Blog Posts About: gaming

Ratings, reputation, recommendations, etc. all have problems when it comes to trying to discover the most accurate/helpful/interesting/compelling content. One of the biggest problems is "gaming" which means working to produce results that diverge from the results the system was designed to produce.

Well, it appears that some are on a mission to game American Idol and actually try to enable one of the lesser-talented performers to, as the BBC reports win the whole thing. Enter: Sunjaya.

Now, I have seen American Idol, but not this season. What I know of Sunjaya comes from the Seattlest blog, that is head over heels in love. He is from Federal Way, a Seattle suburb.

Two resources are leading the charge to game the system:

Howard Stern is an advocate for Sanjaya and hoping to make it easier to vote for him and a website called "vote for the worst" is on a mission to disrupt the results. They would love to see him win simply because he shouldn't and his winning would bring into question the already controversial American Idol system.

I think this highlights what makes rating systems so hard - they are often popularity contests when the goal is quality/accuracy. Popularity and quality are not the same thing and people are motivated by a variety of things. American Idol wants to create the next big recording star, but the voters might actually give them a joke instead. Wouldn't that be funny.

Speaking of funny, if you want a Friday laugh, check out Sanjaya Gonna Set You on Fire.

Since its roll out in December of 2004, 43 Things has won a webby, experienced steady growth and most importantly, formed a very engaged and interactive community of users who volunteer to help garden the community. Though it keeps a low profile, 43 Things is a community success story - they're approaching their millionth member and "thing".

Like so many sites, 43 Things is increasingly the target of spammers and trolls. Instead of hiring more people to patrol the site, the Robot Coop (a team of 6 managing 5 large sites) have enlisted the help of the members in identifying and voting on which accounts should be suspended for bad behavior in a feature called “Neighborhood Watch�?, which is part of their new City Hall.

In Neighborhood Watch, a subset of community members “in good standing�? can vote to “suspend�? or “keep�? the user account (others can't see the feature at all). It’s a little bit like Digg for managing the community’s users.

I’ve voted on a few accounts myself and it’s a slick process; even fun in some ways. When a member (or their anti-spam bot) reports a spammer or troll via a “report this user�? link on user profiles, it gets added to a queue with a description. The voting member in Neighborhood Watch can then view the complaint, the offending content and vote on whether or not the user should be suspended or kept. Further they’ve built secret sauce into the system to prevent gaming.

These features were rolled out yesterday as part of a larger part of the site called “City Hall�?. I love the theme of members working together for the good of the community - people identify with the idea quite easily. If Neighborhood Watch works, as I think it will, it will be a great model for other sites.

A last note - the City Hall also has their new community guidelines which are worth a look. My favorite: You should not be creepy.

Disclosure: Common Craft and the Robots are friends and have done some work together, which means I'm a little biased.

Last night over dinner with Brian Hsi, a fellow online community geek, I was introduced to the concept of Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG). Brian gave me a run down and reminded me that the ILoveBees.com web site to support Halo 2 was an ARG.

Recently, Audi USA created a new ARG around the idea of a missing Audi A3. (more info here) When I first saw the ad weeks ago, I was clueless.

This is really interesting to me. The ARGs are a marketing vehicle, but one that blends online/offline and engages gamers in an effort that encourages "community" collaboration. Here’s how C|Net describes it in the article Blurring the Line Between Games and Reality.

These games are intensely complicated series of puzzles involving coded Web sites, real-world clues like the newspaper advertisements, phone calls in the middle of the night from game characters and more. That blend of real-world activities and a dramatic storyline has proven irresistible to many.

I’m just starting to learn about it, but I could see a lot of more ARGs coming our way… The Alternate Reality Gaming Network (ARGN) seems to be a great resource.