game design

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pages: 145 words: 40,897

Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps by Gabe Zichermann, Christopher Cunningham

airport security, business logic, future of work, game design, gamification, Ian Bogost, lateral thinking, minimum viable product, pattern recognition, power law, Ruby on Rails, SimCity, social graph, social web, systems thinking, urban planning, web application

That is, the arc of your gamified system is based on your player’s and your brand’s stories—as they already exist. Luckily, you don’t need nor should you want to become a full-fledged game designer. While many reference works (such as the excellent The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell [Morgan Kaufmann]) can help deepen your understanding of how to make games, we’ve filtered the key elements of the discipline here to focus on the most important. Our view of game design is narrow, but it is highly optimized for gamification. MDA Framework One of the most frequently leveraged frameworks of game design is referred to as MDA—which stands for: Mechanics Dynamics Aesthetics The MDA framework is a postmortem analysis of the elements of a game.

Only by carefully unpacking consumer emotions and desires can we design something that really sticks—and only through the power of gamification can we make that experience predictable, repeatable, and financially rewarding. We wrote this book to help demystify some of the core concepts of game design as they apply to business, written from the perspective of what a marketer, product designer, product manager, or strategist would want to know. In that regard, we are indebted to the work of notable game designers who helped clarify and amplify the process of game design, making it into a quantifiable art and science. We have leveraged their work and refined the concepts to focus on those elements that are most relevant to business.

Gamification by Design takes a unique approach to this exciting, fast-moving, and powerful trend, and makes it practical. We hope you’ll find it as useful as we enjoyed writing it. Acknowledgments We want to recognize the game-design writing and work of key thinkers, including Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses (Morgan Kaufmann), Jon Radoff’s Game On (Wiley), and Ralph Koster’s A Theory of Fun for Game Design (Paraglyph Press). We are also lucky to have been able to access and distill the insights of Sebastian Deterding, Susan Bonds, Jane McGonigal, Amy Jo Kim, Ian Bogost, Nick Fortugno, Nicole Lazzaro, Rajat Paharia, Kris Duggan, Keith Smith, and Tim Chang.


pages: 420 words: 130,503

Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges and Leaderboards by Yu-Kai Chou

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Firefox, functional fixedness, game design, gamification, growth hacking, IKEA effect, Internet of things, Kickstarter, late fees, lifelogging, loss aversion, Maui Hawaii, Minecraft, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, QR code, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Skype, software as a service, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs

Often, there are only a few building blocks to select from, but based on the context, challenges, and constraints, these building blocks come into play in varying ways for different scenarios. In the book A Theory of Fun for Game Design, game designer Raph Koster introduces a hypothetical game with a single hammer that can only do one thing, which likely results in a dull experience. Koster compares it to the game of Tic-Tac-Toe, which also does not require a meaningful range of abilities and strategy. In comparison, checkers players can start to learn the importance of forcing other players into disadvantageous jumps. “Most games unfold abilities over time, until at a high level you have many possible stratagems to choose from.”30 Game designer Jesse Schell points out that one of the most exciting and interesting ways to add Meaningful Choices is to allow players to choose between playing it safe, and go for a small reward, or take a big risk, and try for a big reward.

But those are all excuses to simply keep the player happily entertained inside the system, further engaging them enough to stay committed to the game. The harsh reality of game designers is that, no one ever has to play a game. They have to go to work, do their taxes, and pay medical bills, but they don’t have to play a game. The moment a game is no longer fun, users leave the game and play another game or find other things to do. Since game designers have spent decades learning how to keep people consistently engaged with repetitive activity loops towards “purposeless” goals, games are a great source of insight and understanding into Human-Focused Design.

However, most are still boring and are financial losers. Only a few well-designed games become engaging and even addictive. Are you designing your experience to be the failing game or the successful game? How would you know? So let us look at how a good game designer might tackle the problem. Instead of starting with what game elements and game mechanics to use, the good game designer may begin by thinking, “Okay, how do I want my users to feel? Do I want them to feel inspired? Do I want them to feel proud? Should they be scared? Anxious? What’s my goal for their intended experience? Once the designer understands how she wants her users to feel, then she begins to think, “Okay, what kind of game elements and mechanics can help me accomplish my goals of ensuring players feel this way.”


pages: 470 words: 128,328

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, citizen journalism, clean water, collaborative economy, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, G4S, game design, hedonic treadmill, hobby farmer, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, mass immigration, Merlin Mann, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Stallman, science of happiness, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart meter, Stewart Brand, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, We are as Gods, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

But I also see a future in which the games we play stoke our appetite for engagement, pushing and enabling us to make stronger connections—and bigger contributions—to the world around us. The modern history of computer and video games is the story of game designers ascending to very powerful positions in society, effectively enthralling the hearts and minds—and directing the energies and attention—of increasingly large masses of people. Game designers today are extremely adept wielders of that power, no doubt more adept than any game designers in all of human history. They have been honing their craft and refining their tactics for thirty years now. And so it is that more and more people are being drawn to the power of computer and video games—and finding themselves engaged by them for longer and longer periods of time, for greater and greater stretches of their lives.

Perhaps we should consider a third idea. Instead of teetering on the tipping point between games and reality, what if we threw ourselves off the scale and tried something else entirely? What if we decided to use everything we know about game design to fix what’s wrong with reality? What if we started to live our real lives like gamers, lead our real businesses and communities like game designers, and think about solving real-world problems like computer and video game theorists? Imagine a near future in which most of the real world works more like a game. But is it even possible to create this future? Would it be a reality we would be happier to live in?

We need to build hybrid industries and unconventional partnerships, so that game researchers and game designers and game developers can work with engineers and architects and policy makers and executives of all kinds to harness the power of games. Finally, but perhaps most importantly, we all need to develop our core game competencies so we can take an active role in changing our lives and enabling the future. This book is designed to do just that. It will build up your ability to enjoy life more, to solve tougher problems, and to lead others in world-changing efforts. In Part I: Why Games Make Us Happy, you’ll go inside the minds of top game designers and game researchers.


pages: 371 words: 107,141

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

In my case, sometimes a little too much, like when I used to regularly stay up until two in the morning to play Team Fortress 2 with friends in the US. What’s crucial, however, is that good game designers recognise that autonomy and competence and relatedness are ingredients, not requirements. Different players in different situations want different games; some players will want to dive into a game all about competence (Dark Souls), and at other times those same players might want the autonomy to shape their own world (Animal Crossing, Minecraft). That’s why the number of game designers I know who consult psychology textbooks is approximately zero. That’s not how they make games. Instead, it’s a process of experimentation, feeling out new takes on old ideas, wondering what’d happen if you combined this premise with that game genre.

Antimonopolists like legal scholar Tim Wu, however, blame the political lack of will to enforce antitrust law, and argue that even if Amazon’s scale helps it lower prices in the short term, its crushing of competition stifles innovation in the long term.104 Either way, whether you want to sell goods online or advertise on social media, you have fewer and fewer options.105 And if those companies decide to push you below the API with only gamification to distract you, there are fewer and fewer places to go. The examples of workplace gamification I’ve described so far have been distinctly lacking in fun, but maybe that’s only because companies haven’t tried hard enough. Perhaps if companies hired better game designers, they could make packing boxes or answering phones all day into a delightful experience. While this might help at the margin, the problem is that good game design doesn’t scale. A game that makes it fun to pack items into a box will not work for picking the items that go into the boxes, let alone driving a taxi or answering phone calls. If you want to make all of those tasks fun, you need to make a unique game for each of them.

As Lazer-Walker notes, The most effective way to make online events more engaging is going to be looking towards game design and virtual world design to learn what makes those spaces tick. This doesn’t (necessarily) mean making actual games. Our space more resembles Discord or Slack from a UI/UX perspective than a historical MUD. It also doesn’t mean building more of the same online event platforms we already have, but throwing in some 2D pixel art or traditional “gamification” markers (leaderboards, badges, etc.) or other surface-level signifiers. What we actually need to take from game design is the understanding of how to use play and playful design to create environments whose architecture encourages and rewards positive social interactions through psychologically satisfying systems.


pages: 329 words: 106,831

All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture by Harold Goldberg

activist lawyer, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, Apple II, cellular automata, Columbine, Conway's Game of Life, Fairchild Semiconductor, G4S, game design, Ian Bogost, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, PalmPilot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Oldenburg, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Good Place, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning

Inspired by a board game and a television show, The 7th Guest and its sequel were so fraught with frights that they drove one of the game designers crazy, literally. Like Myst, The 7th Guest was responsible for selling millions of personal computers. Occasionally terrifying, always campy and over the top, The 7th Guest boldly led the way for the future of horror games. However, the making of The 7th Guest and its follow-up, The 11th Hour, showed in microcosm the rift that could develop when those who held strong ideas about movies worked side by side with those who cared more about game design. The 7th Guest co-creator Graeme Devine was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and then moved to Crawley, a south-of-London town famous for its Stone and Bronze Age artifacts.

The staff at Blizzard in Irvine was not immune to its many enticements, and Adham, now back in the fold, was completely fascinated. So was one of his newer hires, Rob Pardo. Pardo originally had dreams of becoming a movie director, but he ended up managing a local Software Etc. store. After becoming a game tester, he worked his way up to producer at Interplay and was slowly moving into game design. Pardo looked at the smart but soft-spoken Adham as a game design mentor. They began to have intense, constructive discussions; but the two really began to bond when playing EverQuest together. Pardo was so fascinated by EverQuest that he became the Guild Master of Legacy of Steel, one of the gangs of guys who became über-experts at the vagaries of the game.

Thunderous roars were heard as the cave crumbled in as a kind of animated payoff for playing. Before they went further, the team had to ascertain whether they should include a timed mode to quicken the pace and spice up the action. When showing the timer-less version to game designers, they received negative feedback, including a rude response from a Pogo executive: “This stupid thing isn’t a game at all.” More and more professional game designers offered snotty and snooty remarks. They were almost viscerally opposed to what the three were doing, seeing the jewel matching game as an example of exceptionally poor game theory. Yet when Kapulka traveled home to Canada, he performed what he described to John and Brian as the Mom Test.


pages: 266 words: 67,272

Fun Inc. by Tom Chatfield

Adrian Hon, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, An Inconvenient Truth, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, behavioural economics, Boris Johnson, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer age, credit crunch, game design, invention of writing, longitudinal study, moral panic, publication bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, upwardly mobile

Games have long been one of the world’s most important engines for computing innovation – along with, more recently, the mobile phone. It’s largely thanks to the ever-evolving ambitions of game designers that modern computers have a DVD drive, a graphics card, decent sound capability, a staggering amount of RAM, a large colour monitor, and so on. None of this, technically, is required for word processing or even for producing presentations; the multi-media PC is very much a child of gaming, and has been since its youngest days. Now, though, with the power and speed of even inexpensive modern computers at an unprecedented level in historical terms, games designers have begun to turn to perfecting the field of access and interface design – to help as many people as possible to perform complex tasks on a machine in a manner that is engaging and intuitive.

Koster has, among other things, worked as lead designer on Ultima Online (1997), the world’s first commercially successful massively multiplayer online game (MMO), and as creative director on another MMO milestone, Star Wars Galaxies (2003), based on the Star Wars universe. He’s also the author of an influential book, A Theory of Fun for Game Design (2004), that was one of the first to set out in precise terms what it means to say that games are tools for learning: Games are something special and unique. They are concentrated chunks ready for our brains to chew on. Since they are abstracted and iconic, they are readily absorbed. Since they are formal systems, they exclude distracting external details.

But the social integration they offer is subtle and extremely powerful, seamlessly integrating with users’ Facebook accounts so that they can instantly keep track of – and attempt to better – their friends’ scores, or admire each other’s pets. And behind it all lies a network of data analysis and tracking that sets a global standard not just for gaming, but for anyone hoping to make money from media in a digital world. Playfish’s CEO, Kristian Segerstråle, has a successful background in game design for mobile phones. Yet, as he explained to me at Playfish’s London office in mid-2009, the scale of success that Playfish has experienced had caught him by surprise. ‘It’s fair to say that we have been overwhelmed. We started off eighteen months ago with four of us. We are well over 100 people now in four offices: China, America, London, Norway.


pages: 331 words: 96,989

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam L. Alter

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bluma Zeigarnik, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, death from overwork, drug harm reduction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Richard Thaler, Robert Durst, side project, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, three-martini lunch

The longer the average player stays seated at the machine, the better the machine. Since most players lose more money the longer they play, time on device is a useful proxy for profitability. Video game designers use a similar measure, which captures how engaging and enjoyable their games are. The difference between casinos and video games is that many designers are more concerned with making their games fun than with making buckets of money. Bennett Foddy, who teaches game design at New York University’s Game Center, has created a string of successful free-to-play games, but each was a labor of love rather than a moneymaking vehicle. They’re all available on his website, foddy.net, and apart from attracting limited advertising revenue, they aren’t a significant source of income, despite some having achieved cult status.

And also the games ranked fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth, nineteenth, twenty-first, twenty-third, twenty-fifth, twenty-sixth, thirty-third, and thirty-fourth. The industry would have been much the poorer without his influence. What Miyamoto seemed to recognize better than anyone was that addictive games offered something to both novices and experts. Games designed only for beginners would grow stale too soon, and games designed only for experts would lose newcomers before they became masters. When Miyamoto was twenty-four he joined Nintendo. For ninety years Nintendo had traded in the stagnant playing card business, but now, in the late 1970s, it was branching out into video games.

“That’s the point,” he said, “not to make something sell, something very popular, but to love something, and make something that we creators can love. It’s the very core feeling we should have in making games.” When you compare Super Mario Bros.—regularly voted by game designers as the greatest game of all time—to others on the market, it’s easy to recognize in the competition the hallmarks of a predatory game. Adam Saltsman, who produced an acclaimed indie game called Canabalt in 2009, has written extensively about the ethics of game design. “Predatory games are designed to abuse the way you’re wired,” Saltsman said. “Many of the predatory games of the past five years use what’s known as an energy system.


Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System by Nick Montfort, Ian Bogost

Colossal Cave Adventure, Fairchild Semiconductor, functional programming, game design, Google Earth, higher-order functions, Ian Bogost, Ivan Sutherland, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, SimCity, software studies, Steve Wozniak

Even if an arcade game hadn’t been a huge success, as was the case with Star Castle, it would often be ported. A deployed arcade game contained a complete and fully implemented game design, one that had been tested on the playing (and paying) public. Ironically, however, the hardware capabilities of an arcade machine—in terms of processing [82] power, graphics, and controller setup—were always significantly different from those of the Atari VCS, so that having a well-tested and implemented game design on the arcade platform didn’t mean very much when it came to the home console’s hardware. A “port” from the arcade to Atari’s home system was not like a port from one computer system to another, in which the program being converted would function in the same way on both platforms with only minor differences, after a few small changes were made.

Crane saw Atari VCS development less as a refinement of the gameplay in known interaction models and more as a challenge to make the highly constrained VCS hardware do new and exciting things. In Crane’s words, “I got more enjoyment out of discovering a new trick than from the game design itself. More often than not, I used this technique to lead me in a new direction of game design, and some of the tricks were to me as much an accomplishment as solving the Rubik’s Cube the first time.”11 Freeway, which Crane developed in 1981, offered an improvement on the techniques of same-screen sprite register rewrites (which Larry Kaplan had first used in Air-Sea Battle) and multicolored sprites (first used in the 1978 Superman) accomplished by changing both the sprite color 6 Pitfall!

Keeping a secret like that is not easy.”13 Robinett expressed in this statement the same sort of gripe that would cause David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller, and Bob Whitehead to quit Atari in 1979 to start the industry’s first third-party developer, Activision. Robinett and his colleagues worked long, solitary hours without much guidance or supervision—and with no royalties—and Atari then made a fortune on their games without giving them credit, publicly or internally. [60] Today, there are perhaps a handful of game designers whose names are well known. Will Wright, Shigeru Miyamoto, Hideo Kojima, and Richard Garriott are among them. Far fewer are directly marketed as creators of their games—Sid Meier and American McGee are the only two whose names actually precede titles of their games, in the way that an Alist film director or a best-selling author might get top billing above a work’s title.


pages: 632 words: 166,729

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll

airport security, Albert Einstein, Build a better mousetrap, business intelligence, capital controls, cashless society, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, emotional labour, Future Shock, game design, impulse control, information asymmetry, inventory management, iterative process, jitney, junk bonds, large denomination, late capitalism, late fees, longitudinal study, means of production, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, profit motive, RFID, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, the built environment, yield curve, zero-sum game

Connie Jones, IGT’s designated “Director of Responsible Gambling,” describes the situation well: “Our game designers don’t even think about addiction—they think about beating Bally and other competitors. They’re creative folks who want machines to create the most revenue.”95 Although Jones’s statement is meant to defend against the charges of intentional harm that are sometimes leveled at the gambling industry, the fact that her defense rests on an open admission of the mercenary nature of game design, along with the dismissive assertion that “game designers don’t even think about addiction,” does more to illustrate the problem than to pardon it.

Over the years, many in the industry have lost faith in the value of focus groups to the game design process. “People tell you what they want and you produce it and it doesn’t work. Absolute failure. They don’t really know what they want.”5 Today, focus groups are more often used to “confirm hunches” than to guide game development. A top executive at IGT who held a master’s degree in psychology suggested to me that methods of cross-cultural anthropology, such as participant observation, were better suited to the task of game design. Randy Adams agreed. “You could do it up on a PowerPoint type presentation and sit down with a little laptop in front of these people and tell ’em to use the key and play the game,” he told me, “but you’re not gonna learn anything that way.

Scholars of gambling Henry Lesieur, Charles Livingstone, and Roger Horbay read the book in its draft form and offered excellent advice and suggestions. Rachel Volberg made thorough and incisive editorial comments on significant portions of the text. Mirko Ernkvist, Nigel Turner, and Kevin Harrigan read the chapters on game design and helped to clarify important details on the programming of probability, as did gambling machine specialists Mike Shackleford (a.k.a. “Wizard of Odds”), Bob Dancer, and Stacy Freidman. The Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, made much of the archival research possible, and its capable staff helped me track down many a wayward citation.


pages: 256 words: 58,652

The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993 by Jordan Mechner

game design, Menlo Park, place-making, restrictive zoning, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs

It reminded me why I’m good at this – of what I can do that others can’t, or won’t. August 1, 1986 Ed sent sketches of someone’s ideas for Karateka II – Gene’s, presumably. I wasn’t too enthused at first, but now it occurs to me there is a way that this could work. If I get actively involved in the game design – make up a storyline, draw up sketches, brainstorm with Gene, etc. – and stay on in a kind of supervisory capacity, while turning the programming over to Steve Ohmert – that’ll let me keep some control over the project’s development, and also justify asking for a higher royalty rate than if I weren’t involved at all.

Lucasfilm spent a million bucks to make Rescue on Fractalus and Ball Blazer, and those games aren’t significantly better than, or different from, the competition. The real strides forward – Raster Blaster, Choplifter, (what the hell) Karateka – were the work of solo programmers with no special resources. Maybe Danny is leading game design into the 21st century. Maybe he’s just flushing money down the toilet. I’ll stick with my Apple II. September 11, 1986 Met with Gene, Lauren, and Ed Badasov and showed them my Baghdad ideas. (Ed B. made up the working title Prince of Persia.) The storyline didn’t impress them much, but I think they saw promise in it.

I’ll need to redo the straight running, but I think everything else will work as it stands. About half the animations are in now. Next step will be getting the character to interact with the environment (climbing a rope ladder, pulling a lever, etc.) At this juncture I think I’ll redirect my attention to the game design. December 2, 1986 Spent most of the day trying to figure out the velocity of a falling human being as a function of time. Enlisted practically everyone at Broderbund at one point or another. They all seemed to find this a more interesting problem than whatever they were working on. December 24, 1986 Home for the holidays.


pages: 240 words: 109,474

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner

AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, book scanning, Colossal Cave Adventure, Columbine, corporate governance, Free Software Foundation, game design, glass ceiling, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Marc Andreessen, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Neal Stephenson, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, slashdot, Snow Crash, software patent, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, X Prize

Worse, the split from id was so painful that Romero and Tom had hardly spoken since the firing. But at least Tom had managed to land on his feet. Scott Miller, another casualty on the way to id’s success, offered him a job as a game designer for Apogee. It was bittersweet, but Tom accepted; maybe now he would be able to make the games he had always imagined. Back at id, the guys started sifting through resumes for a new game designer of their own. Kevin had received a resume from a promising-looking gamer named Sandy Petersen. At thirty-seven wars old, Sandy was ancient compared with the id guys and an admirable veteran of the gaming scene.

Overnight, it seemed, Carmack was in a strange house, with a strange family and going to a strange school, a junior high with no gifted program or computer’s. He’d never felt so alone. Then one day he realized he wasn’t. 19 The book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution was a revelation. Carmack had heard about hackers: In 1982 a Disney movie called Tron told the story of a video game designer, played by Jeff Bridges, who hacked himself into a video game world; in a 1983 movie called WarGames, Matthew Broderick played a young gamer who hacked into a government computer system, and nearly triggered Armageddon. But this book’s story was different–it was real. Written by Steven Levy in 1984, it explored the uncharted history and culture of the “Whiz Kids Who Changed Our World.”

Carmack was most interested in programming the guts of the game–what was called the engine. This integral code told the computer how to display graphics on the screen. Romero enjoyed making the software tools–essentially the palette they would use to create characters and environments or “maps” of the game–as well as the game design–how the game play would unfold, what action would take place, what would make it fun. It was like yin and yang. While Carmack was exceptionally talented in programming, Romero was multitalented in art, sound, and design. And while Carmack had played video games as a kid, no one had played as many as Romero.


pages: 360 words: 101,038

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax

Airbnb, barriers to entry, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, creative destruction, death of newspapers, declining real wages, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, gentrification, hype cycle, hypertext link, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

The game should now be commercially available. Deal: American Dream had filmed its Kickstarter video at Snakes & Lattes, and I first encountered Vernaza there just before it launched, during one of the monthly game designer nights the café holds in its back room. If Kickstarter and Board Game Geek are the digital communities driving the revenge of board games, then these evenings are their analog equivalent. Each month, twenty to thirty game designers, ranging from well-known professionals to first-time amateurs, invite their peers to play and give feedback on prototype games. The crowd is less diverse than Snakes & Lattes normally.

It looked so simple and perfect, I asked the designer, Daniel Rocchi, whether I could buy the prototype right there. These guys were members of the Board Game Designers Guild of Canada, a community built around mentoring and helping fellow designers get their games to market. It was partly led by Sen-Foong Lim, an occupational therapist and professor of developmental psychology, who had designed games as diverse as the hilarious infomercial party pitch But Wait, There’s More! and an adaptation of the TV show Orphan Black. Lim saw game designing as a “jobby,” a mixture of a job and a hobby that made just enough money to justify the time it required away from his family.

See manual work farmers’ markets, 127 faxes, 31, 44 Federico, Christopher, 175, 176, 200 Federle, Tim, 147 Fellini, Federico, 53–54 Ferrania Technologies, 51–52, 57, 58 See also FILM Ferrania Fetch, 224 Fiegl, Matthias, 59–61 Field Notes, 43–44 Fields, Billy, 19 film cameras, xv, 54, 55, 59–60, 61, 62, 66, 67, 68, 69–70, 71, 73, 115, 240 FILM Ferrania, 158 challenges in reviving, 52–53, 57–58, 65–66, 73–74 film market and, 58–59 history of, 53–54, 55, 56–57 film market, 59, 62, 66–67 film photography appeal of, 60, 62, 67, 72, 238 transition from, 54–56 film processing, 56, 60, 73 film production manufacturing process in, 64, 65–66 reviving, 52–53, 67–69, 71 Filofax, 34 “finishability,” 110, 114 Fitting, Rebecca, 129 flea markets, 145 Flickering Mind, The (Oppenheimer), 187 floppy disk drives, 65 Foo Fighters, 24 Forbes (magazine), 106 Ford, Henry, 158 Ford Motor Company, 161 Foreign Affairs (magazine), 163 Forerunner Ventures, 137, 138 Fossil, 150, 168, 169 fountain pens, xiv, 227 Foxconn, 163, 165 Francese, Alberto, 48 Franchesci, Francesco, 32–33 Frank & Oak, 137 Franklin, Aretha, ix Franklin, Tarez, 158 Free Comic Book Day, 14 free content model, issue with, 109–110, 115–116 free shipping, 135–136 freelance work, 164, 165–166 Fresh Direct, 124 friction, creating, 219 Friedman, Thomas, 154, 157, 165 Fröbel, Friedrich, 194 Frobert, Tristan, 95–96 Front Row Partners, 134 Fujifilm, 55–56, 57, 63, 70, 71 Galloway, Scott, 136, 137 game design, shift in, 88–89, 91 game designers, 77, 82, 96–98 game gurus, 86–88, 89 Game Manufacturers Association (GAMA), 77 Game of Life, The, 86 game stores, 78, 86 games, digital. See digital games; online gaming; video games games, physical, benefit of playing, 81–82 See also tabletop games gaming conventions, 77 Gates, Bill, 177 Gates, Melinda, 177 Gawker, 107 geek/nerd culture, 14, 78, 84–85, 94, 211 GenCon, 77, 85 General Electric, 155 General Motors, 155, 163 Genius Bar, 139 Gentlewoman, The (magazine), 112 Getting Things Done (Allen), 37, 38 Ghostface Killah, 27 Gilt Group, 133 Glass Cage, The (Carr), 159, 239 global economy, 153, 154 globalization, 33, 153, 156 Glowforge, 226 GoldenEye 007 (game), 80 Gonzales, Daniel, 132 Google, 20, 46, 110, 137, 161, 162–163, 171, 187, 194, 201, 206, 221–222 Google Ad words, 107 GoPro, 215 Gotta Groove, 17 GPS guidance, 159 Grayson, Bob, 125–127, 128, 144 Grayson Company, 126 Great Recession, 10, 107, 113, 125, 155, 156, 157 Greenlight, 129, 130, 131, 148 Greenwood College School, 198 Grohl, Dave, 24 Guardian, The (newspaper), 110, 116–117 Guarino, Jennifer, 160 hackers/hacking, 186, 215, 216, 224, 225 Hadfield, Tom, 224 Haimerl, Amy, 160–161 handmade products stores focused on, xiv, 149–150 See also leather goods; watches handwriting benefits of, 37, 38 creating an experience out of, 132 of letters, 234 scanning, 46, 234 transcription of, 47 See also notebooks/journals; whiteboards Hard Day’s Night (album), 25 Hare, Steve, 108 Harman-Ilford, 71 Harrison, George, 26 Harrold, Chris, 46 Harvard, 202 Hasbro, 76 Hearst, 105 Hedrick, Annie, 141, 142 Heffernan, Virginia, 238 Heiferman, Scott, 220 Heights Vinyl, 13 Hewlett Packard (HP), 162 Hey, That’s My Fish!


pages: 165 words: 45,397

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby

3D printing, Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, capitalist realism, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate governance, David Attenborough, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, General Motors Futurama, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, Herman Kahn, intentional community, life extension, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mouse model, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Wall-E

The relationship between reality and unreality is particularly interesting in architecture because many buildings are designed to be built but remain on paper due to economic or political reasons. House VI is unusual because it was intentionally an uncompromising piece of architectural art someone could live in, just about. It was as though the owner lived inside an idea rather than a building. Beyond this lies the world of film design and more recently game design, which deals less with conceptual objects and more with imaginary worlds. We will return to this subject later in chapter 5. Peter Eisenman, House VI, east facade, 1975. Photograph by Dick Frank. Photograph courtesy of Eisenman Architects. Peter Eisenman, House VI, 1975, axonometric drawings.

Probably the most abstract discussion is in philosophy where differences between the many shades of real, fictional, possible, actual, unreal, and imaginary are teased out. In social and political science the focus is on modeling reality; in literary theory it is on the semantics of the real and nonreal ; in fine art, make-believe theory and fiction; in game design, literal world creation; and even in science there are many rich strands of discourse around fictionalism, useful fictions, model organisms, and multiverses.4 For us, the key distinction is between actual and fictional. Actual is part of the world we occupy whereas fictional is not. 5 Of all these areas of research, it is literature and fine art that offer the most promising sources of inspiration.

Jaime HayOn's The Fantasy Collection (2008) for LladrO, for instance, consists of porcelain souvenirs from a parallel world. In fashion, too, it is common to use advertising to suggest the imaginary world behind the brand, especially for perfumes, which often drift toward a form of contemporary fairy tale. But game design has to be the area where fictional world building is most developed. Whole worlds are designed, visualized, and linked. Some readers probably remember the first time they experienced an open world video game such as Grand Theft Auto (1997) and how enjoyable it was to drive around and explore the world created by its designers rather than playing the game.


pages: 500 words: 156,079

Game Over Press Start to Continue by David Sheff, Andy Eddy

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, air freight, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Buckminster Fuller, game design, HyperCard, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, pattern recognition, profit motive, revision control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine

Many senses had to be taken over almost instantly to make the game play “hot,” to use Uemura’s term. The entire consciousness of a player had to be captured. There seemed to be two keys to accomplishing this: fast action, or a combination of fast action and intellectual challenge. The headier stuff was up to the game designers, but fast action required complex and expensive circuitry. Uemura spent eighteen-hour days with the arcade engineers trying to determine the essence of the key components to the circuitry in the best coin-operated games. Only that essence could be carried over to the central processing unit of the new system.

Now the problem was that there were not enough good games. Yamauchi had wisely anticipated the importance of software and prepared for it. One of the instructions he had issued to Uemura was that the Famicom must “be appreciated by software engineers.” It had to be easy to program and able to do the kinds of things that game designers dreamed of doing. Any company, given the time, could copy the Famicom hardware. The key to staying ahead was software. By the time a competitor came out with a game that was as good as a successful Nintendo game, Nintendo had to be releasing a game that left the others in the dust. Nintendo would, Yamauchi decided, become a haven for video-game artists, for it was artists, not technicians, who made great games.

“An ordinary man,” Yamauchi said, “cannot develop good games no matter how hard he tries. A handful of people in this world can develop games that everybody wants. Those are the people we want at Nintendo.” He was interested only in the one genius, as he put it, who would drive Nintendo. He wanted to turn Nintendo into the single place the hottest game designers wanted to be associated with. Since, in Japan, most employees stayed with one company for their entire career, it was generally impossible to seduce good designers from other companies. That meant that they would have to come to Nintendo on their own, fresh from college. Yamauchi wanted to create a place where his geniuses would be encouraged and inspired.


pages: 381 words: 101,559

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Gobal Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, game design, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, income inequality, interest rate derivative, it's over 9,000, John Meriwether, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, Network effects, New Journalism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, one-China policy, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, power law, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time value of money, too big to fail, value at risk, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Our third group planning session took place in mid-November; this time there were a few new faces, including senior officials from the intelligence community. We were no longer contemplating the feasibility of a financial war game; by now it was game on and we were specifically focused on game design. I presented detailed financial warfare scenarios and made a pitch that the game design should incorporate unpredictable outcomes that would surprise both attackers and defenders due to the complex dynamics of capital markets. By the conclusion, the Defense Department and the APL game design team had received enough input from the experts to complete the final design. All that remained was to select the participants, set the date and let the game begin.

The financial war game was the Pentagon’s first effort to see how an actual financial war might evolve and to see what lessons might be learned. The war game had been many months in the making, and I had been part of the strategy sessions and game design that preceded the actual game. Although a well-designed war game will try to achieve unexpected results and simulate the fog of real war, it nevertheless requires some starting place and a set of rules in order to avoid descending into chaos. APL’s game design team was among the best in the world at this, but a financial game required some completely new approaches, including access to Wall Street expertise, which the typical physicist or military planner does not have.

One critical cell is the white cell, which consists of a game director and participants designated as umpires or referees. The white cell decides if a particular game move is allowed and also determines who wins or loses during each round of the game. Generally the game designers attribute specific goals or objectives to each cell; thereafter the players are expected to make moves that logically advance those objectives rather than move off in unexplained directions. The game design team will also use political scientists, military strategists and other analysts to describe the initial conditions affecting all the players—in effect, they determine the starting line. Finally, some system of power metrics is devised so that the relative strength of each cell can be established at the beginning of the game, in the same way that some armies are larger than others or some economies have greater industrial potential at the start of any war.


pages: 297 words: 90,806

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made by Jason Schreier

cloud computing, crowdsourcing, game design, Google Hangouts, gravity well, imposter syndrome, index card, inventory management, iterative process, Kickstarter, pirate software, side project, SimCity, spice trade, trade route

It’s impossible to know how “fun” a game will be until you’ve played it. You can take educated guesses, sure, but until you’ve got your hands on a controller, there’s no way to tell whether it feels good to move, jump, and bash your robot pal’s brains out with a sledgehammer. “Even for very, very experienced game designers, it’s really scary,” said Emilia Schatz, a designer at Naughty Dog.* “All of us throw out so much work because we create a bunch of stuff and it plays terribly. You make these intricate plans in your head about how well things are going to work, and then when it actually comes and you try to play it, it’s terrible.”

“You [think]: ‘There’s something that doesn’t feel right. What doesn’t feel right about this game?’ That’s where Josh and I come in and we sit down and we really analyze what is actually wrong with this.” After building a few technical prototypes, the team’s first major goal was to hit “vertical slice”—a small chunk of the video game designed to resemble the final product in as many ways as possible. During traditional, publisher-funded development, it was important for a vertical slice to look impressive, because if the publisher didn’t approve, the studio wouldn’t get paid. “When you’re focusing on a publisher, a lot of the times you’ll just do things the wrong way [on purpose],” said Bobby Null, the lead level designer.

Each index card contained a story beat or scene idea—one midgame sequence, for example, was just called “epic chase”—and taken together, they told the game’s entire narrative. “One thing we’ve never done here is sat down and written down an entire script for the whole game start to front,” said Josh Scherr, a writer who sat with Straley and Druckmann for many of these meetings. “That never happens. And the reason it doesn’t happen is because game design is an iterative process, and if you do that you’re just asking for heartbreak when things inevitably change because the gameplay doesn’t work out the way you expected it to, or you have a better idea further down the line, or anything like that. You have to be able to be flexible.” Over the next few weeks, Druckmann and Straley put together a two-hour presentation that outlined their vision for Uncharted 4, then showed it to the rest of Naughty Dog.


pages: 314 words: 46,664

The Making of Karateka: Journals 1982-1985 by Jordan Mechner

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, financial independence, game design, Libby Zion, megaproject, Rubik’s Cube, Ted Nelson

My hesitation has always been “How could I devote my whole life to programming arcade games? Can you see me at 65?” But why limit myself to arcade games? Why not adventure games, AI games…? Why not invent a whole new style of games, games that go beyond games? And when I get too old to code, why not do game design? July 17, 1982 Got up relatively early (9) and worked on Deathbounce for a few hours. Then it got so hot and I got so sleepy that I just didn’t feel like working anymore. So I read Catch-22. Great book. July 18, 1982 95°. Too hot to work. The Apple’s overheating. Gonna take it to be fixed.

If you die, the princess falls on the floor in grief as the villain exults. For the first time in a long time, I’m satisfied. The vision in my head is now OK. Now all that remains is to make it reality. I’m indebted to Dad for his good ideas and advice. Really, what’s as important as anything in game design is taste: choosing between alternatives. In the beginning, I envisioned this game as two players facing each other across a mat. Hah! This game is gonna be great! August 21, 1983 More good ideas: You fight the villain in the dungeon. You kick the door open, and he’s hiding behind it.

The stakes are too high to waste this. I have a feeling this year is a turning point. If I stay in my rut another year, I’ll never get out of it. Be At Cause. Be powerful, dangerous. Take responsibility for your actions. © 1972 est Open up to people. Be generous. Care. September 25, 1983 Put in three “game-design” hours on Karateka. Not nearly the 20 hours a week I’ll have to average to finish in mid-October according to schedule. September 28, 1983 Tried to work on Karateka, but I just was not in the mood. This is not good. Should I force myself to just sit in front of the computer until it’s finished?


pages: 238 words: 75,994

A Burglar's Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh

A. Roger Ekirch, big-box store, card file, dark matter, Evgeny Morozov, game design, index card, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Minecraft, off grid, Rubik’s Cube, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, statistical model, the built environment, urban planning

Seen this way, even the most mundane or overlooked buildings and cityscapes around us can inspire the same level of wonder and admiration we might normally reserve for international landmarks, such as the Eiffel Tower or the Houses of Parliament. * For Randy Smith, a Texas-based game designer and a level architect on the legendary Thief games, designing a game environment in order to foreground deeply enjoyable opportunities for criminal stealth, deception, and subterfuge is a complex but rewarding challenge. The Thief series, the first of which came out in 1997, is widely credited as introducing the three-dimensional, first-person stealth game.

At first, this might seem relevant only to the world of computer games or burglary fiction, but game play in the Thief series is not at all unlike the way security worked at Toys “R” Us, for example, with Jeffery Manchester hidden in the walls, staring at his baby monitor, watching the internal traffic of the store ebb and flow, preparing for his moment of attack. Smith pointed out how incredibly easy it is for a game designer to create an impossible level or an impenetrable environment—a castle gate that no one can get past, a high-rise no one will ever be able to sneak into. The real challenge is to find just the right level of difficulty so that slipping past the guards and maneuvering through the rooms and corridors becomes enjoyable. This is what he meant when he suggested that game designers need to “introduce deliberate weak points or blind spots” into their environments, such as removing the guards from a room at key moments or creating otherwise unrealistic amounts of shadow at the edge of a courtyard so that a player can walk past without being seen.

Moving through an architectural interior without being detected was, in many ways, the entire point of the story. The player’s goal was not to kill as many people as possible, but to slip past them unseen and unheard. Sound—or, rather, not creating any—became a central design feature of the Thief universe. During our in-depth conversation about burglary and game design, Smith laughed as he explained, “You would think it was our job to design buildings that are hard to break into, but what we actually want to do is design buildings that will channel the movement of the player along different sequences. We introduce deliberate weak points or blind spots where a player can hide, and we make the guards or the architecture itself do weird things to open up more player opportunities.”


pages: 525 words: 147,008

SuperBetter by Jane McGonigal

autism spectrum disorder, data science, full employment, game design, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mirror neurons, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, social intelligence, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel

In games, we have the notion of “epic wins,” or extremely positive outcomes that can arise when you least expect them, from the most unlikely or daunting circumstances. No wonder SuperBetter works so well for so many people! Once you understand the science, it makes perfect sense. Of course a game designer like me would create a system that taps into these naturally gameful ways of thinking and acting. I didn’t know it at the time, but SuperBetter was essentially a perfect road map to post-traumatic and post-ecstatic growth. Not because I was a genius but because I was a good game designer, and all good games train us in the seven ways of thinking and acting that help us turn extreme stress and challenge into positive transformation. These seven rules to live by make up the SuperBetter method, and they are the heart of this book: 1.

Your new skills combined with your increased confidence will allow you to tackle harder quests in the future. This creates a positive upward spiral of success. (Game designers use this same method to build player skills and create escalating challenge in the game world. Players want to feel more powerful and skillful over time, which is why quests get harder and harder the further you get in the game. But to get players ready to succeed at those ambitious goals, game designers must first give them quests that train them in the necessary skills and abilities.) I experienced exactly that kind of upward spiral myself, starting from the moment I completed my first concussion-recovery quest.

So if post-traumatic growth and post-ecstatic growth work the same way, what exactly is that process? What makes the difference between buckling under extreme stress and flourishing because of it? What determines whether you’ll be weakened by adversity or strengthened by it? This is where the research gets really exciting—at least for a game designer like me. It turns out that there are seven ways of thinking and acting that contribute to post-traumatic and post-ecstatic growth. And they are all ways that we commonly think and act when we play games. 1. Adopt a challenge mindset. You need to be willing to engage with obstacles and look at stressful life events as a challenge, not a threat.


pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

It is possible to change what a game is about through skinning—or take a game that doesn’t appear to be about anything and give it a clear, sensible theme. For example, you can create versions of Tetris that are about death, as we see in examples ranging from those imagined by famous game designers Raph Koster and Clint Hocking to that of the comedy group Monty Python. Deadly Tetris Koster, in his 2004 book A Theory of Fun for Game Design, offers his version of Tetris as a thought experiment: Let’s picture a mass murder game wherein there is a gas chamber shaped like a well. You the player are dropping innocent victims down into the gas chamber, and they come in all shapes and sizes.

And we need the university to turn to games as an area of research, to reclaim its role from the moment when video games first developed—to be the place from which new logics, models, and game designs founded upon them emerge. Until then, you can’t make games about much. Notes 1. Hasbro Games, rule book for Monopoly Brand Property Trading Game from Parker Brothers: The .com Edition, tabletop game (Hasbro, Pawtucket, RI). 2. Raph Koster, Theory of Fun for Game Design (Paraglyph, 2004), 168. 3. Raph Koster, “ATOF Tetris Variant Comes True,” Raph’s Website (blog) (February 13, 2009), https://www.raphkoster.com/2009/02/13/atof-tetris-variant-comes-true/. 4.

As a result, the “best” game graduate program in the 2018 rankings is Southern Methodist University’s Guildhall, which undertakes no research and describes itself as “Built by the industry, for the industry.” See TPR Education IP Holdings, LLC, “Top Game Design Press Release | Public Relations | The Princeton Review | The Princeton Review,” accessed March 30, 2018, https://www.princetonreview.com/press/game-design-press-release; Southern Methodist University, “About | SMU Guildhall,” accessed March 30, 2018, https://www.smu.edu/Guildhall/About. III Where Will the Fire Spread? 12 Coding Is Not Empowerment Janet Abbate “Learn to code and change the world!”


pages: 236 words: 62,158

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 140. 6Richard Rouse, Game Design (Sudbury, MA: Wordware Publishing, 2004), xx. 7Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009). 8Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2006), 1. 9Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 9. 10Notes from Below editors, “The Workers’ Inquiry and Social Composition,” Notes from Below, January 29, 2018, www.notesfrombelow.org/article/workers-inquiry-and-social-composition. 11Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 13. 12Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 94. 13Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 147. 14Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play, 95. 15Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), xxxiv. 16Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 5–6. 17Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 9–10. 18Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 12, 13. 19Lars Kristensen and Ulf Wilhelmsson, “Roger Caillois and Marxism: A Game Studies Perspective,” Games and Culture 12, no. 4 (2017): 388. 20Kristensen and Wilhelmsson, “Roger Caillois and Marxism,” 388. 21Kristensen and Wilhelmsson, “Roger Caillois and Marxism,” 393. 22Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge, 2001), 258. 23McLuhan, Understanding Media, 259. 24“Video Game History Timeline,” National Museum of Play, www.museumofplay.org/about/icheg/video-game-history/timeline. 25Claude E.

The game represented an important break, showing that “simulations could also be a diversion from working on mass death if they were cut loose from serious application, enjoyed for their technical ‘sweetness’ and oddity without instrumental purpose, transformed into play.”32 Unlike the previous demonstrations of potential uses for computers, of working through the practicalities of nuclear war, Spacewar! was a game designed to be played. These kinds of escapes became possible, in the words of Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, “because the military allowed its immaterial workers a lot of latitude.” Unlike the user of the Raytheon military simulations, these immaterial workers understood how to program these computers.

Within this process, “the creative role of designers and developers faces off against the economic imperatives of efficient production for a competitive market, reflected in the demands of publishers and console manufacturers and embodied in technology.”59 Most videogames are not made from scratch. Instead, developers build upon existing game engines using something called “middleware.” This makes “the process of game design easier by offering programmers standardized modules,” also known as software development kits (or SDKs).60 As Graeme Kirkpatrick has noted, the use of technology in the labor process of videogame development involves three related processes. The first is a type of standardization that narrows the creative possibilities for making games.


pages: 315 words: 89,861

The Simulation Hypothesis by Rizwan Virk

3D printing, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, butterfly effect, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DeepMind, discovery of DNA, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, game design, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Minecraft, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological singularity, TED Talk, time dilation, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Zeno's paradox

Adam Curry, founder of Entangled, former researcher for Princeton's PEAR Lab “The Simulation Hypothesis provides a deft and knowledgeable blend of video game history, hard science speculation, and science fiction references. Whether or not you believe we all exist in a simulation, I found it both fascinating and entertaining.” Noah Falstein, former chair of the IGDA, former Chief Game Designer at Google “In The Simulation Hypothesis, Riz Virk takes current trends of immersion in video games and personalized entertainment to their logical conclusion: how to build a simulation as real as what we experience in daily life. While no one can say for certain how many lives we have, my advice is to the assume it's a "one-life game" and make the best of it!"

And of course, the biggest question of all: Why would we be in a probabilistic world where making a choice (or having an observation) collapses a probability wave to a single timeline or probability? As I began to explore this last question in some depth, it brought back my early experiences with Tic Tac Toe and with more sophisticated video game algorithms. As video game designers, we have to map out the possible “futures”—paths that might be taken inside the game. Most simple AI in games simulates moves of “possible futures” and then picks the “best possible move” based on those possible futures. These possible futures are similar to the idea of a probability wave. In fact, the whole field of probability was originally created for gaming.

When we incarnate in the future, we can choose which particular tasks of our past karma we should tackle in our new life. Buddha’s endless “Wheel of Life” tells of the purpose of reincarnation: The reason we keep incarnating in future lives is to fulfill the “missions” created in our present and past lives. To a video game designer like myself, the twin concepts of karma and reincarnation sound a lot like video games in which a player has multiple lives and an on-going list of “quests” and “achievements.” The accomplishment of one task (or quest) unlocks new quests that get added to the list. This is a lot like the process of creating new karma described in Buddhism.


Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins

barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, Columbine, content marketing, deskilling, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, game design, George Gilder, global village, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, no-fly zone, profit motive, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, search costs, SimCity, slashdot, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the long tail, the market place, Y Combinator

The game has attracted international interest—42 percent of visitors to the official America's Army Web site log in from outside the United States (though some of these are probably service personnel and their families stationed overseas.) There are organized groups of players and brigades, representing a range of different nationalities, including some from parts of the world that have traditionally been regarded as enemies. The game's designers advocated successfully for the suspension of many military regulations restricting the expression of opposing ideas to create a robust forum—which they call a "Virtual Community of Interest in Soldiering." There, civilians and service men ' W a g n e r JamesAu,"John K e r r y : T h e V i d e o Game," So7on, April 13,2004, http://www.salon.com/tech/ feature/2004/04/13/battlefiekLvietnam/.

Joseph Campbell, the author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), praised Star Wars for embodying what he has described as the " m o n o m y t h , " a conceptual structure abstracted from a cross-cultural analysis of the w o r l d ' s great religions. Today, many screenwriting guides speak about the "hero's journey," popularizing ideas from Campbell, and game designers have similarly been advised to sequence the tasks their protagonists must perform into a similar physical and spiritual ordeal. Audience familiarity with this basic plot structure allows script writers to skip over transitional or expository sequences, throwing us directly into the heart of the action. 42 43 Similarly, if protagonists and antagonists are broad archetypes rather than individualistic, novelistic, and rounded characters, they are immediately recognizable.

I've got m y w o r l d , I've got m y arcs, some of those arcs can be expressed i n the video game space, some of them can be expressed i n the film space, the television space, the literary space, and you are getting to the true transmedia storytelling." With Enter the Matrix, the "origami u n i c o r n " takes several forms, most notably refocusing of the narrative around Niobe and Ghost. A s the game's designer, D a v i d Perry, explains, every element of the game went toward helping us understand w h o these people are: "If you play as Ghost, who's a Z e n Buddhist Apache assassin, y o u ' l l automatically ride shotgun i n the driving levels, which allow y o u to fire out the w i n d o w at agents hunting y o u d o w n .


pages: 500 words: 146,240

Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay, Peter Molyneux

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, book value, collective bargaining, Colossal Cave Adventure, do what you love, financial engineering, game design, Golden age of television, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index card, Mark Zuckerberg, oil shock, pirate software, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, Steve Jobs, Von Neumann architecture

We are not Pavlov’s dogs, but B.F. Skinner proved long ago that the strongest form of behavioral modification is variable-ratio reinforcement. The slot machine thrives on it, but is a social ill because it is a dehumanizing addiction. In a more interesting, thought-provoking, and truly interactive game design, the principles of reinforcement are very useful. Nobody is going to do anything if, in the end, it doesn’t constructively involve your emotions. Ramsay: In 2006, quality of life became a hot-button issue for EA. Can you provide any insight into the labor environment then? Did you do anything differently with the culture at Digital Chocolate?

Although it was your decision to raise his status, were you ever personally uncomfortable with his shadow? Stealey: No, because I got to be the CEO, and I got to be the big cheese. He got to be the brilliant programmer. In the end, I probably should have done it a different way. It should have been “Wild Bill’s Pirates!” But you know what? Sid is really the programmer. He’s really the brilliant game designer. I’m just the business guy, and I was a good marketing guy. And I had some very good marketing people working for me. I was the first marketing guy, but later, we had a lot of marketing muscle. Ramsay: Who was your marketing muscle? Stealey: We had Gerry Blair, a great marketing guy. We had Deborah Tillett, one of our really great marketing persons.

The very first marketing guy was Fred Schmidt, who eventually went on to run Origin Systems. Fred is a brilliant marketing guy. Those three people were really marketing geniuses as far as I’m concerned. Ramsay: Where was Sid’s interest concerning game development? What drove him to create: design or technology? Stealey: Game design only. His first original game after the many military games was the Pirates! game. Later, we were doing the original Railroad Tycoon, and I said, “Boy, this is really a neat game. Where’d you get the idea?” He said, “Oh, from this box.” It was an Avalon Hill board game called 1830. Oh, no! Eric Dott, the president of Avalon Hill, called me and said, “Bill, you’re doing my board game as a computer game.”


pages: 385 words: 101,761

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

Ruben Rausing is usually credited: “Who We Are: Our Legacy,” Tetra Pak USA website, accessed September 10, 2012, http://www.tetrapak.com/us/ whoweare/heritage/pages/default.aspx. 117 Continuum then launched: Harry West interview, March 20, 2012, New York City. 118 In a recent Harvard Business Review: “Life’s Work: Richard Serra,” Harvard Business Review, March 2010, accessed September 13, 2012, http://hbr.org/2010/03/lifes-work-richard-serra/ar/1. 119 Though there are countless ways of playing: My conversations with Katie Salen, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design in game design, and my reading of her book, have had a huge impact on how I understand the creative process. Salen introduced me to the idea of “magic circles” and connected the engaged interaction of gaming to the educational philosophy of John Dewey, who talked about “learning by doing.” Salen is helping to remake the face of public education; she has set up three public schools—two in Chicago, one in New York—that team up teachers with game designers to build an exciting learning experience for students; Institute of Play, http://www.instituteofplay.org/about, accessed September 17, 2012. 119 Though scholars are in disagreement: Marilyn Yalom, Birth of the Chess Queen (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 3; David Shenk, The Immortal Game (New York: Doubleday, 2006), 16–20. 119 “This was a war game”: Shenk, The Immortal Game. 119 According to military strategist: Max Boot, War Made New (New York: Gotham Books, 2006), 122. 120 In 2002, General Tommy Franks: GlobalSecurity.org, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/ internal-look.htm, accessed September 13, 2012. 120 Internal Look was also used: Mark Mazzetti and Thom Shanker, “U.S.

It’s created what business strategists are calling an “ecosystem,” much like Apple’s, that’s composed of a community of consumers, followers really, participating in activities that are fun and meaningful to them. More than six million runners log on to see how they fared against their competitors. Once you’ve thought a little bit about who’ll be playing your game, you can begin to develop some rules. BUILD YOUR OWN GAMES There are many different kinds of games, but game designers frequently distinguish between two kinds: simple and complex. Simple games include puzzles and, like the New York Times crossword, they do not change as a consequence of the decision you make. Puzzles are simple to solve (though not necessarily simple to create, as anyone who’s crafted a crossword will attest), they often are played alone, and they have exactly one solution.

At the end, these children have improved the following competencies: digital literacy, creative problem solving, and collaboration. They’ve designed and traded digital avatars via Bluetooth, solved mysteries with GPS tags, and created and played their own digital and “physical” games. While these kinds of summer camps for adults don’t exist (yet), what follows are some basic principles of game design that you can keep in mind when you’re embarking on a new project, meeting with a team, or planning to deal with a serious issue that has resisted resolution so far (like getting kids to eat vegetables). Playing a game may provide the motivation and rewards to get people to change their behavior and their goals.


pages: 708 words: 223,211

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture by Brian Dear

air traffic controllers' union, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple Newton, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairchild Semiconductor, finite state, Future Shock, game design, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, lateral thinking, linear programming, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, Plato's cave, pre–internet, publish or perish, Ralph Nader, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, three-martini lunch, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

To help players find other players to join up with, Oubliette’s clever authors had created various “taverns” in which you could meet other players and form parties. In a way, taverns were Big Boards in disguise, a similar mechanism for players to find others and go down into the dungeons together. — Renowned computer game designer Will Wright, creator of a series of bestselling videogames including Sim City, The Sims, and Spore, often speaks of two major themes in the field of game design: the balance of technology and psychology, and the “possibility space.” Essential to making a good game, Wright argues, is striking a good balance between the technical aspects of the game’s implementation (the game’s technology) and the model of the game as rendered in a player’s mind (the game’s psychology).

The keyboards on some of the PLATO IV terminals at Illinois were newer, with little bumps added on the F and J index-finger keys for touch-typists (many keyboards today still have those bumps). Silas would have none of it. He hated the bumps, and they had to go. For every terminal he sat down to work on, he’d chip the little plastic dots away, shaving them off until the keys were smooth. Warner and Daleske discussed Empire game design ideas but mostly spent the time play-testing the game and observing how other PLATO users played it. Daleske noticed that whenever Warner hit a lull when he was working on PLATO, he would reach into a pocket, pull out a book, and read a few pages. Then he’d put it back, and do some more work. After a while he would reach into a different pocket, pull out a different book, and start reading from that.

“A great game gives the players the freedom to make a vast number of choices,” says Dirk Pellett, “some of which are more beneficial than others, and some of which are disastrous, and lets them figure out which is which.” Dnd is historic not only for being one of the earliest dungeon games on any computer, but also for a particular game design feature that many other games would copy over the coming years and still employ today. In the computer gaming world it’s a concept called “the boss”—it might be a monster, it might be one hard-to-obtain item, or it might be both. In Dnd the boss item was something called the Orb, and finding it was the ultimate quest for a player.


pages: 458 words: 137,960

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Albert Einstein, call centre, dematerialisation, disinformation, escalation ladder, fault tolerance, financial independence, game design, late fees, Neal Stephenson, Pepsi Challenge, pre–internet, Rubik’s Cube, side project, telemarketer, walking around money, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

I prepped for the meeting by pulling up a search engine and learning everything I could about Nolan Sorrento. He had a PhD in Computer Science. Prior to becoming head of operations at IOI, he’d been a high-profile game designer, overseeing the creation of several third-party RPGs that ran inside the OASIS. I’d played all of his games, and they were actually pretty good. He’d been a decent coder, back before he sold his soul. It was obvious why IOI had hired him to lead their lackeys. They figured a game designer would have the best chance of solving Halliday’s grand videogame puzzle. But Sorrento and the Sixers had been at it for over five years and still had nothing to show for their efforts.

People employed by Gregarious Games during this period say that Halliday frequently locked himself in his office, where he programmed incessantly, often going without food, sleep, or human contact for days or even weeks. On the few occasions that Halliday agreed to do interviews, his behavior came off as bizarre, even by game-designer standards. He was hyperkinetic, aloof, and so socially inept that the interviewers often came away with the impression he was mentally ill. Halliday tended to speak so rapidly that his words were often unintelligible, and he had a disturbing high-pitched laugh, made even more so because he was usually the only one who knew what he was laughing about.

“There you go,” she said, stepping back. “Thanks,” I said. “But you shouldn’t have. We’re competitors, you know.” “I know. But we can still be friends, right?” “I hope so.” “Besides, the Third Gate is still a long way off. I mean, it took five years for the two of us to get this far. And if I know Halliday’s game-design strategy, things are just going to get harder from here on out.” She lowered her voice. “Listen, are you sure you don’t want to stick around? I bet we can both play at once. We can give each other Jousting tips. I’ve started to spot some flaws in the king’s technique—” Now I was starting to feel like a jerk for lying to her.


pages: 371 words: 93,570

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

4chan, Ada Lovelace, air gap, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, crowdsourcing, D. B. Cooper, dark matter, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Edward Charles Pickering, game design, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Network effects, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, PalmPilot, pets.com, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, semantic web, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Soul of a New Machine, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

An irony: even as computer memory multiplies, our ability to hold on to personal memories remains a matter of will, bounded by the skull and expanded only by our capacity to tell stories. There are technical women in these pages, some of the brightest programmers and engineers in the history of the medium. There are academics and hackers. And there are culture workers, too, pixel pushers and game designers and the self-proclaimed “biggest bitch in Silicon Alley.” Wide as their experiences are, they’ve all got one thing in common. They all care deeply about the user. They are never so seduced by the box that they forget why it’s there: to enrich human life. If you’re looking for women in the history of technology, look first where it makes life better, easier, and more connected.

But the market for personal computers was small, and the competition steep: Sears had the Atari systems, Radio Shack was pushing its own Tandy computer, and the golden age of arcade games was well underway. When CyberVision folded in 1979, Brenda still hadn’t finished her dissertation. But no matter—she was a game designer now. When she moved out to California to work for Atari, she saw the ocean for the first time. We sit in her garden and talk over iced tea; Tejava and pomegranate juice, the house drink. She sucks on an American Spirit, sitting unnaturally straight. She’s recovering from back surgery, her second, and her shock of curly silver hair is accented with pops of magenta and aquamarine.

It stood to reason that if boys were hogging the machines at the school computer lab to play games that girls didn’t like, girls would later be disadvantaged in a workplace, and a world, where computer literacy is not only beneficial but necessary. Making games that girls did like seemed like the obvious solution. As one female game designer put it, “We cannot expect women to excel in technology tomorrow if we don’t encourage girls to have fun with technology today.” It was a smart business move, too: girls represented a huge untapped market, and the prevailing wisdom was that anyone who made a computer game that really appealed to them could conceivably double the games industry.


pages: 329 words: 88,954

Emergence by Steven Johnson

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, AOL-Time Warner, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Douglas Hofstadter, edge city, epigenetics, game design, garden city movement, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, pez dispenser, phenotype, Potemkin village, power law, price mechanism, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, SimCity, slashdot, social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, stakhanovite, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush

The hard work of tomorrow’s interactive design will be exploring the tolerance—that suspension of control—in ways that enlighten us, in ways that move beyond the insulting residue of princesses and magic spells. * * * With these new types of games, a new type of game designer has arisen as well. The first generation of video games may have indirectly influenced a generation of artists, and a handful were adopted as genuine objets d’art, albeit in a distinctly campy fashion. (Tabletop Ms. Pac-Man games started to appear at downtown Manhattan clubs in the early nineties, around the time the Museum of the Moving Image created its permanent game collection.) But artists themselves rarely ventured directly into the game-design industry. Games were for kids, after all. No self-respecting artist would immerse himself in that world with a straight face.

In the years that followed its publication, I began to hear word of the book’s influence on a wonderfully diverse range of fields and professions: from New Urbanists rebuilding neighborhoods and planning new communities; from city mayors in Brazil creating new models of participatory democracy; from the strategists behind Howard Dean’s groundbreaking use of the Internet to build grassroots support for his presidential run in 2004; from Web entrepreneurs and game designers; from experts in management theory, who had begun to think of supply chains as ant colonies; from artists designing new forms of algorithmic expression that showcased the unpredictable creativity of emergent systems. There was one other unanticipated twist. The book was published in the United States during the first week of September 2001.

But all this has changed in recent years, and a new kind of hybrid has appeared—a fusion of artist, programmer, and complexity theorist—creating interactive projects that challenge the mind and the thumb at the same time. And while Tap, Type, Write and Zelda were not, strictly speaking, emergent systems, the new generation of game designers and artists have begun explicitly describing their work using the language of self-organization. This too brings to mind the historical trajectory of the rock music genre. For the first fifteen or twenty years, the charts are dominated by lowest-common-denominator titles, rarely venturing far from the established conventions or addressing issues that would be beyond the reach of a thirteen-year-old.


pages: 180 words: 55,805

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future by Jeff Booth

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, deliberate practice, digital twin, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, Milgram experiment, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, OpenAI, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, software as a service, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, zero-sum game

And while you might believe that you spend the time on the game because of your own desire, let’s explore what drives that desire from a game designer’s perspective. What mechanisms in game design create habits and keep us coming back? For example, if a game is too difficult to win early, users get frustrated and do not stick with it, so game designers include early wins or prizes to create dopamine responses in your brains, which create stickiness. As the game progresses, if it is too easy to win or collect prizes, users quickly get bored and drop off. Over time, by increasing the difficulty in combination with giving ownership of prizes that can be used to get through harder levels, game designers create a ladder of motivators to keep your brain engaged.


pages: 420 words: 135,569

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, airport security, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, fiat currency, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mason jar, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, Minecraft, moral hazard, open borders, pattern recognition, place-making, plant based meat, post-truth, QAnon, QR code, remote working, RFID, risk tolerance, School Strike for Climate, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, stem cell, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator

The next decade is likely to be the most significant opportunity most of us have in our lifetimes to really transform the way society works—and we all have a part to play in creating that positive long-term change. There are many other books about how to think about the future. What makes this book different? Well, I’m a professional futurist and I’m a game designer. It’s not a common combination of career paths—as far as I know, I’m the only one in the world. But it’s a career combination that makes a lot of sense. As both a game designer and a futurist, I see my job as transporting people to imaginary worlds, to worlds that don’t exist—either because they’re virtual or because they’re future worlds that haven’t happened yet and may never happen.

What do you make of what’s going on right now? What should we be doing?” These messages were coming not just from my friends and family but from top executives at the biggest Silicon Valley tech companies, from government agencies, from international foundations. And they were right: yes, I had run a pandemic simulation. I’m a game designer, and I specialize in creating simulations that help people imagine the biggest global challenges we might face in the future. In 2008, I was the lead designer for a six-week future-forecasting simulation called Superstruct. The simulation was run by the Ten-Year Forecast group at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California.

I always participate in the social simulations that I run, so that I can contribute my own personal insights and get the same benefits as other participants. During the Superstruct simulation back in 2008, I was trying to figure out what I would do during a pandemic to help others. How could I use my unique skills and experience to make a difference? I tried to think of a new way a game designer could uniquely help during a pandemic. It occurred to me that the negative stereotype of gamers as people who like to stay home alone in their basements playing video games would actually be a positive behavior during a pandemic. After all, what would public health experts be telling everyone to do if a deadly virus were spreading?


pages: 598 words: 183,531

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition by Steven Levy

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, air freight, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, corporate governance, Donald Knuth, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, Free Software Foundation, game design, Gary Kildall, Hacker Ethic, hacker house, Haight Ashbury, John Conway, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, Multics, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, Paul Graham, popular electronics, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, software patent, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, value engineering, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

He would settle the lawsuit before it came to trial. Chapter 17. Summer Camp Ken Williams came to rely on people like John Harris, Third-Generation hackers influenced not so much by Robert Heinlein or Doc Smith as by Galaxian, Dungeons and Dragons, and Star Wars. A whole subculture of creative, game-designing hacker-programmers was blooming, beyond the reach of executive headhunters. They were mostly still in high school. To lure young programmers to Coarsegold, Williams took out ads in the Los Angeles Times tempting programmers to “Boot into Yosemite.” Typical of the replies was a man who told Ken, “My son’s a great Apple programmer and would like working with you.”

It was a game like Space Invaders, where you had a rocketship and had to fight off waves of invaders. But the waves were full of weird shapes and moved in all kinds of directions, and if the player tried to send a constant stream of bullets off to fight them, his “laser gun” would overheat and he would face almost certain death. It was the kind of game designed to spur cardiac arrest in the feeble-hearted, so fierce were the attackers and so violent were the explosions. It was not exactly a landmark in Apple gaming, since it was so derivative of the Space Invaders school of shoot-’em-ups, but it did represent an escalation in graphic pyrotechnics and game-playing intensity.

The game was based on the Iran hostage crisis: a chopper crossed enemy lines and tried to rescue sixty-four hostages—little animated figures who waved when they saw the helicopter. It was the big game of the year, and consistent with the Carlstons’ classy approach to the business. They loved their hackers. They talked all the time about what great artists their “game designers” were. Sirius had been developing its own superstars, but Gebelli, the designer who had done almost all their games in the first year of Sirius’ existence, was not one of them. According to Jerry Jewell, Gebelli thought that Sirius was not the best agency for display and sale of his artworks—this after receiving a quarter of a million dollars in his first year, noted Jewell incredulously—and, along with a defecting Sirius executive, began his own company, modestly named Gebelli Software.


Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation by Blake J. Harris

air freight, airport security, Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, disruptive innovation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, inventory management, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Maui Hawaii, Michael Milken, Pepsi Challenge, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Jobs, uranium enrichment, Yogi Berra

This had been Nintendo’s approach: dazzle the market with much-talked-about hits like Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and as a result, seduce an entire generation into buying the NES. Unfortunately, this approach presented a problem for Katz because Nintendo held an iron grip on software developers. If game designers wanted their game on the NES, then Nintendo had them sign an exclusive agreement with a stringent noncompete clause. So if Nintendo got a game, there was no way that Sega could offer it on their system, and given Nintendo’s monstrous success, why would anyone choose Sega over Nintendo? Katz’s solution was to hitch Sega’s wagon to household names, believing the association between Sega and the likes of Joe Montana and Buster Douglas would bring about a certain level of respect and legitimacy.

The last remaining hope was for a designer in Japan to quickly create a game that would be compatible with Radarscope’s infrastructure (and, when finished, send over processors with that new game to America, where NOA employees could swap out the motherboard and then repaint the arcade cabinets to reflect this new game). This task was given to Shigeru Miyamoto, a floppy-haired first-time game designer who idealistically believed that videogames should be treated with the same respect given to books, movies, and television shows. His efforts to elevate the art form were immediately given a boost when he was informed that Nintendo was close to finalizing a licensing deal with King Features, enabling him to develop his game around the popular cartoon series Popeye the Sailor Man.

“This is not the reaction I was expecting,” Kalinske said, echoing not only Nakayama’s earlier words but also his distinctly disappointed tone. Nakayama thought for a moment. He was a man who chose his words wisely, so it was significant whenever he took an extra moment to do so. “It doesn’t matter what I think. It only matters what will sell.” But over the following days, tempers at Sega of Japan began to flare. The games designers believed they should be in charge of every aspect of Sonic. In normal circumstances, this would likely be the case, but since the character of Sonic had initially been created for the goal of success in the United States, Sega of America believed that they knew best when it came to the tastes and preferences of their audience.


pages: 270 words: 64,235

Effective Programming: More Than Writing Code by Jeff Atwood

AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, cloud computing, endowment effect, fail fast, Firefox, fizzbuzz, Ford Model T, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Chrome, gravity well, Hacker News, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Merlin Mann, Minecraft, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, price anchoring, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, science of happiness, Skype, social software, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

That’s unfortunate, because the healing abilities of the medic class are frequently critical to winning a round. So what did Valve do? They released a giant set of medic-specific achievements to encourage players to choose the Medic class more often. That’s iterative game design based on actual, real-world gameplay data. Using detailed gameplay metrics to refine game design isn’t new; Bungie ran both Halo 2 and 3 through comprehensive usability lab tests. In April, Bungie found a nagging problem with Valhalla, one of Halo 3′s multiplayer levels: Player deaths (represented in dark red on this “heat map” of the level) were skewing toward the base on the left, indicating that forces invading from the right had a slight advantage.

Random discussion is fine for entertainment, but it’s not particularly useful, nor does it tend to generate the kind of artifacts that will be relevant a few years from now like Wikipedia does. So then the problem becomes how do you encourage groups to do what’s best for the world rather than their own specific, selfish needs? When I looked at this problem, I felt I knew the answer. But there wasn’t a word for it in 2008. Now there is: Gamification. Gamification is the use of game design techniques and mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences. […] Gamification works by … taking advantage of humans’ psychological predisposition to engage in gaming. The technique can encourage people to perform chores that they ordinarily consider boring, such as completing surveys, shopping, or reading web sites.

To a programmer, a game is a perfectly natural introduction to real programming problems. I’d posit that any field can use games as an introduction to the subject matter — and as a reinforcement to learning. Games help people work toward a goal It’s something of a revelation to me that solid game design can defeat the Greater Internet F**kwad Theory. Two great examples of this are Counter-Strike and Team Fortress. Both games are more than ten years old, but they’re still actively being played right now, by tens of thousands of people, all anonymous … and playing as cohesive teams! The game’s objectives and rules are all cleverly constructed to make working together the most effective way to win.


pages: 302 words: 73,581

Platform Scale: How an Emerging Business Model Helps Startups Build Large Empires With Minimum Investment by Sangeet Paul Choudary

3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, fake it until you make it, frictionless, game design, gamification, growth hacking, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, Paul Graham, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, search costs, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social software, software as a service, software is eating the world, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, TaskRabbit, the long tail, the payments system, too big to fail, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Wave and Pay

As a set of actions that players take, Flappy Bird is quite similar to Super Mario Bros. One or two simple actions, when repeated, deliver value, as long as they are performed well. That’s the brilliance of game design. A large goal can be broken down into a set of simple actions for users to perform repeatedly. These simple actions enable users to obtain value from the game and progress towards a larger goal. GAME DESIGN AND PLATFORM SCALE The most alluring aspect of game design is the possibility that simple actions could yield important consequences. What if platforms could break complex business and social interactions down into a set of simple actions?

Build Complex Experiences From Simple Actions A good part of my childhood was spent glued to the television playing Super Mario Bros. A generation that never swiped screens spent its childhood wielding joysticks and clicking on handheld controls. Try as she might, my aunt never understood the obsession. “All you do is click that one button all day. What do you get out of it?” That one statement captures the brilliance of game design. A player may have the lofty goal of saving the princess. One may get a kick out of crossing multiple levels and collect points and lives on the way. But the player merely clicks a set of buttons that help the game character jump and stomp the evil turtles and fire cannonballs. More recently, Flappy Bird had the whole world in outrage when its creator pulled the game from the App Store.


pages: 254 words: 76,064

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

You won’t find it on these students’ schedules. Try “Wellness” instead. Neither do teachers organize the curriculum into “units” on, say, rocks and landforms. Instead there are “quests” and “missions” that culminate in a “boss level,” a term well known to any gamer. The goal, school administrators insist, is not to produce a generation of game designers. “We’re teaching twenty-first-century competencies,” says Arana Shapiro, Quest to Learn codirector. That might come as news to Dominic, an eleven-year-old fidgeting his way through a “crit,” an educational ritual normally endured by would-be artists and poets. His peers, the twenty-three other sixth graders enrolled in “Sports for the Mind,” are providing feedback on Dominic’s video game.

Private schools and wealthy districts have begun enthusiastically integrating robotics and programming into their curricula, a dichotomy that will only reinforce the achievement gap that already exists in our nation’s schools. “We could wind up having two school systems—one for the rich and one for the poor,” says James Gee, the linguist, educator, and game designer. The poor one will teach to the tests, adhere to common curricula, and “guarantee you the basics, thus suiting you for a service job.” The rich schools, on the other hand, will emphasize problem solving, innovation, and the skills required to produce new knowledge. “Those kids will make out very well in the global system.”

—Jeff Howe 7 Diversity over Ability In the fall of 2011 the journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology published a paper revealing that after more than a decade of effort, researchers had succeeded in mapping the structure of an enzyme used by retroviruses similar to HIV.1 The achievement was widely viewed as a breakthrough, but there was something else astonishing about the article. Listed among the international group of scientists that had contributed to the discovery was something called the “Foldit Void Crushers Group.” It was the name for a collective of video gamers. Foldit,2 a novel experiment created by a group of scientists and game designers at the University of Washington, had asked the gamers—some still in middle school and few with a background in the sciences, much less microbiology—to determine how proteins would fold in the enzyme. Within hours, thousands of people were competing against (and collaborating with) one another.


pages: 615 words: 168,775

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin

AltaVista, Apple II, Arthur D. Levinson, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, book value, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, Computer Lib, discovery of DNA, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Oklahoma City bombing, packet switching, Project Xanadu, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, union organizing, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, work culture

Warner knew how to create hits and get products to consumers; Warner’s WEA group had just shipped 1.1 million copies of the Eagles’ new Hotel California album in only three days.17 And Warner understood how to work with artists who needed to be coddled and coaxed, a particular draw for Bushnell, who considered Atari’s game designers artists. Ross also told Bushnell and Keenan that they would be happy at Warner. They could stay in California and continue to run Atari. Ross explained that he took a hands-off approach and even offered to sweeten top management’s incentive structure, which already included a rich bonus pool.18 By the time the Atari team flew back to California on another Warner jet—Ross arranged for Clint Eastwood and Eastwood’s partner, Sondra Locke, to join them—Bushnell was convinced that selling Atari to Warner was the best way to get the money to develop the Stella chip.19 None of the other companies Atari had approached about an acquisition had been interested.

Each cartridge sold for roughly $30, with an 89 percent gross margin for Atari, according to Gerard.24 The VCS accounted for almost a quarter-billion dollars’ worth of sales in 1981.25 A few other companies, most prominently Mattel, made cartridge systems to compete with the VCS, but 80 percent of the 4 million video game systems in American homes in 1981 were made by Atari.26 Within Silicon Valley, Atari, which had grown to nearly ten thousand employees and fifty buildings, became a prestigious employer for computer programmers and game designers.27 Saying you wrote games for Atari, one programmer noted, “didn’t get you laid, but it was seen as cool.”28 Programmers had complete control over every aspect of a game, from design and rules to graphics and sound effects. Some programmers started developing the games on paper before typing code into the hexadecimal language the VCS system could understand.

That bonus was on top of salaries starting at about $20,000, a figure that programmer Carla Meninsky recalls felt like an enormous sum when she first applied at Atari, so absurd that she practiced saying “twenty thousand dollars” in front of her bedroom mirror so she could request it with a straight face at her hiring interview.42 Salaries and bonuses for experienced programmers could go much higher. Despite these efforts to encourage game designers’ productivity, the number of cartridges released by Atari dropped by half the year after the Activision founders left.43 Even with the higher pay, many on the engineering side felt that Kassar and the managers he hired did not appreciate their ideas or their work. Kassar gave an interview in which he called the technical minds behind the games “superstars” but also “high-strung prima donnas.”


pages: 222 words: 53,317

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman

algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Apple II, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, Chekhov's gun, citation needed, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, data science, David Brooks, digital map, discovery of the americas, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Flash crash, friendly AI, game design, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Hans Moravec, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, Inbox Zero, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, SimCity, software studies, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, the long tail, Therac-25, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

As mentioned in the introduction, as our technologies become more complicated, and we lose the ability to understand them, our responses tend toward two extremes: fear and awe. Contemplating a fantastically intricate technological system, some of us are overwhelmed by its power and complexity, and respond with fear of the unknown. Others tend toward an almost religious reverence when faced with technology’s beauty and power. The video game designer and writer Ian Bogost has even suggested that replacing the term “algorithm” with the word “God” changes little of what is being said about technology in today’s discourse. But technology, while it suffuses our society, is not the product of a perfect and immaculate process. Technologies are kluges.

One program I built with HyperCard was a rudimentary password generator: it could make a random string you could use as a password, but it also had options to make the random passwords more pronounceable, and hence more memorable over the long term. It was simple, but definitely ahead of its time, in my unstudied opinion. The computer game designer Chaim Gingold calls gateways like HyperCard “magic crayons.” Like the crayon in the children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon that allows the young hero to draw objects that immediately take on reality, magic crayons are tools that, in Gingold’s words, “allow non-programmers to engage the procedural qualities of the digital medium and build dynamic things.”

Haldane, Possible Worlds and Other Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1928), 286. limitations to what we can know: For a further discussion on scientific humility, see Marcelo Gleiser, The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning (New York: Basic Books, 2014). video game designer and writer Ian Bogost: Ian Bogost, “The Cathedral of Computation,” The Atlantic, January 15, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/the-cathedral-of-computation/384300/. a perfect and immaculate process: This is discussed further in Bogost, “Cathedral of Computation.” the “humble programmer”: Edsger Dijkstra, “The Humble Programmer.”


pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

But if suddenly thousands or millions of people start pounding away on your server? In that situation, unoptimized code can be ruinous. That’s what Lance Ivy found out when Kickstarter got popular. In 2012, three years after it was launched, Kickstarter started to get its first “million-dollar” campaigns. Among the first was a campaign by veteran video-game designer Tim Schafer to create Broken Age, his latest title. Schafer initially wanted to raise $400,000, a huge sum for Kickstarter at the time. But Schafer’s fan base rallied around the cause, and within 24 hours they had come close to raising a full $1 million. To capture the excitement of the moment, Schafer’s company streamed footage from their office, showing the staff as they followed the increasing Kickstarter pledges.

But nearly every one also described the daily fight of having to prove themselves over and over again to the wide swathe of industry peers who, tacitly or openly, assumed they didn’t have serious technical chops, that they couldn’t. One coder, Stephanie Hurlburt, was a classically nerdy math-head who’d cut her teeth doing deep work on graphics. “I love C++, the low-level stuff,” she tells me. She’d worked for a series of firms, including Unity (which makes a popular game-design tool), and then for Facebook on its Oculus Rift VR headset, cranking mad hours to release their first demo. Hurlburt was accustomed to shrugging off neg hits. There were many: She’d been told, including by many authority figures she admired, that girls weren’t wired for math. While working as a coder, if she expressed ignorance of nearly any niggling concept in graphics, some male colleagues would pounce.

The social problems that evolved on Twitter’s service turned out to be maddeningly complex. By the early 2010s, it was clear that some Twitter users were adroitly using the service to engage in coordinated harassment campaigns. Again, the best-known example was Gamergate, a harassment campaign in which groups of mostly men hounded female game designers and game critics who’d talked and written about sexism in games, like Anita Sarkeesian. One tactic the harassers used was dogpiling: They’d pick a target and bombard her account with @-replies, sometimes using bots, in such volume that it was virtually impossible for the target to use Twitter.


The Big Score by Michael S. Malone

Apple II, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, creative destruction, Donner party, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, game design, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, lone genius, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, packet switching, plutocrats, RAND corporation, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, The Home Computer Revolution, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yom Kippur War

In the hyperbole of the era, video game designers were called—with a straight face—the poets and painters of their generation, the pioneers of the next cultural wave combining art and technology. To read the literature of that time, one might have thought if Titian or Tintoretto had been alive in the late 1970s they would have abandoned their easels to design Turbo or Frogger. No one seemed to notice that behind the flashing lights these were really three-dimensional board games for children, a three-minute Monopoly without the allegory at a quarter a throw. The reality was that video game designers were really the Walt Disneys and Windsor McKays of their time, clever commercial artists who had brilliantly tailored the technology of the day to the needs of the consumer.

And building a game had become simple, too, ever since the semiconductor industry had come up with a programmable chip (the EPROM) that made it possible to reduce the single-game home box into an expensive cartridge to be used with a universal, single-purchase player box. With this breakthrough, production could be accelerated to as fast as a new game design could be programmed onto a chip. Even that wasn’t fast enough, because the chip makers couldn’t fabricate sufficient EPROMS, and delivery times stretched out to as much as six months. This not only led to the creation of a gray market to fill the demand of desperate domestic and Asian game makers, but it also created a window for new competitive entries, notably in the arcade business, like Bally.

Kids could play an Atari arcade (or “coin-op”) game like Asteroids, then go home and play a $39.95 home cartridge version of the same game. Atari had it all: Tinkers to Evers to Chance, arcade games to home cartridges to the Atari balance sheet. The most important part of a well-turned double play is to be on the ball at the beginning. Here Atari got mixed reviews. Game designers, as Kassar himself once said, had become the nearest equivalent to a rock star. “Hired guns” might be a more accurate description. During the Bushnell era, these individuals were paid huge sums, buried in praise, and their idiosyncrasies pampered and stroked, even when they were at odds with corporate life.


pages: 89 words: 24,277

Designing for Emotion by Aarron Walter

Abraham Maslow, big-box store, cotton gin, en.wikipedia.org, game design, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Skype, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, Wall-E, web application

We create anticipation when we foreshadow a desired event and give the audience ample time to ponder the experience. Parents excite their children at Christmas with “Santa is coming to our house soon!” to conjure fantasies about the magic of the holidays and the wonderful gifts to come. Anticipation is what game designers call an open system. Games designed with an open structure, like The Sims, allow users to wander and shape game play on their own terms. Open systems encourage people to use their imagination to create a personalized experience. Video games that use a closed system, like Super Mario Brothers, narrowly direct game play, forcing the user to move in a specific direction on a defined mission.


pages: 198 words: 59,351

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning by Justin E. H. Smith

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Adrian Hon, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic management, artificial general intelligence, Big Tech, Charles Babbage, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, global pandemic, GPT-3, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kuiper Belt, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meme stock, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, passive income, Potemkin village, printed gun, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, strong AI, technological determinism, theory of mind, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, you are the product

Such reduction of others to a sort of program is the flip side of what we have already identified as “presenting as a brand,” and both are expressions of the more general problem of what we may call “algorithm creep”: the tendency to see an ever broader portion of the world, and even to see ourselves, on the model of the algorithms that run our new technologies. As will be discussed later, in recent decades even certain questions in speculative metaphysics (notably the question whether our world is a “simulation”) have been substantially influenced by the spread of a manner of thinking about reality that is borrowed from the world of video-game design. This habit of thinking extends to everything from fundamental questions about the nature of the external world, to questions about the structure of human society, from electoral politics to interpersonal relations. To “game the attention economy” is to develop a strategy for “winning” attention from others within a system of formal constraints where the “points” are measured out in clicks, likes, favorites, retweets, and so on: the quantified units of attention.

Either way, we are in uncharted territory, far outside the realm of traditional praise and blame, as now the normative evaluation of human action cannot proceed without “running it through the machines,” without reference to the behavior of artificial systems that are themselves insusceptible to praise and blame. This transformation is shaping the way we understand not only interpersonal relationships, but also political movements. According to the video-game designer Adrian Hon, the QAnon conspiracy theory, whose supporters became a vigorous and multitudinous force backing Donald Trump in the later phase of his presidency, might best be understood as an “ARG” or “alternate reality game.”34 Such a game is not played on a console; instead its strategies and prizes are spread across the internet, built into apps, inserted into newspaper advertisements and even into real-world interpersonal relations.

This has led to an absurd predicament for the good-faith actors and a luscious opportunity for the bad-faith ones. As the pseudonymous Twitter user known only as “Alice from Queens” sharply observes, Twitter is the place where “socialists show contempt for hierarchy, meritocracy and neoliberal competition by competing for status in a game designed by a Silicon Valley overlord.”39 Nor is this a situation that could have been fully anticipated by the theory of the “tragedy of the commons,” at least if we understand tragedy in the proper sense of a misfortune that befalls a protagonist as a result of some particular blind spot, like Oedipus, who did not recognize his own mother.


pages: 205 words: 61,903

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

It’s a sensibility that—by virtue of its ubiquity in venture philanthropy—informs even less hubristic efforts at addressing hunger, inequality, and the environment, as if one needs a totalizing, end-to-end, universal solution capable of being summarized in a TED Talk in order to be considered worthy at all. It’s what we now, disparagingly, call technosolutionism. ReGen Villages, for example, is the brainchild of former game designer James Ehrlich, an entrepreneur-in-residence at Stanford and a teacher of “disaster resilience” for Singularity University. ReGen is a total solution for the creation of regenerative and resilient communities that are capable of producing their own organic food, sourcing clean water, and educating their young, all with renewable energy and in a circular economy.

They grow food in domes, live in solar-powered cottages nestled into the earth, eat fresh fruit in open community courtyards, and are surrounded by woods and animals. Or at least they will be, once Ehrlich is able to convince someone to give him the funding so he can break ground. I met up with him near his office at Stanford. He had left game design to study organic food preparation and ended up producing a TV show, The Hippy Gourmet , originally broadcast from Burning Man and eventually syndicated on PBS. That’s how he learned about the challenges facing America’s family farms, and dedicated himself to applying his skills to addressing them.

Feeling blamed for society’s ills , hopelessly unemployed, sexually frustrated, yet armed with laptops and The Mindset’s propensity for remote attacks, this disparate network has always been ready to rumble and came to prominence during Gamergate , a series of highly coordinated online harassments against female game designers and journalists. While these young men may have been inscrutable to the establishment, the leaders of the emergent alt-right saw its members as the foot soldiers in their digital infowar against politics as usual. Steve Bannon, the media executive and political strategist who eventually served as an advisor to Donald Trump, welcomed the new population of discontents.


pages: 606 words: 157,120

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Thus, the only possible conclusion that McGonigal can draw from all of this is that reality ought to be more like games: “What if we decided to use everything we know about game design to fix what’s wrong with reality? What if we started to live our real lives like gamers, lead our real businesses and communities like game designers, and think about solving real-world problems like computer and video game theorists?” Well, replace “game designers and theorists” with “B. F. Skinner,” and the answer to all these what-ifs might be very different. What to make of McGonigal’s project and her “personal mission to see a game developer win a Nobel Peace Prize in the next twenty-five years”?

Some critics of gamification point out that the best video games are not exhausted by their reward systems. Virtual points do not produce experiences “of interest, enlightenment, terror, fascination, hope, or any number of other sensations,” as game theorist Ian Bogost puts it; rather, those are produced by the content of the game and various narrative strategies adopted by game designers. In other words, one doesn’t have to hate games to hate gamification; that process doesn’t, strictly speaking, turn everything into a game—it turns everything into limited (and often completely unimportant) factors that we sometimes associate with games. Canadian media theorist Alan Chorney offers a very useful distinction between the two: “The use of game mechanics does not necessarily make the product a video game.

Likewise, the point about the potentially corrosive impact such schemes have on character holds as well: sometimes we want citizens to do the right thing for the right reason, not just because it’s more fun than playing Angry Birds. Skimming through gamification literature can be both frustrating and instructive, for it shows the rhetorical tricks deployed by game enthusiasts to promote their schemes and the inherent limitations of their mind-set. Take Gamification by Design by game designers Gabe Zichermann and Christopher Cunningham. One has to praise the book—something of a primer on gamification—for being completely transparent about its Skinnerian philosophy: the cover features five playful monkeys, who presumably are on their way to being gamified. Like most gamification literature, this book, from the very outset, blurs any distinction between games and play and posits that both are natural and inevitable.


pages: 254 words: 79,052

Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us Into Temptation by Chris Nodder

4chan, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, drop ship, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, game design, gamification, haute couture, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, late fees, lolcat, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Monty Hall problem, Netflix Prize, Nick Leeson, Occupy movement, Paradox of Choice, pets.com, price anchoring, recommendation engine, Rory Sutherland, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile

September 22, 2009. Retrieved March 2013. Israel National Lottery repeat numbers: Mark Weiss. “Israel lottery draws same numbers as three weeks before.” The Telegraph (telegraph.co.uk). October 18, 2010. Retrieved March 2013. Use a partial reinforcement schedule Game design seen through an operant conditioning lens: John Hopson. “Behavioral Game Design.”Gamasutra (gamasutra.com). April 27, 2001. Retrieved January 2013. Dog photo credit: Chris Nodder. Make it into a game Volkswagen’s Fun Theory promotion: thefuntheory.com. Fold It: Protein folding game online at Fold.it. DigitalKoot: The Finnish National Library DigitalKoot project page at digitalkoot.fi.

To keep people playing during this time, it makes sense to use a variable ratio schedule for some other activity in the game, such as killing enemies, so that they feel there’s always a chance of being rewarded for some minor goal they’re working toward rather than being disheartened by the far-off major goal. Another approach for game designers is to produce events that are negatively reinforcing. In other words, players work to prevent them from happening. An example might be going too long without logging in to Farmville, only to find spoiled crops and rampant animals. To prevent this, players must remember to tend to their farms frequently.


pages: 122 words: 38,022

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, capitalist realism, citizen journalism, crony capitalism, death of newspapers, DIY culture, Donald Trump, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, mass immigration, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, Overton Window, post-industrial society, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, The Wisdom of Crowds, WikiLeaks

Feminist gamers complained that games writer Felicia Day was publicly dismissed as a ‘booth babe’ by a male games journalist. Games designer Patricia Hernandez drew the attention of 4chan, when she called it a ‘cathedral of misogyny’. Encyclopedia Dramatica has a permanent entry for the memes 4chan created inspired by her comment, where she is described as: A fat, wetback ‘game journalist’ with sausage fingers and a chin like Jay Leno who works for Kotaku, a gaming gossip site infamous for allowing game designers to sleep with its columnists for good reviews and publicity. Patricia is a noted lesbian and feminazi who follows in Kotaku’s proud tradition of writing countless articles about how various games either promote rape or literally rape their female players.


pages: 313 words: 84,312

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production by Charles Leadbeater

1960s counterculture, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, c2.com, call centre, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, death of newspapers, Debian, digital divide, digital Maoism, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, folksonomy, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, game design, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, lone genius, M-Pesa, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, new economy, Nicholas Carr, online collectivism, Paradox of Choice, planetary scale, post scarcity, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social web, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

They achieved this without knowing one another and without anyone’s being in charge. There were no bonuses on offer, nor any of the other incentives we assume are needed to get people to work. The participants were highly organised without having much by way of an organisation. The I Love Bees game, designed by Californian company 42 Entertainment, had its roots in flash mobbing, a form of public performance art which had started in New York and San Francisco in 2003. In flash mobs, anything from a handful of people to several thousand, who have organised themselves by word of mouth, over mobile phones and via the Internet, gather in a public place, such as at a railway station or on a street crossing, to undertake an apparently bizarre activity.3 Jane McGonigal, one of 42 Entertainment’s lead designers and a pioneer of flash mobbing, designed I Love Bees to see whether a mob could become a creative force.

In flash mobs, anything from a handful of people to several thousand, who have organised themselves by word of mouth, over mobile phones and via the Internet, gather in a public place, such as at a railway station or on a street crossing, to undertake an apparently bizarre activity.3 Jane McGonigal, one of 42 Entertainment’s lead designers and a pioneer of flash mobbing, designed I Love Bees to see whether a mob could become a creative force. In the four weeks after the advertisements were shown, the game designers fed clues to the players through hundreds of websites, blogs, thousands of emails and more than 40,000 MP3 transmissions. These clues were released to players all over the globe, so a player anywhere could find themselves with an important role. The players had to share their evidence to make sense of it.

The 600,000 players of I Love Bees showed that a mass of independent people, with different information, skills and outlooks, working together in the right way, can discover, analyse, co-ordinate, create and innovate together at scale without much by way of a traditional organisation. Their collaboration was not an anarchic free-for-all; it was organised, but without a division of labour imposed from on high. So if some ingenious west coast games designers can create the conditions in which thousands of people around the world collaborate to solve a trivial puzzle, could we do something similar to defeat bird flu, tackle global warming, keep communities safe, provide support for disaster victims, lend and borrow money, conduct political and policy debates, teach and learn, design and even make physical products?


pages: 304 words: 82,395

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Kenneth Cukier

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Swan, book scanning, book value, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, double entry bookkeeping, Eratosthenes, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, hype cycle, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, obamacare, optical character recognition, PageRank, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, post-materialism, random walk, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systematic bias, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

For example, after the data showed that FishVille players bought a translucent fish at six times the rate of other creatures, Zynga offered more translucent species and profited handsomely. In the game Mafia Wars, the data revealed that players bought more weapons with gold borders and purchased pet tigers that were all white. These are not the sorts of things that a game designer toiling in a studio might have known, but the data spoke. “We are an analytics company masquerading as a gaming company. Everything is run by the numbers,” explained Ken Rudin, then Zynga’s analytics chief, before jumping ship to head analytics at Facebook. Harnessing data is no guarantee of business success but shows what is possible.

See also data anaysis; predictive analytics and big data, [>]–[>] and credit scores, [>] as driven by hypotheses, [>]–[>], [>], [>] and “end of theory,” [>]–[>] of information, [>]–[>], [>] in marine navigation, [>]–[>] of medical records, [>], [>]–[>], [>] non-linear, [>]–[>] proxies in, [>]–[>], [>], [>] of sales data, [>] vs. scientific method, [>]–[>] and subprime mortgage scandal (2009), [>] of text, [>]–[>] in video game design, [>]–[>] Coursera, [>], [>] Craigslist, [>] Crawford, Kate, [>] credit card fraud: big data and, [>]–[>], [>]–[>] Kunze on, [>] credit scores: correlation analysis and, [>] datafication and, [>] credit transactions: analysis of, [>] crime prevention: predictive policing and, [>]–[>] Crosby, Alfred, [>], [>] Cross, Bradford, [>]–[>] “culturomics,” [>]–[>] data.

National Security Agency (NSA): data-gathering by, [>]–[>] U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, [>] value, economic: big data and creation of, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>] of reusing data, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>], [>] Varian, Hal, [>] video game design: correlation analysis in, [>]–[>] Vietnam War: data misused in, [>], [>]–[>] Visa, [>] von Ahn, Luis: invents Captcha & ReCaptcha, [>]–[>] Walmart, [>] analyzes sales data, [>], [>], [>], [>] merchandising innovations by, [>]–[>] War Managers, The (Kinnard), [>] Warden, Pete, [>] Watts, Duncan, [>] Weinberger, David, [>] Wikipedia, [>] Windows Azure Marketplace, [>] World Bank, [>] and open data, [>] Xoom, [>]–[>] Yahoo, [>], [>], [>] YouTube: data processing by, [>] Zeo, [>] ZestFinance, [>]–[>] Zillow, [>] Zuckerberg, Mark, [>], [>] Zynga, [>]–[>] About the Authors VIKTOR MAYER-SCHÖNBERGER is Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University.


pages: 247 words: 81,135

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small by Steve Sammartino

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, helicopter parent, hype cycle, illegal immigration, index fund, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, lifelogging, market design, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe's law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, Rubik’s Cube, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, The Home Computer Revolution, the long tail, too big to fail, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, web application, zero-sum game

Buy mass media. Rinse and repeat. Innovate incrementally using existing infrastructure. But the linear process just doesn’t work anymore. The environment and resulting go-to-market methodology has fragmented into non-linear, unpredictable pieces. We now operate in a world where a smartphone game designed by an independent game manufacturer can end up being a major motion picture with global licensing that can compete with the likes of Disney (think Angry Birds). Or where a crowdfunding campaign can result in enough financial backing for a new wearable computing device — such as the Pebble — to be launched before Apple or Google enter the smartwatch market space.

We’re all still playing the games right now, but like many aspects of commerce, we go deep into the wormhole before we realise it. Gamification not only becomes possible in a connected and social world, it’s inevitable. If I could draw an analogy for gamification, it would be this: Pong is to consoles, what Angry Birds is to gamification. Gamification is all about intersecting behavioural economics and game design methodology for a commercial outcome. When we think about it deeply, it’s not too far removed from commerce in general. What is business other than anthropology with a scoreboard? Gamification is much more about anthropology than it is about technology, but the two elements of anthropology and technology are starting to conspire to create new commercial platforms that, when used well, have the ability to circumvent currency while also creating purchasing power.

Given we are living in a time of true revolution, we need to look outside our own realm, become exploratory and open our minds through the understanding of different fields. To help you do this, I've pulled together a reading and viewing list of work that helped me to see the world better. I've done this because the truth about business is that the patterns within it come from worlds outside it. Books The Art of Game Design: A Book of lenses Jesse Schell Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium Carl Sagan Brand Hijack: Marketing Without Marketing Alex Wipperfurth The Cluetrain Manifesto Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed Ray Kurzweil The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing.


pages: 402 words: 126,835

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

With no managers to turn to for adjudication or support, there is enormous pressure on employees to “fit in” with the prevailing corporate culture. Those who fail to do so are sometimes marginalized or ejected in an “off the island”–style banishment. Several years ago, the company “voted out” more than two dozen top engineers, including inventor Jeri Ellsworth, a legend in game design circles. Ellsworth, who went on to cofound a new venture, described the Valve structure as “pseudoflat” with a hidden layer of authority that she compared to “popular kids in a high school clique.” Since a large portion of employee compensation at the company is based on individual performance as perceived by one’s peers, Ellsworth said most engineers gravitated toward high-profile projects that were both visible and almost certain to succeed.

Finland’s exemplary school system is famous for launching students to the top of international academic assessments. That’s old news. Most of us have heard of the so-called Finland Miracle. But I wondered what role, if any, this and other social investments had played in the country’s transformation into an innovation hub, a nation known for churning out extraordinary numbers of both visionary video game designers and world-class symphony conductors. And I wondered, too, whether this quirky Nordic nation could realistically serve as an incubator of ideas and practices that could be adopted in the United States. My first stop was a visit to Pekka Ylä-Anttila, then head economist at ETLA, the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy.

Passing the business on to employees in a cooperative arrangement is a way to serve their employees, retain their customers, and preserve their legacy. Meanwhile, the cooperative movement has widened and found common cause in some unlikely places, like union halls. At a national gathering of cooperative owners and advocates I met lawyers, video game designers, cabdrivers, a maker of photovoltaic cells, and Rob Witherell, a contract negotiator for United Steelworkers (USW), the nation’s largest industrial labor union. Burly and soft-spoken, Witherell is every inch the union man, but he sees cooperatives as the next big thing. “At the most basic level, labor unions and cooperatives have a lot in common,” he told me.


pages: 561 words: 163,916

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality by Blake J. Harris

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, airport security, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, call centre, Carl Icahn, company town, computer vision, cryptocurrency, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, financial independence, game design, Grace Hopper, hype cycle, illegal immigration, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, sensor fusion, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, unpaid internship, white picket fence

When I began to think about what sort of person might create this virtual utopia, I immediately thought of Richard Garriott, the eccentric video game designer who created all the Ultima games, including Ultima Online. He was known for cosplaying as his video game avatar, Lord British, at press events and conventions. He was also famous for holding elaborate haunted house events at his mansion in Austin, Texas, which was rumored to be filled with hidden rooms and secret passages. His larger-than-life personality also reminded me of the character Willy Wonka, and when I made that connection, an idea suddenly occurred to me: What if Willy Wonka had been a video game designer instead of a candymaker? And what if he held his golden ticket contest inside his greatest video game—a sprawling virtual reality that had replaced the internet?

This was the very first video game Easter egg, and discovering it was one of the most thrilling childhood memories. I wondered, What if my Wonka-esque game designer hid his own Easter egg somewhere inside his virtual universe, and then after his death, he held a posthumous contest to find it? The first person to find the egg would win his fortune, along with ownership of his game company and control of his virtual kingdom. That got me thinking about what sort of tests and challenges my eccentric game designer, James Halliday, would leave behind to find a worthy successor, and another idea occurred to me: all the riddles, puzzles, and clues leading to the hidden Easter egg could be linked to the dead billionaire’s various pop-culture passions—his favorite books, movies, video games, cartoons, and TV shows from his youth.

To some in the VR community, Oculus’ hiring of Malamed was a cause for concern. As summed up by one user on MTBS3D: “I hate to jump to conclusions because I don’t know the guy, but Activision is one of my least favorite companies, and their business strategy . . . [has] made for some really unethical business-over-game-design choices . . . Maybe a little compromise needs to be made to get to big markets with big hardware, but I’m still concerned about the ‘open-sourceness’ spirit going forward.” These sorts of gone-corporate concerns were enhanced when, in an introducing-our-new-VP interview with GIBiz, Malamed talked about competing with console-makers and suggested that the consumer version of Rift might cost more than originally thought.5 As someone who typically operated behind the scenes, Malamed wasn’t used to being in the crosshairs of internet drama.


pages: 199 words: 43,653

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal

Airbnb, AltaVista, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, dark pattern, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, framing effect, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, invention of the telephone, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, lock screen, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Paradox of Choice, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social bookmarking, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, the new new thing, Toyota Production System, Y Combinator

These tendencies of ours lead to a mental process known as rationalization, in which we change our attitudes and beliefs to adapt psychologically. Rationalization helps us give reasons for our behaviors, even when those reasons might have been designed by others. At a 2010 industry conference, Jesse Schell, a renowned game designer and professor at Carnegie Mellon University, articulated the peculiar train of thought some players exhibit online.6 Schell examined Mafia Wars, one of Zynga’s first breakout hits, which, like FarmVille, attracted millions of players. “There’s definitely a lot of psychology here, because if someone had said, ‘Hey, we’re going to make a text-based mafia game that’s going to make over $100 million,’ you’d say, ‘I don’t think you’ll do that.’

As for my own reward, after finishing my verse, I received affirmation from a satisfying “Day Complete!” screen. A check mark appeared near the scripture I had read and another one was placed on my reading plan calendar. Skipping a day would mean breaking the chain of checked days, employing the endowed progress effect (previously discussed in chapter 3)—a tactic also used by video game designers to encourage progression. As habit forming as the Bible App’s reading plans can be, they are not for everyone. In fact, Gruenewald reports most users downloaded the app but never register for an account with YouVersion. Millions choose to not follow any plan, opting instead to use the app as a substitute for their paper Bibles.


pages: 319 words: 89,477

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel Iii, John Seely Brown

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, future of work, game design, George Gilder, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Benioff, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Network effects, old-boy network, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, software as a service, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, TSMC, Yochai Benkler

Beyond the guild, however, is a second, broader social network in which participants from all the guilds come together in a vast and diverse complex of discussion forums, wikis, databases, and instructional videos. Here they share experiences, tell stories, celebrate (and analyze) prodigious achievements within the game, and explore innovative approaches to addressing the challenges at hand. Although a few of these forums are officially sponsored by the game designer, most of them have emerged spontaneously, organized by participants seeking access to more advice and insight regarding the challenges they face in the game. This “knowledge economy” is impressively large: In the United States alone, the official forums hosted by Blizzard Entertainment contain tens of millions of postings in hundreds of forums.

Most gamers monitor their dashboards continually as they embark on quests to raid dungeons, kill monsters, and collect “loot.” The dashboards give players rich, real-time feedback on their performance along a range of dimensions. Though some elements of these dashboards were introduced by the game designer, an entire cottage industry has emerged among participants who specialize in modifying them to suit the needs of different players. The detailed information they capture becomes invaluable during after-action reviews, when guild members gather to reflect on their individual and collective performance and brainstorm about ways to improve.

Players have written scripts for each of these functions using the WoW API. World of Warcraft introduced the dashboard concept and provided some basic functionality right from the start—illustrating the importance of careful planning and design at the inception of such a project. Very quickly, however, the game designers opened this feature up to third parties, allowing the players themselves to develop additional features for other players to adopt and incorporate into their personalized dashboards. This flexibility was a successful element of the game, showing that creation platforms may operate at different levels in the creation space—learning networks, teams, and individuals may all require creation platforms tailored to their specific needs.


pages: 302 words: 90,215

Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do by Jeremy Bailenson

Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, computer vision, deliberate practice, experimental subject, fake news, game design, Google Glasses, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, overview effect, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telepresence, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury

It may take two years, it may take ten, but mass adoption of affordable and powerful VR technology, combined with vigorous investment in content, is going to unleash a torrent of applications that will touch every aspect of our lives. The powerful effects that researchers, doctors, industrial designers, pilots, and many others have known about for decades are about to become tools for artists, game designers, filmmakers, journalists, and eventually regular users, empowered by software to design and create their own custom experiences. At the moment, however, VR is unregulated and poorly understood. Consequently, the most psychologically powerful medium in history is getting an alpha test on-the-fly, not in an academic lab but in living rooms across the globe.

Time, of course, will tell. And it is revealing that the first-person shooter, Raw Data, one of the first hit VR games with over $1 million in sales in its first month, eschewed the gratuitous blood and guts of traditional videogames, choosing instead to pit the gamer against robot enemies. Many game designers, it turns out, quickly realized that there is a big difference in how we feel about performing violent actions on a screen versus performing them in VR. This is even truer when motion tracking technology is involved. Making an avatar commit violent acts by pressing buttons on a controller in a traditional videogame is an entirely different experience from when the same action involves pointing a gun with your hand at a three-dimensional representation of a person and pulling the trigger, or using your hands to strike or stab a virtual opponent in a violent game.

The “SpiderWorld” they had used—which depicted a kitchen filled with potentially unpleasant associations like an oven, a stovetop, and a toaster—was not exactly welcoming to burn patients. Hoffman wondered if he could create a more pleasant experience. He also wanted to turn the experience into a game—imagine how much more involving the treatment would be if it combined game design with the immersive properties of VR. The result of Hoffman’s tinkering was SnowWorld, a simple, sedate VR game set in a world of cool whites and blues. In it, the player/patient gently moves along an arctic canyon floor amidst falling snowflakes, snowmen, penguins, and woolly mammoths. Using a mouse, the patient can aim snowballs at the virtual objects, and defend herself from snowballs lobbed at her.


pages: 360 words: 100,063

Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

centre right, death from overwork, Future Shock, game design, transaction costs

Rig some votes if you have to. All right, I can see you glowering at me, so I will say this. One thing the man is doing right, amazingly, is insisting that his soldiers treat the propaganda canisters as real threats. So far it’s all gridpaper games, and they don’t interface with anything, but still. Solid game design, but I expect that from a Shuos. No, the issue is that they’re miniature history lessons. I think Jedao has miscalculated, though. Take that one video segment with the Liozh prisoners’ ribs cracked open so their lungs could be extracted while they were still alive. This sort of thing is only stiffening resistance on our end.

The next two splinters took her through the eyes like bullets. CHERIS WAS SITTING at a table outside, shuffling and reshuffling her favorite jeng-zai deck. Normally she didn’t lack for opponents – this was Shuos Academy, after all, and there was always someone who didn’t believe a first-year could be as good as she claimed to be – but the yearly game design competition was going on, and everyone was distracted. Someone came up from behind and kissed the top of her head. “Hey, you,” said a familiar tenor: Vestenya Ruo, the first friend she’d made here, and her occasional lover. “Dare I hope that I’ve finally gotten the drop on you?” He came around and took a seat on the bench next to her.

An interesting story. Almost plausible, even. But Vahenz knew how good he was at being plausible. The lights flickered left, flickered right. She didn’t even notice them anymore. “One more angle,” Jedao said, and Vahenz thought he was going to dredge up some bit of history regarding Shuos cadets, or game design, or vengeful commanders, but instead what she got was: “What do you know about geese?” Vahenz blinked. “Unlike certain undead generals,” she said, “I don’t have a whole lot to do with fowl other than eating them.” She knew he had grown up on a farm of some sort, although what this had to do with – “Then you don’t know about goslings.”


pages: 307 words: 101,998

IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives by Chris Stedman

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, context collapse, COVID-19, deepfake, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, game design, gamification, gentrification, Google Earth, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, move fast and break things, off-the-grid, Overton Window, pre–internet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sentiment analysis, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TikTok, urban planning, urban renewal

But to explore both spheres, it’s important to be clear about what constitutes a game. In A Theory of Fun for Game Design, game designer Raph Koster explains that most people who study games agree that a game is a voluntary, rule-based “free activity” outside of “ ‘ordinary’ life.” Within this context, “different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable,” says game designer and video-game theorist Jesper Juul. Sid Meier, creator of the Civilization games, describes a game as “a series of meaningful choices,” and authors Ernest Adams and Andrew Rollings add to the definition, describing a game as “one or more causally linked series of challenges in a simulated environment.”


pages: 204 words: 54,395

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, behavioural economics, call centre, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, deliberate practice, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, functional fixedness, game design, George Akerlof, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, performance metric, profit maximization, profit motive, Results Only Work Environment, scientific management, side project, TED Talk, the built environment, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, zero-sum game

Scientists motivated by this intrinsic desire filed significantly more patents than those whose main motivation was money, even controlling for the amount of effort each group expended. (That is, the extrinsically motivated group worked as long and as hard as their more Type I colleagues. They just accomplished less perhaps because they spent less of their work time in flow.) And then there's Jenova Chen, a young game designer who, in 2006, wrote his MFA thesis on Csikszentmihalyi's theory. Chen believed that video games held the promise to deliver quintessential flow experiences, but that too many games required an almost obsessive level of commitment. Why not, he thought, design a game to bring the flow sensation to more casual gamers?

The paid version, designed for the PlayStation game console, has generated more than 350,000 downloads and collected a shelf full of awards. Chen used the game to launch his own firm, thatgamecompany, built around both flow and flOw, that quickly won a three-game development deal from Sony, something almost unheard of for an unknown start-up run by a couple of twenty-six-year-old California game designers. Green Cargo, thatgamecompany, and the companies employing the patent-cranking scientists typically use two tactics that their less savvy competitors do not. First, they provide employees with what I call Goldilocks tasks challenges that are not too hot and not too cold, neither overly difficult nor overly simple.


pages: 345 words: 105,722

The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling

Apple II, back-to-the-land, Future Shock, game design, ghettoisation, Hacker Conference 1984, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, machine readable, Mitch Kapor, pirate software, plutocrats, radical decentralization, Silicon Valley, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

Some of Illuminati's users, however, were members of the Legion of Doom. And so was one of Steve Jackson's senior employees—the Mentor. The Mentor wrote for Phrack, and also ran an underground board, Phoenix Project—but the Mentor was not a computer professional. The Mentor was the managing editor of Steve Jackson Games and a professional game designer by trade. These LoD members did not use Illuminati to help their HACKING activities. They used it to help their GAME-PLAYING activities—and they were even more dedicated to simulation gaming than they were to hacking. "Illuminati" got its name from a card-game that Steve Jackson himself, the company's founder and sole owner, had invented.

The next cyberpunk game had been the even more successful Shadowrun by FASA Corporation. The mechanics of this game were fine, but the scenario was rendered moronic by sappy fantasy elements like elves, trolls, wizards, and dragons—all highly ideologically-incorrect, according to the hard-edged, high-tech standards of cyberpunk science fiction. Other game designers were champing at the bit. Prominent among them was the Mentor, a gentleman who, like most of his friends in the Legion of Doom, was quite the cyberpunk devotee. Mentor reasoned that the time had come for a REAL cyberpunk gaming-book—one that the princes of computer-mischief in the Legion of Doom could play without laughing themselves sick.

Naturally, he knew far more about computer-intrusion and digital skullduggery than any previously published cyberpunk author. Not only that, but he was good at his work. A vivid imagination, combined with an instinctive feeling for the working of systems and, especially, the loopholes within them, are excellent qualities for a professional game designer. By March 1st, GURPS Cyberpunk was almost complete, ready to print and ship. Steve Jackson expected vigorous sales for this item, which, he hoped, would keep the company financially afloat for several months. GURPS Cyberpunk, like the other GURPS "modules," was not a "game" like a Monopoly set, but a BOOK: a bound paperback book the size of a glossy magazine, with a slick color cover, and pages full of text, illustrations, tables and footnotes.


pages: 250 words: 9,029

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Popular Culture Is Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson

Columbine, complexity theory, corporate governance, delayed gratification, edge city, Flynn Effect, game design, Golden age of television, Marshall McLuhan, pattern recognition, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, sexual politics, SimCity, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, the market place

The game scholar James Paul Gee has observed precisely this phenomenon­ called the " regime of competence" principle-at work i n t h e architectu re of successful video games. " Each level dances around the outer l i mits of the player's abilities," he writes, "seeking at every point to be hard enough to be j ust doable . . . which results i n a feeling of si multaneous plea­ sure and frustration-a sensation as familiar to garners as sore thumbs . " Game designers don't build learning ma­ chines out of charity, of course; they do it because there's an economic reward in creating games that stay close to that border. Make a game too hard, and no one will buy it. Make it too easy, and no one will buy it. Make a game where the 1 78 STEVEN JOHNSON chal lenges evolve alongside yo ur skills, and you ' l l have a shot at success.

Many fasci nating experi ments i n using games as educational 201 202 N O T E S ON F U R T H E R R E A D I N G tools have come out of the Education A rcade conso rtium (educationarcade.org) , whose cofounder Henry Jenkins has been the model of the pop culture public intellectual, mak­ ing a number of crucial defenses of games in the media and in the courtroom. Some of the ideas presented here about the logic of gaming a re explored fro m a game designer's point of view in Rules of Play, a textbook coauthored by the designer Eric Zimmerman . The field of video game theory is sometimes cal led " ludology " ; for further reading about this n a scent critical movement, I recommend the Web sites ludology.org and seriousgames.org. Readers interested in the way gaming culture is transforming busi ness will want to check out two relatively new books: Got Game, by John Beck and Mitchell Wade, and Pat Kane's delightful mani­ festo The Play Ethic.


pages: 518 words: 49,555

Designing Social Interfaces by Christian Crumlish, Erin Malone

A Pattern Language, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, c2.com, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commons-based peer production, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, ghettoisation, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, if you build it, they will come, information security, lolcat, Merlin Mann, Nate Silver, Network effects, Potemkin village, power law, recommendation engine, RFC: Request For Comment, semantic web, SETI@home, Skype, slashdot, social bookmarking, social graph, social software, social web, source of truth, stealth mode startup, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, Yochai Benkler

In Chapter 17, we look at many models of openness and the benefits and consequences of embracing them in your social architecture. In Chapter 18, we look to the frontiers of “social in the enterprise,” mobile application development, generational change (at both ends of the age spectrum), and what we can learn from game design. Sidebar Essays Just as we have approached the collection of patterns as both authors and as curators of information from many sources, we have curated a collection of different voices from around the Internet to share alternative opinions, more in-depth exploration, and thoughts about social user behavior that provide seasoning around the patterns in each chapter.

In Chapter 17, we’ll discuss several approaches to openness that we believe are essential to the effective design and development of social environments online, but for now just keep in mind the question “how could this interface be improved if we made it more open?” while designing your experiences. Learn from Games We’ll talk a little bit later about the fascinating intersection between game design and social design that’s opening up new possibilities for social experiences in game environments and introducing playful elements to social interfaces. An application doesn’t have to literally be a game or be presented as a game to employ many of the same design techniques that make games fun to play.

Areas that traditionally have been ghettoized in traditional web software design are mobile and enterprise. Often forgotten or addressed as an afterthought, these areas provide rich and interesting challenges to creating social experiences. If you want to see the future of interactive interfaces, look to gaming. Game designers have the liberty to experiment and Darwinian competitive pressures. The ideas they come up with and prove out in the market are setting expectations for a large number of people who may eventually become, or may already be, your users. With more and more consoles appearing in homes, families playing together, and games becoming a standard offering on mobile devices, designers need to consider how social intersects with gaming and how that changes the nature of play.


pages: 501 words: 114,888

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

Because of the AI layer, these objects don’t live in one fixed spot. In fact, they’re less like objects and more like another form of life, moving, by their own volition, around the digital world. Say you’re at Microsoft and want to hire a new game designer for a fantasy game. So you design a smart flaming sword that’s built to scrape social media and find individuals who have a passion for fantasy, cryptography, game design, and whatever other skills you need. You find John Smith, a perfect candidate, who happens to be on vacation in the Bahamas. He’s walking down the beach, wearing his smart glasses—which are providing a history of the beach as he strolls along.

Yet the handle glimmers—sixteen numbers wink into existence, then wink out again. But John, because he’s into cryptography, realizes the numbers are actually a puzzle. John solves the puzzle, says the answer aloud, and can now pull the sword from the beach. As he does, the sword turns into a small pink dragon that tells him he’s been selected as a potential game designer for Microsoft and asks if he’s interested in applying for the job. And we can go on like this for a while. Smart objects don’t just bridge the gap between worlds, they gamify the world. If blockchain is a science-fiction technology that’s become science fact, then smart objects seem to invert this process, turning regular reality back into science fiction.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

In today’s exponentially advancing world, in the battle between good and evil, victory will belong to whichever group proves itself most capable of mobilizing the larger crowd. It’s time to start gaming this system in our favor to ensure our technological tools inure to the greatest overall benefit of humanity. Gaming the System Every game designer should make one explicitly world-changing game. Lawyers do pro bono work, why can’t we? JANE MCGONIGAL According to the American game designer and researcher Jane McGonigal, today there are more than half a billion people worldwide playing computer and video games at least an hour a day, with more than 183 million in the United States alone. That works out to three billion hours a week as a planet playing video games.

ALBERT EINSTEIN Increasingly, as we live our lives through avatars—in video games, online worlds, and social networking sites—our online personas are standing in for us in social situations, commercial transactions, and even sexual encounters. They are there representing us online 24/7, compressing time and space, to interact on our behalf with the rest of the world even as we sleep. The renowned game designer Jane McGonigal has noted that “the average young person racks-up 10,000 hours of gaming by the age of 21,” the vast majority of which is in the persona of an avatar or game character. As they do, we witness the rise of Homo virtualis, perhaps the next evolution of Homo sapiens, a species that is pulled away from the constraints of our natural physical world in favor of the immediacy and perceived unlimited potential of the virtual.

Parviz, “Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens,” IEEE Spectrum, Sept. 1, 2009. 81 It is expected: Juniper Research, “Press Release: Over 2.5 Billion Mobile Augmented Reality Apps to Be Installed Per Annum by 2017,” Aug. 29, 2012. 82 Ikea even incorporated AR: Luisa Rollenhagen, “Augmented Reality Catalog Places IKEA Furniture in Your Home,” Mashable, Aug. 6, 2013. 285 A future malicious app: Franziska Roesner, Tadayoshi Kohno, and David Molnar, “Security and Privacy for Augmented Reality Systems,” Communications of the ACM 57, no. 4 (2014): 88–96, doi:​10.​1145/​2580723.​2580730. 83 The renowned game designer: Jane McGonigal, TED Conversation, http://​www.​ted.​com/​conversations/​44/​we_spend_​3_billion_​hours_a_wee.​html; Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (New York: Penguin Books, 2011). 84 “Strategically we want to start building”: Sarah Frier, “Facebook Makes $2 Billion Virtual-Reality Bet with Oculus,” Bloomberg, March 26, 2014. 85 Many genuinely view: “Worlds Without End,” Economist, Dec. 14, 2005. 86 But there is a downside: “A Korean Couple Let a Baby Die While They Played a Video Game,” Newsweek, July 27, 2014; “Korean Couple Let Baby Starve to Death While Caring for Virtual Child,” Telegraph, March 5, 2010. 87 Virtual worlds have their own currencies: “The Economy of Online Gaming Fraud Revealed: 3.4 Million Malware Attacks Every Day,” Kaspersky Lab, Sept. 28, 2010. 88 As strange as it may sound: Carolyn Davis, “Virtual Justice: Online Game World Meets Real-World Cops and Courts,” Philly.​com, Dec. 8, 2010. 89 Even “sexual assaults”: Benjamin Duranske, “ ‘Virtual Rape’ Claim Brings Belgian Police to Second Life,” Virtually Blind, April 24, 2007. 287 These incidents might be: Anna Jane Grossman, “Single, White with Dildo,” Salon, Aug. 30, 2005. 90 A 2008 report: Sara Malm, “U.S.


pages: 266 words: 87,411

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed by Carl Honore

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 13, Atul Gawande, Broken windows theory, call centre, carbon credits, Checklist Manifesto, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, drone strike, Enrique Peñalosa, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, game design, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index card, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, lone genius, medical malpractice, microcredit, Netflix Prize, no-fly zone, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty

Many games now have a strong social component: think of The Sims or all those invitations you receive to water your friends’ gardens in Farmville. The average age in the gaming community is now 30, and more than a quarter are over 50. Nearly half of gamers are female. With four decades of fine-tuning behind them, game designers know all the psychological and neurological buttons to push to keep us fully engaged. In Chore Wars rewards for completing adventures are immediate, and you can always monitor how powerful and skilful your avatar becomes. That might sound trivial, but constant, measurable and incremental progress is precisely what the brain craves.

Remember pedestrians in Bogotá passing instant judgement on motorists by brandishing thumbs-up or thumbs-down cards and how the RAF telephones crew members who report a mistake or a near miss within 24 hours and then keeps them apprised of progress in the case. A leading proponent of the push to harness gaming is Jane McGonigal, a thirty-something game designer based in San Francisco. Her book, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, is a call to arms, a manifesto for how online games can help solve problems in the real world. Organizations ranging from the World Bank to the US Department of Defense to McDonald’s beat a path to her door.


pages: 291 words: 81,703

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Amazon Mechanical Turk, behavioural economics, Black Swan, brain emulation, Brownian motion, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deliberate practice, driverless car, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, full employment, future of work, game design, Higgs boson, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, Loebner Prize, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, P = NP, P vs NP, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, reshoring, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

Of course these games don’t interest everyone, but wouldn’t it be funny if we already had figured out the education problem and simply didn’t know it? If there is anyone today who understands the dynamic potential of games it is Jane McGonigal (game designer and author of Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World). Her dream, entirely reasonable in my view, is to see a games designer nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. For all the successes of games, however, they also point out some limitations of education by computer, at least how we currently practice it. Education into the world of games works remarkably well, but it works mainly for people who wish to learn the games.


pages: 309 words: 79,414

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists by Julia Ebner

23andMe, 4chan, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, game design, gamification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Greta Thunberg, information security, job satisfaction, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, off grid, OpenAI, Overton Window, pattern recognition, pre–internet, QAnon, RAND corporation, ransomware, rising living standards, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, SQL injection, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Transnistria, WikiLeaks, zero day

All members’ successes in conquering the online world will be reflected in their real lives one day, Nikolai Alexander promised them. But first, they need to change the existing power structures. Like many extremist movements, Reconquista Germanica has found a way of gamifying its propaganda, recruitment and mission. Psychological studies show that specific gaming designs such as badges, leaderboards and performance graphs can be powerful tools to maximise customer participation and brand loyalty.15 Over the past decade most corporate brands and media outlets have adopted interactive gaming elements to boost human motivation and performance. Political movements, including extremist and terrorist organisations, have done the same: they increasingly use competitive scoring and reward systems as well as gaming language and imagery.

Available at https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/The-Fringe-Insurgency-221017.pdf. 14Sheila Johnston, ‘The Wave: the experiment that turned a school into a police state’, Telegraph, 5 September 2018. Available at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/3559727/The-Wave-the-experiment-that-turned-a-school-into-a-police-state.html. 15Michael Sailer et al., ‘How gamification motivates: An experimental study of the effects of specific game design elements on psychological need satisfaction’, Computers in Human Behavior, 69, April 2017, pp. 371–80. Available at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074756321630855X. 16Jarret Brachman and Alix Levine, ‘The World of Holy Warcraft: How Al Qaida is using online game theory to recruit the masses’, Foreign Policy, 13 April 2011.


pages: 251 words: 80,831

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, asset light, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, business intelligence, buy and hold, Chris Wanstrath, clean water, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, General Magic , gig economy, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, nuclear winter, PageRank, PalmPilot, Parker Conrad, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, power law, QR code, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the payments system, TikTok, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator

A number of founders graduated from schools you may never have heard of—like Jason Citron, the co-founder and CEO of Discord, a billion-dollar gaming-communication platform, who got his degree at Full Sail University. The little-known school in Water Park, Florida, specializes in media and arts, with courses like audio engineering. Citron, who was already an avid programmer by the time he reached college, enrolled in Full Sail’s game-design program. He took jobs at gaming studios after college and started making iPhone apps, winning awards for his mobile game design. On average, the founders of billion-dollar startups did come from high-ranking schools more often than other founders. The median world ranking of universities that graduated the billion-dollar group was twenty-seven, compared to seventy-four for the group of random startup founders—almost three times as high, suggesting that those who went to high-ranking schools were more likely to create billion-dollar startups.


pages: 259 words: 84,261

Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World by Mo Gawdat

3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, AlphaGo, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, carbon footprint, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, digital map, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, microplastics / micro fibres, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, OpenAI, optical character recognition, out of africa, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

Even our scientists search for wormholes – portals through the very fabric of the universe. They believe these will transport us to galaxies light years away. We just need to find them and, when we do, all of our dreams will become a reality. We gamers, we love cheats. A hidden glitch in the fabric of the game design, one that exposes a hidden weapon crate or a doorway to another level. A passage that leads us to where we want to be without having to go through the tough parts of the game. We love portals. In 2007, a game was launched that was called, simply, Portal. It ticked every box for the geekiest of gamers.

The game world of Portal is a lab referred to in the game as the Aperture Science Enrichment Center. You, the player, are the lab rat. With every new level of the game you enter a new section of the premises. You use your portal gun and your intelligence to find your way through it without getting hurt. To help you do this, the game designers scripted it so that you appear to receive help from an AI. Her name is GLaDOS. GLaDOS is portrayed to be an incredibly advanced AI responsible for running all the experiments in Aperture Laboratories. Very quickly, you start to love GLaDOS as she guides you through the maze. She’s often funny and supportive.


pages: 285 words: 86,853

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

A cathedral is a space for collective belief, a structure that embodies a framework of understandings about the world, some visible and some not. This is a useful metaphor for understanding the relationship we have with algorithms today. Writing in The Atlantic in early 2015, digital culture critic and game designer Ian Bogost called out our increasingly mythological relationship with software in an article titled “The Cathedral of Computation.” Bogost argues that we have fallen into a “computational theocracy” that replaces God with the algorithm: Our supposedly algorithmic culture is not a material phenomenon so much as a devotional one, a supplication made to the computers people have allowed to replace gods in their minds, even as they simultaneously claim that science has made us impervious to religion.8 We have, he argues, adopted a faith-based relationship with the algorithmic culture machines that navigate us through city streets, recommend movies to us, and provide us with answers to search queries.

Players either didn’t realize that this was a satire, or played in spite of that knowledge, like the stay-at-home father who told Tanz, “instead of stupid games that have no point, we might as well play a stupid game that has a point.”13 At its apogee, over 50,000 people were clicking on digital cows and Bogost found himself enmeshed in his own Skinner box of feedback, getting rewarded by the player community when he added new features to the game. Bogost has described this process as a kind of “method design” like method acting, putting himself into the creative space of a social game designer and ultimately suffering the same kind of systemic, dehumanizing entanglement with the software that he sees it inflicting on players: “It’s hard for me to express the compulsion and self-loathing that have accompanied the apparently trivial creation of this little theory-cum-parody game.”14 Figure 4.1 Cow Clicker screenshot.


pages: 336 words: 88,320

Being Geek: The Software Developer's Career Handbook by Michael Lopp

do what you love, finite state, game design, job satisfaction, John Gruber, knowledge worker, reality distortion field, remote working, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sorting algorithm, systems thinking, web application

The thrill, the adrenaline, comes from the discovery, hunt, and eventual mastery of the unknown, which, confusingly, means if you want to keep a geek engaged in a game, you can't let them win, even though that's exactly what they think they want. Think of it like this: does it bug you that there's an absolute high score to Pac-Man? It bugs me. To get around this entertainment-killing paradox in subscription-based games like World of Warcraft, game designers freely change rule sets as part of regular updates. The spin is, "We're improving playability," which translates into, "The geeks are close to figuring it out, and we can't have that, because they'll stop paying." This paradox does not apply to all games. It's hard to argue that there is much more to learn about Tetris, but folks continue to play it incessantly, which leads to the warning.

This is the act of mentally removing ourselves from a troubled planet full of messy people, combined with our ability to find pleasure in the act of completing a small, well-defined task. This is our ability to lose ourselves in repetition, and it is task at which we are highly effective. In the defense of game designers, there are no quests that read, "Go waste 16 hours of your life doing nothing." They are more elegant with their descriptions; they splice all sorts of different tasks together to distract you from the dull inanity of large, laborious tasks. But they know that part of what makes us tick is the micro-pleasure we get from obsessively scratching the task itch in pursuit of the achievement.


pages: 339 words: 88,732

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

It accomplished this with digital sensors including a microphone array (which pinpointed the source of sound better than a single microphone could), a standard video camera, and a depth perception system that both projected and detected infrared light. Several onboard processors and a great deal of proprietary software converted the output of these sensors into information that game designers could use.17 At launch, all of this capability was packed into a four-inch-tall device less than a foot wide that retailed for $149.99. The Kinect sold more than eight million units in the sixty days after its release (more than either the iPhone or iPad) and currently holds the Guinness World Record for the fastest-selling consumer electronics device of all time.18 The initial family of Kinect-specific games let players play darts, exercise, brawl in the streets, and cast spells à la Harry Potter.19 These, however, did not come close to exhausting the system’s possibilities.

In August of 2011 at the SIGGRAPH (short for the Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques) conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, a team of Microsoft employees and academics used Kinect to “SLAM” the door shut on a long-standing challenge in robotics. SIGGRAPH is the largest and most prestigious gathering devoted to research and practice on digital graphics, attended by researchers, game designers, journalists, entrepreneurs, and most others interested in the field. This made it an appropriate place for Microsoft to unveil what the Creators Project website called “The Self-Hack That Could Change Everything.”*20 This was the KinectFusion, a project that used the Kinect to tackle the SLAM problem.


pages: 307 words: 92,165

Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing by Hod Lipson, Melba Kurman

3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, additive manufacturing, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, Free Software Foundation, game design, global supply chain, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lifelogging, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microcredit, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, new economy, off grid, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, TED Talk, the long tail, the market place

Solid modeling software isn’t capable of meeting the demands of this new and largely untapped design space. As 3D printing technologies continue to improve, traditional solid modeling will become out of date, a powerful but somewhat crude design tool. The surface modeling software used by animators and video game designers shares a similar limitation, namely the absence of design data to describe an object’s insides. If you were to design and attempt to 3D print a colorful and elaborately shaped teapot covered with amusing illustrations, the printed teapot might look great on the outside, but would not be functional.

Other researchers are developing computer algorithms that can skillfully stitch together scanned cross sections of a faulty organ into a single 3D computer model. A major challenge continues to be how to best manage the enormous reams of data generated by the medical imaging process. In the larger computing industry, commercial video game designers are making strides capturing surface details and better understanding how to graphically depict the way our bodies move. The medical establishment is making progress in capturing more precise digital details about the insides of our bodies. Academic scientists are building ever-more powerful algorithms to model, predict, and analyze data collected from biological systems.


pages: 487 words: 95,085

JPod by Douglas Coupland

Asperger Syndrome, Drosophila, finite state, G4S, game design, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, neurotypical, pez dispenser, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, sugar pill, tech worker, wage slave, Y2K

Bree was born on April 22, 1980, in Nanaimo, BC, where she was known as Dark Queen of Bondage. Okay, not really, but she knew what she liked at an early age. In 2002 she was discovered by her parents to have not enough concern for her future, so she was shipped to one of 400 videogame design schools in Vancouver, where it turned out she not only had a flair for game design, but was also but a mere gentle puff of a rotating nipple tassel away from four local strip clubs. Bree is awaiting your interest. She has just changed her outfit and is now wearing a fabulous "Bow" bustier by Bali, style #8211, c. 1940s, with a black satin torso. The cups are stunning and have black sheer-illusion lace with the famous "circle stitch" for that sizzling sweater-girl bullet-bra look.

We were bustling about jPod, installing the final few bolts in preparation for its campus christening party. The last-minute pressure made Kaitlin needy. "What if nobody comes?" "Kaitlin, relax. The party will be mobbed." "What if people come but don't like the machine?" "Kaitlin, this is a game design company." "Or what if they want to come, but they don't think they can handle the social pressure of being seen using a hug machine?" Kaitlin has become convinced that everybody in the tech industry is autistic to some degree. It's her new cause. "Relax." As an added bonus, after being held by Agriculture Canada for inspection for umpteen months, Cowboy's shipment of dried cola nut powder arrived from the US.


pages: 301 words: 90,362

The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 90 percent rule, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, game design, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Khan Academy, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TED Talk

Yet because gathering is inherently a collective endeavor, I’ve also interviewed more than one hundred other gatherers to learn their secrets and test my own ideas. My conversations with conference organizers, event planners, circus choreographers, Quaker meeting clerks, camp counselors, funeral directors, DJs, auctioneers, competitive wingsuit flying-formation instructors, rabbis, coaches, choir conductors, performance artists, comedians, game designers, Japanese tea ceremony masters, TV directors, professional photographers, family wealth advisers, and fundraisers have all informed the ideas here. I intentionally draw from a wide variety of gatherings—museums, classrooms, partner meetings, birthday parties, summer camps, and even funerals—to illustrate the creativity that people use regardless of the context, and I hope it inspires you to do the same.

One underground party planner explained it to me like this: “If you are on a picnic blanket, you will hang out around your picnic blanket. It’s not because there’s a fence around it; it’s because your picnic blanket is your mental construct. It’s not about sitting on a blanket versus sitting on the grass; it’s about claiming that mental space and making it yours and comfortable and safe.” A game designer named Eric Zimmerman once told me about an experiment he and his colleagues designed for an exhibition in Los Angeles. The board game they created was surrounded by four curved walls that approximated a circle, so that when you stepped inside to play, it felt as if you were in a cave. Passersby were intrigued and players ended up becoming so addicted to the game that well after day had given way to night, they kept playing.


pages: 625 words: 167,349

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, butterfly effect, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, effective altruism, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Frances Oldham Kelsey, game design, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, Goodhart's law, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hedonic treadmill, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, Internet Archive, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kenneth Arrow, language acquisition, longitudinal study, machine translation, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, multi-armed bandit, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, premature optimization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, sparse data, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, Steve Jobs, strong AI, the map is not the territory, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

They always behaved as they ought.”63 If they weren’t learning something, it was the fault of the experimenter not shaping their task properly. So maybe it’s not a lack of willpower on our part, but rather that—as the bestselling 2011 book by Jane McGonigal put it—Reality Is Broken. McGonigal, a game designer by trade, has spent her career designing games to help people—including herself—overcome challenges in their lives. For her, the incredibly addictive and compelling quality of most games, computer games in particular, is how clear they always make it what you need to do, and how achievable whatever that is always seems.

Jane McGonigal, “Gaming Can Make a Better World,” https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world/. 65. See McGonigal, SuperBetter. 66. Jane McGonigal, “The Game That Can Give You 10 Extra Years of Life,” https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_the_game_that_can_give_you_10_extra_years_of_life/. 67. See, e.g., Deterding et al., “From Game Design Elements to Gamefulness.” 68. See, e.g., Hamari, Koivisto, and Sarsa, “Does Gamification Work?” 69. Falk Lieder, personal interview, April 18, 2018. 70. See Lieder, “Gamify Your Goals,” for a general overview and Lieder et al., “Cognitive Prostheses for Goal Achievement,” for more details. 71.

Complex Systems 1, no. 5 (1987): 877–922. Desmarais, Sarah L., and Jay P. Singh. “Risk Assessment Instruments Validated and Implemented in Correctional Settings in the United States,” Council of State Governments Jusice Center, 2013. Deterding, Sebastian, Dan Dixon, Rilla Khaled, and Lennart Nacke. “From Game Design Elements to Gamefulness: Defining Gamification.” In Proceedings of the 15th International Academic Mindtrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments, 9–15. ACM, 2011. Devlin, Jacob, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, and Kristina Toutanova. “BERT: Pre-Training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding.”


pages: 289 words: 99,936

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age by Virginia Eubanks

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, call centre, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, desegregation, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, game design, global village, index card, informal economy, invisible hand, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, microcredit, new economy, post-industrial society, race to the bottom, rent control, rent stabilization, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social contagion, South of Market, San Francisco, tech worker, telemarketer, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban planning, web application, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

These projects took place at different times and under vastly different circumstances, but I believe they show a progression from Box 6.2 WYMSM Member Profile, Jennifer Rose “Don’t be scared to stand up for what you believe, even though it may have costs.” I’ve always really loved computers, since high school. I didn’t own one until I was in my early twenties, because I couldn’t afford one, but I’ve always been interested. I thought they were the way to go in the world. When the dot-com bubble burst, a lot of that stuff was going away. But then game design was getting big. So I thought to myself, “Maybe I can make something more than these stupid shoot-‘em-up games. Something that might actually make people think.” That’s why I got involved in WYMSM. I had come to the YWCA to escape a domestic violence situation, and when the project was mentioned as being a possible computer game, that sparked the geek side of me.

Because the tapes proved extremely difficult to transcribe—each tape included several speakers, and the conversation was usually intense and lively, with voices overlapping—I transcribed only eight of them, chosen at random to represent each of four periods of five or six months. In addition to these transcripts, I gathered and coded approximately 700 pages of agendas, minutes, notes, flipcharts, game design plans, handouts, promotional materials, and other WYMSM working documents. Appendix A 173 Interviews To supplement data gathered through collective and participatory practices, I undertook twenty-nine semistructured interviews with YWCA residents, staff, and other community members. These interviews provided the opportunity for women in the YWCA community to speak as individuals, with the protection of anonymity (if they chose it), and created a conversational space for in-depth probing of thoughts, ideas, and feelings.


pages: 344 words: 96,020

Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success by Sean Ellis, Morgan Brown

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, DevOps, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, minimum viable product, multi-armed bandit, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, working poor, Y Combinator, young professional

In a number of studies he references, it was discovered that once people take an action, no matter how small, as long as the experience wasn’t onerous, they are more inclined to take any action in the future. The explanation for this, he says, is that they have made a form of psychological commitment by taking the action, and people have a bias for honoring commitments with subsequent, follow-on actions, often regardless of the change in size of request. Game designers shrewdly realized that rather than providing instructions about how to play a game, they had to get people committed; they had to get them to start playing through small, easy steps to get them oriented and rolling. Game developers draw on many other powerful insights from psychology as well.

People who are “in flow” are so engaged that they lose track of time; three hours of working on a painting or on writing an essay or coding an app can feel like much less, and people will look up from their work shocked by the time that’s passed. Anyone who’s ever been told by someone playing a videogame “Just give me ten more minutes!”—then another ten minutes then another ten minutes—knows how easily game players tend to get into flow. Game designers combined this wisdom to craft new user experiences that lead people gently into playing their games, starting with simple challenges that can be mastered quickly, and providing them with rewards for each hurdle cleared, while orienting them to the rules of the game and the environment in the process.


pages: 340 words: 101,675

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction by Adrian Hon

Adrian Hon, air gap, Anthropocene, augmented reality, blockchain, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, defense in depth, discrete time, disinformation, disintermediation, driverless car, drone strike, food desert, game design, gamification, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, impulse control, income inequality, job automation, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, machine translation, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, peak oil, peer-to-peer, phenotype, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, precariat, precautionary principle, prediction markets, rewilding, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, social graph, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, telepresence, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Turing test, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, VTOL, working-age population

Over time, RFL engines were improved to allow for unusual mashups of authors and genres, with Rowling being paired with Shakespeare, and Douglas Adams paired with Ayn Rand. Some combinations worked rather better than others. Engines were also extended to more popular media such as movies (Wes Anderson being used as a test case, due to his formulaic nature) and eventually game designs (Tencent, ditto). Amid the tsunami of new literature and entertainment, many critics feared that RFL would spell the end of creativity. They needn’t have worried—there’s only so much Harry Potter one can stomach. And our hunger for genuinely new voices in storytelling was the one thing that RFL couldn’t sate. 78    THE OBSERVAVI DATABASE Earth, 2049 The structure of DNA.

But just as some pundits are decrying the end of the US economy as we know it, there’s an unspoken question lurking in many minds—so what if most people are unemployed? Does the very concept of employment itself have any useful meaning in our hyper-casualized, fully automated world anymore? “It was a big shock, being fired,” says Ryholt. “Back in the ’90s, everyone would always ask us what we wanted to be when we grew up. An astronaut, a fireman, a games designer, that sort of thing. Just work hard, and you can do anything! If you dream it, it can come true. So, you go to school, go to college, get a degree, get a job, do everything you’re told to.” He leans forward, shaking his head in disbelief. “And when that stops when you’re only forty-six, when I got fired from my news site, I thought it’d be the end of the world.


pages: 427 words: 112,549

Freedom by Daniel Suarez

augmented reality, big-box store, British Empire, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, cloud computing, corporate personhood, digital map, game design, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Naomi Klein, new economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, private military company, RFID, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, speech recognition, Stewart Brand, telemarketer, the scientific method, young professional

How do I justify the freedom of humanity to the Daemon?" She frowned. "That's not visible to me." He rubbed his eyes in frustration. "Why do I have to wander all over hell's half acre to complete this damned quest?" "It's the hero's journey." He narrowed his eyes at her. "Don't forget: Sobol was an online game designer. In the archetype, a hero must wander lost in the wilderness to find the knowledge necessary for his or her quest. Perhaps that's what's happening to you." "And I'm supposed to be the hero." "It's your life. You should be the hero of it. If it's any consolation, I'm the hero of mine, too." "Riley, why did the Thread lead me to you?"

As he looked ahead of him, he could see projected onto reality a view into the Monte Cassino game map through a spiked and studded virtual portcullis. There, standing behind the bars, was an old opponent--Herr Oberstleutnant, Heinrich Boerner, the infamous virtual SS officer in a long trench coat, with an Iron Cross hanging at his throat from the stiff collar of his tunic. He was just a game bot. An electronic figment of the game designer Matthew Sobol's imagination, but even so, the villainous Boerner was deviously clever. While playing Sobol's game, Loki had been virtually killed by this bot more times than he'd care to remember. And now here Boerner stood. As always, Boerner wore a monocle over his right eye and he clenched a long black cigarette filter between his teeth, exhaling volumetric smoke as he nodded in greetings--his voice coming over Loki's earpiece.


pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

This will place the workers of China and Brazil on the same overall trajectory as the rich-world workforce, which is to become service-dominated, split into a skilled core and a precariat, with both layers seeing work partially de-linked from wages. In addition, as the Oxford Martin School suggests, it is the low-skilled service jobs that stand the highest risk of total automation over the next two decades. The global working class is not destined to remain for ever divided into factory drones in China and games designers in the USA. However, the struggle in the workplace is no longer the only, or most important, drama. In many industrial and commercial cities around the world, the networked individual is no longer a sociological curiosity, s/he is the archetype. All the qualities the sociologists of the 1990s observed in the tech workforce – mercuriality, spontaneous networking, multiple selves, weak ties, detachment, apparent subservience concealing violent resentment – have become the defining qualities of being a young, economically active human being.

A crucial goal for the transition process would be to trigger a third managerial revolution: to enthuse managers, trade unions and industrial system designers about the possibilities inherent in a move to networked, modular, non-linear team work. ‘Work cannot become play,’ Marx wrote.11 But the atmosphere in the modern video game design workshop shows that play and work can alternate quite freely and produce results. Among guitars, sofas, pool tables covered in piles of discarded pizza boxes, there is of course still exploitation. But modular, target-driven work, with employees enjoying a high degree of autonomy, can be less alienating, more social, more enjoyable – and deliver better results.


pages: 391 words: 105,382

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

He devotes one of his longest chapters to a report on the proceedings of an industry convention in Las Vegas in 2009, where “matters of narrative, writing, and story were discussed as though by a robot with a PhD in art semiotics from Brown.” Though they often have the feel of homework assignments written by a clever, slightly bored student, the journalistic sections of Bissell’s book are illuminating and at times fascinating. They allow him to explore the challenges that game designers face as they struggle to expand the boundaries of their craft. Video games have become much more sophisticated in recent years—the spectacles they present are often tinged with moral ambiguity—but they continue to be plagued by what Bissell, in describing the Resident Evil series, calls “phenomenal stupidity.”

Because games by definition have to be played, they can never be experienced with the combination of immersion and detachment, the repose, that characterizes the reader of a novel, the viewer of a painting, or the listener to a song or symphony. Whatever their artistic talents and pretensions, game designers may in the end be fated to be toolmakers, creators of marvelous contraptions of intense but only passing interest. As Bissell’s account makes clear, even the very best modern games—those with exquisite animation, smart writing, intriguing characters, and fresh story lines—have not been able to transcend their gameyness.


pages: 371 words: 108,317

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, bank run, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, connected car, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, Freestyle chess, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, placebo effect, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, robo advisor, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, value engineering, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero-sum game

One hundred years ago not a single citizen of China would have told you that they would rather buy a tiny glassy slab that allowed them to talk to faraway friends before they would buy indoor plumbing. But every day peasant farmers in China without plumbing purchase smartphones. Crafty AIs embedded in first-person shooter games have given millions of teenage boys the urge, the need, to become professional game designers—a dream that no boy in Victorian times ever had. In a very real way our inventions assign us our jobs. Each successful bit of automation generates new occupations—occupations we would not have fantasized about without the prompting of the automation. To reiterate, the bulk of new tasks created by automation are tasks only other automation can handle.

When the balance between an ordained narrative and freewill interaction is tweaked just right, it creates the perception of great “game play”—a sweet feeling of being part of something large that is moving forward (the game’s narrative) while you still get to steer (the game’s play). The games’ designers tweak the balance, but the invisible force that nudges players in certain directions is an artificial intelligence. Most of the action in open-ended games like Red Dead Redemption, especially the interactions of supporting characters, is already animated by AI. When you halt at a random homestead and chat with the cowhand, his responses are plausible because in his heart beats an AI.


pages: 390 words: 109,519

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, borderless world, Burning Man, complexity theory, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, deep learning, do what you love, Donald Trump, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, eternal september, fake news, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, game design, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jean Tirole, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral panic, multi-sided market, Netflix Prize, Network effects, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two-sided market, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Apple was roundly criticized for censoring news publications and fashion magazines: apps for the Sun in the United Kingdom and Stern in Germany were both briefly removed until nude images published in their print versions had been excised.33 The comics community cried “censorship” when Apple rejected app versions of the graphic novels Murderdrome, Zesty, and Sex Criminals.34 Other decisions were seen as prudish, as when Apple asked developers of a comics version of James Joyce’s Ulysses to remove a single panel that included exposed breasts, or when a comic version of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest was fitted with a black bars across images of men kissing, or when the Ninjawords dictionary app was approved only after developers removed entries for common profanities, or the Eucalyptus e-book reader was removed for including the Kama Sutra.35 More recently, Apple has rejected several “serious games” apps, games designed to draw critical attention to some political issue: Smuggle Truck dealt with the hazards of illegally crossing the Mexico-U.S. border; Joyful Executions criticized the North Korean dictatorship; Ferguson Firsthand offered a virtual reality walkthrough of the protests in the Missouri city; Sweatshop HD highlighted exploitative labor conditions in a factory.36 Apple also rejected Endgame: Syria, a battle game designed to highlight the ongoing Syrian civil war.37 Designed by the founder of Game the News, Endgame: Syria was rejected for violating a different part of Apple’s review guidelines, a fascinating restriction that, as far as I can tell, has no corollary in traditional media or in other digital environments thus far.


Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World by Matt Alt

4chan, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, game design, glass ceiling, global pandemic, haute cuisine, hive mind, late capitalism, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, period drama, Ponzi scheme, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, union organizing, work culture , zero-sum game

After delivering the critical storyboards months late, he found many of his original ideas second-guessed by staff who had been forced to make creative decisions without him. Tezuka’s pride may have been wounded, but the result was a hit. Released in 1960, Journey to the West opened to raves among Japanese kids. One of its fans was a seven-year-old named Shigeru Miyamoto who, as a video game designer decades later, would use an ox that appears in the film as the inspiration for Bowser, the final boss of Super Mario Bros. An Americanized edition of the movie fared far less well. Heavily rewritten and sanitized of virtually all its Asian references, Alakazam the Great flopped so terrifically among Western audiences that it earned an entry in a 1978 bestseller called The Fifty Worst Films of All Time (And How They Got That Way).

While in Japan games remained limited to arcades and coffee shops, abroad they began to proliferate in supermarkets, convenience stores, even unexpected locations like dentists’ offices and funeral parlors; it seemed few spots save for places of worship could resist the siren song of Space Invaders and Pac-Man machines. Simple yet instantly recognizable, the Invaders proved the first superstar characters of the video game era. Just a decade after Pong’s debut in that smoky California tavern, game designers from Japan were giving the Americans a serious run for their money and mindshare. * * * — “WE JUST GOT back from Paris and everyone’s wearing them,” enthused Andy Warhol in 1981. The response was in answer to a question about his strange headgear: a pair of tiny Sony headphones connected to a TPS-L2 Walkman on his hip.


pages: 420 words: 119,928

The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth's Past) by Cixin Liu

Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, cosmic microwave background, Deng Xiaoping, game design, Henri Poincaré, horn antenna, information security, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Norbert Wiener, Panamax, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Von Neumann architecture

The answer was that the photograph’s information content—its entropy—exceeded the painting’s by one or two orders of magnitude. Three Body was the same. Its enormous information content was hidden deep. Wang could feel it, but he could not articulate it. He suddenly understood that the makers of Three Body took the exact opposite of the approach taken by designers of other games. Normally, game designers tried to display as much information as possible to increase the sense of realism. But Three Body’s designers worked to compress the information content to disguise a more complex reality, just like that seemingly empty photograph of the sky. Wang let his mind wander back to the world of Three Body.

The layers surrounding it, by contrast, appeared insubstantial, wispy, gaseous. The fact that he could see through the outside layers to the core indicated that those layers were transparent or translucent, and the light from those layers was likely just scattered light from the core. The details in the image of the sun stunned Wang. He was once again assured that the game designers had hidden a vast amount of data within the superficially simple images, just waiting to be revealed by players. As Wang pondered the meaning of the sun’s structure, he became excited. Because time in the game was now passing quickly, the sun was already in the west. Wang stood, adjusted the telescope to aim at the sun again, and tracked it until it dipped below the horizon.


pages: 412 words: 116,685

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple Newton, augmented reality, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, game design, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, hype cycle, intermodal, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, non-fungible token, open economy, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Planet Labs, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, satellite internet, self-driving car, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, Y2K

Ultimately, the number of transactions that were occurring inside this hub made the CCP Games’ servers start to buckle, leading the publisher to alter the EVE Online universe so that the destination would be less convenient to visit. The lessons from “the Yulai Problem” doubtlessly helped CCP Games design, expand, and overhaul its maps in the years that followed. However, it doesn’t help the publisher avoid another outcome: the sudden outbreak of battles so strategically important that thousands of users suddenly converge to save their faction or defeat another. In January 2021, the largest battle in EVE’s history occurred.

A teacher in 2022 cannot, by most measures, teach more students than they could decades ago without adversely affecting the quality of their education. In addition, we have not found ways to teach for less time, either (that is, to teach faster). However, teaching salaries must compete with the salaries offered to someone who might otherwise become an accountant (or software engineer, or game designer), and must rise with the rising cost of living as a result of a growing economy. And beyond teacher time, education remains incredibly resource-intensive in terms of physical resources, from the size of the school, the quality of its facilities, and the quality of supplies. In fact, costs associated with these resources have partly increased due to new, more expensive technologies (for example, high-definition cameras and projectors, iPads, and so on).


pages: 480 words: 123,979

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

Today, one of the biggest problems for virtual reality is that the immediately obvious customer base willing to spend money is gamers, and gaming culture has been going through misogynist convulsions. This phenomenon is known as Gamergate. Complaints about how women are portrayed in games are drowned out by blithering barrages of hate speech. When a feminist game design is promoted, the response is bomb threats and personal harassment. Women who dare to participate in gaming culture take real risks, unless they can adopt a persona that puts men first. Gamergate has left a trail of ruined lives. And yet, needless to say, the perpetrators feel they are the victims.

ethical filtering eugenics Evergreen College everything dreams of previous, drugs as evolution Exorcist, The (film) experiences, as allegories experimental music experimental programming language eye contact Eyematic EyePhone EyePhone HRX eyes face blindness (prosopagnosia) Facebook facial expression facial recognition facial tracking Fairness Doctrine Fakespace Fantastic magazine FBI “Feelies” Feiner, Steve feminist game designs Fermi Paradox Feynman, Richard field of view figure eight sensorimotor loop financial incentives Finite and Infinite Games (Carse) Fisher, Scott fitness bands flight simulators floating holograms flute flying saucers force feedback Ford Motors forgeries form factor Forster, E.M.


pages: 468 words: 124,573

How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the Secrets of the Most Successful Entrepreneurs of Our Time by George Berkowski

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business intelligence, call centre, crowdsourcing, deal flow, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, Paul Graham, QR code, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, ubercab, Y Combinator

At the centre of it is this idea of small – if you think around the console industry, or even if you look at newer platforms like Facebook, what happens is that somebody comes in, and they have this small and very passionate team, and they make a great game, and consumers pick it up.’6 Paananen explains, ‘We don’t have dedicated game designers as such – it’s the team that is going to build the game, and they are all responsible for the end-user experience.’ Supercell’s outrageous success is evidence that this approach can drive huge success. ‘People really step up and take more responsibilities,’ adds Paananen. ‘It’s a lot more motivating to do that, and a lot more passion gets thrown into the product.’

The CEO needs to ensure these are in place, to ensure there is a real purpose for the company, which is a mechanism to both inspire and organise employees. Leading gaming company Rovio has a mobile-centric mission statement: ‘We provide unique and novel stories with innovative game-play to satisfy the growing demand of games designed for mobile.’6 Vision and mission statements evolve over the lifetime of a company, so don’t worry if you don’t settle on one immediately. They should come organically; they need to feel right. Google didn’t flesh out its mission statement until the company was about three years old. But when that mission was crystallised it really injected a meaning and purpose into the company, and allowed it to expand into so many new and fantastic areas, all which really do seem to make sense.


pages: 781 words: 226,928

Commodore: A Company on the Edge by Brian Bagnall

Apple II, belly landing, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computer Lib, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Firefox, Ford Model T, game design, Gary Kildall, Great Leap Forward, index card, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Ken Thompson, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, packet switching, pink-collar, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, vertical integration

At the time, most of the electronics resided in the game cartridge. “They looked like game cartridges that you plugged into the game [module], but in fact the game module itself was just a power supply and an R/F modulator. The game cartridges weren’t software; they were whole custom chips to play that particular game.” Charpentier found the game design inefficient. “Al basically thought that was a pretty crazy way to do that,” recalls Yannes. “Why not have a microprocessor and a video chip in the box, and the cartridge could just be software, which is where Atari ended up.” After the MOS Technology acquisition, Charpentier worked for Tramiel.

Engineer Bob Yannes witnessed the dawn of the personal computer while working in a computer store. “The big breakthrough, which came with the PET and the TRS-80 (and to some extent the Apple II, although I won’t give them as much credit as they want), was the fully assembled computer.” Chris Crawford, an early game designer and PET owner, summarizes the 1977 Trinity. “A lot of people don’t realize that the Apple got off to a slow start. In the early days, the horse race was between the PET and the TRS-80,” he says. “The Apple was nowhere to be seen. It was too expensive to sell.” By the end of 1977, Apple had sales of $775,000 for the fiscal year, which included sales of the Apple I.

Finkel wanted to create the most accurate duplication of the arcade game as possible. “We tried a couple of times to get the source code but they said it was written in a proprietary programming language and that it wouldn’t help us anyway,” he recalls. Eventually the programmers got in contact with the Bally-Midway game designers. “It turns out the proprietary programming language was pretty much Forth. It was a Forth variant with assembler extensions.” Without access to the source code, it was difficult for the programmers to determine exactly how the game was supposed to play. “We did those games based on playing them for hours and hours and hours.


pages: 170 words: 45,121

Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug

collective bargaining, game design, Garrett Hardin, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Tragedy of the Commons

My son, Harry, now finishing his degree at RPI, whose company I treasure more than he knows. I exhaust his patience regularly by asking him to explain to me just one more time the difference between a meme and a trope. If anyone has a job opening for a Cognitive Science major with a minor in Game Design, I’ll be happy to pass it on. And finally, Melanie, who has only one known failing: an inherited lack of superstition that leads her to say things like “Well, I haven’t had a cold all Winter.” Apart from that, I am, as I say so often, among the most fortunate of husbands. If you’d like your life to be good, marry well.


pages: 509 words: 132,327

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, connected car, domain-specific language, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Extropian, full employment, game design, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kubernetes, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snow Crash, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, The Hackers Conference, Timothy McVeigh, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

“They depended on the viewer’s imagination to fill the gaps, which is exactly what happens when you read a book.”94 The Habitat engineers had the same approach: the game depended on the player’s imagination to fill the gaps. Habitat was meant to represent the real world—at least to a degree. The game designers liberally added childhood memories of games of make-believe, “a dash of silliness, a touch of cyberpunk,” and of course, their remarkable technical skills in what was then called “object-oriented programming.” The objects were the furniture of the Habitat world: houses, trees, gardens, mailboxes, books, doors, compasses, but also more controversial objects like clubs, knives, and guns.

For each new player joining Habitat, an avatar was created, or “hatched,” and a starting amount of 2,000T was placed in the player’s personal account. Each day the player logged in to the game, the money grew by 100T. The game was inspired by science fiction, “notably Vernor Vinge’s novel, True Names,” the game designers explained.95 ATMs, which in Habitat stood for “automatic token machines,” gave avatars access to their money. One token was a twenty-three-sided plastic coin, slightly larger than a US quarter. Remarkably, the game coins had a portrait of Vinge on their face, adorned with the motto “Fiat Lucre” and the line “Good for one fare” on the back.


pages: 567 words: 122,311

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster by Alistair Croll, Benjamin Yoskovitz

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, constrained optimization, data science, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, frictionless market, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, Network effects, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, platform as a service, power law, price elasticity of demand, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social software, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, web application, Y Combinator

There’s also a way to watch ads that pays gold coins. The company spends considerable time striking a balance between making it enjoyable for casual players (who don’t want to pay) while still making a purchase attractive (so players pay a small amount). This is where the science of economics meets the psychology of game design. The company cares about the following key metrics: Downloads How many people have downloaded the application, as well as related metrics such as app store placement, and ratings. Customer acquisition cost (CAC) How much it costs to get a user and to get a paying customer. Launch rate The percentage of people who download the app, actually launch it, and create an account.

The company needs to increase download volumes, increase the engagement rate, maximize ARPU, minimize churn, and improve virality so customer acquisition costs go down. There’s a natural tension between these goals—for example, making the game more enjoyable so people don’t churn versus extracting money so ARPU is high—and this is where the art and finesse of game design comes in. Percentage of Users Who Pay There are some players who simply won’t spend money in a game. And there are others (often referred to as “whales”) who will spend literally thousands of dollars to gain the upper hand in a game they love. Knowing the difference between the two—and finding ways to make more users purchase things within the application—is the key to a successfully monetized free mobile application.


pages: 437 words: 132,041

Alex's Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos

Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, beat the dealer, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital rights, Edward Thorp, family office, forensic accounting, game design, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, lateral thinking, Myron Scholes, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Pierre-Simon Laplace, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, random walk, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, SETI@home, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traveling salesman, two and twenty

This introduced the classic melon and cherry symbols and is why slots are known in the UK as fruit machines. The Liberty Bell had a payback average of 75 percent, but these days slots are more generous than they used to be. ‘The rule of thumb is, if it’s a dollar denomination [machine], most people would put [the payback percentage] at 95 percent,’ said Anthony Baerlocher, the director of game design at International Game Technology (IGT), a slot-machine company that accounts for 60 percent of the world’s million or so active machines, referring to slots where the bets are made in dollars. ‘If it’s a nickel it’s more like 90 percent, 92 percent for a quarter, and if they do pennies it might go down to 88 percent.’

Game A is what is called a low-volatility game, while Game B is high-volatility – you hit a winning combination less often, but the chances of a big win are greater. The higher the volatility, the more short-term risk there is for the slot operator. Some gamblers prefer low-volatility slots, while others prefer high. The game designer’s chief role is to make sure the machine pays out just enough for the gambler to want to continue playing – because the more someone plays, on average, the more he or she will lose. High volatility generates more excitement – especially in a casino, where machines hitting jackpots draw attention by erupting in spine-tingling son et lumière.


pages: 486 words: 132,784

Inventors at Work: The Minds and Motivation Behind Modern Inventions by Brett Stern

Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Build a better mousetrap, business process, cloud computing, computer vision, cyber-physical system, distributed generation, driverless car, game design, Grace Hopper, human-factors engineering, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart transportation, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the market place, value engineering, Yogi Berra

Stern: During the process of doing all this work, were there other inventions or inventors in the toy biz that you admired? Guyer: Well, I admired the success that a group out of Chicago—oh I forget his name. He was a very unusual man, but I admired his team’s products. You know, there are so many really creative toy-and-game designers. I really haven’t spent a lot of time getting to know a lot of the other toy-and-game designers. Mainly because I don’t consider myself only a toy-and-game inventor. I do other things. Stern: What other fields are you working in now? Guyer: We have an education company by the name of Winsor Learning that is one of the leading companies for remediating children who are behind in their reading skills.


AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, active measures, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital map, digital rights, digital twin, Elon Musk, fake news, fault tolerance, future of work, Future Shock, game design, general purpose technology, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, language acquisition, low earth orbit, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, mirror neurons, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, OpenAI, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, smart transportation, Snapchat, social distancing, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, trolley problem, Turing test, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

Sipping the coffee and nibbling a cookie, she finally relaxed. “Well, I want to hear about your feedback on this—immersive game.” Aiko set down her cup and took a deep breath, her face thoughtful. “I’ve never experienced anything quite like it. Even though my brain knew it was fake, the details of the game design—the way the AI ghost spoke, gestured, and interacted with me—were enough to suspend my disbelief. Gradually, as I allowed myself to immerse fully in the game, my doubts went out the window.” “You sure speak highly of the game. I’m pleased to hear it.” “I have one question, though: Did AI create everything?”

As the AI got to know Viktor during his stay on the island, he was given opportunities to build a relationship with Akilah. He was also put in situations that could satisfy his innate desire for adventure and offer boosts of self-esteem. He was offered the chance to seek self-actualization by using his game-designing skills to improve the Isle of Happiness. Viktor’s goals were uniquely his, and AI tailored opportunities for him by understanding him and those goals. Whereas Viktor sought adventure, another person might have preferred just the opposite—serenity, for example—and for that AI would propose completely different experiences.


pages: 175 words: 52,122

Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune by Kristin Ross

game design, informal economy, intentional community, plutocrats, Suez canal 1869, the built environment

The way people live now—working part-time, studying and working at the same time, straddling those two worlds or the gap between the work they were trained to do and the work they find themselves doing in order to get by, or negotiating the huge distances they must commute or migrate across in order to find work—all this suggests to me, and to others as well, that the world of the Communards is in fact much closer to us than is the world of our parents. It seems utterly reasonable to me that younger people today, put off by a career trajectory in video-game design, hedge-fund management, or smart-phone bureaucracy, trying to carve out spaces and ways to live on the edges of various informal economies, testing the possibilities and limitations of living differently now within a thriving—if crisis-ridden—global capitalist economy, might well find interesting the debates that took place among Communard refugees and fellow travelers in the Juras in the 1870s that led to the theorizing of something called “anarchist communism”—debates, that is, about decentralized communities, how they might come into being and flourish, and the way they might become “federated” with each other in relations of solidarity.


pages: 915 words: 232,883

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, fixed income, game design, General Magic , Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, profit maximization, publish or perish, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Home Computer Revolution, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

—Apple’s “Think Different” commercial, 1997 CONTENTS Characters Introduction: How This Book Came to Be CHAPTER ONE Childhood: Abandoned and Chosen CHAPTER TWO Odd Couple: The Two Steves CHAPTER THREE The Dropout: Turn On, Tune In . . . CHAPTER FOUR Atari and India: Zen and the Art of Game Design CHAPTER FIVE The Apple I: Turn On, Boot Up, Jack In . . . CHAPTER SIX The Apple II: Dawn of a New Age CHAPTER SEVEN Chrisann and Lisa: He Who Is Abandoned . . . CHAPTER EIGHT Xerox and Lisa: Graphical User Interfaces CHAPTER NINE Going Public: A Man of Wealth and Fame CHAPTER TEN The Mac Is Born: You Say You Want a Revolution CHAPTER ELEVEN The Reality Distortion Field: Playing by His Own Set of Rules CHAPTER TWELVE The Design: Real Artists Simplify CHAPTER THIRTEEN Building the Mac: The Journey Is the Reward CHAPTER FOURTEEN Enter Sculley: The Pepsi Challenge CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Launch: A Dent in the Universe CHAPTER SIXTEEN Gates and Jobs: When Orbits Intersect CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Icarus: What Goes Up . . .

LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.” CHAPTER FOUR ATARI AND INDIA Zen and the Art of Game Design Atari In February 1974, after eighteen months of hanging around Reed, Jobs decided to move back to his parents’ home in Los Altos and look for a job. It was not a difficult search. At peak times during the 1970s, the classified section of the San Jose Mercury carried up to sixty pages of technology help-wanted ads.

Daniel Kottke and Jobs with the Apple I at the Atlantic City computer fair, 1976 Machines of Loving Grace In San Francisco and the Santa Clara Valley during the late 1960s, various cultural currents flowed together. There was the technology revolution that began with the growth of military contractors and soon included electronics firms, microchip makers, video game designers, and computer companies. There was a hacker subculture—filled with wireheads, phreakers, cyberpunks, hobbyists, and just plain geeks—that included engineers who didn’t conform to the HP mold and their kids who weren’t attuned to the wavelengths of the subdivisions. There were quasi-academic groups doing studies on the effects of LSD; participants included Doug Engelbart of the Augmentation Research Center in Palo Alto, who later helped develop the computer mouse and graphical user interfaces, and Ken Kesey, who celebrated the drug with music-and-light shows featuring a house band that became the Grateful Dead.


pages: 171 words: 54,334

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia by Becky Hogge, Damien Morris, Christopher Scally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, disintermediation, DIY culture, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, mass immigration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

Bequeathed to the Quakers by the daughter of its original owner, the first Admiral of the Royal Canadian Navy, Grindstone Island became an experimental centre of non-violent civilian defence against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. In 1965, it had been the setting for the disastrous “Grindstone experiment”, a role-playing game designed to test theories of non-violent resistance that in the end only served to highlight their inefficacy: the entire exercise was curtailed two days early after half the non-violent party were “killed” by a staged invading force. It was the mid-eighties by the time a young Cory arrived at Grindstone Island, and it was there that Cory’s techno-Utopianism was to crystallise.


pages: 170 words: 51,205

Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age by Cory Doctorow, Amanda Palmer, Neil Gaiman

Airbnb, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Brewster Kahle, cloud computing, Dean Kamen, Edward Snowden, game design, general purpose technology, Internet Archive, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, MITM: man-in-the-middle, optical character recognition, plutocrats, pre–internet, profit maximization, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Streisand effect, technological determinism, transfer pricing, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy

Creators, investors, intermediaries, and audiences When we’re talking about copyright, we’re fundamentally talking about four different activities: making creative works, investing in creative works, distributing and selling creative works, and enjoying creative works. As a shorthand, I’ll be using “creator” to describe people who make creative works—painters, photographers, game designers, novelists, poets, musicians, songwriters, choreographers, dancers, and many other sorts of people. I’ll use “investor” to describe someone who puts capital—cash—into the production and refinement of that work: think of a publisher, a record label, a studio. I’ll use “intermediary” to describe those entities that handle the work between creation, investment, and delivery: a distributor, a website like YouTube, a retailer, an e-commerce site like Amazon, a cinema owner, a cable operator, a TV station or network.


pages: 223 words: 52,808

Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing) by Douglas R. Dechow

3D printing, Apple II, Bill Duvall, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, game design, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, semantic web, Silicon Valley, software studies, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

One of the reasons for this I think, as some game critics have said, is that it’s partly because when you’re looking at ways to interact with a virtual world, destruction is one of the first and most obvious ways to have an effect on the world. It’s kind of a 2 year old’s way of dealing with the world: poke at things and see if they break! A big check-box for game designers was “can we add more destructibility to the environment.” Thankfully, we’re now starting to move beyond that and explore other things that games can do. Finally, one of my great passions is the intertwingularity of popular culture. I’m very interested in what is usually referred to as “fan fiction.”


pages: 196 words: 54,339

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

A simple search for “a pizzeria near me” may list all the restaurants that have paid to be found, but not those that haven’t. Persuasive designs offer users options at every juncture, in order to simulate the experience of choice without the risk of the user exercising true autonomy and wandering off the reservation. It’s the same way game designers lead all players through the same game story, even though we feel like we’re making independent choices from beginning to end. None of these choices are real, because every one leads inevitably to the outcome that the designers have predetermined for us. Because the interfaces look neutral, we accept the options they offer at face value.


pages: 173 words: 52,725

How to Be Right: In a World Gone Wrong by James O'Brien

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, clockwatching, collective bargaining, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, fake news, game design, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, plutocrats, post-industrial society, QAnon, ride hailing / ride sharing, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, young professional

In short, the revenues raised by a brace of fixed-odds betting terminals in each shop is invariably enough to pay staff and rent while leaving a tidy profit for the bookmaker’s shareholders. They work so ‘well’ because they use some of the starkest teachings of behaviourist psychology. The ‘fixed odds’ element of the equation sees the punter make regular small wins as he plays, in pretty much the perfect proportion to ensure that he keeps playing. Next, the games’ designers ensure that the gap between wins never becomes big enough to sate his hunger for the next payout. And finally, with the psychological trap so perfectly set, you allow him to stake as much as £100 every twenty seconds. This combination of frequent wins, massive stakes and incredibly quick gameplay mean that these machines are designed to maximise the amount of time that people play for.


Lonely Planet Pocket San Francisco by Lonely Planet, Alison Bing

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Day of the Dead, edge city, G4S, game design, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Larry Ellison, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, off-the-grid, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, stealth mode startup, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, Zipcar

Transamerica Pyramid & Sentinel Building RUDY SULGAN/CORBIS © Best For Kids San Francisco has the least kids per capita of any US city, and according to SFSPCA data, about 19,000 more dogs than children live here. Yet many locals make a living entertaining kids – from Pixar animators to video-game designers – and this town is packed with attractions for youngsters. Junior Foodies When spirits and feet begin to drag, there’s plenty of ice cream and kid-friendly meals to pick them back up – look for the symbol throughout this book. Major Thrills Exploratorium (Click here ) Mind-bending technology and hands-on weird science exhibits that won a MacArthur genius grant.


pages: 562 words: 146,544

Daemon by Daniel Suarez

Berlin Wall, Burning Man, call centre, digital map, disruptive innovation, double helix, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, high net worth, invisible hand, McMansion, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, RFID, satellite internet, SQL injection, Stewart Brand, tech worker, telemarketer, web application

He knew there was no hope of containing the Daemon now. And guns were useless against it. Chapter 13:// Demo BBC.co.uk Dead Computer Genius Slays Police, Federal Agents— Thousand Oaks, CA—Authorities have surrounded a walled estate owned by the late Matthew Sobol, a leading computer game designer who died earlier this week of brain cancer. Six law officers were killed and nineteen others injured serving a search warrant at the property. They were reportedly attacked by a computer-controlled SUV that still roams the grounds. Anderson’s North Beach condo had twelve-foot pressed-tin ceilings, original wood floors, full-height windows with a fabulous view of the windows across the street, and enough Victorian charm to draw grudging praise from the snottiest folks she knew.

The top headline screamed at him: Dead Computer Genius Kills Eight Gragg clicked the link, and the extensive news coverage of the siege at Sobol’s estate unfolded before him. Gragg voraciously read every word and followed every link. An hour later and he was wide-awake again with one ‘factoid’ echoing in his mind: “…Matthew Sobol, game designer and AI architect for Over the Rhine.” This Sobol guy had been a genius. Beyond a genius. Gragg was rarely impressed by other people’s hacks—but this Sobol was the king. Engineering a daemon that took vengeance on the world once you were safely dead and beyond all punishment. Gragg’s mind ran through the possibilities.


pages: 470 words: 144,455

Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World by Bruce Schneier

Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, business process, butterfly effect, cashless society, Columbine, defense in depth, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, fault tolerance, game design, IFF: identification friend or foe, information security, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knapsack problem, macro virus, Mary Meeker, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Morris worm, Multics, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, pez dispenser, pirate software, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, slashdot, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, systems thinking, the payments system, Timothy McVeigh, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Hackers have written computer bots that assist play for some of these games, particularly Quake and NetTrek. The idea is that the bots can react much quicker than a human, so that the player becomes much more effective when using these bots. An arms race has ensued, as game designers try to disable these bots and force fairer play, and the hackers make the bots cleverer and harder to disable. These games are trying to rely on trusted client software, and the hacker community has managed to break every trick the game designers have thrown at them. I am continuously amazed by the efforts hackers will go through to break the security. The lessons are twofold: not only is there no reasonable way to trust a client-side program in real usage, but there’s no possible way to ever achieve that level of protection.


pages: 498 words: 145,708

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, AltaVista, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bread and circuses, business cycle, Celebration, Florida, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, G4S, game design, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, McJob, microcredit, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, presumed consent, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, spice trade, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

On the other hand, the simulation is not programmed in accord with neoliberalism’s anti–big government discourse and so is not averse to inviting state intervention on the way to improving a simulated society. The social significance of games is attested to by the spread of video-game design to academia, in no small part through the influence of leading game design companies such as Electronic Arts. The University of Southern California, the University of Central Florida, Georgia Tech, and Parsons School of Design at New School University (among others) have now launched technical design offerings (and in some cases humanities programs) that pay attention to video games.


pages: 629 words: 142,393

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Kessler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, c2.com, call centre, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, illegal immigration, index card, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, license plate recognition, loose coupling, mail merge, Morris worm, national security letter, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, post-materialism, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert X Cringely, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Those proprietary information services that remain, such as Lexis/Nexis and Westlaw, sustain themselves because they are the only way to access useful proprietary content, such as archived news and some scholarly journal articles.53 Of course, there need not be a zero-sum game in models of software creation, and generative growth can blend well with traditional market models. Consumers can become enraptured by an expensive, sophisticated shooting game designed by a large firm in one moment and by a simple animation featuring a dancing hamster in the next.54 Big firms can produce software when market structure and demand call for such enterprise; smaller firms can fill niches; and amateurs, working alone and in groups, can design both inspirational “applets” and more labor-intensive software that increase the volume and diversity of the technological ecosystem.55 Once an eccentric and unlikely invention from outsiders has gained notoriety, traditional means of raising and spending capital to improve a technology can shore it up and ensure its exposure to as wide an audience as possible.

To maintain it, the users of those devices must experience the Net as something with which they identify and belong. We must use the generativity of the Net to engage a constituency that will protect and nurture it. That constituency may be drawn from the ranks of a new generation able to see that technology is not simply a video game designed by someone else, and that content is not simply what is provided through a TiVo or iPhone. Acknowledgments Many people helped bring about this book. I am fortunate to have brainstormed, taught, and argued with Terry Fisher, Lawrence Lessig, Charlie Nesson, and John Palfrey. They helped me discover, shape, and refine the underlying ideas and themes.


pages: 210 words: 56,667

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs by Alexa Clay, Kyra Maya Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, collaborative consumption, conceptual framework, cotton gin, creative destruction, different worldview, digital rights, disruptive innovation, double helix, fear of failure, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer rental, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, supply-chain management, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Zipcar

If the results of this experiment are positive, they would enable greater workplace safety in many industries where focus and attention on task is key to success—for example, mining and construction or medical surgery. Other types of “culture hacks” can be simpler acts of insurgency. Heidi McDonald, a video game designer, decorates her desk at work with a pirate ship and is planning to get a skull and crossbones tattoo. David Berdish, who was looking to reinvent mobility at Ford, was very open at work about his Catholic faith. Sometimes the simplest change we can make to a culture is to bring our passions and values to work.


pages: 176 words: 55,819

The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha

Airbnb, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, business intelligence, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, follow your passion, future of work, game design, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, late fees, lateral thinking, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, out of africa, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, recommendation engine, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the strength of weak ties, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

Be a Bridge A good way to help people is to introduce them to people and experiences they wouldn’t otherwise be able to access. In other words, straddle different communities/social circles and then be the bridge that your friends can walk over. My passion for entrepreneurship combined with my interest in board game design led me to introduce many of my entrepreneur friends to Settlers of Catan, the German board game. A community in Silicon Valley has sprung up around the game. I’ve also combined my experience scaling consumer Internet products with my interest in cause-based philanthropy to help organizations like Kiva and Mozilla—bridging my network and expertise from the for-profit world to the not-for-profit world.


pages: 918 words: 257,605

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

The ultimate goal is to capture a comprehensive array of the 151 Pokémon, but along the way players earn “experience points,” rising to successive levels of expertise. At level five, players can join one of three teams to battle Pokémon at designated sites referred to as “gyms.” The ramp-up had begun years earlier with Ingress, Niantic’s first mobile game designed for real-world play. Released in 2012, Ingress was a precursor and test bed for the capabilities and methods that would define Pokémon Go. The game drove its users through their cities and towns to find and control designated “portals” and capture “territory” as the game masters relied on GPS to track users’ movements and map the territories through which they roamed.

BJ Fogg,” Technori, October 19, 2012, http://technori.com/2012/10/2612-behavior-design-bootcamp; Ryan Wynia, “BJ Fogg’s Behavior Design Bootcamp: Day 2,” Technori, October 22, 2012, http://technori.com/2012/10/2613-behavior-de sign-bootcamp-day-2. The Stanford researcher B. J. Fogg in his 2003 book Persuasive Technology recognized that computer game designers seek to change people’s behaviors with Skinnerian-style conditioning, concluding that “good game play and effective operant conditioning go hand in hand.” 33. Kevin Werbach, “(Re)Defining Gamification: A Process Approach,” in Persuasive Technology, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, International Conference on Persuasive Technology (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2014), 266–72, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07127-5_23; Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter, For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business (Philadelphia: Wharton Digital Press, 2012). 34.

Kevin Werbach, “(Re)Defining Gamification: A Process Approach,” in Persuasive Technology, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, International Conference on Persuasive Technology (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2014), 266–72, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07127-5_23; Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter, For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business (Philadelphia: Wharton Digital Press, 2012). 34. Michael Sailer et al., “How Gamification Motivates: An Experimental Study of the Effects of Specific Game Design Elements on Psychological Need Satisfaction,” Computers in Human Behavior 69 (April 2017): 371–80, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.12.033; J. Hamari, J. Koivisto, and H. Sarsa, “Does Gamification Work?—a Literature Review of Empirical Studies on Gamification,” in 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2014, 3025–34, https://doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.2014.377; Carina Soledad González and Alberto Mora Carreño, “Methodological Proposal for Gamification in the Computer Engineering Teaching,” 2014 International Symposium on Computers in Education (SIIE), 1–34; Dick Schoech et al., “Gamification for Behavior Change: Lessons from Developing a Social, Multiuser, Web-Tablet Based Prevention Game for Youths,” Journal of Technology in Human Services 31, no. 3 (2013): 197–217, https://doi.org/10.1080/15228835.2013.812512. 35.


pages: 233 words: 66,446

Bitcoin: The Future of Money? by Dominic Frisby

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, capital controls, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer age, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, game design, Hacker News, hype cycle, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, Julian Assange, land value tax, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Occupy movement, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing complete, Twitter Arab Spring, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, War on Poverty, web application, WikiLeaks

There are hundreds of different programming languages, but Satoshi chose to code in C++. In C++, programmers have to do things for themselves that are automated in later languages – they are working with ‘nuts and bolts’, close to the hardware of the computer. This means there are many who don’t go near C++, finding it too complicated, though it remains popular with games designers – and cryptographers. Other coders, such as Wei Dai, think it is ‘a pretty standard choice for anyone wanting to build such a piece of software’.132 C++ is a computing subculture in itself. Dan Kaminsky – the hacker who tried to crack Bitcoin – was initially dismissive about the choice to use C++.


pages: 243 words: 66,908

Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Meadows. Donella, Diana Wright

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, clean water, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, game design, Garrett Hardin, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, peak oil, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Review

That’s what antitrust laws do in theory and sometimes in practice. (One of the resources very big companies can win by winning, however, is the power to weaken the administration of antitrust laws.) The most obvious way out of the success-to the-successful archetype is by periodically “leveling the playing field.” Traditional societies and game designers instinctively design into their systems some way of equalizing advantages, so the game stays fair and interesting. Monopoly games start over again with everyone equal, so those who lost last time have a chance to win. Many sports provide handicaps for weaker players. Many traditional societies have some version of the Native American “potlatch,” a ritual in those who have the most give away many of their possessions to those who have the least.


pages: 202 words: 64,725

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett, Dave Evans

David Brooks, fail fast, fear of failure, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, impact investing, invention of the printing press, iterative process, knowledge worker, market design, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

Most of all, curiosity is going to help you “get good at being lucky.” It’s the reason some people see opportunities everywhere. Try Stuff. When you have a bias to action, you are committed to building your way forward. There is no sitting on the bench just thinking about what you are going to do. There is only getting in the game. Designers try things. They test things out. They create prototype after prototype, failing often, until they find what works and what solves the problem. Sometimes they find the problem is entirely different from what they first thought it was. Designers embrace change. They are not attached to a particular outcome, because they are always focused on what will happen next—not what the final result will be.


The Data Journalism Handbook by Jonathan Gray, Lucy Chambers, Liliana Bounegru

Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, business intelligence, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, eurozone crisis, fail fast, Firefox, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, game design, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, John Snow's cholera map, Julian Assange, linked data, machine readable, moral hazard, MVC pattern, New Journalism, openstreetmap, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Silicon Valley, social graph, Solyndra, SPARQL, text mining, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks

But if the front end sucks, nobody will care about it. There is still a lot to learn about and to experiment with. But luckily there is the games industry, which has been innovating with respect to digital narratives, ecosystems, and interfaces for several decades now. So when developing data journalism applications, we should closely watch how game design works and how stories are told in games. Why are casual games like Tetris such fun? And what makes the open worlds of sandbox games like Grand Theft Auto or Skyrim rock? We think that data journalism is here to stay. In a few years, data journalism workflows will be quite naturally embedded in newsrooms, because news websites will have to change.


pages: 279 words: 71,542

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport

Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cal Newport, data science, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, financial independence, game design, Hacker News, index fund, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mr. Money Mustache, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, price discrimination, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

People are more eager than ever before to play Scrabble with neighbors, or trash-talk co-workers over poker, or line up in the Toronto cold for a table at Snakes & Lattes. The classic games that were popular in the pre-digital 1980s—Monopoly, Scrabble—remain popular sellers today, while the internet is fueling innovations in new game design (one of the most popular categories on Kickstarter is board games), leading to a renaissance in smarter, European-style strategy games—a movement best exemplified by the megahit Settlers of Catan, which has sold more than 22 million copies worldwide since it was first published in Germany in the mid-1990s.


pages: 246 words: 68,392

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work by Sarah Kessler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, financial independence, future of work, game design, gig economy, Hacker News, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, law of one price, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, post-work, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

He had stood nervously in front of a whiteboard as various managers filtered into the room, asked him esoteric questions unrelated to the work he would actually do on the job, and watched him draw and explain his answers. He performed so poorly in his daylong interview that shortly after he had begun, he already knew he’d failed. It felt terrible. Gigster’s interview, he was relieved to find out, would follow a completely different process. It would be conducted via a typed chat. Rather than esoteric mind games designed to test theoretical knowledge, like the ones he’d completed while interviewing at other tech companies, all of Gigster’s questions related directly to whether or not Curtis would be able to do the job. The company had no obvious reason to care if Curtis was a “culture fit,” had growth potential, or worked well on a team.


pages: 272 words: 66,985

Hyperfocus: How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction by Chris Bailey

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bluma Zeigarnik, Cal Newport, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, functional fixedness, game design, imposter syndrome, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Parkinson's law, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, side hustle, SimCity, Skype, TED Talk, twin studies, Zipcar

Hyperfocus consumes mental energy, while scatterfocus is energy restorative. Scattering your attention will be particularly beneficial when your work demands that you connect more complex, disparate ideas. For example, you should scatter your attention more often if you’re a researcher responsible for designing experiments or a video game designer who constructs story lines. The more creativity your job requires, the more often you should scatter your attention. In most cases, the knowledge work of today benefits from as much creativity as we can bring to it. Finally, the frequency with which you scatter your attention should reflect how important it is that you find the right approach to your work.


pages: 252 words: 70,424

The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value by John Sviokla, Mitch Cohen

Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Colonization of Mars, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, driverless car, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, global supply chain, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Jony Ive, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megaproject, old-boy network, paper trading, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Virgin Galactic, young professional

Jaharis and Frost sold Key in 1986 to Schering-Plough, and Jaharis went on to found Kos Pharmaceuticals, which marketed the first niacin product that is well tolerated and effective at increasing good cholesterol. Jaharis sold Kos to Abbot Laboratories. He has since founded Vatera Healthcare Partners, a health venture capital firm, and Arisaph Pharmaceuticals, a biotech discovery firm. Steve Jobs 1955–2011, United States Apple Computer, Pixar Jobs was a game designer at Atari when he, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne launched Apple Computer in 1976 to market a personal computer Wozniak had invented. The first Apple PCs proved a huge success, but later products floundered. Infighting led to Jobs’s 1985 ouster. He founded NeXT Computer and bought the Pixar animation studio from George Lucas.


pages: 229 words: 68,426

Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing by Adam Greenfield

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, augmented reality, business process, Charles Babbage, defense in depth, demand response, demographic transition, facts on the ground, game design, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, James Dyson, knowledge worker, late capitalism, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, new economy, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, profit motive, QR code, recommendation engine, RFID, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, value engineering

While unidimensional bar-codes have seen ubiquitous public use since 1974 as the familiar Universal Product Code, they're sharply limited in terms of information density; newer 2D formats such as Semacode and QR, while perhaps lacking the aesthetic crispness of the classic varieties, allow a literally geometric expansion of the amount of data that can be encoded in a given space. At present, one of the most interesting uses of 2D codes is when they're used as hyperlinks for the real world. Semacode stickers have been cleverly employed in this role in the Big Games designed by the New York City creative partnership area/code, where they function as markers of buried treasure, in a real-time playfield that encompasses an entire urban area—but what 2D coding looks like in daily practice can perhaps best be seen in Japan, where the QR code has been adopted as a de facto national standard.


pages: 245 words: 71,886

Spike: The Virus vs The People - The Inside Story by Jeremy Farrar, Anjana Ahuja

"World Economic Forum" Davos, bioinformatics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, dual-use technology, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, machine translation, nudge unit, open economy, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, side project, social distancing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, zoonotic diseases

Harries said publicly that the UK did not need to follow the WHO’s advice (that countries should ‘test, test, test’) because it did not apply to high-income countries. In 2021, she was appointed chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency. Demis Hassabis A former child chess prodigy, neuroscientist, games designer and entrepreneur, and co-founder of artificial intelligence start-up DeepMind. Hassabis attended the SAGE meeting on 18 March 2020, where he expressed alarm at the way the epidemic was unfolding. Richard Hatchett CEO of CEPI (the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) and a former White House adviser (during the H1N1 outbreak of 2009).


pages: 252 words: 66,183

Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, car-free, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, clean water, confounding variable, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, land bank, lone genius, mass immigration, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, Overton Window, parking minimums, restrictive zoning, rewilding, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SimCity, starchitect, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty

In this regard, negative though it may at first seem, the project of this book is fundamentally constructive: beyond merely arguing against the arbitrary lines that hold us back, this book is a reminder that a more affordable, prosperous, equitable, and sustainable America is possible. Will you be a part of that journey? Part I CHAPTER 1 Where Zoning Comes From For many Americans, their singular experience with city planning is a little game called SimCity. First released in 1989 and developed by legendary game designer Will Wright, the game invites players to plan their own cities. More of a sandbox than a conventional game with points or levels, each new “round” of SimCity presents players with a virgin field, the power to map out streets and zoning, and the freedom to do whatever they like from there. Poor planning decisions are punished with blinking indicators and unsolicited advice from AI advisors; wise planning decisions are rewarded with happy simulated citizens and a growing city.


pages: 1,881 words: 178,824

HTML5 Canvas by Steve Fulton, Jeff Fulton

barriers to entry, Firefox, game design, Google Chrome, off-the-grid, web application, WebSocket

This is known as the law of conservation of momentum (Newton’s third law). To do this, we will take the x and y velocities of two colliding balls, and draw a “line of action” between their centers. This is illustrated in Figure 5-9, which has been adapted from Jobe Makar and Ben Winiarczyk’s Macromedia’s Flash MX 2004 Game Design Demystified (Macromedia Press). Then we will create new x and y velocities for each ball based on this angle and the law of conservation of momentum. To properly calculate conservation of momentum when balls collide on the canvas, we need to add a new property: mass. Mass is the measurement of how much a ball (or any object) resists any change in its velocity.

It took some serious effort for us to translate this code from other sources into a working example on HTML5 Canvas. The code here is based on Flash Lite Effort: Embedded Systems and Pervasive Computing Lab by Felipe Sampaio. It is also partly based on Jobe Makar and Ben Winiarczyk’s work in Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Game Design Demystified, and Keith Peters’ books on ActionScript animation. Here is the full code listing for Example 5-7. Example 5-7. Balls with simple interactions <!doctype html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8"> <title>CH5EX7: Balls With Simple Interactions</title> <script src="modernizr.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> window.addEventListener('load', eventWindowLoaded, false); function eventWindowLoaded() { canvasApp(); } function canvasSupport () { return Modernizr.canvas; } function canvasApp() { if (!


pages: 193 words: 19,478

Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext by Belinda Barnet

augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Duvall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, game design, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, John Markoff, linked data, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Project Xanadu, publish or perish, Robert Metcalfe, semantic web, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, the scientific method, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons

Romney, on the ontological status of corporations). For the moment it is enough to note that Coulton’s title applies both to the arch-villain of the game (GLaDOS, or Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System), as well as everyone who beats the final level, becoming perhaps the most important ‘people who are still alive’, if you are a game designer. Such at least was the song’s first rhetorical situation, before it went viral on YouTube: if you are hearing this message, congratulations, your long history of failure has paid off. You have traversed or configured the game logic to reach this not entirely meaningless outcome. Okay, you win; the game, of course, goes on.


pages: 252 words: 74,167

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future by Luke Dormehl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, book scanning, borderless world, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Flash crash, Ford Model T, friendly AI, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, hive mind, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, PageRank, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

More than 1,500 new types of occupation have all appeared as official job categories since 1990. These include roles such as software engineers, search engine optimisation experts and database administrators. The use of AI within video games has meanwhile inspired millions of fans to seek out work as professional game developers. Like ‘vloggers’, the job of video game designer was not the dream of a single person 200 years ago, although today the video game industry is among the world’s most valuable entertainment industries. The launch of Grand Theft Auto V in September 2013 achieved worldwide sales of more than £500 million – becoming the biggest launch of any entertainment product in history.


pages: 302 words: 74,878

A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life by Brian Grazer, Charles Fishman

4chan, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, Apple II, Asperger Syndrome, Bonfire of the Vanities, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Chrome, Howard Zinn, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple

Wilson: biologist, author, professor emeritus at Harvard University, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize Oprah Winfrey: founder and chairwoman of the Oprah Winfrey Network, actress, author George C. Wolfe: playwright, theater director, two-time winner of the Tony Award Steve Wozniak: cofounder of Apple Inc., designer of Apple I and Apple II computers, inventor John D. Wren: president and CEO of marketing and communications company Omnicom Will Wright: game designer, creator of Sim City and The Sims Steve Wynn: businessman, Las Vegas casino magnate Gideon Yago: writer, former correspondent for MTV News Eitan Yardeni: teacher and spiritual counselor at the Kabbalah Centre Daniel Yergin: economist, author of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, winner of the Pulitzer Prize Dan York: chief content officer at DirecTV, former president of content and advertising sales, AT&T Michael W.


pages: 251 words: 76,225

The Geek Feminist Revolution by Kameron Hurley

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, clean water, commoditize, desegregation, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Kickstarter, means of production, microaggression, Nelson Mandela, Skype, the long tail, women in the workforce

Many young men, taught by our culture to emote only anger and sarcasm, are ill-equipped when it comes to processing strong emotion. When you are promised the world and the world says it doesn’t want you, you’re left flailing and lashing out, and that’s what these guys did. In the churn of comments sections across the internet, someone decided the real problem here was that the young woman was a video game designer, and the man she was accused of sleeping with by her ex-boyfriend was a video game reviewer, and that this was some kind of breach of … ethics in gaming journalism. I’m unsure how this epiphany grew out of a spurned ex-boyfriend’s explicit rant about his ex-girlfriend’s supposed sexual exploits, but this is the internet.


pages: 242 words: 71,938

The Google Resume: How to Prepare for a Career and Land a Job at Apple, Microsoft, Google, or Any Top Tech Company by Gayle Laakmann Mcdowell

barriers to entry, cloud computing, do what you love, game design, information retrieval, job-hopping, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, why are manhole covers round?

Once the core game components have been decided, some designers may double as engineers. Designers are not necessarily expected to have an artistic background, but they are expected to be highly creative. Recruiters typically want people with some sort of development background, even if they won’t be a full-time coder. Many schools offer courses or programs in game design, from which companies recruit designers. Other Roles Though development, production, art, and design may handle game creation, a number of other key support roles exist. The following are some of the most popular: Quality assurance. QA can be broken down into three types: functional testing, certification testing, and automation testing.


pages: 267 words: 78,857

Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff by Dinah Sanders

A. Roger Ekirch, Atul Gawande, big-box store, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, clean water, clockwatching, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, credit crunch, do what you love, endowment effect, Firefox, game design, Inbox Zero, income per capita, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Kevin Kelly, late fees, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Merlin Mann, Open Library, post-work, side project, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand

That’s the principle behind EpicWin, an iPhone app that you can use to cajole yourself into doing mundane household chores: “I really want to call it quits for the night, but washing the dishes will only take five minutes and I will get experience points for it. I am really close to leveling up!” HealthMonth, the online game, helps build habits that will make you feel better all the time. It’s not just a silly trick. Games designer, researcher, and author Jane McGonigal cites years of scientific studies to back up her assertion that “… when we game we are tapping into our best qualities: our ability to be motivated, to be optimistic, to collaborate with others, to be resilient in the face of failure.” Stepping into that place of strength in the safe environment of games makes it easier for us to do so outside of them.


pages: 257 words: 76,785

Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less Here's How by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

8-hour work day, airport security, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Brexit referendum, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, death from overwork, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, game design, gig economy, Henri Poincaré, IKEA effect, iterative process, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Johannes Kepler, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, neurotypical, PalmPilot, performance metric, race to the bottom, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, zero-sum game

“On Monday through Thursday, I feel like we have a more focused and engaged workforce, because they say, ‘I just need to make sure that I’m getting the things that I need done, done,’” Cockroach Labs CEO Spencer Kimball tells me. “Having shorter time doesn’t mean that you’re losing creativity,” game designer Linus Feldt says, since being “more focused made the staff more creative and better at finding solutions.” The four-day workweek at web design firm Reusser Design gives developers “more concentration time, and that, paired with a conscious effort to minimize interruptions, means more productive days” than a five-day week, writes UX designer Andy Welfle.


pages: 303 words: 75,192

10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less by Garett Jones

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Brexit referendum, business cycle, central bank independence, clean water, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, fake news, financial independence, game design, German hyperinflation, hive mind, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Neil Armstrong, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price stability, rent control, Robert Solow, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen

Case describes them: “Numerous forums for dialogue including the Feedback Unit, created in 1985, the Government Parliamentary Committees, introduced in 1987, and the Institute of Policy Studies, formed in 1988, have grown up alongside new middle class constituencies and dissuaded them from seeking more autonomous modes of participation.”¹⁰ It’s PAP’s political ground game, designed to make the middle classes feel that they’re being heard. And indeed, it gives the PAP more information about what the middle classes actually want. It’s not democracy—it’s not listening carefully to everyone. Instead it’s semidemocracy: listening carefully to PAP’s core constituency, but holding honest elections so that everyone can let off some steam.


pages: 231 words: 71,299

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy by Talia Lavin

4chan, Bellingcat, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, end-to-end encryption, epigenetics, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, information security, Kevin Roose, lockdown, mass immigration, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Overton Window, phenotype, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, zero-sum game, éminence grise

While this particular example is extreme, lesser versions of misogynist harassment play out every day online. Women of color are subject to extraordinary harassment, but white women, too, receive disproportionate harassment online, compared to their male counterparts. This is particularly true of those who are outspoken about feminism, or who enter fields—such as video-game design and science—that misogynists view as “masculine” endeavors. In April 2019, newspapers and blogs exploded with the first documented image of a black hole: an eye-of-Sauronish red ring, like a sinister doughnut, carefully constructed by scientists. Among those scientists was a twenty-nine-year-old postdoctoral fellow named Katie Bouman, who, working at MIT, was a prominent member of the team that created the groundbreaking image.


pages: 273 words: 85,195

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Boeing 747, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, company town, crowdsourcing, fulfillment center, full employment, game design, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, Mars Rover, new economy, Nomadland, off grid, off-the-grid, payday loans, Pepto Bismol, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, six sigma, supply-chain management, traumatic brain injury, union organizing, urban sprawl, Wayback Machine, white picket fence, Y2K

So iconic—and dreaded—was the poorhouse that it was awarded a square in the earliest version of Monopoly. Situated on a corner of the board, this civic institution was the space of last resort for any player who “has not enough money to pay his expenses, and cannot borrow any or cannot sell or mortgage any of his property,” according to the 1904 rules. In later versions, game designers paved over the poorhouse and put up a “free parking” space. It took the Great Depression to make retirement into a reality in the United States. There were too many workers, too few jobs, and a consequent sense that the elderly needed to be nudged out of the labor pool. At the same time, older Americans weren’t faring so well.


pages: 337 words: 86,320

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

affirmative action, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Filter Bubble, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Seder, John Snow's cholera map, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, working poor

In other words, find enough winners of A/B tests and you have an addictive site. It is the type of feedback that cigarette companies never had. A/B testing is increasingly a tool of the gaming industry. As Alter discusses, World of Warcraft A/B-tests various versions of its game. One mission might ask you to kill someone. Another might ask you to save something. Game designers can give different samples of players’ different missions and then see which ones keep more people playing. They might find, for example, that the mission that asked you to save a person got people to return 30 percent more often. If they test many, many missions, they start finding more and more winners.


pages: 294 words: 87,986

4th Rock From the Sun: The Story of Mars by Nicky Jenner

3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Astronomia nova, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, Golden age of television, hive mind, invention of the telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, overview effect, placebo effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, retrograde motion, selection bias, silicon-based life, Skype, Stephen Hawking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Virgin Galactic

The more light-hearted Daffy Duck: The Marvin Missions uses the aforementioned ant-like humanoid Marvin the Martian as the antagonist, who must be destroyed in order to complete the final stage of the game. New concepts are being developed using virtual reality (VR) technology. NASA is collaborating with game developers on a project named Mars 2030, an interactive game designed for VR headsets that will place the player directly on to the surface of Mars. Mars 2030 is as scientifically accurate as possible, from topography through to gravity, making it a kind of hybrid between a video game and a planetary simulator. Many musicians have taken inspiration from Mars, notably Holst with his famous The Planets suite (written in approxi­mately 1914).


pages: 255 words: 90,456

Frommer's Irreverent Guide to San Francisco by Matthew Richard Poole

Bay Area Rapid Transit, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Day of the Dead, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, game design, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Loma Prieta earthquake, Maui Hawaii, old-boy network, pez dispenser, San Francisco homelessness, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, Torches of Freedom, upwardly mobile

The Palace of Fine Arts is a must-see, not just because it houses the Exploratorium, but because it looks just like an ancient Roman temple and it’s the only building that remains from the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition (held to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal). A trip to the Exploratorium is also mandatory, particularly if you’re toting along kids. Seasoned locals will assure you it’s the most fun you can have without hallucinogenic drugs, especially if you crawl through the dark, sensual Tactile Dome or try any of the other hands-on games designed to totally twist your mind. You never know what the mad scientists will have in store for you at this wonderfully fun, interactive science museum—and the gift shop is the best place in the city to load up on brainy birthday and Christmas gifts. San Francisco’s cable-car system is still run out of a three-story red-brick barn, and you can watch it in action from several special spectator galleries at the highly entertaining (and always free) Cable Car Museum.


Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors by Matt Parker

8-hour work day, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, British Empire, Brownian motion, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, fake news, Flash crash, forensic accounting, game design, High speed trading, Julian Assange, millennium bug, Minecraft, Neil Armstrong, null island, obamacare, off-by-one error, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, publication bias, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, selection bias, SQL injection, subprime mortgage crisis, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Therac-25, value at risk, WikiLeaks, Y2K

They pit you against several world leaders from history in a race to build the greatest civilization, one of whom is the normally peace-loving Gandhi. But ever since early versions of the game, players noticed that Gandhi was a bit of a jerk. Once he developed atomic technology, he would start dropping nuclear bombs on other nations. This was because of a mistake in the computer code. The game designers had deliberately given Gandhi the lowest non-zero aggression rating possible: a score of 1. Classic Gandhi. But later in the game, when all the civilizations were becoming more, well, civilized, every leader had their aggression rating dropped by two. For Gandhi, starting from 1, this calculation played out as 1 − 2 = 255, suddenly setting him to maximum aggression.


pages: 303 words: 83,564

Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World by Paul Collier

Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, charter city, classic study, Edward Glaeser, experimental economics, first-past-the-post, full employment, game design, George Akerlof, global village, guest worker program, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, language acquisition, mass immigration, mirror neurons, moral hazard, open borders, radical decentralization, risk/return, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, white flight, zero-sum game

In an important new study, a team of researchers investigated variations in the willingness of Hispanic immigrants to America to cooperate for public goods. The variations were designed to pick up differences in how immigrants perceived both their identity and their degree of exclusion from the society around them. An innovation of their research was that in addition to the conventional laboratory games designed to tease out attitudes to others, it included real neighborhood public goods, such as local health and education facilities. They found powerful evidence that how migrants see themselves influences their willingness to cooperate and contribute to public goods. The more migrants self-identified as Latino as opposed to American, the less they contributed.


pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

EyeWire illustrates how an ExO can apply game elements and mechanics in non-game products and services to create fun and engaging experiences, converting users into loyal players—and in the process accomplish extraordinary things. Other games that use this technique include MalariaSpot (hunt malaria parasites in real images), GalaxyZoo (classify galaxies according to their shapes) and Foldit (help biochemists combat AIDS and other diseases by predicting and producing protein models). As game designer and author Jane McGonigal sees it, “Human beings are wired to compete.” Engaging gamers, however, requires more than just throwing a game up on a website and letting gamers have at it. “Gamification should empower people, not exploit them. It should feel good at the end of the day because you made progress towards something that mattered to you.”


pages: 361 words: 83,886

Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics and the Coming Robotopia by Frederik L. Schodt

carbon-based life, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, factory automation, game design, guest worker program, industrial robot, Jacques de Vaucanson, Norbert Wiener, post-industrial society, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce

Dainichi Kiko made amusement robots to complement its regular line for industry. The game companies, like the toy companies, make them to raise their own technological level and to create a high-tech image. One of the biggest amusement robot manufacturers is Namco, best known today for Pac-Man, the video arcade game designed by Toru Iwatani that took the world by storm in 1980. Established in 1955, Namco has a long relationship with robots. It originally built amusement attractions and rides of the sort commonly found on the tops of Japanese urban department stores—often in the shape of popular cartoon character robots like Arare-chan and Doraemon.


pages: 291 words: 80,068

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

Literature, paintings and sculptures, theater, movies, and radio and television all let us experience alternative realities, but not interact with them. We can act them out in our minds—or with others, through role-playing games or anime cosplay—but we cannot directly manipulate them. One relatively new medium though is changing this. In her classic 1993 book, Computers as Theatre, the video game designer Brenda Laurel suggests that the essential quality of computer games is that they let users influence alternative realities. We’ve come a long way since then, from Mario jumping on magic mushrooms to World of Warcraft, Fortnite, Among Us, and of course Dota players slaying their friends. These games borrow some elements of the world we know but introduce ones that are novel and different.


Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power by Rose Hackman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, cognitive load, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Graeber, demand response, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, game design, glass ceiling, immigration reform, invisible hand, job automation, lockdown, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, performance metric, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

” * * * Figuring out ways forward has been the emotional labor taken on by some, yearning for ways that allow for progress, hope, and even forms of amends. To some, the reeducation of men Colom called for is an act that we cannot afford to put off. * * * In 2015, at sex and technology conference Arse Elektronika, Mattie Brice, a game designer and cultural critic, explained the precarious educator role she was forced into taking on after sex.11 As a trans woman who had sex with cis men, she said she had little choice but to find prospective romantic partners in niche corners of the internet, marginalized from most other spaces. But as she engaged with men she met in this way, she found that lovers often cried and expressed intense emotions like shame after intimacy, expecting her to step in as a de facto therapist.


pages: 363 words: 92,422

A Fine Mess by T. R. Reid

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, game design, Gini coefficient, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial robot, land value tax, loss aversion, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Tesla Model S, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the rebellion that threw out China’s last ruling dynasty, embraced Georgian tax policy for his (short-lived) new government. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr. cited Georgian principles in major speeches. To further their cause, George’s followers in the early twentieth century created a board game designed to denounce the landlord class; this offshoot of Georgism lives on today as one of the world’s most popular parlor pastimes. It’s called Monopoly. George’s book became a surprise bestseller for essentially the same reasons that Thomas Piketty’s did. Just as Piketty’s book followed the Great Recession of 2008–9, Progress and Poverty came out in the wake of the national depression of 1873–77, a time when millions of working-class Americans felt they had been handed a raw deal by the economic and political establishment.


pages: 315 words: 93,522

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy by Stephen Witt

4chan, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, autism spectrum disorder, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, cloud computing, collaborative economy, company town, crowdsourcing, Eben Moglen, game design, hype cycle, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, inventory management, iterative process, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, job automation, late fees, mental accounting, moral panic, operational security, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, security theater, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, software patent, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, zero day

In April 1999 the company relocated Henri Linde to California during the height of the dot-com boom, and opened a dedicated office for him with a staff of six. Business was merely brisk at first, but turned electric after the favorable result in RIAA vs. Diamond. Big Gadget finally moved, with Japanese money displacing Korean. Any device that could play an mp3 had to pay. Linde signed deals with dot-coms, software vendors, chip manufacturers, game designers, car stereo vendors, and hundreds of start-up ventures. In the first four years he’d worked as licensing manager he’d signed less than twenty deals. In the next four he signed more than 600. The only holdout was Sony. Inside the company a civil war had broken out between its consumer electronics arm and the music labels it owned.


pages: 324 words: 92,805

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, business cycle, business process, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, double helix, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, impulse control, income inequality, inflation targeting, insecure affluence, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge worker, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, performance metric, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the long tail, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, value engineering, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

Or as Hilarie Cash, reSTART cofounder and an expert in online addiction, told me, “We end up being controlled by our impulses.” Which, for gaming addicts, means being even more susceptible to the complex charms of the online world. Gaming companies want to keep players playing as long as possible—the more you play, the more likely you’ll upgrade to the next version. To this end, game designers have created sophisticated data feedback systems that tie players to an upgrade treadmill. As players move through these virtual worlds, the data they generate is captured and used to make subsequent game iterations even more “immersive.” (World of Warcraft, for instance, releases periodic upgrades, or “patches,” with new weapons and skills that players must have to retain their godlike status.)


pages: 282 words: 88,320

Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry by David Robertson, Bill Breen

barriers to entry, Blue Ocean Strategy, business logic, business process, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disruptive innovation, financial independence, game design, global supply chain, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, Wall-E, work culture

So it was that LEGO, in its initial August 2009 release, decided to come out with not one but ten different board games. It was all part of a bid to swiftly stake out an entirely new market, and it had the desired effect. Soon thereafter, LEGO Games was rapidly ascending the year’s list of the hottest Christmas toys. Largely through the efforts of one driven games designer and a handful of wingmen, the company had an “obviously LEGO, but never seen before” hit on its hands. On the surface, LEGO Games and that other ambitious creation—LEGO Universe—shared several similarities. Both were rooted in the LEGO DNA of the brick and the System of Play. Both sought to deliver new types of LEGO play experiences.


pages: 316 words: 90,165

You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves by Hiawatha Bray

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, digital map, don't be evil, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Edward Snowden, Firefox, game design, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, license plate recognition, lone genius, openstreetmap, polynesian navigation, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Thales of Miletus, trade route, turn-by-turn navigation, uranium enrichment, urban planning, Zipcar

We are even tracked by the third-party software apps we install on our phones. A research report from February 2013 found that half of the fifty most popular apps for iPhones and Android smartphones automatically transmit information about the user’s location.4 Fire up the popular game Angry Birds, and game designer Rovio will use the phone’s GPS and Wi-Fi to determine where you are. It is useful information for pinging you with targeted advertisements. Yet in 2012 researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that when a user stops playing Angry Birds, it keeps right on running in the background, steadily broadcasting the player’s whereabouts.5 Add to this the detailed personal information available from information brokers like Acxiom, which has files on about 190 million Americans and a total of a half-billion people worldwide.


pages: 315 words: 92,151

Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future by Brian Clegg

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Brownian motion, call centre, Carrington event, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Future Shock, game design, gravity well, Higgs boson, hive mind, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, silicon-based life, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Turing test

What the teenager wanted to do was create a world on the computer screen that would fully immerse the player, making them feel as if they were part of the action. At the time, computer graphics, particularly on the then relatively new IBM PC, were dire. Yet the first major game produced by id Software, the company formed by Carmack and game designer John Romero, Wolfenstein 3D, managed to do remarkable things on a PC. Admittedly the game was visually blocky and limited in its use of color, but by making use of every software trick in the book, and many that weren’t until he wrote them, Carmack managed to make the journey through the castle taken by the player, who saw a first-person view, smoother and more convincing than anything that had ever come before.


pages: 354 words: 91,875

The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Doto Get More of It by Kelly McGonigal

banking crisis, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, delayed gratification, Dunning–Kruger effect, Easter island, game design, impulse control, lifelogging, loss aversion, low interest rates, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, PalmPilot, phenotype, Richard Thaler, social contagion, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Tragedy of the Commons, Walter Mischel

And we search. And we search some more, clicking that mouse like—well, like a rat in a cage seeking another “hit,” looking for the elusive reward that will finally feel like enough. Cell phones, the Internet, and other social media may have accidentally exploited our reward system, but computer and video game designers intentionally manipulate the reward system to keep players hooked. The promise that the next level or big win could happen at any time is what makes a game compelling. It’s also what makes a game hard to quit. One study found that playing a video game led to dopamine increases equivalent to amphetamine use—and it’s this dopamine rush that makes both so addictive.


pages: 322 words: 88,197

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

McLuhan coined the term “global village” as a metaphor for the electronic age, but if you watch a grade-schooler constructing a virtual town in Minecraft with the help of players from around the world, the phrase starts to sound more literal. The migratory history of chess, like that of most games, did not begin with some immaculate conception in the mind of some original genius game designer. As chess traveled across borders, new players in new cultures experimented with the rules. “Like the Bible and the Internet,” Shenk writes, “[chess was] the result of years of tinkering by a large, decentralized group, a slow achievement of collective intelligence.” Evolving out of an earlier Indian game called chaturanga, the first game that modern eyes would recognize as chess was played in Persia during the fifth century CE, a game called chatrang.


pages: 304 words: 91,566

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption by Ben Mezrich

airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cryptocurrency, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, game design, information security, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, new economy, offshore financial centre, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, QR code, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, transaction costs, Virgin Galactic, zero-sum game

If he was a Japanese man, he wrote in idiomatic, flawless English that alternated between American spellings and British spellings. The time stamps of his writings revealed no particular time zone. Investigative journalists had named at least fifteen people as possible alter egos to the mysterious inventor, including Elon Musk, the Tesla billionaire, and Hal Finney, a game designer and cryptographer who had received the first Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi in 2009; but none of these leads had led anywhere. “To me,” Voorhees said, “the mystery surrounding Satoshi is a feature of Bitcoin, not a bug. The beauty of Bitcoin is that it is not built around Satoshi, it’s not built around anyone.


Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

Apple Newton, Big Tech, Biosphere 2, car-free, computer age, El Camino Real, Future Shock, game design, General Magic , guns versus butter model, hive mind, Kevin Kelly, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence

There must be all of these people everywhere on earth right now, waiting for a miracle, waiting to be pulled out of themselves, eager for just the smallest sign that there is something finer or larger or miraculous about our existence than we had supposed. 26) "The replayability problem" (Engineering a desire for repetition). 27) I think "van art" and Yes album covers were the biggest influence in game design. 28) I wonder if I've missed the boat on CD-ROM interactive - if I'm too old. The big companies are zeroing in on the 10 year olds. I think you only ever truly feel comfortable with the level of digitization that was normal for you from the age of five to fifteen. I mean sure, I can make new games workable, but it won't be a kick the way Tetris was.


Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

“I am absolutely going to see the movie,” Sonja told him, as soon as Jon returned from sailing overseas. Sonja had actually met Candace Bushnell, the author of the book Sex and the City, in New York in the summer of 2001. Sonja had been with her fiancé at the time, and Candace was with her boyfriend, a game designer for the Lara Croft Tomb Raider series. The foursome went to a small Italian restaurant where waiters greeted them by name. Sonja remembered Candace’s outfit: a suede triangle halter top paired with preppy East Coast pants. Candace had taken to Sonja, as much as Sonja did to her, telling her she knew too few women who made their own money.


pages: 298 words: 93,083

Autism Adulthood: Strategies and Insights for a Fulfilling Life by Susan Senator

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, different worldview, fake it until you make it, game design, mouse model, neurotypical, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Zipcar

“I don’t know what the future is for my son,” Susan said, but as she told her daughter and her husband, “So what? He makes weird noises, but at least he’s not drinking, or on the internet with pornography. He cooks, does his own laundry, and takes care of his dog.” Paul does have job responsibilities. He works assembling games for the family’s company, Cactus Game Design, which uses popular secular games like Apples to Apples, Scrabble, and Cranium, and creates Bible editions. “We have a game called Redemption; the appeal is not only sophisticated game play, but collecting. Paul assembles these card packs. Watching him is like witnessing a well-oiled machine,” Susan said.


pages: 334 words: 91,722

Brexit Unfolded: How No One Got What They Want (And Why They Were Never Going To) by Chris Grey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, game design, global pandemic, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, lockdown, non-tariff barriers, open borders, post-truth, reserve currency, Robert Mercer

It could hardly be said that this had been settled by the referendum, precisely because of all the questions which had since emerged about what, in concrete terms, it meant. Equally, it was by this time becoming clearer that the decisions about this would affect every single area of daily life, from air travel through to nuclear waste disposal, and every industry from fishing to computer game design. So there were huge new, and urgent, questions for the country. What exactly did the government’s white paper Brexit plan, endorsed in the Tory manifesto, mean? Was ‘no deal better than a bad deal’? How would a ‘bad deal’ be defined? What did a ‘no deal’ scenario look like? Perhaps most glaring of all, where was the discussion of the costs of the Brexit plan?


pages: 340 words: 91,416

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder

Adam Curtis, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, double helix, game design, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, random walk, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Skype, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, TED Talk, the scientific method

But then after some time, two or three months, they get in step and they get this intuitive understanding of quantum mechanics, and it’s actually quite interesting to observe. It’s like learning to ride a bike.”23 And intuition comes with exposure. You can get exposure to quantum mechanics—entirely without equations—in the video game Quantum Moves.24 In this game, designed by physicists at Aarhus University in Denmark, players earn points when they find efficient solutions for quantum problems, such as moving atoms from one potential dip to another. The simulated atoms obey the laws of quantum mechanics. They appear not like little balls but like a weird fluid that is subject to the uncertainty principle and can tunnel from one place to another.


pages: 326 words: 88,968

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now by Sergey Young

23andMe, 3D printing, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, brain emulation, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Easter island, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, European colonialism, game design, Gavin Belson, George Floyd, global pandemic, hockey-stick growth, impulse control, Internet of things, late capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, moral hazard, mouse model, natural language processing, personalized medicine, plant based meat, precision agriculture, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, TED Talk, uber lyft, ultra-processed food, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, X Prize

Fernandez and his team implanted a tiny bed of electrode spikes into the woman’s brain that conducted electrical signals like the Second Sight solution. With the implant, Bernardéta Gomez can now recognize objects like ceiling lights, doorways, printed shapes and letters, and the silhouettes of people. She can even play a simple video game designed to test the implant’s effect.23 Then there are the advances being made for hearing. If you have never watched a video of someone having his or her modern cochlear implant turned on for the first time, you might want to put down this book and treat yourself. It is truly heartwarming. Take Sarah Churman, for instance, whose cochlear implant initiation video on YouTube has been viewed nearly 32 million times.24 At age twenty-nine, Sarah had a productive life, full of rich experiences, a successful career, a loving marriage, and two children.


pages: 312 words: 93,836

Barometer of Fear: An Insider's Account of Rogue Trading and the Greatest Banking Scandal in History by Alexis Stenfors

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, capital controls, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, game design, Gordon Gekko, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, mental accounting, millennium bug, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shock, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Rubik’s Cube, Snapchat, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, work culture , Y2K

It was nice to leave dark and icy Stockholm behind for two weeks to join 15 or 20, mainly London-based, soon-to-be traders and sales people in the leafy English countryside. HSBC was very good at FX, probably in the top three in the world at the time, so my expectations of the course were high. We got to play a computer-based trading simulation game, designed to replicate a realistic situation in a dealing room. It was fun, and the teacher was both knowledgeable and engaging. I remember how we were repeatedly told to ‘galvanise our HPs’, as if our calculators (manufactured by Hewlett-Packard) were like musical instruments needing to be restrung before a concert.


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Rendering is estimated to be a nearly two-billion-dollar market, growing at 22 percent per year. It is dominated by entertainment companies with their own supercomputers and by hundreds of “render farms” around the globe. Golem’s announcement that it was entering this arena aroused new interest in its token issue from tens of thousands of game designers, architects, and virtual reality experimenters. These users now find themselves in queues for what often are prolonged procedures on arrays of multi-core Intel Xeon processors. For Golem, however, rendering is just test-market “Brass,” low-hanging fruit to be harvested with free “Blender” software before the company moves on to its panoply of other supercomputer functions in its “Stone” and “Iron” versions.


pages: 295 words: 89,441

Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley by Atsuo Inoue

Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, Apple II, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, business climate, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, fixed income, game design, George Floyd, hive mind, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Masayoshi Son, off grid, popular electronics, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TikTok, Vision Fund, WeWork

One day the smallest titbit of news caught Son’s eye – it had to do with Japanese arcade games. During his multiple trips to Japan and back, Son had caught wind of a boom occurring in this market in Japan, with Space Invaders becoming incredibly popular between the months of March and August 1979. Space Invaders had been developed and released by Taito, a Japanese game designer, the previous year and marked a sea change, being drastically different to the video games that had come before it. Like a science-fiction book come to life, the game featured an alien army swarming the player’s base on earth. Players would control their own gun battery, manoeuvring it to shoot down the space invaders.


pages: 347 words: 97,721

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

British game developer Ed Key recently mused along these lines about how artificial intelligence might be useful to him. Bemoaning the fact that he quit a corporate job in order to work full-time on his game Proteus, only to find that “80 percent of my time was spent doing business stuff” that had nothing to do with game design, he said: “Things like creating trailers and contacting the press, tweeting the screenshots—maybe an AI agent could be helpful for that. Self-promotion is something you might delegate to a robot who is your biggest fan.”23 But in some cases, augmentation actually will amplify some high-value, noncognitive strength—and we might say, help the human bring more humanity to the work.


pages: 346 words: 102,666

Infomocracy: A Novel by Malka Older

corporate governance, game design, high-speed rail, information security, land tenure, military-industrial complex, young professional

He remembers the centenal in Jakarta where he watched the first debate, Free2B. He never did look up all their outposts. “Or maybe I’ll become a … a bartender.” Mishima laughs, a real laugh this time. Bartenders don’t exist anymore outside of films and extremely pretentious bars. Ken laughs too. “Or a game designer, or a crow mechanic.” “You really think you could live like that?” Mishima is trying to imagine what it would take to slow her pulse down, how it would feel. She imagines the problematic mountain range of her psyche smoothing into a gentle, dull plain, the colors overlapping into blah. Even if she survived like that, even if she liked it, she can’t imagine it would last.


pages: 357 words: 100,718

The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update by Donella H. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, Dennis L. Meadows

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, financial independence, game design, Garrett Hardin, geopolitical risk, Herman Kahn, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, means of production, new economy, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, systems thinking, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Review

It is a web of connections among equals, held together not by force, obligation, material incentive, or social contract, but by shared values and the understanding that some tasks can be accomplished together that could never be accomplished separately. We know of networks of farmers who share organic pest control methods. There are networks of environmental journalists, "green" architects, computer modelers, game designers, land trusts, consumer cooperatives. There are thousands and thousands of networks that developed as people with common purposes found each other. Some networks become so busy and essential that they evolve into formal organizations with offices and budgets, but most come and go as needed. The advent of the World Wide Web certainly has facilitated and accelerated the formation and maintenance of networks.


pages: 346 words: 102,625

Early Retirement Extreme by Jacob Lund Fisker

8-hour work day, active transport: walking or cycling, barriers to entry, book value, buy and hold, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, delayed gratification, discounted cash flows, diversification, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, dumpster diving, Easter island, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, game design, index fund, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, junk bonds, lateral thinking, lifestyle creep, loose coupling, low interest rates, market bubble, McMansion, passive income, peak oil, place-making, planned obsolescence, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, power law, psychological pricing, retail therapy, risk free rate, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, wage slave, working poor

Harding, Operations Management [40] David Holmgren, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability [41] Richard Brewer, Principles of ecology [42] Jacques Ellul, Propaganda [43] William Catton, Overshoot [44] Matthew B. Crawford, Shop class as soulcraft [45] Herman Hesse, Siddhartha [46] David Wann, Simple Prosperity [47] Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety [48] Jesse Schell, The Art of Game Design [49] Amy Dacyczyn, The Complete Tightwad Gazette [50] Ann Thorpe, The Designer's Atlas of Sustainability [51] Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline [52] Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto [53] Michael Maccoby, The Gamesman [54] Dick Stoken, The Great Cycle [55] Peter Lawrence, The Happy Minimalist [56] Lin Yu Tan, The importance of living [57] Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap [58] Elizabeth Gilbert, The Last American Man [59] Scott Nearing, The Making of a Radical [60] Margarat Lobenstine, The Renaissance Soul [61] James Dale Davidson & Lord William Rees-Mogg, The sovereign individual [62] G.


pages: 367 words: 99,765

Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks by Ken Jennings

Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, British Empire, clean water, David Brooks, digital map, don't be evil, dumpster diving, Eratosthenes, game design, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, helicopter parent, hive mind, index card, John Harrison: Longitude, John Snow's cholera map, Mercator projection, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Journalism, openstreetmap, place-making, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Stewart Brand, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, three-masted sailing ship, traveling salesman, urban planning

Burgess was a humorist best remembered today for coining the word “blurb” and writing the poem “The Purple Cow,” but he was also an inveterate map geek. “There is nothing so difficult as to create, out of hand, an interesting coast line. Try and invent an irregular shore that shall be convincing, and you will see how much more cleverly Nature works than you.” A video-game designer who moonlights as a fantasy mapmaker, Isaac probably has as much experience testing Burgess’s dictum as anyone in the world. A century later, coastlines are still hard. “You wind up doing this seizure thing with your hand, and it doesn’t work sometimes,” he tells me. Burgess’s solution was to spill water on his paper, pound it with his fist, and trace the resulting blotch.


pages: 364 words: 103,162

The English by Jeremy Paxman

back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Etonian, game design, George Santayana, global village, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, Own Your Own Home, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Right to Buy, sensible shoes, Stephen Fry, Suez canal 1869, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

It is, like the rest of the world, dominated by brand names. The English wear baseball caps and jeans, eat versions of American, Asian or Italian food, drive cars made anywhere on the globe (even the grandest British car-maker, Rolls-Royce, is now owned by Germans), dance to international beats and play computer games designed in Seattle or Tokyo. In this new world neither geography nor history, religion nor politics exerts the influence it once did. And as external fashions have changed in the last half-century, so too have the internal certainties. The Second World War, the time of Brief Encounter and In Which We Serve, was the last extended period when we could say with any confidence that the impression of England matched the reality.


pages: 323 words: 95,939

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

No matter how well they write their programs, and no matter how powerful the computers they use, the most important factor in bringing algorithms up to speed is a better physical location on the network. The physical distance of a brokerage house’s computers to the computers executing the trades makes a difference in how fast the algorithm can read and respond to market activity. As former game designer Kevin Slavin has pointed out in his talks and articles,29 while we may think of the Internet as a distributed and nonlocal phenomenon, you can be closer or farther from it depending on how much cable there is between you and its biggest nodes. In New York, this mother node is fittingly located at the old Western Union Building on 60 Hudson Street.


pages: 349 words: 95,972

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford

affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche

That means a compromise between bonding and bridging—a willingness to allow a degree of messiness into a tidy team. This chapter is all about why getting the best of both approaches can prove very challenging indeed. • • • If we’re looking for a petri dish to examine the nature of teamwork in the twenty-first century, a computer game isn’t a bad candidate. Game design requires a marriage of skills—visual, audio, and narrative artists work with skilled software engineers alongside commercial functions such as finance and marketing. The technical possibilities are always changing, and for many games it is important to take full advantage of the very latest technology.


pages: 416 words: 100,130

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Christakis, “A New, More Rigorous Study Confirms: The More You Use Facebook, the Worse You Feel,” Harvard Business Review, April 10, 2017. Chapter 7: The Participation Premium “traditional terrestrial options”: Chris Roberts, “Letter from the Chairman,” Roberts Space Industries, November 27, 2014. www.robertsspaceindustries.com. The creator of the classic: Wolff Bachner, “Chris Roberts Returns to Game Design: Unveils ‘Star Citizen’ at GDC,” Inquisitr, October 11, 2012. “a living, breathing science fiction”: “About the Game,” July 2017. www.robertsspaceindustries.com. In an hour-long presentation: Cloud Imperium, “Legendary Designer Chris Roberts Making Re-entry into PC Gaming Stratosphere with Star Citizen from Cloud Imperium,” Business Wire, October 10, 2012.


pages: 305 words: 101,743

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, financial independence, game design, Jeff Bezos, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Norman Mailer, obamacare, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QR code, rent control, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, TikTok, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, wage slave, white picket fence

(It went viral, as intended, but not in the way TPUSA wanted—the protest was uniformly roasted, with one Twitter user slapping the logo of the porn site Brazzers on a photo of the diaper boy, and the Kent State TPUSA campus coordinator resigned.) It has also been infinitely more consequential, beginning in 2014, with a campaign that became a template for right-wing internet-political action, when a large group of young misogynists came together in the event now known as Gamergate. The issue at hand was, ostensibly, a female game designer perceived to be sleeping with a journalist for favorable coverage. She, along with a set of feminist game critics and writers, received an onslaught of rape threats, death threats, and other forms of harassment, all concealed under the banner of free speech and “ethics in games journalism.” The Gamergaters—estimated by Deadspin to number around ten thousand people—would mostly deny this harassment, either parroting in bad faith or fooling themselves into believing the argument that Gamergate was actually about noble ideals.


pages: 342 words: 101,370

Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut by Nicholas Schmidle

Apollo 11, bitcoin, Boeing 737 MAX, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, crew resource management, crewed spaceflight, D. B. Cooper, Dennis Tito, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, game design, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, overview effect, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, time dilation, trade route, twin studies, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

For those with means and the right risk appetite there was nothing else like it; a Himalayan expedition seemed almost pedestrian by comparison. Moreover, the Russians proved you could charge whatever you wanted. On top of the $12 million, they billed the Japanese TV station $100,000 per hour for the assistance their cosmonauts gave the reporter.These costs proved too much for some: Tito inherited his ticket from an American video game designer who lost his shirt when the dot-com bubble burst; a member of the boy band ’N Sync forfeited his reservation when he couldn’t come up with a deposit. NASA found this all repulsive. When Tito flew to Houston to train with his two Russian companions, NASA officials barred him from entering the facility and later threatened to bill him for disrupting space station operations—though, truthfully, Tito was less disruptive and more meditative, gazing during his trip at the spectacular views out the window and listening to opera on his headphones.


pages: 328 words: 96,678

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

In early 2022, the Fed and other central banks finally signaled that rising inflation required much tighter monetary policy. That yanked the punch bowl. Asset prices sank in response to interest rate hikes aimed at taming inflation. When monetary restraints fanned fears of a recession, prices for risk assets slid further. Macroeconomists are not game designers, although it might look that way. We build models on a grand scale, using imaginary concepts that aggregate all the factors that drive production and consumption, also known as supply and demand. We nudge variables like prices, taxes, wages, and exchange rates to see what happens. We seek combinations that promote growth while dodging calamities that arise from flawed judgment and bad luck.


pages: 375 words: 102,166

The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality by Kathryn Paige Harden

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, classic study, clean water, combinatorial explosion, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, desegregation, double helix, epigenetics, game design, George Floyd, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Scientific racism, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, twin studies, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Americans, on the whole, are more inequality-accepting than are Norwegians, and political conservatives are more inequality-accepting than political liberals. But across the board, people are more willing to redistribute to equalize outcomes due to luck than redistribute inequalities stemming from factors considered under a person’s control. In economic games designed to measure people’s distributional preferences, and in surveys about fair and unfair inequalities, the types of luck that produce unfair inequalities are outside events that happen to a person and that constrain the person’s overall control over their social and economic outcomes. The experimenter set a low price on your work.


pages: 394 words: 110,352

The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation by Jono Bacon

barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), collaborative editing, crowdsourcing, Debian, DevOps, digital divide, digital rights, do what you love, do-ocracy, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, Guido van Rossum, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jono Bacon, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, openstreetmap, Richard Stallman, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, software as a service, Stephen Fry, telemarketer, the long tail, union organizing, VA Linux, web application

Of course, there were attempts at alternatives: light guns, dance mats, plastic guitars and drums. Most still had the assumed knowledge that the player controlled the action by pressing buttons. These alternative approaches were never a core part of the systems. They were novelty add-ons that often had limited appeal. The Wii changed all of that. Shigeru Miyamoto, a renowned video game designer and cocreator of many games, including Super Mario Brothers, Donkey Kong, and The Legend of Zelda, sat down with other designers and questioned whether they should be limited to the existing norms of the game interface. The result was one of the most significant developments in video game history: the Wii Remote, which allowed gamers to control the action by moving the unit itself.

They will want to share it with people who might not be able to see it if it just exists inside a game world. Getting these creations out of the game and onto the Web allows people to share far more easily, in places where they like to hang out with their non-LittleBigPlanet friends. For us, LBP.me was our solution, and we very much consider it an extended part of the game design itself. We’re always watching and learning, and iterating on our designs as the community evolves, so we can build a better and more enjoyable experience, and everything we have learned will be applied to our future projects. Personally, I’ve learned that a simple game about playing, creating, and sharing can have some wonderful effects on people’s lives, and that I’m very lucky to have worked with a community of lovely, creative people who seem to be able to blow my mind on an almost daily basis!


pages: 416 words: 108,370

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, always be closing, augmented reality, Clayton Christensen, data science, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, hindsight bias, hype cycle, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, information trail, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Roose, Kodak vs Instagram, linear programming, lock screen, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, subscription business, TED Talk, telemarketer, the medium is the message, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, women in the workforce

It means that “number one bestseller” is a universally alluring descriptor. It conflates “most read article” with most interesting article. It means you’re drawn to videos with more YouTube plays or Facebook likes. The truism even encourages some publishers and authors to artificially inflate book sales to get them on the bestseller lists or pushes game designers to fictitiously inflate download counts to appear in demand. Manipulating popularity can work. But consumers are not infinitely clueless. There is a limit to how much you can trick people into liking something. First, as song-testing sites from the first chapter show, you can put lipstick on a dead pig, but that’s not the same as creating a market for it.


pages: 426 words: 105,423

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, call centre, clean water, digital nomad, Donald Trump, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, fixed income, follow your passion, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, global village, Iridium satellite, knowledge worker, language acquisition, late fees, lateral thinking, Maui Hawaii, oil shock, paper trading, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, passive income, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, remote working, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

Prosoundeffects.com, launched in January of 2005 after one week of sales testing on eBay, was designed to do one thing: give Doug lots of cash with minimal time investment. This brings us back to his business inbox in 2006. There are 10 orders for sound libraries, CDs that film producers, musicians, video game designers, and other audio professionals use to add hard-to-find sounds—whether the purr of a lemur or an exotic instrument—to their own creations. These are Doug’s products, but he doesn’t own them, as that would require physical inventory and upfront cash. His business model is more elegant than that.


pages: 388 words: 106,138

The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory by John Seabrook

AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, financial independence, game design, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the long tail, trade route

Baby One More Time.” 8 | “I Want It That Way” EVEN BEFORE HIS health began to decline, Denniz PoP had been getting bored. By 1997, Cheironite Per Magnusson says, “I think Denniz was tired of the pop music. So he started working on his own computer games. If he had lived, I think he would have become a game designer or something like that.” He adds, “He’d sit there, and smoke, and turn a knob—it seemed like nothing was going on.” Denniz did put some work into an epic he called The Cheiron Saga, a sort of Wagnerian disco opera, which he never finished. Denniz hadn’t been feeling well for some time. Kristian Lundin recalls, “In 1997, I noticed he was having trouble swallowing.


pages: 452 words: 110,488

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead by David Callahan

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, business cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, East Village, eat what you kill, fixed income, forensic accounting, full employment, game design, greed is good, high batting average, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, job satisfaction, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, PalmPilot, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent stabilization, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

For young people, though, the biggest social-health story of the 1990s was the onslaught of a virulent new strain of consumerism. The disease begins earlier and earlier with children these days, and it just gets worse. Parents complain endlessly about pressures from their kids to keep up with the Johnnies at the locker next door—with expensive video games, designer-label clothing, digital music players (to play pirated music), home computers, and cell phones. "Over the past 10 years, more people have come to think of themselves as having their identities shaped by their consumer goods," commented Alissa Quart, author of Branded, a book about consumerism among teenagers.


pages: 407 words: 109,653

Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing by Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman

Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Edward Glaeser, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, FedEx blackjack story, Ford Model T, game design, industrial cluster, Jean Tirole, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, phenotype, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, school choice, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, work culture , zero-sum game

Updegraff, “Biobehavioral Responses to Stress in Females: Tend-and-Befriend, Not Fight-or-Flight,” Psychological Review, vol. 107(3), pp. 411–429 (2000) Testosterone Responds When You Care about the Outcome / Testosterone in Home Field Advantage: Bateman, Chris, & Lennart E. Nacke, “The Neurobiology of Play,” Paper Presentation at Futureplay ’10 Proceedings of the International Academic Conference on the Future of Game Design and Technology, New York (2010) Carré, Justin, Correspondence with Authors (2012) Carré, Justin, Interviews with Authors (2012) Carré, Justin M., “No Place Like Home: Testosterone Responses to Victory Depend on Game Location,” American Journal of Human Biology, vol. 21(3), pp. 392–394 (2009) Carré, Justin, Cameron Muir, Joey Belanger, & Susan K.


pages: 382 words: 105,819

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

A few industry people and journalists I encountered appeared to be enjoying a moment of schadenfreude. Even after the first salvo of press appearances by Zuck and Sheryl, the pressure on Facebook continued to grow. On March 21, a Facebook user filed a proposed class action lawsuit in San Jose, California. That same day, this showed up on Twitter: On March 22, a game designer by the name of Ian Bogost published a piece in The Atlantic titled, “My Cow Game Extracted Your Facebook Data.” For a spell during 2010 and 2011, I was a virtual rancher of clickable cattle on Facebook. . . . Facebook’s IPO hadn’t yet taken place, and its service was still fun to use—although it was littered with requests and demands from social games, like FarmVille and Pet Society.


pages: 383 words: 105,021

Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Fred Kaplan

air gap, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, computer age, data acquisition, drone strike, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, game design, hiring and firing, index card, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Morris worm, national security letter, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, packet switching, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stuxnet, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Wargames Reagan, Y2K, zero day

His frustration had two layers: he wanted the military—all three of the main services, as well as the Pentagon’s civilian leadership—to know how good his guys were at hacking the adversaries’ networks; and he wanted them to know how wide open their own networks were to hacking by the same adversaries. As the new director of the NSA, he was determined to use the job to demonstrate just how good and how bad these things were. * * * Each year, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff held an exercise called Eligible Receiver—a simulation or war game designed to highlight some threat or opportunity on the horizon. One recent exercise had focused on the danger of biological weapons. Minihan wanted the next one to test the vulnerability of the U.S. military’s networks to a cyber attack. The most dramatic way to do this, he proposed, was to launch a real attack on those networks by a team of SIGINT specialists at the NSA.


pages: 406 words: 109,794

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, Checklist Manifesto, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deliberate practice, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, functional fixedness, game design, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, knowledge economy, language acquisition, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, messenger bag, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, multi-armed bandit, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, precision agriculture, prediction markets, premature optimization, pre–internet, random walk, randomized controlled trial, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, young professional

Sculptor Rachel Whiteread achieved a feat akin to Geim’s Ig Nobel/Nobel double: she was the first woman ever to win the Turner Prize—a British award for the best artistic production of the year—and also the “Anti-Turner Prizer” for the worst British artist. And she won them in the same year. When I was researching the history of video games to write about Nintendo, I learned that a now-psychotherapist named Howard Scott Warshaw was once an Atari video game designer who used extremely constrained technology in a resourceful way to make the sci-fi game Yar’s Revenge. It was the bestselling original title for Atari’s 2600 console during the early-1980s when Atari became the fastest-growing company in U.S. history. The very same year, Warshaw designed the Atari adaptation of the film E.T.


pages: 375 words: 105,067

Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry by Helaine Olen

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, game design, greed is good, high net worth, impulse control, income inequality, index fund, John Bogle, Kevin Roose, London Whale, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage debt, multilevel marketing, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, post-work, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stocks for the long run, The 4% rule, too big to fail, transaction costs, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, wage slave, women in the workforce, working poor, éminence grise

Struthers did not mention that Bank of America executives might also have benefitted from a class on financial literacy before they decided to buy Countrywide Financial Corp. in 2008 without realizing the mortgage origination firm was in such desperate financial trouble that it could have caused BofA’s collapse. Needless to say, even the most unironic efforts rarely involve any “education” that might threaten the financial model of the corporate sponsor. Take Visa’s Financial Football, a computer game designed to teach high schoolers and adults the intricacies of personal finance. According to Visa spokesman Jason Alderman, the curriculum “emphasize(s) that credit is a terrific tool…you need to stop and think, ‘How am I paying for this item today? Does it make sense? What is the best payment choice to make?’”


pages: 519 words: 104,396

Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (And How to Take Advantage of It) by William Poundstone

availability heuristic, behavioural economics, book value, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, equal pay for equal work, experimental economics, experimental subject, feminist movement, game design, German hyperinflation, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, index card, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, Linda problem, loss aversion, market bubble, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, new economy, no-fly zone, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Potemkin village, power law, price anchoring, price discrimination, psychological pricing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, rolodex, social intelligence, starchitect, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, ultimatum game, working poor

To be “rational” would be to deny what he felt inside. Like a perverse Galileo, he knew his valuations still moved. Eleven The Best Odds in Vegas “Roulette Bet May Decide Man’s Fate,” ran a curious headline in the March 2, 1969, Las Vegas Review-Journal. A photo showed the avuncular Ward Edwards playing a game “designed by scientists to probe what makes man tick.” A 25-cent bet on a Las Vegas roulette table could be a factor in the greatest decision ever to confront mankind. That would be the unimaginably catastrophic decision to plunge the world into nuclear war. Some place, at some time, as long as a human being is able to poise his finger over a nuclear button, that is a possibility.


pages: 350 words: 107,834

Halting State by Charles Stross

augmented reality, book value, Boris Johnson, call centre, forensic accounting, game design, Google Earth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, impulse control, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, Ken Thompson, lifelogging, Necker cube, no-fly zone, operational security, Potemkin village, RFID, Schrödinger's Cat, Vernor Vinge, zero day

“Content is, well, the map of the dungeon, location of treasure, where the monsters live, what the wallpaper looks like. Any game is full of the stuff, and it’s expensive to do by hand—you need tile illustrators, narrators, musicians, programmers, a whole bunch of skills. So over the past couple of decades the industry’s put a lot of effort into procedural game design—AI tools that can design a virtual-reality environment on the fly for players to explore. It’s not just multiplayer games like Avalon Four; there’s been work on ARG—artificial reality games—that can take a set of starting hints and design a conspiracy to drop on top of the players. You know, generate scripts for phone calls, order up custom gadgets to be planted at certain locations, hire actors…?”


pages: 502 words: 107,510

Natural Language Annotation for Machine Learning by James Pustejovsky, Amber Stubbs

Amazon Mechanical Turk, bioinformatics, cloud computing, computer vision, crowdsourcing, easy for humans, difficult for computers, finite state, Free Software Foundation, game design, information retrieval, iterative process, language acquisition, machine readable, machine translation, natural language processing, pattern recognition, performance metric, power law, sentiment analysis, social web, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, text mining

As with any project, it will take a few tries to get a HIT design that gets you the annotation you need in the degree of detail you want. Games with a Purpose (GWAP) Fortunately, other ways of crowdsourcing data also exist. One widely talked about method is that of using “games with a purpose”—essentially, computer games designed to make an annotation task fun so that people will do it voluntarily. A few successful annotation games are: Phrase Detective Purpose: Collect information about coreference relations in text. This game asks players to examine a short piece of text, with a section of the text (a word or phrase) highlighted in orange.


pages: 334 words: 104,382

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits

And as Quinn and Sarkeesian found out, they don’t limit their attacks and threats to a single individual. They will threaten family members, including children. They will also instantly direct their bile toward anyone who comes to the target’s defense. That is where Brianna Wu enters the story. About two months after Gjoni’s post, Wu, an established game designer, spoke out against the #Gamergate campaign, sarcastically tweeting a meme suggesting that the trolls were saving everyone from an “apocalyptic future” where women might have slightly more influence in the industry. That’s when all hell broke loose. Shortly after responding to the trolls on Twitter, Wu was inundated with violent, disturbing threats on her life.


pages: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

So I split the cost with him, and arranged for him to pay off his half with allowance money, extra chores, and whatever he could make on his lemonade stand. Suffice it to say, FIFA Mobile has since been removed from his phone. “Persuasive” Technology As a mother, I was horrified by this whole incident. As a business journalist, I was fascinated. How, I wondered, was this game designed to be so utterly irresistible as to turn my normally well-behaved and well-adjusted son into a veritable FIFA Mobile junkie? Was it the unique talent of one brilliant game maker? Dumb luck? Or was it something else entirely? It was indeed something else—a very big and lucrative something.


The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot by Yolande Strengers, Jenny Kennedy

active measures, Amazon Robotics, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, cloud computing, cognitive load, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, data science, deepfake, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, game design, gender pay gap, Grace Hopper, hive mind, Ian Bogost, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, Masayoshi Son, Milgram experiment, Minecraft, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Turing test, Wall-E, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

Apple’s guidelines for Siri’s programming saw her responses explicitly rewritten to ensure she would say that she is in favor of “equality,” while never directly taking a stance on feminism. Explaining the decision, the guidelines state that “Siri should be guarded when dealing with potentially controversial content.”82 Feminism is indeed a controversial topic, especially when smart wives are involved. As professor of interactive computing and game designer Ian Bogost observes in his critique of Alexa’s feminist declaration, “It’s disingenuous to celebrate building ‘feminism’ into a product after giving a robot servant a woman’s voice.”83 Bergen makes a similar point about Siri, who she argues is “programmed to play the part of a neoliberal commodity.”


Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

, through “loot boxes” containing unknown rewards).118 Variable rate reinforcement is most effective at shaping a steady increase in desirable behaviour, and it has effects on the release of dopamine, another hormone that plays an essential physiological role in reward-motivated behaviour.119 Game designers use variable rate reinforcement to entice players to continue playing the game repeatedly. The higher- and lower-level functions of social media outlined in the previous chapter are, as always, significant. While the player is moving through the game, slowly getting addicted, the game’s application learns more and more about the player’s device, interests, movements, and other factors.


pages: 414 words: 109,622

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

SARA SABOUR, the Iran-born researcher who worked on “capsule networks” alongside Geoff Hinton at the Google lab in Toronto. ERIC SCHMIDT, chairman. AT DEEPMIND ALEX GRAVES, the Scottish researcher who built a system that could write in longhand. DEMIS HASSABIS, the British chess prodigy, game designer, and neuroscientist who founded DeepMind, a London AI start-up that would grow into the world’s most celebrated AI lab. KORAY KAVUKCUOGLU, the Turkish researcher who oversaw the lab’s software code. SHANE LEGG, the New Zealander who founded DeepMind alongside Demis Hassabis, intent on building machines that could do anything the brain could do—even as he worried about the dangers this could bring.


pages: 1,028 words: 267,392

Wanderers: A Novel by Chuck Wendig

Black Swan, Boston Dynamics, centre right, citizen journalism, clean water, Columbine, coronavirus, crisis actor, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, fake news, game design, global pandemic, hallucination problem, hiring and firing, hive mind, Internet of things, job automation, Kickstarter, Lyft, Maui Hawaii, microaggression, oil shale / tar sands, private military company, quantum entanglement, RFID, satellite internet, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, supervolcano, tech bro, TED Talk, uber lyft, white picket fence

Suddenly, the conversation attracted others—shepherds were like that, sometimes. They were islands, until they weren’t. Any moment of connection, any hope to communicate with one another and commiserate on the craziness of everything was a moment nobody wanted to waste. Three other shepherds popped around them—Lucy Chao, plus Kenny Barnes (whose game-designer brother Keith was a walker) and Hayley Levine (who was here watching over a cousin, Jamie-Beth). Next came talking about the storm, about the CDC, about how they wanted the president to say more, and then it dissolved into the standard talk of what this even was or where it came from (terrorists, the government, monkeys, invasive plants, God, the Devil, what about that comet).

“There’re things you need to know.” * * * — THEY SAT ON a park bench. Others passed on the far side of the street, looking over, giving Shana sad, awkward smiles. Nessie waved to them like she knew them. Shana knew them, too—or knew their faces. There walked Keith Barnes, brother to Kenny, some kind of game designer, if she remembered right. And Jamie-Beth Levine, hair in braids just as it was on the road, except now her eyes were alive and she was eating ice cream out of a dripping cone. Some faces she knew but had no names for except nicknames: Birthmark Girl, Surfer Dude, Mister Manypockets because his pants had, well, shitloads of pockets.


pages: 455 words: 116,578

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Checklist Manifesto, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, game design, haute couture, impulse control, index card, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, patient HM, pattern recognition, power law, randomized controlled trial, rolodex, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, telemarketer, Tenerife airport disaster, the strength of weak ties, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Walter Mischel

Soon, everyone from Shirley Temple to Clark Gable was bragging about their “Pepsodent smile.”2.4 By 1930, Pepsodent was sold in China, South Africa, Brazil, Germany, and almost anywhere else Hopkins could buy ads.2.5 A decade after the first Pepsodent campaign, pollsters found that toothbrushing had become a ritual for more than half the American population.2.6 Hopkins had helped establish toothbrushing as a daily activity. The secret to his success, Hopkins would later boast, was that he had found a certain kind of cue and reward that fueled a particular habit. It’s an alchemy so powerful that even today the basic principles are still used video game designers, food companies, hospitals, and millions of salesmen around the world. Eugene Pauly taught us about the habit loop, but it was Claude Hopkins that showed how new habits can be cultivated and grown. So what, exactly, did Hopkins do? He created a craving. And that craving, it turns out, is what makes cues and rewards work.


pages: 549 words: 116,200

With a Little Help by Cory Efram Doctorow, Jonathan Coulton, Russell Galen

autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, death of newspapers, don't be evil, game design, Google Earth, high net worth, lifelogging, lolcat, margin call, Mark Shuttleworth, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Ponzi scheme, reality distortion field, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, sensible shoes, skunkworks, Skype, traffic fines, traveling salesman, Turing test, urban planning, Y2K

Bruce is one of my idols -- and he's now a friend and colleague, and my daughter's godfather, besides. We'd corresponded, sat on panels together, but this, this was levelling up. It was a hell of a workshop, and it was also where I met Raph Koster, now also a good friend (as well as an astute and inspiring game designer and theorist). 1440 I'd admired a play by Dewayne Hendricks to use Indian land in the USA to test out cognitive radio applications, on the basis that these sovereign territories were not under FCC jurisdiction. He'd found various tribal leaders who were excited by the idea. Cognitive radio may just be the most radical, game-changing technology on our immediate horizon -- if it works. 1441 In the meantime, I couldn't shake my memories of the brutal standoff at Oka, in Quebec.


pages: 380 words: 118,675

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, buy and hold, call centre, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, deal flow, Douglas Hofstadter, drop ship, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, fulfillment center, game design, housing crisis, invention of movable type, inventory management, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Larry Ellison, late fees, loose coupling, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Rodney Brooks, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Skype, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, zero-sum game

Collins briefed Amazon executives on his seminal management book before its publication. Companies must confront the brutal facts of their business, find out what they are uniquely good at, and master their flywheel, in which each part of the business reinforces and accelerates the other parts. Creation: Life and How to Make It, by Steve Grand (2001). A video-game designer argues that intelligent systems can be created from the bottom up if one devises a set of primitive building blocks. The book was influential in the creation of Amazon Web Services, or AWS, the service that popularized the notion of the cloud. The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business, by Clayton M.


pages: 377 words: 115,122

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, emotional labour, game design, hive mind, index card, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, twin studies, Walter Mischel, web application, white flight

Scientists now know that the brain is incapable of paying attention to two things at the same time. What looks like multitasking is really switching back and forth between multiple tasks, which reduces productivity and increases mistakes by up to 50 percent. Many introverts seem to know these things instinctively, and resist being herded together. Backbone Entertainment, a video game design company in Oakland, California, initially used an open office plan but found that their game developers, many of whom were introverts, were unhappy. “It was one big warehouse space, with just tables, no walls, and everyone could see each other,” recalls Mike Mika, the former creative director. “We switched over to cubicles and were worried about it—you’d think in a creative environment that people would hate that.


The Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick by Jonathan Littman

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, centre right, computer age, disinformation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, information security, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mitch Kapor, power law, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, telemarketer

The ancient general was principally known for advocating deception ("war is based upon deception") and avoiding hostilities: "It is best to win without fighting." ■ ■ ■ The fortunes of two hackers could not have taken more opposite turns. As Tsutomu Shimomura launched his new careers as pitchman, author, movie subject, and video game designer, Kevin Mitnick sat in a Southern county jail. Mitnick wrote to me nearly every week on yellow legal paper in longhand, bemoaning the lack of a word processor as he recounted the hardships of jail. He told me he had been attacked and robbed by two inmates and barely avoided fights with several others.


pages: 523 words: 112,185

Doing Data Science: Straight Talk From the Frontline by Cathy O'Neil, Rachel Schutt

Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, bike sharing, bioinformatics, computer vision, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, distributed generation, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Snowden, Emanuel Derman, fault tolerance, Filter Bubble, finite state, Firefox, game design, Google Glasses, index card, information retrieval, iterative process, John Harrison: Longitude, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, machine translation, Mars Rover, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, p-value, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, pull request, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, selection bias, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, statistical model, stochastic process, tacit knowledge, text mining, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

These would all be stored in timestamped event logs. You’d then need to process these logs down to a dataset with rows and columns, where each row was a user and each column was a feature. At this point, you shouldn’t be selective; you’re in the feature generation phase. So your data science team (game designers, software engineers, statisticians, and marketing folks) might sit down and brainstorm features. Here are some examples: Number of days the user visited in the first month Amount of time until second visit Number of points on day for (this would be 30 separate features) Total number of points in first month (sum of the other features) Did user fill out Chasing Dragons profile (binary 1 or 0) Age and gender of user Screen size of device Use your imagination and come up with as many features as possible.


pages: 426 words: 117,775

The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child by Morgan G. Ames

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Benjamin Mako Hill, British Empire, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, clean water, commoditize, computer age, digital divide, digital rights, Evgeny Morozov, fail fast, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, hype cycle, informal economy, Internet of things, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Minecraft, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, SimCity, smart cities, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Hackers Conference, Travis Kalanick

See Programme for International Student Assessment test Plan Ceibal, 240n27 laptop support staff in, dependence on, 102, 245n68 maintenance in, 90 Paraguay Educa compared with, 79–81, 107, 216 popularity of, 107, 246n78 success of, evaluating, 106–107 teacher training of, 244n60 XO laptops in, breakage and repair of, 89–90, 244n57 Play, 133 in OLPC core principles, 49–50 in Paraguay Educa, 110–111, 114, 119–125, 128–129, 131 XO laptop and, 54–59, 71–72, 114, 234n32, 234n34, 235n41 PlayStation, 112, 246n4 Pornography, 125–127, 135 Practice, networks of, 160 Privatized education, 187–189 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, 203 Programming Anglocentrism in, 157–161 Hour of Code, 187–188 Logo, 24–27, 167, 177, 225nn14–15 Lua, 77, 160, 163 Paraguay Educa and, 77, 139–140, 153, 157–159, 162–163, 239nn17–18 Proteus of machines, 29, 109, 111, 115 Python, 156–157, 236n59 Rebellion, 230n81 gender and, 28–29, 38–40, 230n73 in hacker ethic, 28–29, 37–41, 46 Reguetón (reggaeton), 119, 124, 143 Religion Catholicism, in Paraguay, 80, 196, 239n20, 241n39 charisma and, 8–9, 189–190 fetishism and, 223n42 technology and, 10, 223n44 Remotely Global (Ferguson), 161–162 Repair by children, 62–63 limits of, 115–118, 118f in Paraguay Educa, breakage and, 88–91, 111, 115–118, 118f, 214–215, 243n54, 247n10 in Plan Ceibal, breakage and, 89–90, 244n57 social class and, 17, 117–118 urban-rural divide in, 116–117, 118f Research methods, 177, 251n19 Resnick, Mitch, 27, 56, 186 Rodríguez Alcalá, Cecilia, 74 Rommes, Els, 71 Rosner, Daniela, 187 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 228n42 Routinization, 11–12 Rurality breakage and repair divide of, 116–117, 118f consumption and, 113 Guaraní language and, 157 in Paraguay Educa educational assessment, 206–207 Rwanda, 76, 238n12 Scaffolding, 160 connected learning and, 155 families providing, in Paraguay Educa, 144, 150–151, 153–155 individualism and, 163 Schoolers, as opposed to yearners, 70, 115 Schools Bender on OLPC and, 35–36, 47–48 Catholicism and Paraguayan, 81, 241n39 charter, 188, 252n7 factory model of, 36–37, 60, 229n69, 230n73 fourth-grade classroom in Paraguayan, 83–85, 91–92, 98–99, 102 funding of Paraguayan, 80, 241n34 Papert criticizing, 34–36, 40–41, 229n70 Phase I and Phase II, assessing, 202, 204–207, 255n1 primary, Paraguayan, 81–83 reconstruction of, 36, 229n67 rhetoric opposing, 34–36, 229nn67–68 yearner and, 36, 40 Science and technology studies (STS) agency in, 9, 19 boundary object in, 222n36 coproduction in, 9, 223n39 on performativity, 179 technological determinism critiqued by, 10 Scratch, 27, 56 games designed with, 141–142, 153 gender and, 145–147 Papert influence on, 186 in Paraguay Educa, 140–142, 145–146, 150–151, 153 Scratch (cont.) popularity of, 186–187 Scratch@MIT conference, 145 Scratchero/a, 145, 147–148 Scripting the user, 70–71 Segal, Howard, 192 Self-taught learner, 64–66, 236n67 Senegal Logo project, 25–27, 225n15 Silicon Valley, 178–179, 188–189 Sims, Christo, 13 Sistema Nacional de Evaluación del Proceso Educativo (SNEPE), 202–203 Smartphone, 146, 244n46 SNEPE.


pages: 370 words: 112,809

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future by Orly Lobel

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital map, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Grace Hopper, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, iterative process, job automation, Lao Tzu, large language model, lockdown, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, microaggression, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, occupational segregation, old-boy network, OpenAI, openstreetmap, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, randomized controlled trial, remote working, risk tolerance, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, work culture , you are the product

Organized online attacks exist, quite simply, to maintain the status quo, and women—especially women of color, queer women, and trans women—are more susceptible to online harassment. During the controversy known as “Gamergate,” which began in 2014, a group of women and non-binary gamers, including game designer Zoë Quinn, were “doxed,” which means publicly posting “dox” (as in documents) to the web with private information about the victim, such as their home address, telephone number, credit card information, or a relative’s personal information. These gamers received hate mail, threats of rape, and death threats after they criticized the male-dominated culture of gaming.


pages: 398 words: 120,801

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, airport security, Bayesian statistics, Berlin Wall, citizen journalism, Firefox, game design, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, mail merge, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Thomas Bayes, web of trust, zero day

MIT, of course, is one of the legendary origin nodes for global nerd culture, and the campus bookstore lives up to the incredible expectations I had when I first set foot in it. In addition to the wonderful titles published by the MIT press, the bookshop is a tour through the most exciting high-tech publications in the world, from hacker zines like 2600 to fat academic anthologies on video-game design. This is one of those stores where I have to ask them to ship my purchases home because they don't fit in my suitcase.]] [[MIT Press Bookstore http://web.mit.edu/bookstore/www/ Building E38, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA USA 02139-4307 +1 617 253 5249]] Here's the email that went out at 7AM the next day, while Ange and I were spray-painting VAMP-MOB CIVIC CENTER -> -> at strategic locations around town


pages: 755 words: 121,290

Statistics hacks by Bruce Frey

Bayesian statistics, Berlin Wall, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, G4S, game design, Hacker Ethic, index card, Linda problem, Milgram experiment, Monty Hall problem, p-value, place-making, reshoring, RFID, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, statistical model, sugar pill, systematic bias, Thomas Bayes

He is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with an Sc.B. and an M.Eng. in computer science and computer engineering. Joe is an unapologetic Yankees fan, but he appreciates any good baseball game. Joe lives in Silicon Valley with his wife, two cats, and a DirecTV satellite dish. Ron Hale-Evans is a writer, thinker, and game designer who earns his daily sandwich with frequent gigs as a technical writer. He has a Bachelor's degree in Psychology from Yale, with a minor in Philosophy. Thinking a lot about thinking led him to create the Mentat Wiki (http://www.ludism.org/mentat), which led to his recent book, Mind Performance Hacks (O'Reilly).


Multicultural Cities: Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles by Mohammed Abdul Qadeer

affirmative action, business cycle, call centre, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, game design, gentrification, ghettoisation, global village, immigration reform, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, market bubble, McMansion, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, place-making, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional

These forces are polarizing cities’ job markets into circuits of high-paying professional and 122 Multicultural Cities managerial occupations, on the one hand, and low-paid service and manufacturing jobs, on the other.80 This split job market is what confronts immigrants and their ethnic children. They are further finding that a lot of opportunities are turning into contractual self-employment, many of which turn into ethnic niches, for example, Latino limo drivers in New York and Taiwanese computer-game designers in Los Angeles. The economic base of cities is increasingly determined by their infrastructure, educational and research institutions, community services, and cultural life. The talent and creativity of a city’s workforce is its resource base. Richard Florida may be overplaying the role of the creative class in economic growth, but the education, skill, and diversity of a city’s population are undoubtedly strong determinants of economic prosperity.81 Cultural pluralism and its associated ethnic diversity are marks of cosmopolitanism that attract global capital and talent.


pages: 404 words: 124,705

The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter by Susan Pinker

assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, facts on the ground, fixed-gear, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, indoor plumbing, intentional community, invisible hand, Kickstarter, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, neurotypical, Occupy movement, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), place-making, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social contagion, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, tontine, Tony Hsieh, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning, Yogi Berra

Compared to healthy teens their own age and sex, the Internet addicts’ brain images revealed less density in areas related to self-awareness, error detection, and self-control.68 The corresponding impairments to thinking and attention suggest why dreadful tragedies have occurred. One British twenty-year-old died of a blood clot that developed during the twelve hours he spent immobilized while playing Xbox games, shortly before he was about to enter university to study game design. Then there was the appalling case of a three-year-old girl who starved to death when her twenty-something-year-old mother became so entranced by the hugely popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft that she forgot to feed her. Sometimes, though, the impact of computer game addiction isn’t dangerous, it’s just bizarre.


pages: 518 words: 128,324

Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides's Trap by Graham Allison

9 dash line, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, escalation ladder, facts on the ground, false flag, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, game design, George Santayana, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, industrial robot, Internet of things, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, long peace, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, one-China policy, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, UNCLOS, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

The United States temporarily controlled the islands after World War II, but in the early 1970s returned them to Japan, which had claimed them since the nineteenth century. But in the 1970s, China also claimed sovereignty over the islands. Chinese ships regularly pass through these waters, raising tensions between Beijing and Tokyo and risking a collision that could set off a chain reaction. Consider a scenario that provided the story line for a recent war game designed by the RAND Corporation.30 A group of Japanese ultranationalists sets sail for the Senkakus in small civilian watercraft. On social media, they explain they are headed for Kuba Jima, one of the smaller islands, which they intend to claim and occupy on behalf of Japan. They land and begin building unidentified structures.


pages: 411 words: 140,110

Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery by Scott Kelly, Margaret Lazarus Dean

Apollo 11, clean water, dark matter, game design, inventory management, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, Skype, space junk, the scientific method, traumatic brain injury, twin studies, Virgin Galactic, Y2K

Astronauts have been bringing instruments to space for decades—at least as far back as 1965, when astronauts played “Jingle Bells” on the harmonica. As far as I know, Kjell is the first bagpiper in space. “Sorry, did I wake you?” says Kjell. “No, it’s great,” I said. “Play anytime you like.” Today, Gennady, Misha, and I are moving a Soyuz, the one Gennady will go home in, to the aft of ISS in a complex shell game designed to most efficiently utilize the docking ports. Gennady could move the Soyuz by himself, but Misha and I must come along for the ride because this Soyuz is our lifeboat, and once it undocks it’s never guaranteed we will be able to get back aboard the station. On Earth, moving the Soyuz would be as simple as reparking a car.


pages: 409 words: 138,088

Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth by Andrew Smith

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, game design, Gene Kranz, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, overview effect, pensions crisis, Ronald Reagan

There are all sorts of organizations planning all kinds of more or less extravagant projects. Some are run by billionaires such as the hotelier Bob Bigelow, who’s spending five hundred million of his own dollars on manufacturing an inflatable space hotel in the desert outside Las Vegas, while others, like Armadillo Aerospace, run by the über-computer-game-designer John Carmack, coauthor of the mega-selling Quake and Doom series, are part of an expensive race to develop the first low-cost spaceships. The one problem they share in 2002 is NASA, and behind NASA the federal government and its tight regulations. And so it was that after meeting Myers, I turned left off Sunset, went up the hill past Mulholland Drive and down to Studio City, where just off Ventura Boulevard I found the offices of the Space Frontier Foundation and Rick Tumlinson.


pages: 455 words: 133,719

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte

8-hour work day, affirmative action, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deliberate practice, desegregation, DevOps, East Village, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, game design, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, machine readable, meta-analysis, new economy, profit maximization, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Zipcar, éminence grise

Judi Hand, phone interview with author, December 13, 2011. 13. Marcee Harris-Schwartz, flex strategy adviser for BDO, phone interview with author, March 20, 2012. 14. Schor, Overworked American, 51. 15. Robinson, “Bring Back the 40-Hour Work Week.” Robinson based some of her conclusions on a white paper written by her computer game designer husband, Evan Robinson: “Why Crunch Modes Doesn’t Work: Six Lessons,” International Game Developers Association, www.igda.org/why-crunch-modes-doesnt-work-six-lessons. 16. Christopher P. Landrigan et al., “Effect of Reducing Interns’ Work Hours on Serious Medical Errors in Intensive Care Units,” New England Journal of Medicine 351 (2004): 1838–48, doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa041406. 17.


pages: 493 words: 136,235

Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves by Matthew Sweet

Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, computer age, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, game design, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Skype, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

“Don’t get freaked out by anything,” he said, “but I don’t want to create conditions which are not healthy for one or two individuals in the group here. I’m going to give you the worst part of the thing as well as the best so that there’s no question in your mind that I’ve given the whole scoop. We are now in the second phase of a psy-war game designed by the CIA, that is, a psychological warfare game conducted on a scale of four continents.” Everybody, quite naturally, freaked out. The Central Intelligence Agency—the state body tasked with gathering, processing, and analyzing national security information from around the world—had, he explained, turned some of their most trusted colleagues into killers.


pages: 464 words: 127,283

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

As Jacob explained to me later, in August 2012 he had taken on a new role advising his peers in several other American cities on how to replicate the success of the Office of New Urban Mechanics. Philadelphia, the first to come knocking “actually called and asked ‘Can we just franchise what you guys do?’ ” Jacob proudly said.53 He was also working to help spread to other cities some of the projects kick-started in Boston. One such tool, Community PlanIt, was an online game designed by Eric Gordon, a visual and media arts professor at Emerson College, to enhance the value of community meetings. When we spoke, Community PlanIt had been successfully rolled out in two of Boston’s suburbs as well as Detroit. Although it was poised to go viral, can New Urban Mechanics survive a change of leadership at home in Boston?


pages: 544 words: 134,483

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars by Jo Marchant

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, complexity theory, Dava Sobel, Drosophila, Easter island, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, founder crops, game design, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, overview effect, Plato's cave, polynesian navigation, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, trade route

NASA astronaut Ron Garan, who orbited Earth in 2008, also saw our planet as “like a living, breathing organism,” with only a paper-thin atmosphere to shield everything on it “from death . . . from the harshness of space.” They often return determined to protect the environment. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Artyushkin felt “a strong sense of compassion and concern for the state of our planet and the effect humans are having on it . . . You are standing guard over the whole of our Earth.” After millionaire games designer Richard Garriott became the world’s sixth space tourist in 2008, he sold his SUVs, installed solar panels and began investing in green energy and electric cars. Others talk about the triviality of national boundaries and political conflicts, while astronauts of all nationalities emphasize that we are inhabitants of the same planet.


pages: 573 words: 142,376

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

* * * Shortly after he arrived in Sausalito, Kevin Kelly read Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, a book that portrayed three generations of “white hat” computer hackers (the good guys) ranging from the young programmers at MIT’s AI Lab decades earlier, through the Homebrew Computer Club, to the then new world of video game design. (The term hacker had only recently entered the national lexicon. It had been just a year since the movie WarGames had introduced the American public to the notion of network-accessible computers and bright young computer wizards.) Levy identified what he described as “the hacker ethic,” epitomized by the MIT students who, beginning in the 1950s, had “hacked” projects for the simple joy of designing computers and software as an end in itself.


pages: 642 words: 141,888

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

Stefan Molyneux, the Canadian self-help philosopher, joined in, posting a video rebutting The Young Turks. But Molyneux and the anti-social-justice-warrior (SJW) brigade were really waiting for a bigger spark to set things off: Gamergate. David Sherratt watched Gamergate spread, tracking the manufactured online controversy as best as he could. From what he grasped, a feminist video game designer had received fawning coverage from an ex-lover, and then YouTube videos and web forum posts about the scandal were attacked or entirely removed. That seemed wrong. Details were hard to follow, but the rage was not. Some women had criticized how female characters were depicted in video games, only deepening the ire of male gamers, furthering a perception of PC, feminist culture run amok: the social justice warriors had come to ruin video games.


pages: 439 words: 131,081

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

Many platforms initially considered gamers—tech obsessives who would surely pump hours into this digital interface, too—to be a core market. Thanks to a twist of commercial history, the gaming industry catered overwhelmingly to young men and boys of certain temperaments, which meant that social media platforms effectively did the same. But nothing about videogaming is inherently gendered or age-specific. The first games, designed by 1970s Silicon Valley shops like Atari, launched alongside personal computers and were presumed to have the same universal appeal. That changed with what the industry calls the North American video game crash. From 1983 to 1985, sales collapsed by 97 percent. Japanese firms sought to revive the market by rebranding this now-tarnished computer product, sold in electronics stores to adults, as something simpler: toys.


pages: 528 words: 146,459

Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional

One of the more celebrated stories about him is that, at the age of thirteen, when he needed some electronic components for a school project, he telephoned William Hewlett, the multimillionaire co-founder of Hewlett-Packard. Hewlett, won over by Jobs’s chutzpah, not only gave him the parts but offered him a part-time job with the company. Something of a loner, and not academically motivated, Jobs drifted in and out of college in the early 1970s before finding a well-paid niche as a games designer for Atari. An admirer of the Beatles, like them Jobs spent a year pursuing transcendental meditation in India and turned vegetarian. Jobs and Wozniak made a startling contrast: Wozniak was the archetypal electronics hobbyist with social skills to match, while Jobs affected an aura of inner wisdom, wore open-toed sandals, had long, lank hair, and sported a Ho Chi Minh beard.


pages: 527 words: 147,690

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

Facebook is a literal manifestation of the social factory. We do the work, by clicking, writing, posting, giving over our content, data, and attention. This work is diffused throughout our society, through our day jobs and entertainment and most basic communications. We might not even realize it’s work. The writer and game designer Ian Bogost describes this form of always-on but rarely acknowledged labor as “hyperemployment”: “We do tiny bits of work for Google, for Tumblr, for Twitter, all day and every day.” It’s enough to make one think that platform owners don’t do much at all. In digital serfdom, the digital lords appear to be little more than caretakers fattening themselves on our data production.


pages: 509 words: 147,998

The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School by Alexandra Robbins

airport security, Albert Einstein, Columbine, game design, hive mind, it's over 9,000, Larry Ellison, messenger bag, out of africa, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics

Emos might be in touch with their feelings and others’, and unafraid to show and empathize with those emotions. Scenes and indies often influence the cutting edge of cultural movements. Gamers, adept at problem solving, engage in ventures of successful “collective intelligence,” researchers say, because of their collaborative efforts, on forums, blogs, and wikis, to understand the games. As game designer and award-winning innovator Jane McGonigal has argued, these “collective knowledge–building” efforts could be applied to real-world issues. Freaks are often creative and perhaps the boldest of the cafeteria fringe because they display their distinctions openly with pride. Skaters and punks are frequently underestimated; their sense of artistry suggests the inventiveness they could bring to other endeavors.


pages: 467 words: 154,960

Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets by Michael W. Covel

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fiat currency, fixed income, Future Shock, game design, global macro, hindsight bias, housing crisis, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mental accounting, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Nick Leeson, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stephen Hawking, survivorship bias, systematic trading, Teledyne, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, value at risk, Vanguard fund, William of Occam, zero-sum game

Richard Dennis91 How did it start? Dennis ran classified ads saying “Trader Wanted’’ and was immediately overwhelmed by some 1,000 queries from would-be traders. He picked 20+ novices, trained them for two weeks, and then gave them money to trade for his firm. His turtle traders included two professional gamblers, a fantasy-game designer, an accountant, and a juggler. Jerry Parker, the former accountant who now manages more than $1 billion, was one of several who went on to become top money managers.90 Although Dennis appears to own the mantle of trend following teaching professor, there are many other trend followers, including Seykota, Dunn, and Henry, who have served as teachers to a number of successful traders.


pages: 339 words: 57,031

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”64 Throughout the conference, hackers discussed different ways they had managed this dilemma. Some, like Richard Greenblatt, an early and renowned MIT hacker, argued that source code must always be made freely available. Others, like game designer Robert Woodhead, suggested that they would happily give away the electronic tools they had used to make products such as computer games, but they would not give away the games themselves. “That’s my soul in that product,” explained Woodhead. “I don’t want anyone fooling with that.”65 In discussion Bob Wallace said he had Tak i n g t h e W h o l e E a r t h D i g i t a l [ 137 ] marketed his text editor PC-WRITE as shareware (in shareware, users got the software for free but paid if they wanted documentation and support), whereas Andrew Fluegelman indicated that he had distributed his telecommunications program PC-TALK as freeware (users voluntarily paid a small fee to use the software).


San Francisco by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, G4S, game design, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Joan Didion, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, retail therapy, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, Zipcar

Street performers on a float, Lunar New Year Parade (Click here) ROBERTO GEROMETTA / LONELY PLANET IMAGES © Competitor in costume, Bay to Breakers (Click here) GREG GAWLOWSKI / LONELY PLANET IMAGES © With Kids Rainforest dome, California Academy of Sciences (Click here) SABRINA DALBESIO / LONELY PLANET IMAGES © San Francisco has the fewest kids per capita of any US city and, according to SF SPCA data, about 19,000 more dogs than kids live here. Yet many locals make a living entertaining kids – from Pixar animators to video game designers – and this town is packed with attractions for kids. Techies Silicon Valley engineers encourage their kids’ scientific curiosity at SF’s hands-on discovery museums. San Francisco Children’s Creativity Museum ( Click here ) allows future tech to moguls design their own video games and animations, while the Exploratorium’s MacArthur Genius Grant– winning interactive displays (Click here ) help kids figure out the physics of skateboarding for themselves, and kiddie gearheads are riveted by vintage steamships at the Hyde St Pier Historic Ships Collection ( Click here ).


The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

affirmative action, Columbine, game design, Lao Tzu, Maui Hawaii, music of the spheres, place-making, the scientific method, trade route

They will resurrect the "lost stories" in new ways that restore their depth and surprise—that are capable of uplifting, testing, and altering the psyche. Currently, it is on the internet that gifted "frontier" writers and artists gather to create stories together. It is in web-zines, through cyber-art, the fabulae of game design, and in other wildly inventive never-before-seen forms, that any impoverishment to deep story the over-culture has caused is being overthrown. What an amazement it has been to us mere mortals to find that the reality now exists for "a voice greater" to be broadcast via the binary-code blips of ones and zeroes —a process, I am toid, which mirrors the binary code used by the synapses in the human brain.


We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, compensation consultant, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, eternal september, fake news, game design, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, Hacker News, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Lean Startup, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Palm Treo, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QR code, r/findbostonbombers, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, uber lyft, Wayback Machine, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

(A later semantic analysis by FiveThirtyEight confirmed that the nonpolitics subreddits on Reddit most closely related to The_Donald were r/fatpeoplehate, r/TheRedPill, and r/CoonTown.) Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart, who’d seen his star rise while chiming in on Gamergate, a campaign of harassment against female programmers and game designers (of which Reddit was one hub), had developed a flair for drawing young gaming and programming types into the alt-right movement. He tweeted his support of The_Donald subreddit and mentioned it in his articles. His cross-platform evangelism created a sort of alt-right synergy that seemed to translate to an increased following for r/The_Donald.


pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

Because the whole point is never-ending play, without overwhelmingly decisive, permanent winners or so many losers the game doesn’t work as well as it can and should. All games have rules, but unlike other games, the rules by which an economy operates only seem like they’re handed down by a godlike game designer—whereas in fact, they’re amended and sometimes dramatically rewritten by the players over time. Meanwhile, back in real-life American economic history, starting in the 1800s the industrial revolution changed the game, modern corporations formed, and one player, big business, began acquiring unparalleled new economic and political power.


pages: 467 words: 149,632

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, company town, computer age, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, data science, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, George Gilder, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, index card, information retrieval, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Perry Barlow, land reform, linear programming, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Peter Thiel, profit motive, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

Kennedy and, 120, 167    — Johnson and, 75–76, 167, 182, 258    — reaction to space race and arms race, 78    — sit-ins, 101, 106, 196, 199, 234, 275    — Stevenson and, 42–43, 63, 66 Clark, Kenneth and Mamie, 85 Clinton, Bill, 303, 304 Clinton, Hillary, 303, 304 Cold War    — as battle over the future, 35, 208–9    — beginning of, 15    — in Burdick’s fiction, 28    — effects of, 49–50, 135, 163 Coleman, James    — American Sociological Association presidency, 303    — Bureau of Applied Social Research and, 84–85    — commodification of attention, 145    — Equality of Educational Opportunity (Coleman Report), 259, 303    — friendship with McPhee, 84–85, 87, 89, 137    — insufficiency of data for models, 145    — letter of support for Popkin, 310    — marketing for Simulmatics, 137, 142, 152    — preparation for 1962 Times election coverage, 154–55, 164, 362n    — Project Camelot, 209    — resignation from Simulmatics, 271    — riot prediction project, 260–62    — simulation games designed by, 258–59, 377n    — Simulmatics stock offering and, 139    — Simulmatics’ Urban Studies Division, 258–59 Coleman, John, 85 Coleman, Lucille (Lu) Ritchey, 84–85, 89, 144, 270 Coleman, Thomas, 85 Collingwood, Charles, 24–25 Collins, Ella, 252 Columbia Pictures, 173–74, 175, 364n Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, 287 Committee for the Re-election of the President, 308, 309 Communications Act of 1934, 23, 316 compilers, 69, 70 “Computer Politics” (Kristol), 367n computer revolution    — ARPANET, 284, 296, 310–11, 312, 313–15, 316, 318    — hackers, 312, 313, 326    — no safeguards on data collection and analysis, 315, 323    — personal computers, 310, 313, 318    — Pool, arguments against regulation, 315–17, 318    — Pool, writing about emerging technologies, 277–79, 299, 316–17, 318–19, 323    — Stewart Brand promotion of, 310, 311–12, 314, 317–18    — see also artificial intelligence computers, early    — development during and after World War II, 68–70    — mainframe computer in 1956, 8    — presidential election of 1952, 24–26, 69, 122, 150    — see also specific topics Cook, Mike, 303 coronavirus and social distancing, 5, 322 Corrupt Practices Act, 23 Counterfeit World (Galouye), 187–88 counterinsurgency    — McNamara’s theory, 208–9    — progress measurement by counting deaths, 212–13    — Simulmatics program, 49, 200, 209, 211, 213, 216, 258 Cronkite, Walter, 24–25, 267 Cuban Missile Crisis    — aftermath, 163, 169    — Andrei Gromyko, 157, 160    — beginning of, 156    — end of, 162–63    — ExComm (Executive Committee of the National Security Council), 157, 162    — John F.


San Francisco by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, G4S, game design, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Joan Didion, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, retail therapy, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, Zipcar

Street performers on a float, Lunar New Year Parade (Click here) ROBERTO GEROMETTA / LONELY PLANET IMAGES © Competitor in costume, Bay to Breakers (Click here) GREG GAWLOWSKI / LONELY PLANET IMAGES © With Kids Rainforest dome, California Academy of Sciences (Click here) SABRINA DALBESIO / LONELY PLANET IMAGES © San Francisco has the fewest kids per capita of any US city and, according to SF SPCA data, about 19,000 more dogs than kids live here. Yet many locals make a living entertaining kids – from Pixar animators to video game designers – and this town is packed with attractions for kids. Techies Silicon Valley engineers encourage their kids’ scientific curiosity at SF’s hands-on discovery museums. San Francisco Children’s Creativity Museum ( Click here ) allows future tech to moguls design their own video games and animations, while the Exploratorium’s MacArthur Genius Grant– winning interactive displays (Click here ) help kids figure out the physics of skateboarding for themselves, and kiddie gearheads are riveted by vintage steamships at the Hyde St Pier Historic Ships Collection ( Click here ).


pages: 469 words: 149,526

The War Came to Us: Life and Death in Ukraine by Christopher Miller

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Bellingcat, Boris Johnson, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, false flag, friendly fire, game design, global pandemic, military-industrial complex, Ponzi scheme, private military company, rolling blackouts, Saturday Night Live, special economic zone, stakhanovite, wikimedia commons

The students giggled at my shortened name, which sounded similar to the Russian word for rat, krisa. “Maybe it’s better to call you Mr Christopher,” Olha, a teacher who was assisting me, suggested. The students objected. “No! No! Meester Krees!” My English lessons with all of the younger classes consisted mainly of games designed for them to recognize words, phrases, and numbers, and get used to speaking and hearing English. With the older students, my task was much more challenging: I needed to get them to be able to communicate in what was their third language after Russian and Ukrainian. From the very start, my eleventh-form class of 16- and 17-year-olds weren’t interested in learning English.


pages: 558 words: 164,627

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boston Dynamics, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, GPS: selective availability, Herman Kahn, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, license plate recognition, Livingstone, I presume, low earth orbit, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, place-making, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, social intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, traumatic brain injury, zero-sum game

The Advanced Research Projects Agency, 1958–1974. Richard J. Barber Associates, Washington, DC, December 1975. ______. Combat Development & Test Center: Vietnam. May 1962. ______. “Counterinsurgency: A Symposium, April 16–20, 1962.” RAND Corporation, Washington, DC, 1962. ______. Counter-Insurgency Game Design Feasibility and Evaluation Study. SD-301. ABT Associates, Inc., Cambridge, MA, November 1965. ______. Guerilla Activity Defection Study. DEC-63-1236. Defense Research Corporation, McLean, VA, December 1963. ______. Operation Pink Rose: Final Report. ARPA Order No. 818. U.S. Department of Agriculture–Forest Service, May 1967. ______.


pages: 552 words: 168,518

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

“We encourage people to approach this problem like a diet: if you want to splurge in one area you have to make up for it in another,” says Dahl. A World Without Oil and the Power of Imagination Carbon calculators and competitive challenges aren’t for everyone. For Ken Eklund, a freelance writer and game designer, interactive gaming experiences provide an engaging alternative where ordinary people can immerse themselves in an experiential process of finding everyday solutions for climate change that drive real-world changes in behavior. Eklund is the creator of a fascinating alternate reality game (ARG) called World Without Oil, an interactive, Internet-based narrative where large numbers of game players collaborate to solve plot-based challenges and puzzles.


pages: 836 words: 158,284

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss

23andMe, airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Buckminster Fuller, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, Dean Kamen, game design, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, index card, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, language acquisition, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, messenger bag, microbiome, microdosing, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, placebo effect, Productivity paradox, publish or perish, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

In fact, making any change at all seemed to result in increased productivity. It turned out that, with each change, the workers suspected they were being observed and therefore worked harder. This phenomenon—also called the “observer effect”—came to be known as “the Hawthorne Effect.” Reinforced by research in game design, Jack Stack and Western Electric’s results can be condensed into a simple equation: measurement = motivation. Seeing progress in changing numbers makes the repetitive fascinating and creates a positive feedback loop. Once again, the act of measuring is often more important than what you measure.


pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Astronomers build research collaborations and present their findings on conferences. These tasks are all way beyond the competence of computers. Many jobs also require creativity, like the ability to come up with new, unusual, and clever ideas. Survey data show that the work of physicists, art directors, comedians, CEOs, video game designers, and robotics engineers, to name a few, all involve such activities.50 The challenge here, from an automation point of view, is not one of generating novelty but generating novelty that makes sense. For a computer to produce an original piece of music, write a novel, develop a new theory or product, or make a subtle joke, in principle the only things that are required is a database with a richness of experience that is comparable to that of humans and solid methods that allow us to benchmark the algorithm’s subtlety.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Wujec is a fellow at Autodesk and a global leader in 3-D design, engineering, and entertainment software. While his title sounds like a guy designing hubcaps for an auto parts company, the truth is that Autodesk is another of those really important companies few people know about—it builds the software that architects, auto and game designers, and film studios use to imagine and design buildings, cars, and movies on their computers. It is the Microsoft of design. Autodesk offers roughly 180 software tools used by some twenty million professional designers as well as more than two hundred million amateur designers, and each year those tools reduce more and more complexity to one touch.


pages: 799 words: 187,221

Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, Commentariolus, crowdsourcing, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, game design, iterative process, lone genius, New Journalism, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, urban planning, wikimedia commons

A lesser-known but important component of Pacioli’s work at court involved contributing, alongside Leonardo, to its ephemeral amusements and performances. In a notebook he began just after his arrival, “On the Powers of Numbers,” Pacioli compiled riddles, mathematical brain-twisters, magic tricks, and parlor games designed to be presented and solved at court parties. His tricks include how to make an egg walk across a table (it involves wax and strands of hair), how to make a coin go up and down in a glass (vinegar and magnetic powder), and how to make a chicken jump (quicksilver). His parlor games included the first published version of the standard card trick of guessing which card someone has picked from a deck (it involves an accomplice), brain-teasers such as one in which a man has to figure out how to ferry a wolf and a goat and a cabbage across a river, and math games in which a spectator thinks of a number which can then be discovered by asking the result of a few operations performed on it.


pages: 588 words: 193,087

And Here's the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft by Mike Sacks

Albert Einstein, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Exxon Valdez, fake news, fear of failure, game design, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, Joan Didion, Martin Parr, Norman Mailer, out of africa, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, upwardly mobile

He has worked at The Washington Post and is currently on the editorial staff of Vanity Fair. Additional interviews can be found at www.andheresthekicker.com. More Great Resources From Writer's Digest Books THE WRITE BRAIN WORKBOOK 366 Exercises to Liberate Your Writing by Bonnie Neubauer This one-of-a-kind guide provides a full year of writing exercises and games designed to get thoughts brewing and the pen moving across the page. Turn on the right side of your brain to stimulate creativity and generate work, painlessly leading yourself into new writing every day. You'll never have to face a blank page again. ISBN: 978-1-58297-355-5 • paperback; 384 pages • #10986 THE ART AND CRAFT OF STORYTELLING by Nancy Lamb A good story flows from a solid understanding of writing and structure, along with a confident grasp of character, plot, and dialogue.


pages: 804 words: 212,335

Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds

game design, glass ceiling, gravity well, Kuiper Belt, planetary scale, random walk, statistical model, time dilation, VTOL

Not soon enough, for them — but after a million years of waiting, trapped in their bubble of spacetime, they began to wonder if the threat had now diminished... They could not simply dismantle the Shrouds and look around — far too hazardous; especially as the Inhibitor machines were nothing if not patient. Their apparent silence might only be part of the trap, a waiting game designed to entice the Amarantin — who were now the Shrouders — out of their shells, into the open arena of naked space, where they could be destroyed with ease, terminating the million-year purge against their kind. Yet, in time, others came. Perhaps there was something about this region of space which favoured the evolution of vertebrate life, or perhaps it was only coincidence, but in the newly starfaring humans, the Shrouders saw echoes of what they had once been.


pages: 999 words: 194,942

Clojure Programming by Chas Emerick, Brian Carper, Christophe Grand

Amazon Web Services, Benoit Mandelbrot, cloud computing, cognitive load, continuous integration, database schema, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, drop ship, duck typing, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, finite state, Firefox, functional programming, game design, general-purpose programming language, Guido van Rossum, higher-order functions, Larry Wall, mandelbrot fractal, no silver bullet, Paul Graham, platform as a service, premature optimization, random walk, Ruby on Rails, Schrödinger's Cat, semantic web, software as a service, sorting algorithm, SQL injection, Turing complete, type inference, web application

[137] In particular, multiversion concurrency control (often abbreviated MVCC): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiversion_concurrency_control. [138] We present a way to address durability of ref state with the help of agents in Persisting reference states with an agent-based write-behind log. [139] We’re not game designers, and what we build here is obviously a contrivance, but there’s no reason the mechanisms we demonstrate here could not be utilized and extended to implement a thoroughly capable game engine. [140] In a real game engine, you would almost surely not use vars to hold characters; rather, it would make sense to use a single map containing all online players’ characters, itself held within a ref.


pages: 935 words: 197,338

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

With a six-foot four-inch frame and a shaggy head of hair, he presided over his company like a high-tech Hugh Hefner.[3] He kept an oak beer tap outside his office and liked to hold business meetings in a hot tub—either the one in his house or the new one he had installed in Atari’s engineering building.[4] The hot tub meetings and hot tub parties—it could be difficult, sometimes, to be sure of the difference—were part of the Atari culture, which hinged on keeping the male game designers happy by hiring the best-looking female secretaries available.[5] Bushnell’s approach to corporate strategy was to scrawl epiphanies on scraps of paper that fell out of his pockets. His employees got travel expenses paid in advance and sometimes absconded with the cash, never to be seen again.


Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

FPGAs can be reprogrammed for different applications, unlike ASICs whose logic is embedded into the hardware of the chip. AI chips are a relatively small portion—about 10 percent—of the global semiconductor market but are growing five times faster than non-AI chips. AI-specialized chips are also widening the field of potential chip designers, with companies like Google and Tesla getting in the game designing their own ASICs for specific applications. As AI technology matures with more real-world applications, dominance in AI-specialized chips may turn out to matter far more for influencing how AI is used than dominance in semiconductors more generally. It remains an open question whether the Chinese semiconductor industry can continue to catch up to industry leaders or whether the hurdles to accessing the technology and human capital needed to operate at the most advanced process nodes will remain too difficult to overcome.


pages: 562 words: 201,502

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

“And if Thornfield Hall burns down and you are blind, I’ll come to you and take care of you.” 40 Artificial Intelligence OpenAI, 2012–2015 With Sam Altman Peter Thiel, the PayPal cofounder who had invested in SpaceX, holds a conference each year with the leaders of companies financed by his Founders Fund. At the 2012 gathering, Musk met Demis Hassabis, a neuroscientist, video-game designer, and artificial intelligence researcher with a courteous manner that conceals a competitive mind. A chess prodigy at age four, he became the five-time champion of an international Mind Sports Olympiad that includes competition in chess, poker, Mastermind, and backgammon. In his modern London office is an original edition of Alan Turing’s seminal 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” which proposed an “imitation game” that would pit a human against a ChatGPT–like machine.


pages: 678 words: 216,204

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business logic, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, dark matter, desegregation, digital divide, East Village, Eben Moglen, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, George Gilder, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, machine readable, Mahbub ul Haq, market bubble, market clearing, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, random walk, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, software patent, spectrum auction, subscription business, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Its users have created 99 percent of the objects in the game environment. The medieval village was nothing but blank space when they started. So was the flying vehicle design shop, the futuristic outpost, or the university, where some of the users are offering courses in basic programming skills and in-game design. Linden Labs charges a flat monthly subscription fee. Its employees focus on building tools that enable users to do everything from basic story concept down to the finest details of their own appearance and of objects they use in the game world. The in-game human relationships are those made by the users as they interact with each other in this immersive entertainment experience.


Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale by David N. Blank-Edelman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, bounce rate, business continuity plan, business logic, business process, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, commoditize, continuous integration, Conway's law, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, database schema, Debian, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, DevOps, digital rights, domain-specific language, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, exponential backoff, fail fast, fallacies of distributed computing, fault tolerance, fear of failure, friendly fire, game design, Grace Hopper, imposter syndrome, information retrieval, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, invisible hand, iterative process, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kubernetes, loose coupling, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Maslow's hierarchy, microaggression, microservices, minimum viable product, MVC pattern, performance metric, platform as a service, pull request, RAND corporation, remote working, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, search engine result page, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, single page application, Snapchat, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, systems thinking, the long tail, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, traumatic brain injury, value engineering, vertical integration, web application, WebSocket, zero day

The SRE on call checks the monitoring; there are no clues as to the cause, yet it’s clear this key production service is in a bad state: the errors and latency graphs are the only ones going up and to the right. Revenue is being lost. The on-caller declares a production incident. The VP of engineering storms in, demanding to know what’s going on. The other SREs in the room just laugh. Why? Because this is Incident Manager, a game designed to teach incident response skills and teamwork, and the current player just drew a bad card. Incident management is a key SRE skill that can be learned — and it’s much better for your organization’s SLO budget (and the stress levels of your SRE team) to learn it via a fun and effective game rather than during an actual production incident.


pages: 797 words: 227,399

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, cuban missile crisis, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, Google Earth, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, junk bonds, Law of Accelerating Returns, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Neal Stephenson, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, private military company, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra

Who could ask for more than good friends and family? [NOTES] AUTHOR’SNOTE:WHY A BOOK ON ROBOTS AND WAR? 1 Because robots are frakin’ cool Frak is a made-up expletive that originated in the computer science research world. It then made its way into video gaming, ultimately becoming the title of a game designed for the BBC Micro and Commodore 64 in the early 1980s. The main character, a caveman called Trogg, would say “Frak!” in a little speech bubble whenever he was “killed.” It soon spread into science fiction, appearing in such games as Cyberpunk 2020 and the Warhammer 40,000 novels. It crossed over into the mainstream most explicitly in the new 2003 reboot of the 1970s TV series Battlestar Galactica.


Israel & the Palestinian Territories Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, flag carrier, G4S, game design, gentrification, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, information security, Khartoum Gordon, Louis Pasteur, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

AdoraMEDITERRANEAN ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %03-605 0896; 226 Ben Yehuda St; brunch 99NIS, 2-course business lunch 69NIS, mains 79-96NIS; hnoon-midnight Mon-Thu, 9am-midnight Fri & Sat; v) One of the original foodie destinations in town, Adora is looking a little bit worn these days but still attracts attention for the quality of its Mediterranean cuisine. Meat and fish dishes jostle for attention on the menu: vegetarians may feel hard done by. The business lunch is a great deal. CAFE CULTURE Tel Aviv has developed a global reputation as a hub of the creative industries, particularly in the fields of software and game design, architecture, advertising and graphic design. The fact that many members of this creative class are involved in start-up or speculative projects means that many are idea-rich but cash-poor, and so can't afford to pay the extremely high office rents that apply in the city centre. Their solution is suitably creative – taking advantage of the tables, caffeine fixes and free wi-fi offered in cafes.


pages: 798 words: 240,182

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Even without other players, division of labor can be an important motivation for having two avatars. 2. Diversity of experience. Avatars of different races often enter the virtual world in different geographic regions, experiencing a different set of initial conditions and completing different missions. Different classes experience even the same quest and territory in a different way. Game designers encourage this diversity of experiences, because they want players to persist in subscribing to the gameworld, effectively combining many games into one to accomplish this commercial goal. Very popular games like World of Warcraft run many instances of the game simultaneously, on different servers, which may be fundamentally ­different in their rules, as well as being inhabited by different players who give each a ­distinct quality.


pages: 468 words: 233,091

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apple II, Apple Newton, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business cycle, business process, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, don't be evil, eat what you kill, fake news, fear of failure, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, game design, General Magic , Googley, Hacker News, HyperCard, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Larry Wall, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, nuclear winter, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, proprietary trading, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, software patent, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine, web application, Y Combinator

Fake: At the beginning it was me, Stewart, and Jason Classon. Jason and Stewart had started a company together in 1999 that was acquired by a venturebacked startup out of Boston after about 6 to 9 months. Jason went and worked in Boston for a year and came back and then the three of us started working on the game together. I did the game design, Stewart did the interaction design, and Jason did the PHP for the prototype. Livingston: Did they fund the game with money that they made from the acquisition? Fake: Partially, yes. It was really a friends-and-family investment. It was the three of us and we added Eric Costello very soon thereafter.


pages: 1,233 words: 239,800

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design by Matthew Carmona, Tim Heath, Steve Tiesdell, Taner Oc

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Arthur Eddington, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, City Beautiful movement, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, East Village, edge city, food miles, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, global supply chain, Guggenheim Bilbao, income inequality, invisible hand, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, land bank, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Masdar, Maslow's hierarchy, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-oil, precautionary principle, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Florida, Seaside, Florida, starchitect, streetcar suburb, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the market place, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Action Planning Activity Mapping Act Create Experience (ACE) Adaptable Model Appreciative Inquiry Architecture Centre Architecture Week Awareness-Raising Day Beo Best Fit Slide Rule Briefing Workshop Broad-Based Organisation Capacity-Building Workshop Choices Method Citizen Advocacy Citizens' Juries Community Appraisals Community Design Centre Community Indicators Community Plan Community Planning Forum Community Projects Fund Community Site Management Plans Community Strategic Planning Consensus Building Design Assistance Team Design Day Design Game Design Workshop Development Trust Elevation Montage Enspirited envisioning Environment Shop Finding Home – Visualising our Future by Making Maps Fish Bowl Forum From Vision to Action Future Search Conference Guided Visualisation Imagine! Interactive Display Issues, Aims, Expectations, Challenges & Dialogues in a Day Local Sustainability Model Mobile Planning Unit Mock-Up Neighbourhood Planning Office Open Design Competition Open House Event Open Space Workshop Parish Maps Participatory Appraisal Participatory Building Appraisal Participatory Strategic Planning Participatory Theatre Planning Aid Planning Day Planning for Real Planning Weekend Process-Planning Session Real-Time Strategic Change Resource Centre Roadshow Round-Table Workshops Social Audit Street Stall Table Scheme Display TalkWorks Task Force Team Syntegrity Time Dollars Topic Workshop Trail Urban Design Game Urban Design Soapbox Urban Design Studio Urban Studies Centre Visual Simulation Web Site For a successful collaborative approach, Barton et al (2003: 47) suggest five golden rules:1.


pages: 982 words: 221,145

Ajax: The Definitive Guide by Anthony T. Holdener

AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, business logic, business process, centre right, Citizen Lab, Colossal Cave Adventure, create, read, update, delete, database schema, David Heinemeier Hansson, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, full text search, game design, general-purpose programming language, Guido van Rossum, information retrieval, loose coupling, machine readable, MVC pattern, Necker cube, p-value, Ruby on Rails, SimCity, slashdot, social bookmarking, sorting algorithm, SQL injection, Wayback Machine, web application

Not long after that, Intellivision started a competition with Atari that many other companies would join. By 1983, so many bad console games were being produced, all because companies were trying to get a foothold on the market, that users became disenchanted with them. This started the rise of the PC and educational games. It took several years, but game designers soon began to port console games to the more powerful PCs. Original games such as Space Invaders (1978), Pac-Man (1982), Pitfall (1982), Pole Position (1982), and Spy Hunter (1983) joined the post-video-game-crash arcade games such as Castlevania (1986), Mortal Kombat (1993), Tomb Raider (1996), and Grand Theft Auto (1998), which became the model for the arcade genre also known at this point as platform games.


pages: 993 words: 318,161

Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson

Ada Lovelace, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, bitcoin, blockchain, cloud computing, coherent worldview, computer vision, crisis actor, crossover SUV, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, demographic transition, distributed ledger, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, fake news, false flag, game design, gamification, index fund, Jaron Lanier, life extension, messenger bag, microaggression, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, no-fly zone, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, planetary scale, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, short selling, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, tech bro, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, The Hackers Conference, Turing test, Works Progress Administration

The purposes of linen and beer trucks were obvious, being printed right on their sheet metal, but of course every vehicle on the street and every pedestrian on the sidewalk had a purpose as well. It was the flowing-together and interaction of all those intentions that made a city. The early failure of Corporation 9592’s game designers to capture that feeling had led to several months of Richard’s doing what Richard generally did, which was to attack problems so weird that merely to cop to their existence would have been career suicide for anyone who wasn’t the company founder. The name of the game, and of the imaginary world in which it was set, was T’Rain.


pages: 1,263 words: 371,402

The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois

augmented reality, Bletchley Park, carbon tax, clean water, computer age, cosmological constant, David Attenborough, Day of the Dead, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, financial independence, game design, gravity well, heat death of the universe, jitney, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, lolcat, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, power law, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Skype, stem cell, theory of mind, time dilation, Turing machine, Turing test, urban renewal, Wall-E

Kilometers of empty land stretched out ahead of them: for a moment, Max imagined it a garden, like the cemetery in the capitol, filled with flowers remembering all those who died to terraform the planet. “There’s been enough killing.” Balancing Accounts JAMES L. CAMBIAS As everyone knows, robots are programmed to follow orders—but sometimes that programming has just a little wiggle room in it. A game designer and a writer of role-playing game supplements as well as a science fiction writer, James S. Cambias has been a finalist for the Nebula Award, the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He’s become a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and has also sold to Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic, All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, The Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives, Hellboy: Odder Jobs, and other markets.


pages: 889 words: 433,897

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey by Emmanuel Goldstein

affirmative action, Apple II, benefit corporation, call centre, disinformation, don't be evil, Firefox, game design, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, information retrieval, information security, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, late fees, license plate recognition, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Oklahoma City bombing, optical character recognition, OSI model, packet switching, pirate software, place-making, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RFID, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, undersea cable, UUNET, Y2K

Others would be imprisoned, despite the fact that the allegations against them had been proven false in a related case. But this time something a little different happened. In their enthusiasm, the Secret Service had really overstepped the boundary and harassed a completely innocent (and well known) game designer named Steve Jackson. This part of the story managed to hit home with a lot of people and, before you knew it, we were organizing and communicating online in an effective manner. Through a public UNIX system in California known as The Well, we helped spread the story to even more people. The mass media actually picked up on it.