Monthly Archives: March 2010

“The check-in model dominates the current crop of location-based games from Foursquare to MyTown to Loopt and Whrrl. And understandably so. Checking in is very casual and maps very easily to what people already do. We go places and then we call people to let them know where we are and encourage them to join us. It’s like the location-based game equivalent of matching three. It’s a very casual mechanic which you can learn instantaneously. The advantage of simply checking in is that it integrates well with your life. It’s similar to the way many Facebook games only demand interaction once a day—they realize people probably only check into Facebook for a short period once a day, so you need to be able to quickly do your business and be gone. But I do think checking in is just the tip of the iceberg. If other games want to combine play with the world around us, they’ll have to develop additional mechanics.”

– Being there is playing there: Checking in on the emergence of location-based games | Gamezebo Continue reading →

“Considering the work by Henry Jenkins (2006) and others on the increasing role of the consumer as collaborator or co-creator of media content, I have to conclude that a possible third institutional logic is emerging next to, and in a symbiotic relationship with, editorial and market logics: a convergent culture logic. Work done following this logic includes the (intended) consumer in the process of product design and innovation, up to and including the production and marketing process.”

– Deuzeblog: Media Work & Institutional Logics Continue reading →

“How audiences are imagined is crucial to the organization of media industries (Ang 1991; Hartley 1987), which rely on such mental models to shape their interface with their public.”

– Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Archives: The Moral Economy of Web 2.0 (Part Two) Continue reading →

“Immaterial labor finds itself at the crossroads (or rather, it is the interface) of a new relationship between production and consumption. The activation of both productive cooperation and the social relationship with the consumer is materialized within and by the process of communication. The role of immaterial labor is to promote continual innovation in the forms and conditions of communication (and thus in work and consumption). It gives form to and materializes needs, the imaginary, consumer tastes, and so forth, and these products in turn become powerful producers of needs, images, and tastes. The particularity of the commodity produced through immaterial labor (its essential use value being given by its value as informational and cultural content) consists in the fact that it is not destroyed in the act of consumption, but rather it enlarges, transforms, and creates the “ideological” and cultural environment of the consumer. This commodity does not produce the physical capacity of labor power; instead, it transforms the person who uses it. Immaterial labor produces first and foremost a “social relationship” (a relationship of innovation, production, and consumption). Only if it succeeds in this production does its activity have an economic value. This activity makes immediately apparent something that material production had “hidden,” namely, that labor produces not only commodities, but first and foremost it produces the capital relation.”

– Immaterial Labor – Maurizio Lazzarato Continue reading →

“Harrah’s uses “loyalty cards” to induce people to play longer and spend more money (Abumrad, 2008). The cards function like bank cards; users swipe them at the slot machines to play, and the cards register wins and losses. The loyalty cards are part of a pilot program to track individual user behavior. The casino maintains real-time data on the actions of every card-holder and uses the data to determine individuals’ financial “pain point” – i.e. how much money they are willing to spend before leaving the casino. The casino uses that pain point to stage strategic interventions during real-time play. When a player comes close to her limit, a staff member on the casino floor receives an alert from a dispatcher, greets the player, and offers her a free meal, a drink, or a bonus gift of money added to the loyalty card. By mitigating the bad experience of losing with a gift, Harrah’s extends people beyond their pain points and they stay and play longer.”

– Archives & Museum Informatics: Museums and the Web 2009: Paper: Simon, N., Going Analog Continue reading →

“Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish – a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. (Lakoff and Johnson 1980)”

– Archives & Museum Informatics: Museums and the Web 2009: Paper: Simon, N., Going Analog Continue reading →