SxSWi - Tuesday
Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 6:49 am11:30PM: PANEL - Visualizing Sustainability. Jon Lebkowsky (Principal, Social Web Strategies), Dawn Danby (Aylanto), Jamais Cascio (World-Builder-in-Chi, Open the Future), Joel Greenberg (Writer, podaddies.com) discuss show to present information affecting environmental impact.
Virtual Worlds: There will be virtual world in buildings give off data. This is just beginning. The Toyota Pruis is the first product that gives you feedback about your environmental impact. The capacity to analyze your footprint is growing. Bike messengers are wearing air pollution monitors in some cities in Germany.
Google Earth constructed a visualization of the spread of bird flu.
Currently, there are only visualization of how we are destroying the world. We need visualization of how we are saving the world.
Need devices that say: “I just justed use as much water as my neighbor with that shower.”
12:30PM: Pro Paypal E-Commerce by Damon Williams. ~50% of Paypal’s volume comes from Ebay. 14% average increase in sales for e-merchants that add Paypal to their sites. 51% of customers would have abandoned their purchase it PayPal payments were not available (PayPal survey of 5,000 online customers). Accepted in 190 countries. US online consumers trust PayPal more than Visa or MasterCard. 70+ currencies. 141 million accounts. $2 billion dollars stored in their platform, and it turns itself out in ~2 weeks.
2:00PM: Keynote: Jane McGonigal (Creative Dir, Avant Game). One of the formost expertises on games talks about “Alternate Realities.” A game designer’s perspective on the future of happiness. She’s also a researcher at the Institute of the Future.
Instead of trying to make games more realistic (like the real world), she’s trying to make the real world more like games.
Positive pyschology flows what makes us happy, what makes us function well. It will increasingly effect interactive mediums in design. Shouts: Happiness by Richard Layard.
Value is defined as a measurable increase in real happiness, or well being — the new capital. There will be metrics for happiness. Canada alright has a national index.
Principles of Happiness
- satisfying work to do the
- experience of being good at something
- time spent with people we like
- the chance to be a part of something bigger
Games give you all of this. Gamers: “I’m not good at life.” When you joing World of Warcraft, you have legions of collaborators. When you wake up in the mornings, that’s not true.” Nobody is going to come up and say: “You get +1 speaking points.”
Games give us feedback. Have better community. “We are witnessing what amounts to no less that a global mass exodux to virtual worlds.” These environments are set up for them to succeed. They’re learning something, getting something not in their life. Average amount of time in games: 16 hours.We need to take everything we learned about games, and do that in the real world.
For many games, in terms of the preception of quality of life, virtuality is beating reality.
What if I felt like I was as good as life as I am in games?
It’s like we invented the written word… and decided to only write books. Put the games in the world to help us navigate the world.
Chorewars.com gives you experience points.
Zyked.com treats exercise like an MMO.
Serios is a virtual productivity currency software.
“SOAP KILLS GERMS” headline in 1931. “GAMES KILL BOREDOM.” “GAMES KILL ALIENATION” “GAMES KILL DEPRESSION”
Alternate reality dsigners are trying to embed these happiness engines in everyday life.
“An alternative reality is another way of experience existence.”
WorldWithoutOil is a global simulation as if oil ran out.
How alternate reality games applify human happiness:
- Mobbability: callorbate in large numbers.
- Ping quotient: You ability to reach out to other people in a network, and your ability to respond.
- Influency: The ability to adapt your persuasive strategies.
- Multi-capitalism: People are trading different kinds of capital: money, social, intellectual.
- Protovation: Rapid fearless innovation. Failure is fun. Fail quickly and often.
- Open-authoriship: Comfort with giving content away and knowing it will be edited. How do I create something that won’t be broken by other people.
- Signal/Noise Management: Which clues and data is relevant.
- Longbroading: Think in much bigger system. High-level systems views.
- Emerginsight: You can spot patterns and are ready to take advantage of them.
How do we give people more of these powers?
- Nikey iPod - loves it because it gives her feedback, makes her want to run more
- Planes
- Sniff collars are social networks for dogs
- Prius giving you feedback.
- Trackstick
The Important Stuff
- Look at the happiness books and positive pyschology
- game designers have a head start
- alternate realities signal the desire, need and opportunity for all of us to redesign reality for the real quality of life
Q&A
- The military uses games because it makes it better for soldiers: increases skill and distance.
- sf0.org is fun real life game
- Proctor and Gamble invented the “soap opera”
- Ministry of Reshelving
- Tomb Stone holdem
- x2 project with the National Academy of Sciences
- Secret Society of Pickup Artists - Jane: “It’s not clear to everybody that a game is being played.”
- “Games can treat a form of engagement and is preferrable to disengagement.”
- SoldierBoy dance breaks out on stage.
3:30PM PANEL - Considerations for Scalabale Web Ventures. Chris Lea (Media Temple), Joe Stump (Lead Architect, Digg.com Inc), Cal Henderson (Badass MC, Flickr), Matt Mullenweg (Founding Dev, Automattic/WordPress) answer the question: how do you scale?
Digg had servers crashing left and right. If you’re starting a site like Flickr, you’ll need to start thinking about it immedidately. Storage is key.
NetScaler is an apparatus from sucking money out of small companies.
This panel bored me, so I left.