statistics about your character are compiled within the game, and can be viewed within the game, but also output in the form of a generated badge. In games like Battlefield 2, a similar open stats database made huge amounts of raw data available as information, and also made syndication of that avatar information hugely popular.

On the web, we can easily see many parallels to these methods of customization to game avatars. Early and even modern messageboards vary in what level of freedom their avatars have. However; the most common customization options involve uploading or linking to an avatar image, and being able to modify a signature reflecting something about their personality relevant to the community. Some sites also collect and display member stats, such as Date Joined, Number of Posts, and occasionally a summarized title that reflects their status or history in the community.

In the Web 2.0 world, we can also see parallels in sites like Flickr, which allow more complete profile building as an activity, including Buddy Icons, Bios, relationship status, all sorts of different metadata about one’s self. However, the real expression of creativity on the site — the photos that one uploads — is directly where you go when you click on a buddy icon. This user-controllable information is clearly the emphasis of these communities.

Data is also aggregated and syndicated out from these services via widgets, although it’s easy to see that some widget providers are doing better than others at creating an aesthetically pleasing summary of the raw data behind the user’s activity.

Unfortunately, i’m running out of time, so i’ve gotta wrap this up.

The framework i’m trying to illustrate here is to look at avatar or profile buildling as a layered approach to identity, common between games and social media. I like to imagine the layers from high to low, sorted by the time it takes to comprehend or digest the meaning of the information compared to the incremental value it provides to identity. The first layer consists of small, controllable aspects of identity that are most frequently encountered — these are things like buddy icons, character appearance customization, usernames, etc. Within a community, this is how one gets to be known, and provides visual cues for recognition and memory. The second layer is also under the user’s control, but provides a huge bulk of relevant information to the community — this includes profiles, bios, photos, descriptive information, and more. This top half of the framework really is defined by the user’s ability to directly control the information within. In MySpace terms, the first layer would be a user’s profile name and buddy icon (which you see all over the site), and the second layer would be the user’s profile page (which tells you the most about the user for the space taken).

The layers underneath are more about the indirectly-controllable raw data reflecting a user’s activity within a community, and they can be segregated into multiple parts. The highest layer of these are visual elements that reflect summary information about a user’s activity in the community, such as trophies, medals, rank displays, and little icons. Underneath that lie small textual summaries that are easier to parse, such as signatures, information summaries, Xbox Live Gamerscore, and more. Even further beneath (but still widely used) are the full-blown statistical layouts, like the Battlefield 2 and World of Warcraft stats pages. Although this information is less valuable for getting to know an avatar than say, a full profile page, it often can give us a more nuanced, trusted view of the data within, because it’s less easy to game, and takes time to build up.

Although the minimum amount of avatar building on the web is sometimes just a simple username, this can still be an effective device to giving users a sense of identity. It’s my hope that understanding these elements of avatars can help me go further than just username, though, in building more compelling identity experiences for users of the web, and perhaps it’ll also be helpful for game designers to watch what web 2.0 users are doing to build their identities online. As I said earlier, this is just a base concept that i’ll extend and elaborate about as time goes on, but I need to stick with my one-post-per day commitment, so apologies if this comes out as half-baked.

Tech, sxsw

To kick off this series of SXSW-related thoughts, I decided to start with a side note I made while thinking about the discussion at High Class and Low Class Web Design, moderated by Christopher Fahey. As an important preface, the issue of class in web design conjures up images of discrimination and prejudice, which is why I believe the panel felt pretty uncomfortable. I believe that some of these brave souls were being asked to represent their company’s attitude towards the class system, and that was probably more than a little unfair. It was a charged discussion, but I felt some important conclusions lay under the surface.

Although most of the panelists spent a great deal of time investigating whether their experiences involved designing for a particular class of society, most of the opinions held seemed to be pretty unsurprising. Brant Louck of WWE seemed to be very aware of their work to design the publication to a particular class, whereas Khoi Vinh of NYTimes believed that such action could ultimately be detrimental to the growth of a brand — that is, it could be construed as disrespect of the customer, ultimately harming your ability to serve them.

Now, big brand companies spend a great deal of time focusing on Brand with a capital B. You don’t see a massive redesign like the new Yahoo! Homepage too often, because it’s difficult to make a technological upgrade without a corresponding leap in brand identity. Also, within a large organization, the brand is considered in almost all design work.

So, it is possible that a class of society is chosen at the time the brand is established?

This would certainly explain why the NYTimes, having over a century of established brand identity, simply doesn’t need to have these discussions internally. It would also help explain why the WWE finds itself having to gradually introduce brand-shifting changes to try and attract growth in the segment served by the expanding UFC. And it would also explain why some startups may begin with User Personas that include the car a potential customer would drive (i.e. John with a Jetta, Matt with a BMW 330i, and Jenny with a RAV4) only to later ditch them when they seem unnecessary.

Now, in the world of web design, the biggest shift in brand identities comes with the all-encompassing Big Redesign, or Version 2.0. When we look at companies that refuse to do so — craigslist, ebay, myspace — it helps me understand why by looking at red esign possibilities. Even the emphasis on whitespace and alignment could possibly shift brand perception into an entirely new category.

In fact, what happens when you completely change a brand by applying “good” design principles to relatively primitive sites? One of my most lamented examples of the shift in brand perception that can occur through redesign is Chowhound. In the old days of chowhound, the page was a usability nightmare. Essentially, it was a number of gigantic old-style everything-on-a-page messageboards, with fixed-width typeface and huge load times.

Then, one day, with much fanfare, there was CHOWHOUND, the redesign: Revenge of the Giant Fonts and Web2.0 Stuff, and Different Messageboards. The commentary on the recent redesign was pretty varied, and there was definitely some backlash. But why did the Chowhound redesign bother me so much?

The old design was the perfect example of incredible content locked in an aesthetic nightmare. However, in the case of the Chowhound brand, this was not a problem for its audience! These people (including myself) pride ourselves in our ability to go eat in restaurants with horrible decor but incredible delights to the palate. When the design changed, the brand that I adored felt discarded, and the content may be as good, but I no longer felt like I had found a little hole-in-the-wall on the internet.

How’s that for an optical illusion?

In conclusion, I wonder if i’m really saying anything that interesting. Brand identity, of course, is key to whether a potential customer feels welcome, or chooses to identify with a product or service. It’s a given. During the conversation at SXSW, though, I felt like the panelists we heard from either had no established, long-term brand, or already had one, and so the question of considering class was somewhat moot. So, i’ll posit a conclusion that may seem obvious — that Web Design is probably not the point at which one should take class into account; rather, it’s during the Brand Design process that one really needs to care.

Tech, sxsw

I’ve just gotten up on the first day back from SXSW, and what woke me up was the constant pressure of thoughts in my brain. Thoughts about my to-do list, thoughts about folks who have emailed me without a reply, and thoughts about the new concepts and insights that the trip brought me. Save for a quick trip to the bathroom, my desk has been a hubbub of activity ever since I awoke.

Now that i’ve taken care of the truly pressing matters in the first two categories, I can spend a little time preparing my blog for the latter. If there’s one thing I constantly was reminded of during SXSW, it’s that publishing counts. The ideas going back and forth at a conference seem to usually reflect the result of a plethora of conversations between peers, not of an isolated mental track. To me, this is why it’s so common to go to a panel in your industry of expertise and hear what seems like the same old discussion that you’ve been reading about for the past year. Those panels might very well be summaries of the ideas being discussed online in the past year, and they might very well come from the same participants!

One way to deal with this is to listen actively; to not run a firewall ruleset on all ideas coming across, destined for either ACCEPT or REJECT, but rather, to listen deeply and try to look for nuance as these ideas come across in the verbal plane, as opposed to within a feedreader. Just the change in medium is occasionally enough to spark an interesting insight from a conversation that might have been overlooked while following the written version.

Another way to approach things is to actively seek out subjects outside of your areas of knowledge, and to constantly try to extract the essence of topics panelists or speakers struggle with, and see if they can apply to other things you know about. For example, the game industry’s conversations about the future directions of storytelling are actually a close parallel of conversations we’ve been having in the realm of social media for the past few years.

I tried both of these approaches, and the result was about a quarter notebook full of notes, thoughts, new concepts, and a fleshing out of various conversations i’d like to have with the smart folks out there. But if I don’t publish, it doesn’t count for a damn thing.

So, at the suggestion of Andy Baio, i’ll be publishing a post a day with at least one crispy nugget of thought from within that notebook. This is just the introductory post – light on content, but necessary to get myself committed to the project. I hope you enjoy it, and hope you choose to participate throughout the discussion as well.

Update: First post is here! Jeez, I need to get up earlier.

Tech, sxsw