“If you really don’t want to share….DONT PUT IT ON THE NET!”

I am not a technological determinist, but we are crazy if we don’t realize that there is a lot of pressure to put things on the Internet. And we can’t just blame people for being uninformed. People do it because they don’t feel like they have much of a choice due to the impending social pressures of being “on Facebook.” Of course they do have a choice, just like how we have a choice not to fill out every single field when we create one of our hundreds of profiles in the digital sphere. But there are a lot of people who happily fill out every single field, unknowingly giving away lots of information that they don’t have to, because that is what the interface is telling them that it wants. Of course we should try to inform ourselves about these things, but we can’t really expect every person to become “Facebook literate.”

Think back to filling out doctor’s forms when they used to be on paper. Their officialness and connection to our personal health told us that we should fill out every box and not skip anything. In remediating the fill-in-the-blank form onto the computer screen, many people still feel the same way when they are presented with things to fill out on profiles. I can’t tell you how many people I have seen fill out every field when they created a profile for Skype, MySpace, Facebook, etc. Sometimes they go back and eliminate things from the profile, paring it down because they wished they hadn’t included some of that information, but not everyone does this and sometimes it is too late anyway.

We should stop blaming people for being “stupid enough to put things on the Internet that they don’t want known” and acknowledge the role that the design of the interaction itself plays in this. We have finally gotten away from interactions that force people to provide information by at least allowing people to opt out (even if this is still poorly done with an asterisk or a buried drop-down menu somewhere). However, interactions as simple as filling out fields in profiles or engaging with a variety of interactions on Facebook are still telling people that they should provide the information. As designers it is our responsibility to critique and question this status quo – and stop assuming that filling that database with as much discreet information as possible is in some way adding value to how people experience technology.

Ultimately, the profile fill-in-the-blanks is just one example out of many where we blame users for making bad decisions, when the design itself was telling them that it was ok to do so. It is like putting an “OPEN” sign on a locked door, and then blaming the person after they bumped into it when it didn’t open.

Don’t get me wrong – I am not angry because I am naive about virtual worlds and their economies. As matter of fact I am fascinated by real money trade in virtual worlds, and I understand economics well enough to see that real money trade is not only an inevitable facet of virtual worlds, but is in some ways a beneficial one. Having attended Indiana University, I have even had the pleasure of sitting down with Edward Castronova, author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games, and who was mentioned several times in Dibbell’s book. And I agree with both of those guys that the production and trade of virtual goods should be viewed more seriously as a legitimate economy. However, because of this I also think that people who hack and exploit code in order to make money should face harsher consequences that just having an account banned.

But when it comes to this book I am disappointed in Julian Dibbell. Sure, he spent a lot of time learning a lot of very interesting things about virtual economies and working to shine a light on the whole phenomenon. Now I am not trying to crucify Dibbell here, and if he ever reads this I don’t mean for this to sound offensive towards him. But during his self-experiment with learning to make money in Ultima Online, he made partnerships and deals with dishonest people, and engaged in activities that negatively affected a lot of people – glorifying them for reasons I can’t understand. The fact is, for all the heralding of this grand new virtual space where currencies and economies are more democratic and we inch closer to bridging the digital divide – the people who end up at the top of the food chain do so by breaking the rules and negatively affecting other people’s experience. When I say rules, I am not talking about “user agreements” – we all know that the logic and fairness of these are shaky at best. I am talking about real money traders who hack the code, exploit unintended game mechanics, and run bots to create their product.

Dibbell even mentions that virtual world economies don’t work on the same rules of supply and demand that “real world” economies do. However, the main reason for this isn’t because of some new branch of economics that the world has been blessed with now that technology has given us virtual worlds – it is because of people who break the integrity of the game world for their own monetary gain. What would we do in the “real world” if someone actually figured out a way to turn lead into gold? I bet we wouldn’t let them set up a website and hire young people in China to dig up lead for them.

And this is the main reason why I will never play MMORPGs again: Currently, real money trading ruins the integrity of the game space. I remember back when I played Final Fantasy XI, and my friend and I loved going around and farming for resources to sell on the in-game auction house. However, because the real money traders in the game had so successfully figured out how to generate income they inflated the economy to a point where it took us months to farm enough money to buy the items we needed to proceed. We couldn’t hunt a monster or farm for resources without running into gold-farming bots. I don’t mind if someone is making money off of the game, but when gold farming bots are preventing players from making any money in the game, that is wrong. When a gold-selling company holds 90% of a virtual economy’s currency, that is wrong. When players must compete with trained employees of gold-farming companies who don’t care about interfering with the game experience, that is wrong.

I know the gaming industry is concerned about this stuff, but I don’t think they are nearly concerned enough. The websites that sell gold, items, and accounts only make money by exploiting things in the game to the detriment of the game economy and the experience of people who actually want to play the game and interact with other players. The mafia-style business antics detailed in Dibbell’s book loom on the horizon, providing a very disenchanting vision of the future of our digital lives. It will be interesting to see if eventually the IRS, law enforcement agencies, and the game companies that provide these games will start treating the trade of virtual goods seriously – and criminalize resource production methods that disrupt the integrity of the game space.

It has taken me a long time to figure out what I think about Facebook, and I have read enough articles to make me yearn for a nice 20-page End User License Agreement. In this post I will respond to the Schrage article from my perspective as a human-centered designer, in the hopes of shining a light on why Facebook never seems to get it right.

For many people, Facebook represents the way they define their lives, and I mean that to be as profound as it sounds. Because of this, Facebook should seek to cultivate a better understanding of society and culture – Facebook as a social space in 2010 is a far cry from its origins in 2003′s Facemash. I may be wrong, but it seems that Facebook understands people and culture with all the nuance of a 19 year-old Mark Zuckerberg illegally accessing student information and photos in order to evaluate students based on if they were “good-looking.”

I don’t mean to suggest that Mark or Facebook haven’t matured since then, but I do think that Schrage’s response conveys a Facebook that doesn’t acknowledge its social and civic responsibility. It is absolutely true that Facebook has created a social space that adds a lot of value to people lives, but it is clear that the service and company still have a lot of growing up to do. One might make the case that Facebook has no responsibility to “do the right thing,” however that is not the message that Schrage delivered. Not to mention that a non-attempt to do the “right thing” is essentially a conscious choice to do the wrong thing.

I think the first step is to stop assuming so many things about people based on “user data” and “user activity.” It is good that they care about their users, but they seem to only see them as “users of Facebook” instead of individual people. No amount of digital data in the world will tell you why someone “liked” something, it will only tell you that they clicked a button. No amount of options, drop-down menus, or “Facebook Site Governance Pages” will provide the transparency and user-centeredness that Schrage claims to have.

Here are a few suggestions that I think would work, although this is hardly an all-encompassing solution. They should 1) bring in some designers who are trained in real empathic research methods (not just developers and graphic designers), 2) allow them to carry out qualitative and quantitative research about users, culture, and society, and 3) actually incorporate the findings about what people as a culture (not just users) care about into a long-term plan to make Facebook a social space that enhances our lives instead of complicating them.

“If you consider Human Computer Interaction Design to be “designing the relationship between humans and technology, then to do it well you need nothing less than an understanding of the depths and expanses of the human condition, and the ability to work in situations of co-creation. To understand the human condition you need to understand experience, language, culture, and emotion. To understand co-creation you have to understand how to enable, educate, and empower others to design.”

“When attempting to teach someone something new, it is better to say “We aren’t here to change you, but to challenge you.”

“The principles of design thinking are the keys to organizations solving problems that arise from disruptions.”

Interaction Design is about:

• thinking critically
• making something from nothing
• getting stakeholders to evaluate their own risks and goals
• focusing on people, understanding them while you navigate the process and learn how to listen
• knowing your process, making it transparent, and creating a situation in which everyone takes part
• designing for the user to promote inward-facing dialog in the organization

Here are 3 different levels of what human-centered design could mean, each of which is important:

• looking to the user for inspiration of design instead of the technology
• looking to the user for the evaluation of good design, usability, and “rightness”
• cultural theory and cultural critique methods to “humanize” the process

“HCI/d relies on understanding people. You can’t design or do anything of value unless you understand people first. Get the right design before you get the design right.”

That was actually quite enlightening for me to put all that here. I think I actually synthesized a bit for myself. And I got some Twitter fodder.

It also seems to me that speaking of design as a shaper of behavior or rhetoric puts the emphasis on the wrong place for most practical industrial or interaction design work. I guess I align more with Christopher Alexander’s approach in Notes on the Synthesis of Form and A Timeless Way of Building–that what we design should fit, not so much change or shape, the way people already behave or want to behave, and it should only be rhetorical if put to ends that align with the good of those being designed for.

Thank you J. Ambrose Little.  People come first.  Our values as designers will undoubtedly manifest themselves in our work, but we design things, not behavior.  We can only design for behavior.  Now I gotta go read Jon’s book.

In making my thoughts and assumptions explicit, I have very strong opinions about how World of Warcraft favors certain playstyles over others.  I feel that the design and “loudest” player groups have created a game culture that favors ambition, aggressiveness, and a focus on certain achievements over others.  (Warning: The following sentence might be highly subjective or half-baked).  High level or “epic/elite” activities, raiding, or player vs. player are seen as “better” than any-level activities like exploration, pet collection, or crafting.  While these any-level activities are not seen as unimportant, they don’t have near the prestige of the other activities, and are often treated as a means to an end.

After my first attempt at doing a semiotic reading of the FigurePrints service, I have a vague sense of a thesis.  This is something along the lines of: The FigurePrints interaction favors dominant, aggressive, and high-level players over players that are low-level or less concerned with aggressive or competitive play.

I begin with a statement about what the figure itself represents.  It is a text that represents the player’s time investment, their attachment to the character and the character’s place in the history of the game lore, the character’s (and player’s) growth over time, the character (and player’s) growth in a larger social context of friends and other players in the game, and on and on.  It is a text of rich and personal meaning, and the choices that FigurePrints provides limit players to only certain kinds of meaning.  I will illustrate this with a syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis of the choices provided to players in the creation of the figure.

Syntagmatically-speaking, the creation of the FigurePrints statue consists of choosing from a Pose, a Base, and a set of Armor.

I think I need to explore the importance of limiting players to these 3 choices, but as of yet I haven’t analyzed it that much.  However, I currently can adequately speak about what each of these paradigms represent and what choices are given.

Pose as a representation of body language

Players can choose from 44 different poses, 33 of which involve the use of a weapon and depict the character in battle.  This leaves 11 poses that could reflect the character out of battle.  Of these 11 poses, 5 are gestures that depict behavior that is aggressive or negative in the culture of World of Warcraft.  There are the character poses of yell, chicken (taunt), rude (making an obscene gesture), train (a gesture that represents a despised activity in which a player or players, on purpose or on accident, lead a large group of monsters to another player resulting in chaos, game lag, and death), and beg (perhaps an even more despised behavior than a monster train).

The remaining 6 poses are stand, walk, wave, kiss, kneel, and sit.  Out of 44 possible representations of body language, this seems to be a very limited range of choices for creating a character figure that is NOT fighting or calling attention to the negative cultural aspects of the game.  Granted, the game is called World of WARcraft, not the World of Politeness and Compromise.  However, there is much more to a player’s character and gameplay than fighting.  Players engage in arguably more social/helpful scenarios than they do in fighting, and they collect plants, mine for metals, go fishing, craft items, and engage with storylines.  But there are no poses for any of these.

Base as a representation of [something]. < I don’t know what to put here yet.  It is a symbol of elevated status, of standing on top of something, of being built upon something.  I don’t know.  Anyway:

There are 4 choices of statue bases:

Marbled Floor: The “plainest” of all the bases, but represents a material of luxury and importance.

Horned Stand: Horns are aggressive, bestial, and associated with violence

Gold Mound: wealth, greed, achievement

Onyxia Base: This one is interesting in that it cost an extra $10, perhaps due to printing constraints.  However, more cost is usually associated with a “premium” or “superior” product, which in this case is the base that represents a large, epic battle against a dragon.  This particular battle is a well-known (relatively-speaking) raid in World of Warcraft, and is sort of a rite of passage for players that begin raiding.  Here the “premium” product is reserved for players concerned with raiding.

What is missing from this assortment of bases is the choice to have your character standing in a meadow, or at a crafting station, or near a fishing hole, all of which are places that exist in the game and can have very special meanings for players.

Armor as a representation of fashion and achievement

Choices of armor are limited to the armor you have actually collected in the game.  In the analysis I did, a level 80 character that has done many raids and player vs. player fights has 10 armor options as opposed to a level 20 character who has 3.  Additionally, 2 of these options are for Christmas outfits that every player has access to.  If you remove those options the armor choices are 8 to 1 in favor of the player that engages with game activities that reward players with special armor.

As I mentioned before, there are an incredible amount of activities that players can engage with.  Players can follow the storyline, harvest materials, craft items, play the stock-market on the auction house, explore the game world, collect pets, teach other players how to play, help out other players with difficult situations, make new friends, and on and on.  However, these activities in themselves are not rewarded with special sets of armor.  Special sets of armor are reserved for players that engage with high-level game content, and are successful in killing “epic” monsters, or defeating other players in tournaments.

Since FigurePrints only allows players to “dress” their character in the armor they have acquired in the game, this places a much higher value on high-level players concerned with raids and player vs. player activities.  This is most evident in the words used in the instructions:

These are the instructions shown to all players, regardless of if they have 8 sets of high-level armor to choose from or 1 low-level set of armor.

Any player without high-level armor could be described as either not interested in those aspects of the game that provide the armor, or as not “advanced” enough to have acquired it.  By not providing this player with as many options to “dress” the character, the player is limited in the ways he or she can create a meaningful representation of his or her character.

FigurePrints situated amongst other texts

And then I can also talk about FigurePrints as a creative activity concerned with creating an artifact that represents the player’s character.  In seeing FigurePrints as this, I can compare it to many other artifacts that are created to represent the character:  costumes, drawings, forum signatures, fan fiction, and the WoW Armory just to name a few.  In exploring these artifacts, I have seen an interesting occurrence: artifacts that are created from scratch by players have very different qualities than artifacts that are generated using information from the game.

Some future design implications?

Namely, game-generated artifacts seem to focus on achievements, statistics, armor, and items.  Player-generated artifacts seem to focus on personal stories and social elements.  Some of this is discussed by Silvia Lindtner, Bonnie Nardi, and Fernanda Viégas.  This will be more important in the future as representations based on digital data become a source for decision-making.  If social spaces like World of Warcraft use their digital data to reduce the rich experience down to statistics and equipment, what implications does that have for the ways in which we value others and ourselves?
EDIT: January 4, 2010.  Since first posting this, I have developed these thoughts more and have written several drafts of this paper.  It is currently a work in progress.

The transformative powers of repeated viewings were incredible. I had entirely different experiences when I viewed the game through different phenomenological perspectives. The first time I saw it as just a MMORPG player. When I first watched this video, I was distracted by the medium. All I saw was World of Warcraft characters, and attached to them every stereotype and bias that exists about World of Warcraft players, my understanding of the culture of MMORPGs, and the pop culture phenomenon that is the game.

However, after repeated viewings the “World of Warcraft-ness” started to fade away, and I realized that this video is very compelling. The second time I saw it as Chad with my particular history of knowing people who have died and the beginnings and endings of relationships in my life. I even noticed that when I was writing my notes from watching the video, I never referred to the character in the video as “he” or “him.” I kept writing the word “I” or “me.” That was quite a powerful realization.

Then I started reading the various comments and I saw someone who said it reminded him of when his mom was killed by a drunk driver. In my next viewing I pretended that my mom had been killed by a drunk driver, and I was surprised (and a little frightened) at how easily I was able to envision that scenario. Throughout all of these viewings I felt real, genuine pain. It grew even worse when I kept reading the comments about all the other types of loss that people associated with the video: breaking up, moving away, death of a loved one, losing touch with a childhood friend, someone cheating on someone else, or watching a sick relative slowly get sicker.

The sadness and tragedy of life were made even clearer by the insensitive and frankly assholish comments that are interspersed amongst the genuine comments. For every heartfelt comment there is another where someone is making fun of anyone who got something out of a “stupid video game.” There is much to be said here about internet culture, how machinima is viewed amongst other forms of expression, or how this particular video is grouped in with funny and ridiculous other WoW-inspired machinima. But that is the structuralist and semiotic stuff for later.

With all my new lenses for looking at things, I am slightly overwhelmed with things that I can say about this video, not least of which is that this video is definitely not what Blizzard had in mind when they created World of Warcraft.  But I have come to an interesting realization recently, and it is this: It isn’t our ability to say all these things that is valuable. It is the fact that we have noticed new things and in doing so are able to have richer experiences.

While those are admittedly straw-man statements, I feel that they do have a hint of truth in the field of HCI.  I myself feel that way at times, but I am beginning to understand what I will gain from a deep study of aesthetics and critical theory.  The goal isn’t to replace all of the inspirational pictures on the walls of the design space with academic papers, but to provide me (the designer) with new perspectives to view those pictures through.  By that I mean that the point of this approach (and of this class) isn’t to turn me into a philosophy-spewing humanities fueled machine, but to internalize some of the material so that I cultivate better designerly judgment.

I tend to think of incentives as “the path of least resistance,” and these incentives are key when thinking about design, especially the design of sustainable systems. I will use an example from my own life: recycling.

I want to recycle everything. However, I don’t consider myself to be a “green” person, and I am not really motivated out of guilt or because I want to save the planet. I want to recycle because it makes sense. I tend to be motivated by logic and waste isn’t logical to me. However I am also motivated by efficiency, the same as many people in American culture these days.

But the apartments I live in don’t have recycling bins anywhere. If I want to recycle, I have to separate all my trash in my apartment. I don’t have a vehicle, so my options are to get a friend to let me pile up all my garbage in their car and take it to the recycling center across town. With this system in place, there is no incentive (path of least resistance) for me to recycle.

Conversely, when I am at school I recycle every can and every piece of paper because there are recycling bins everywhere. Since I find it illogical to not recycle, the path of least resistance at school is to recycle. The recycling bin is located right next to the trash. There is no reason why I wouldn’t recycle it.

Then back at home everything goes into the garbage. This is because there is no incentive for me to go through all the trouble to recycle outside of my own altruism. And sadly altruism is not the best incentive for most people.

I feel that design for sustainable systems suffers from not understanding this. Many projects and ideas that I have been presented with since I have been studying human-computer interaction design have focused on raising awareness. The assumption is that if we design systems that make the amount of waste visible, people will be more aware and will waste less. While this will certainly make a difference, it is not the answer that is going to help change an inherently wasteful culture.

For certain the tone in our culture is shifting, and being “un-green” will exude a poor public image. Perhaps there will come a time when being seen as “un-green” will carry such a bad connotation that the path of least resistance is to do the eco-friendly thing. But we aren’t there yet. That is why we need to understand that for most people, the path of least resistance is to toss everything in the trash.

Maybe we could focus on changing the system based on incentives. My current system has no incentive for me to recycle, and I actually want to. This could be solved by any number of recycling programs (bins, more recycling centers, recycling pickup, etc.), and eventually they will be implemented. When thought of from the point of incentives, or the path of least resistance, there is no way I can be expected to recycle within my current system. The same could be said for many others within many other systems, and a deeper understanding and appreciation of incentives may be key to designing better systems in the future.

Instead of “changing behavior” I think it is a designer’s job to “understand behavior” and design accordingly. This might mean changing behavior, but could also mean changing perceptions, or “encouraging” behavior. Nobody can say that any one way of doing something is necessarily better than another, so attempting to design a “better” behavior is at best arrogant or naive, and at worst is just plain wrong. If we only look at how we can change a behavior, we end up with solutions that don’t address the real problem.

Trying to change behavior might overlook what is important to understand about that behavior. If you are always looking at the factors that cause a certain behavior only in the interest of changing that behavior, you can miss out on why the behavior exists and if that might be something good. Perhaps we should pay attention to the difference between changing someone’s behavior within a system, or keeping the behavior and changing the outcome of the system.

For instance, if a designer (Mike) sees that someone (John) throws out his aluminum cans instead of recycling, MIke might design a system that seeks to change this behavior. So Mike creates a display that shows how many pounds of cans John throws out per week that could be recycled. In this case Mike is using guilt as a motivational tool to change the “bad” behavior. Maybe this works and maybe it doesn’t.

However, if you look at this behavior another way it might be seen as good. Maybe John throws the cans away because there is no recycling center nearby, and it is too much trouble to save the cans and then drive them across town. And maybe John drives a vehicle that gets poor gas mileage and the recycling center is in a bad part of town. Now this may be a poor example, but if Mike is only seeking to change one behavior to a “better” behavior, he might overlook something important about that behavior.

John’s behavior might come from wanting to be efficient and not waste time. That is not necessarily a bad behavior. But Mike is trying to change that behavior in order to accomplish something good: eliminating waste. But John’s behavior of “being efficient” isn’t what needs to be changed. It is the system that needs to be changed in order to gain a different outcome. For instance, maybe John just needs someone to come pick up his cans.

Depending on the perspective of the designer, this could be seen a couple of ways:

1. Mike wants to change John’s wasteful behavior of throwing out cans to a new behavior where John takes his cans to the recycling center, by informing him about how much he wastes.

2. Mike wants to provide John with a system that reinforces John’s behavior of being efficient by creating a system where someone picks up John’s cans.

Both 1 and 2 are solutions that make the world greener, but 1 is trying to change John’s behavior and 2 works because of his behavior. Both solutions have pros and cons, but the point is that there can be valid solutions that don’t always seek to change behavior. It isn’t the designer’s “job” to change people. It is the designer’s job to understand people and situations and come up with relevant solutions. Sometimes those solutions change behavior to get better results, and sometimes they change the system to get better results from a certain behavior.