This past week’s Virtual Cinema course at Dartmouth College proved that machinima works can go far beyond the tried and true. A mere handful of students explored lost love, gaming culture, poet-zombie attacks, and perhaps most importantly, the pensive and strange qualities of virtual life. Check out their playlist, and celebrate with Tilt.
At Tiltfactor we’re designing a suite of games that inspires users to tag photographs with “expert” data. Using their input, are building a searchable database of terms that users can explore to find the photographs they need. But how should such a database be constructed in order to be searchable? To answer this question we need to decide exactly what we will be sorting.
If you want to sort dates, design a timeline; if you want to sort names, just make an alphabetical list.
It turns out we’re sorting the entirety of human knowledge.
So how on earth do you arrange “everything” in a way that is searchable and avoid keyword-only piles of data? My initial idea was to build a “tree” which could be measured and molded and meticulously added to by expert players.
It’s not that unique of an idea:
Aristotle is said to have been the last person to know everything there was in his own time.
Knowing everything in the context of ancient Greece, Aristotle established a framework for that body of information. By doing so, he established an informational “ontology,” an answer to the question: how should one think about the world? In information science, an “ontology” is the way in which data is structured and referred to, the vocabulary with which information is discussed inside its own context. Yep.
But Aristotle’s context was 2300 years ago. Today it might seem strange to us that he divided the category for all animals into two main groups: those that have blood and those that do not. As the world’s first taxonomist, (a person who arranges meanings) Aristotle determined the nature of zoology for the next two thousand years simply by making a miniscule decision regarding where things should be divided in the animal kingdom within his particular project.
So what is our context, and how might we best design an ontology to organize it? Well, today the estimated information content of all human knowledge is 10 exobytes. That’s 1 billion gigabytes, 6000 times the storage capacity of the human brain. We have to deal with way more meanings to design a context for than Aristotle admirably dealt with. Information is also created at a much faster rate today, so we’d have to structure a database prepared to take in information in real time and instantly incorporate it.
Yet even if we were to “succeed” in representing human knowledge as it stands today, our Solomonic decisions regarding what-goes-where will seem equally as random to future generations as Aristotle’s animals-with-blood division seems to us today.
Human knowledge is a dynamic, changing thing. As time passes, our libraries and universities slowly shift from one paradigm to the next. As such, to try to design a perfect hierarchy would be to miss the point: knowledge and culture are developing systems of astounding complexity and they’re growing more complex every day. Even the way they change is changing!
So what do we do?
Well it might be interesting to try to build a taxonomy with some help from crowd sourcing. We could hand users a very basic outline (animals, plants, volcanoes etc) and let them have a go at filling it out. But this might be a tad chaotic. 
Hierarchical databases have been outdated since the 1970’s for a few reasons:
1) They only allow for entries to be listed under a single category. Thus “European History” would have to be listed under either “Europe” or “History”.
2) If you delete a single node, every node listed underneath it is deleted.
So if we we were to build relationships between all of the tags we receive, we’d have to come up with something “polyarchical,” with connections possible between every node in the structure. Thus “European History” would be connected both to “Europe” AND “History.” It might even be connected to a hundred other terms in varying ways. Why not?
Because moderating a structure like that would be unfeasible. As language and culture develop with new events happening every day, the pace of data entry would far outpace any possible moderation. The network would become unavoidably riddled with bugs, mistags and misconceptions. Wikipedia survives because a small handful of moderators volunteer to painstakingly preserve it; they believe in the cause. Because our database is hidden behind the façade of a game, the humanitarian goals of our project will not be as openly advertised and thus publicly upheld.
So what is the tree now? Maybe it was just a good idea. An ideal. We’d like to think that everything in the world makes sense in a way that is somehow navigable. Things do, but only in a given context.
There are 8 billion contexts walking around the planet every day, each changing completely with everything they do. It is time for us to scale this project back: Rauner (the Archive we are working with) needs their photos tagged so that people can use them. Any information, albeit temporary and contextually biased information, is useful.
So lets design a system we can make, moderate, and use rather than lament unattainable ideals. (This, from a humanist!)
Stay tuned — a new PLAYCUBE event at Dartmouth!
Friday, May 7th: AREA+the Playcube present
“This is my World”
The Spring Student Art Exhibition
Gallery opening from 5-7PM, with the Cube serenading the Top of the Hop
Music + refreshments provided!
(in the belly of the the CUBE=digital photography and short films from the Dartmouth community!)
We need to tag 64,000 photographs with expert data.
Thousands of people are going to come and help us, some for hours at a time, and we will attract them through the pleasure of play. How can tagging an archive of old photographs ever be an enjoyable experience?
Contemporary designers are more and more mixing play with work, and at Tiltfactor, we’re interested in how this happens, and how one can foster expertise in the process. We’re also interested in how values manifest in these data-driven systems. In making games for the social good, and games that result in real-world contributions, the designer must rely on ideas beyond innovative game mechanics and good old-fashioned playtesting. The data entry system for repositories such as databases need to be so enjoyable, well-organized, and instantly rewarding that people approach the tasks with motivation playfully like… a game.
Crowdsourcing is already being done successfully in a few other games. Particulary inspiring for us is the work of Luis von Ahn and his “ESP Game” that is reportedly played by some users more than 40 hours a week! But there are obvious issues with crowdsourcing that such work suggests need fixing. Simple match mechanics inspire players to provide only the most common, obvious tags regarding a given image. The key problem is that archives are specific. They require specialized, precise information in order for their contents to remain relevant or useful to the people who wish to use them.
Professor Mary Flanagan has said that “Crowdsourcing is great for lowest common denominator data. But we also need to go beyond crowdsourcing and tap groups from each group’s base of expertise.” Our design team is thus challenged to encourage students, researchers and common users to be able to search for ridiculously specific items inside a given archive by traveling paths laid out by our players.
“Computer, show me happy pictures containing any species of duck in Florida before the year 1954.”
Boom.
Our designs for our metadata research are presented within a small suite of enjoyable games that encourages players to think harder and to dig deeper into the depths of human knowledge. More on these designs to come.
~Tiltfactor Team Member Brendan S, who is using a mental-mapping program called x-mind that is insanely useful (and free!). Check it out at www.xmind.net.
Social communications expert Clifford Nass, with researchers Eyal Ophir and Anthony Wagner, Stanford University, just completed a study of multitasking and productivity among college students. The resulting paper, “Cognitive control in media multitaskers,” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The results of “digital overload” were similar to past research: multitasking does not make one more productive. See the CNN article here. Do you self identify as a ‘chronic media multitasker’?
How nice that Grand Text Auto, a collaboratively written blog to which Tiltfactor contributes, is recommended in the 100 best blogs for new media students. This nice long list should serve as an excellent resource for students and scholars alike!
It looks like we have a bound book date for Critical Play, Mary Flanagan’s new book! The time is now! watch for it.
Eric Zimmerman says, “In Critical Play, Flanagan uncovers a secret history of games buried deep inside folk culture, experimental media, and the world of art. Critical Play should be required reading for anyone who cares about the cultural importance and future potential of games.”
Tiltfactor says, “HURRAY!” and is exited to launch the book.
