Facebook is upon us



Facebook, originally uploaded by Laughing Squid.

You may have noticed from that desperate plinking of your email client that Facebook is taking over the world. The invasion of Denmark started for real, relatively late, around October of this year.
I wrote a little analysis of the phenomenon for the newspaper Politiken a few weeks ago. If your Danish skills are up to it, you can read it.

The point, in essence, is that I see four main motivations for using Facebook:

1) Social necessity: You want to be where your friends are
2) Identity management: Being able to construct a self image, with great control and many options, is appealing
3) Worried curiosity: Who knows, something very important might be happening in there
4) Practical help: Keeping track of friends and weak ties through Facebook is simply practical

Of course, this list leaves out a factor: Hanging out on Facebook is simply entertaining (as Malouette mentions.). It is a constant cocktail party (although one with too little hard liqueur and too many zombies) and members of homo sapiens, as a rule, enjoy being social. Of course, to get all long-haired (and to protect my little list from criticism) one could argue that “fun” is a meta-factor. Using Facebook is “fun” because it satisfies “needs” such as the ones in my list.

Comments, questions and mad outbursts are welcome as always.

The active 1%

Writes Charles Authur of The Guardian:

It’s an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of
100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with
it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just
view it.

That’s very fine and interesting, of course. But does anyone know of a credible analysis of motivations for contributing? What makes those 1% tick? What incentives do they face which the silent majority do not?

Via Kollaborativ

Game Research 2.0 (work in progress)



I’m tweaking WordPress to work as a CMS for www.game-research.com. Updating the old thing has been just too difficult – and so nothing will stand in the way of new content (of which various things are planned).

If you wish to contribute to the site – in the form of a book review etc. – let me know.
The new version is visible at www.game-research.com/2.

Comments? Suggestions? (Put ’em here).

Post-aesthetics

Back from sunny Bergen, I can report that the Aesthetics of Play conference was most succesful. Presentations were competent and varied and the organizers impressively organized.
One thing that struck me as oddish was the strong focus, in most presentations, of issues related to realism, mimemis, representation (as opposed to, say, rules). Guess I just figured that general interest had veered away from such things, but the conference did of course focus on “aesthetics”.
No-one (else) spoke of games as competitive or of players as optimizers/achievers but that just proves my point that game studies represent a radically different theory of the player than does game design (how’s that for a generalization?).

Tourist pictures on Flickr.

Oh, and this site has been down for a few days due to the server-threatening behaviour of a WordPress plug-in.

Technically different

You’ve made your way to the sparkling new WordPress edition of my blog. The principle is something like if you have no fascinating new content the least you can do is switch CMS once in a while.
But of course, Blogger was getting really slow and WordPress is a really excellent piece of (free!) software.