social-interaction
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Findery app lets you discover the world around you using annotated notes and maps
Findery (free) hit the App Store today, and I expect it is going to be a successful app launch. Findery has been in beta a couple of years, so it already has a lot of content. Many new apps launch with very little user-contributed content, which is a weakness in my estimation. Findery allows people anywhere in the world to add notes, photos or video to illustrate the interesting things they see or experience. "Every place has a story, or a thousand stories," said Caterina Fake, founder and CEO of Findery. "Findery brings places to life, be they where you stand or where you hope to go." The app doesn't require an account if you just want to browse, but part of the fun is sharing. Members can leave notes that are public or private, and the app helps to organize a member's notes, reports activity on their notes, and provides information on followers. The app is easier to use than describe, and you can check out the idea and the content on the Findery website. A good example is best taco recommendations around the US, but topics can be really anything, from historical oddities to best surfing locations. Findery has elements of Yelp and National Geographic, Facebook and Instagram, yet in total it is a unique experience. Once you have the map, you can scroll and zoom to any place in the world and see what information people have uploaded. I tried the app from my small town in Arizona, and surprisingly there were quite a few items of direct interest to me. Obviously, the beta users have been busy. If I wanted to, I could leave my own notes on some of the local topics, or follow those who were making notes. The app is ad-free, but at some point it will likely be monetized. I found using the app easy and fun, and I learned some things about my area I would not have known otherwise. Findery is not universal, and it requires iOS 7 or later. It is optimized for the iPhone 5. I consider Findery a good 'find'.
Storyboard: You ruined your own event
You're running a roleplaying event, and it's going well. It's lively, people are having fun, characters are playing off one another well, it's ideal. So you decide to push things a little further, to take things up a little more, and the next thing you see is people mumbling excuses and leaving until you're left with one or two people who remain less as a function of fun and more as a testament to bitter determination. What in the world happened? I'll tell you what happened: You ruined your own event. This has kind of been a week for me of people ruining good stuff, which makes this week's column unintentionally apropos. A lot of roleplaying events start out great, with everyone invested and happy to be present, but they quickly dissolve when a few well-intentioned but poor choices are made by the people running the event. And while I can't chronicle every possible pitfall, I can at least talk about the most common ones that I see again and again.
Nexi robot helps Northeastern University track effects of shifty body language (video)
MIT's Nexi robot has been teaching us about social interaction for years, and has even done a stint with the US Navy. Its latest role, however, involved studying those moments when society falls apart. Northeastern University researchers made Nexi the key ingredient of an experiment where subjects were asked to play a Prisoner's Dilemma-style game immediately after a conversation, whether it was with a human or a machine. Nexi showed that humans are better judges of trustworthiness after they see the telltale body language of dishonesty -- crossed arms, leaning back and other cues -- even when those expressions come from a collection of metal and plastic. The study suggests not just that humans are tuned to watch for subtle hints of sketchy behavior, but that future humanoid robots could foster trust by using the right gestures. We'll look forward to the friendlier machine assistants that result... and keep in mind the room for deception when the robots invariably plot to take over the world.
WildStar Wednesday sheds light on the game's social design
WildStar, like every other MMO, wants players to enjoy the company of other players. The team behind the game wants players invested in the community and in participating with one another. Victoria Dollbaum, the Social Systems Designer for the game and the writer of this week's WildStar Wednesday, explains that the team wants to create the sort of community feel of older games without including the same sort of brutal systems that made constant community involvement a necessity. Dollbaum explains that the main goal of social design is creating incentives for players to group up rather than punishing them for playing solo. Housing is a prime example, as the game's housing system rewards players of all types: raiders can collect raid trophies, crafters can grow and harvest resources, and roleplayers can run events in their houses along a set theme. Or players can completely ignore the system if they'd prefer. It's a design all about letting the players do what they want and offering the appropriate carrots, and housing is just the tip of a carrot-flavored iceberg.
The Soapbox: Eat your tanking or you won't get your ice cream
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. Picture this -- you're a parent of a squalling child. (For some of you, this may be a very easy picture as you sit at the dinner table.) Your child is refusing to eat his or her dinner on the basis that the broccoli doesn't taste like doughnuts covered in Skittles. Being a mature adult and realizing that a lifetime of Skittle-based food toppings is not a viable dietary choice, you are trying to patiently reason with said child despite the fact that the child assumes Kevin at school is evil incarnate because he took the good swing despite your child's having called it. Eventually, you break down. You tell your child that a special treat awaits if he or she eats all of those vegetables. And so your child queues up for a random heroic in World of Warcraft, and -- wait, we skipped ahead of the metaphor, but that's essentially what the whole Call to Arms feature boils down to. And it brings up interesting questions of bribery, choice, and what makes a fun and functional mechanic.
Alter-Ego: Working together is hard to do
The news earlier this week that DC Universe Online is now Sony Online Entertainment's best-selling game probably won't come as much of a surprise to anyone who has actually played it. There's an enormous amount of fun to be had in running through the game, and the storylines are incredibly well thought-out. However, for all that I personally love the game, there is one thing that I and many other people I've talked to find to be incredibly lacking, and in this case, it's something so integral to the MMOG experience as to essentially make or break parts of the game. Essentially, what point is there to an MMO in which you can't really reliably interact with the other people you're playing with? It's also rather eye-opening just how much your enjoyment of a game like this can be impacted when you can't effectively talk to other people. As such, this week I'll look at several crucial problems with the DC Universe Online chat interface, as well as things that can be done to improve the overall experience.
The Daily Grind: Do you socialize differently in-game?
Some people are just naturally more social than others. Some of us have no trouble talking to new people, asking questions, making friends, and generally interacting with our fellow humans. Others struggle to even make eye contact with the cashier at the local McDonald's for fear of somehow screwing things up. But whether or not you're a social person, how you behave often depends on the situation you find yourself in -- such as whether you're in the real world or trying to get four random strangers to attack the darn skull-marked target first. There are those of us who go from being a shy and insular person in the real world to a social butterfly when we get online, and there are those of us who perform the exact opposite transformation and barely say a word. And then there are people who don't change much, who are just as shy or outgoing as they are in day-to-day life despite the change of venues. Do your social traits change when you log in? Or do you tend to stay the same in the virtual world? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of our readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's The Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: Where is your uncanny social valley?
Ravious at Kill Ten Rats took an amusing look at the scale of social interaction in MMOs the other day, outlining the type of interaction vs. the level of fun in a game, and it made us wonder. The type of gameplay preferred varies from person to person, of course. What one person views as the most fun type of play can sound completely boring or annoying to another person, and the same goes for interacting with those in the MMO world around you. So where do you stand? Are you one of those players who leaps headfirst into any PUG, excited at the prospect of meeting new people? Do you prefer your circle of friends, those known elements that won't surprise you, be it good or bad? Or do you eschew company as a rule, preferring to treat the game as a single player game? Click the handy comment link below and let us know what you think!
The Daily Grind: What attitudes can you not stand?
Blizzard has always been known by the fans for going all-out with their jokes on April 1st, and this year was no exception. The entire Equipment Potency Equivalence Number was funny in its own right, but especially as an attitude prevalent not only among World of Warcraft players. No matter what game you play, you know people whose sense of ego and importance at in-game achievements drives you up the wall. For some people it's a minor irritation; for others, it's the sort of thing that is so insufferable it's not worth even trying to work with them. There are no shortage of helpful and friendly players in games, but there's also an abundance of arrogant gear worshippers, socially inept trolls, die-hard PvP grognards, ineffectual PvE carebears... you get the idea. Almost everyone agrees the extreme cases are bad, but we all think some are worse than others. So what about you? What sort of outlook makes you just quit a group in frustration no matter how the player performs? Is it something hugely removed from your own playstyle and approach, or something that's close to how you normally run and becomes more obnoxious as a result?
"Why do we play MMOs" series concludes
When we last checked in with Tobold, he was just starting up a new blog series looking into why we play MMO games to a greater degree than single-player games. That isn't to say that the MMO genre is bigger than the single-player genre, just that MMO gamers tend to focus on massively multi-player games more than single-player games. His first two articles examined Storytelling and Gameplay elements in MMOs and since then he has done pieces on Challenge, Character Development, Rewards, Social Interactions, and Learning.The series just wrapped up and Tobold wrote a nice summary of why he thinks we mostly choose MMOs over single-player games. He feels that while we may play single-player games that have strong elements of story, gameplay, or challenge, the social aspects of MMOs seem to be the trump card. MMOs can have many weaker core elements but social interaction (direct) or simply participating in a persistent game world (indirect) appears to make up for those deficiencies. It's a long series to get through but well worth the read if you're into these kinds of high-thinking philosophical discussions.
Sony opens complete EverQuest 2 database to researchers
The players of EverQuest 2 might be pleased to learn that their gameplay may further science. They may be less enthused, however, to learn that a complete record of their interactions with one another is being studied by researchers. Following a session at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, ars technica's John Timmer reports, "With the cooperation of Sony, a collaborative group of academic researchers at a number of institutions have obtained the complete server logs from the company's EverQuest 2 MMORPG." That's right. This is everything you've ever done in the game, but it's all in the name of science.The researchers are among those who believe that massively multiplayer online games can be used to model real world collective behavior. The task ahead of them is a daunting one, with close to 60 TB of data to pore over. "The end result is a log that included four years of data for over 400,000 players that took part in the game, which was followed up with demographic surveys of the users. All told, it makes for a massive data set with distinct challenges but plenty of opportunities," Timmer writes.
The Daily Grind: Is there a place for diplomacy in an MMO?
'Violence is the first refuge of the incompetent', wrote Isaac Asimov, and to a certain extent, that's true. But in an industry that caters to these primal impulses -- and thriving off of them, as well -- is there room for the non-violent path? Certainly, the violent response is more fun than talking it out, at least in an urge overkill kind of way, but surely that's just a matter of implementation.If we truly want to simulate any sort of real-life experience in our games, the full range of social interactions ought to have a place, including politics. And it's one thing to try to reason with an AI, but if you can create a lasting peace with another human player, you have something to be proud of. But is it necessary, or would diplomacy in a combat-oriented game merely detract from the experience?
