OTOinsights

OTOinsight's t=Zero group to lead Game Expereince Research Workshop at CHI 2008 in Florence, Italy

Yesterday, OTOinsight's t=Zero was informed that it's  paper titled "Making Player Engagement Visible: A Multimodal Strategy for Game Experience Research" was accepted for presentation at the 2008 CHI Conference in Florence, Italy (April 5th-10th).

The workshop that t=Zero will lead will focus on  the relationships among neurological, physiological and cognitive assessments of engagement in ongoing and short duration gaming experiences. It is a centerpiece of an iterative strategy toward understanding and modeling relationships among different engagement measures. The research will lead to design proposals for model-based assessments of engagement calibrated to individuals’ responses. 

You may download and read our entire research proposal here: Making Player Engagement Visible: A Multimodal Strategy for Game Experience Research

Ethnography in Industry: Notes from EPIC2007

EPIC (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry) is, as its name suggests, a conference about the implications and uses of ethnography in industry. I was a little surprised (and pleased) that about 80% of the presenters and participants were from industry, and only about 20% were academics. Intel, Microsoft, and IBM are very well represented here, as are less-than-household names, such as consultants, who are nonetheless doing some fascinating work.

The upshot of this is that the problems were quite grounded in contemporary business practices and problems. A sampling of some of the issues around which ethnography was used to improve understanding include the following:

• Sales pipeline management (IBM)
• Mailing out 38,000 individual retirement packages in 7 days (XEROX)
• Researching and modeling medical care ecosystems (Intel)
• Implementing computer automation in wastewater plant management (University of Southern Denmark)
• Teaching ethnographic practices to system engineers to improve their understandings of user needs (Fujitsu, PARC)
• Improving a real estate firm's direct marketing strategy (Ricoh)

There was an interesting tension that many of the researchers seemed to be facing. On the one hand, their work was being used to help develop models for complex business practices. On the other hand, as ethnographers, they wanted to focus on concrete situations and contexts and the real, flesh-and-blood people within them. From my perspective, one way that this tension got addressed was to work proactively to improve communication between managers (who want the models) and employees, on whom the models are ideally grounded and in any case who will have to live with them once they are developed. Stated more abstractly, the ethnographers seemed to want to make a distinction between managing complex processes (which is seen as good) and implementing rationalist control schemes (which are seen as inhuman and bad).

Another major issue is one of legitimation. How can ethnographers convince managers and marketing leaders to take them seriously? How do they justify their work both intellectually (methods, data, etc.) and also from a business perspective (actually leads to better business processes or products)? Complicating this argument is the perceived conflict between the reductionist, abstract models that managers and marketing professionals want and the rich, individual "thick" and nuanced descriptions that ethnographers value and provide. Another way of saying this is that there is a lot of thinking about how ethnographic research can, should, does, or fails to connect to business cycles, that is, there is a lot of thinking about ways that ethnography can have real business impact.

It may appear from this post that there is an ethnographer versus managers and marketing professionals, good guys versus bad guys rhetoric at the conference; that is not the mood here and is instead a misleading artifact of the way I have tried to boil down the complex dynamics that I am seeing. The managers and marketing professionals are hiring and/or collaborating with the ethnographers, whether they are in-house researchers or consultants. So the managers and marketers, too, seem to want to distinguish between (a) managing complex processes and (b) implementing inhuman rationalist control schemes. In that regard, they and the ethnographers share a common value: the two groups just engage with it at different levels.

--Jeffrey Bardzell, Ph.D., Indiana University

Towards a Sociology of Massive Cultural Production

I've spent the last two days devoted to the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002), who wrote extensively on what he calls the field of cultural production. I think "cultural production" is an important category for study, because I think a lot of recent work on Web 2.0 (such as Tapscott & Williams' Wikinomics book and Benkler's Wealth of Networks) focuses too narrowly on professional collaborations in the discovery, production, and dissemination of "knowledge" and "information." These are important contributions, but many of the big sites aren't about knowledge or information. They are fundamentally about experience: of culture (YouTube, Newgrounds), of friendship (Facebook, MySpace), of shared fantasy (Second Life, World of Warcraft), etc. The Web isn't an encyclopedia: along with the home and the workplace, it's a primary environment in which we live, play, love, learn, and express ourselves. Thus, the sociology of massive cultural production is as necessary to study as the economics of networked collaboration. Which brings us back to Bourdieu.

Among Bourdieu's goals are disentangling and even modeling the incredibly complex inputs that lead to epochs of cultural production, such as late 19-century French literature. These inputs include things like the following:

• The intentions and dispositions of the artist or author
• Economic and political contexts, including material production, income, and influence of dominant class ideology
• The artist's particular use of a generic "language," such as the visual and thematic conventions of a contemporary science fiction movie
• The role of the critic in justifying, discovering, or downright creating the value of a work (think of Oprah's effect on a novel's sales and prestige)
• The education, dispositions, and tastes of the audience and how they combine to create demand

The obvious strength of Bourdieu's approach is that it avoids reducing cultural production to an oversimplified account, such as "the author's intention," or "serving the needs of the dominant economic class," or "whatever happens in the cognition of the reader/viewer," etc. Reductiveness is particularly a problem in scientific sampling, which seeks through its "operational definitions" to place discrete boundaries around phenomena whose very essence is the struggle to create boundaries; in other words, for Bourdieu, sampling of phenomena relating to cultural production predetermines the data, rather than enabling its representation.

The obvious weakness of Bourdieu's theory is that this is not an easy model to go out and apply. Fortunately, Bourdieu does apply his model in analyses of French literature, which we can, in turn, at least try to emulate in a domain of cultural production that we all care about, say, Newgrounds animations, SecondLife builds, or MySpace mini-apps.

So, simplifying for clarity and brevity, Bourdieu characterizes the "field" of cultural production as a "space" in which actors (artists, critics, etc.) struggle. They struggle not only to promote their own ideas over others, but also to draw boundaries of inclusion and exclusion as to who has a voice, who belongs in the struggle. This field he represents as a two-dimensional graph. Different agents, through an interaction between their own predispositions and the objective world of options they have in front of them, position themselves in this space.

The X-axis maps the range of popularity, from no audience to a large audience. Related to that are economic matters: large audiences tend to mean lots of money but also lots of market interference on the artist's vision. Small or no audiences mean lots of autonomy for the artist--who can do whatever she or he wishes--but at the expense of economic profit.

The Y-axis maps the degree of consecration. High consecration refers to academic and institutionalized consecration: the work is recognized as "high art," "worthy," or "important"; it also correlates to the category of the "old." Low consecration is associated with youth, the merely popular, throwaway culture.

Now, here is my central question: Can Bordieu's model be used to represent massive cultural production in the era of Web 2.0? Here are some objections that have occurred to me:

• Both French literature and contemporary mainstream film, books, and comics have high barriers to entry, that is, restricted access; that clearly is not the case (at least, not in the same way) for Web 2.0 creativity.
• Institutionally, we know how to handle all aspects of 20th century mass media: production, distribution, and consumption. Thus, we have established protocols for "consecration." With massive cultural production, the relationships between the relevant institutions (such as the hierarchies of blogs and wikis on the one hand versus universities and journalism on the other) are anything but clear, and the protocols for consecration are likewise confused.

That's all pretty abstract. Let me make it more concrete. In April, Jeremi Karnell, Carl Marci, and I did a presentation for MITX on the Numa Numa dance viral video. It doesn't get any more establishment than the president of a digital marketing services firm, a corporate researcher, and a university researcher coming together to present under the auspices of something like MITX. In Bourdieu's model, that would be a consecration of high order. Did we consecrate Numa Numa in that presentation? Surely we did on some level, but what does "consecration" even mean in this context?

Another example. Earlier this year, YouTube held awards for its "best" videos of 2006, as divided into seven categories. Each category had 10 finalists. That's 70 finalists taken from around 24 million videos uploaded that year. What possible protocol could justifiably identify the best 0.0003% of YouTube videos, from a cultural standpoint? And once this task is complete, for better or worse, again we are faced with the question of what kind of consecration is it to be a finalist of a YouTube video award.

Returning to the original question: Can Bourdieu's model be used to expose and represent the field of massive cultural production? The answer is yes, but with a caveat. Many of the underlying characteristics and concepts of Bourdieu's model will apply (e.g., field, habitus, position-taking, cultural capital), but identifying the specific categories of the space of massive cultural production, that is, finding alternatives to, or at least redefinining "degree of consecration" and large versus small audience, will require deriving or defining the new categories empirically. And that's gonna be a bit of a job. And I've got six weeks to do it. Hrm.

OTO hosts inaugural User Experience Network event

Tuesday night, June 26th, local user experience professionals gathered at the offices of One to One Interactive for the inaugural meeting of User Experience Boston (UX Boston), the local chapter of UXNet, a national organization whose goal is to create connections across UX-related disciplines including design, IA, usability, and technology. 

The evening kicked off at 7pm with lively discussion over wine and cheese, following by a brief Q&A with OTO President, Jeremi Karnell. Jeremi gave a tour of OTO’s neuromarketing research lab, anchored by the newly-acquired Quantemo TM capability. The lab offers a scientific approach to measuring a target audience’s level of emotional engagement with digital media such as web sites, online advertising, viral video, virtual worlds, etc.

The night continued with a presentation from local UX consultant, author and Phd, Lynn Cherny on designing effective online communities. The presentation reviewed some academic background on what makes a "community," whether online or offline, and showed how these notions apply online in the form of useful design principles. Lynn wrapped with a discussion on metrics for evaluation beyond simple page views and number of members.

Plans are in the works for a second chapter meeting of UX Boston early this fall.

For updates or to join, please visit: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/uxboston

WoW's Lunar New Year Festival: Experience Design Gone Awry

As a player of World of Warcraft and husband to a Chinese woman from Taiwan, I was delighted to see that Blizzard had introduced a Lunar New Year set of quests in World of Warcraft, complete with firecrackers, red lanterns, interracial harmony, and dumplings.

So it was, on the final evening of the 14-day holiday, the day known as Xiao Guonian, or "Little New Year," my wife and I, at the end of an evening of power leveling, decided to indulge ourselves in the Lunar New Year quest sequence. We dutifully began a quest in our home area, the Undercity (home of the undead), where we were pointed to the Undercity celebration area. Once there, as instructed, we purchased and set off a number of fireworks. Next, we received our invitation to join the celebration in Felwood, and we promptly teleported ourselves to a moonlit hill filled with revelers represented WoW's eight original races, dancing within a circle enclosed by red lanterns.

Moonglade is a "contested" region in WoW, which means that neither of the two factions ("the Alliance" and "the Horde") engaged in a bitter war clearly owns it. That the celebration was in such a space, and that it enclosed and included all of its races, sent a positive message about setting aside racial and political hatreds in the name of shared religious and cultural holidays.

The final phase of our Lunar New Year WoW celebration was to speak to a non-player character in the nearby town of Nighthaven. Now Nighthaven, unlike the meadows of Moonglade, is a night elf town, which means that it belongs to the Alliance, and under normal circumstances, our characters, who are undead, would not be welcome there. But the Lunar New Year quest sent us there as our final step, and enjoying WoW's recreation of this major Chinese holiday, we embarked on the final steps of our journey.

We did reach Nighthaven, and we did speak to our quest-ending interlocutor, and even earned for ourselves a nice set of virtual dumplings, a traditional symbol of prosperity in the coming year. Delighted, we set out to leave Nighthaven and return to the silvery meadow, so that we might teleport back to our home area.

On the road back, a night elf on a mount rode past us, stopped, dismounted, and killed both of our avatars. When he was done, using World of Warcraft's built-in emote system, he spat on each of us. Twice.

The two of us were stunned and offended. The very word for "death" is forbidden in Chinese culture during this holiday time, and our casual race-based killing goes profoundly against the values, traditions, and symbols of the holiday. That other player, the night elf who killed us, had no way of knowing that we had just completed a cultural observance; to him, we surely looked like two morons who had the petulance to go somewhere they had no business going and who got what they deserved. I do not blame the night elf who killed us, and his spitting on us is encouraged at every level by the game.

The mistake here is on Blizzard's end. Blizzard put significant effort into creating this "Lunar Festival" experience, which included interaction design, original 3D models and textures, sounds, characters, quests, and storytelling. The festival was clearly done to show honor to the Chinese traditions on which it drew. The sequence also established a clear experience trajectory that created expectations about what would happen as players went through it. When the sequence reverted from universal religious celebration to typical WoW PVP race-based combat, it radically altered that trajectory without signifying to the player that this change had occurred. Stated more abstractly, it's not the element in isolation that bothered us. We play on a PVP server and get killed all the time. It's the syntax: the final element of the Lunar Festival sequence was not a syntactically valid conclusion to what had preceded it. This oversight undermines the substantial efforts Blizzard put into creating the festival in the first place.

Minority Report Becomes Reality

Jeff Han is a research scientist for New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Here, he demonstrates for the first time publicly his intuitive, "interface-free," touch-driven computer screen, which can be manipulated intuitively with the fingertips, and responds to varying levels of pressure.

One to One Interactive & IU School of Informatics Explore Research Opportunities

Last week, I traveled to Bloomington, IN to begin talks with the Indiana University School of Informatics regarding establishing a formal research partnership.  Former One to One Interactive staffer, Christian Briggs, brokered the introduction.  He is currently one of a handful of PHD candidates who will be the first to matriculate from the school.

My full day on campus was spent in the company of Christan and Martin Siegel (Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research).  I met with faculty from Complex Systems and Human Computer Interface (HCI)respectively.  The conversation with the Complex Systems group (mainly mathematicians and physicists who focus on the science of networks) centered around One to One's interest in research associated with advanced measurement and analytic models.  This is to assist with digital marketing accountability, predicting word-of-mouth campaign results, and measuring the impact that social media is having on algorithmic search results, among other things.  Conversation with the faculty from HCI mainly focused on issues of consumer privacy and enhancements in interfaces that allow individuals to opt-in and customize/control digital advertising.

Founded in 2000, Indiana University was the first in the nation to launch a School of Informatics.  One of the central tenants of the School's vision is to support and enhance interdisciplinary research projects in the field of Informatics, focusing on distributed systems technology, information theory and information management, human factors and human computer interaction, and the study of social impacts of information technology. 

In my opinion, our first meeting went extremely well.  There is a great deal of interest on both sides to further explore Informatics within the evolving digital media landscape and its impact on marketing and advertising.  This also supports a strategic goal for One to One in 2006 to strengthen it's ties with academia.  Too date, the firm has established a formal partnership with the Design and Usability Center at Bentley College, and engaged both MIT Media Lab and the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society to participate in panel moderation for the MITX Digital Marketing Track the agency is managing.  Stay tuned for more developments to come.

Jeremi Karnell-President, One to One Interactive

Web 2.0: Engaging the Long Tail (Event Notes)

  On March 14th, Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange (MITX) and One to One Interactive hosted the first (sold-out) of four events in the new MITX Digital Marketing Track titled, “Web 2.0: Engaging the Long Tail.”  The panel focused on the next generation of on-line services generally referred to as Web 2.0 (e.g., Social Networks, Blogs, Podcasts, Tags, Wikis, Social Bookmarks, etc.) , how companies and consumers are adopting these new technologies, what is the real business impact, and what are the implications to future marketing and communications efforts.

The panel was moderated by Henry Jenkins, Director of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program and included participation by:

• Jack Barrette, Category Development Officer, Yahoo!

• Adam Cutler, User Experience Director, IBM’s Innovation Technology Center

• Jim Nail, CMO, Cymfony

• Jeremi Karnell, Co-Founder & President, One to One Interactive

Henry kicked the panel off by providing definitions of “Web 2.0” and “The Long Tail”. 

He then asked the panelists to introduce themselves and to share some initial brief thoughts about Web 2.0 and its impact.

Jack Barrette kicked things off by stating “Web 2.0 is a broad category, encompassing dozens of user engagements from photosharing to machinima to blogs. At base, they are all: Online content created, circulated, shared and used by consumers; often informed by relevant experience; typically archived for access by others”. 

Adam Cutler shared the following initial thoughts:  “In our (IBM) opinion, people as computing power is the single most important aspect to what Web 2.0 really is at its essence.   In other words, when you have many individuals and/or groups working on solving many little problems 24/7, innovations come on a daily basis. As these incremental innovations are adopted, mutated and re-released into the wild there are regular quantum leaps forward every two to six months when the smaller pieces are loosely joined in a novel way. One just has to look to Google Maps, Ajax (as a concept) or Flickr to see evidence of this.  The net of this is that there isn’t a corporation, entity or individual that has enough money or offshoring capability to compete with that kind of horsepower. From a business perspective, the first companies to recognize and embrace this will vault so far ahead of their competition, the rest of the field will have no choice but to follow.”

Jim Nail finished the set of introductions by stating “The important thing about Web 2.0 is the change in consumer behavior toward 1) creating more content and 2) engaging with each other 3) mashing up mainstream media content with their own or other consumer-generated content, with little regard for the source. The reason it is happening now is new technologies that are enablers, but we shouldn’t get hung up on the technologies, because they will change; I’ve heard the argument that MySpace, Gather.com, etc are already subsuming/replacing blogs as the center of gravity. No doubt something else will come along in a few years. But the change in consumer behavior from passive recipient of whatever the Mass Media/Marketing Industrial Complex dishes out is an inexorable change.”

One of the first questions Henry posed to the panel was:

“What happens to brands in the era of Web 2.0 and the Long Tail?”

Jim Nail responded by stating brands will evolve and the most important dimension of a brand will be how they relate to their consumers. “Think of it this way: Originally, the key dimension of a brand was a differentiating feature: Ivory soap being 99.44% pure. Then it became a differentiating benefit: Winston tastes good like a cigarette should. Then it was image: Just do it! In the future it will be brands that listen and respond to their consumers’/communities’ feedback.”

Adam Cutler initially disagreed with Nail’s statement by asserting that "brands will die" in favor of user experience.  This kicked off a lengthy (probably too lengthy) debate.  I fell in Nail’s camp regarding the notion that the successful brands in the future will be those that listen and take part in a one-to-one dialogue with their prospects and customers.  I went on to assert that social computing will begin to even the playing field in regards to marketing.  Brands will no longer be able to hide behind large advertising campaigns as a proxy to mask sub-standard product or services.  Furthermore, small entrepreneurial start-ups who leverage communities of interest from the very beginning and create a superior product/service will benefit with quicker innovation, more rapid product/service adoption, and less capital expense to drive awareness as it leverages word-of-mouth communications (Skype is a good example of this).   In the end, I agree with what Adam acknowledged - that as people are able to track down a broader range of information and tap the community's collective wisdom about products, they will be less reliant on the traditional notion of brand (reputation and/or aura) and more interested in the experience.  In this view, we all were of one mind that the activity of branding is on the cusp of a major shift.  A quote from Jack Barrette’s nicely wrapped up this section of the discussion: “Join the conversation or get talked about.”

Jenkins went on to ask:

“Which companies (other than the ones represented on this panel) seem to "get" Web 2.0? What do you see as the best practices which are emerging from these companies?”

The panel collectively highlighted the following companies as early adopters of social computing (reprinted from audience member Stephanie Rogers’ blog, CultureJunkie):

• Intuit 's Product Manager blogs. Companies are still considered experts on their products, and who better to address product development news, issues, questions and concerns than the developers themselves.

• Lego's consumer innovation council, where active members of online Lego enthusiast networks were tapped for special product brainstorming and development conversations.

• Maytag's Man Caves. There's a burgeoning population of men outfitting their basements and garages with all the trappings of manhood - plasma screen tvs, high end audio systems, pool tables, and wet bars - and blogging about it! A popular item in the caves is a Maytag soda fountain filled with beer. So Maytag provides high res images and sneak peaks of new models for these fans to post on their own sites and help spread the word.

Regarding emerging best practices, I used a recent client example at One to One Interactive where we focused on strategic research to help prioritize Web 2.0 initiatives.  This included:

1. Using firms like Cymfony or Nielsen Buzz Metrics to identify who is speaking about your product or service online.
   1. Includes identifying which blogs, podcasts, online discussion boards, online communities, and portals that are sought out by consumers to reach your product/service

2. Identifying and flagging key issues within those online conversations

3. Prioritizing and executing key word-of-mouth programs to take part in the conversation.  These may include:
   1. Word of Mouth Evangelism Programs to make it easier for brand evangelists to tell their friends about your product/service.

   2. Online Community Development

   3. Advocacy/Outreach programs such as Blogger Relation Days.

   4. Word-Of-Mouth Paid Search Program to help promote corporate blogging efforts and to promote related communities, blogs, podcasts, etc.

   5. Co-creation and Information sharing program.  Letting customers behind the curtain and give them first access to information/content.  Allow them to provide feedback on product/service innovation and marketing strategies.

Following this question the Panel was opened to the audience for Q & A.  Notable queries included:

• How does the fact that a majority of individuals are not participating in developing blogs, participating in social networks, or posting to online discussion groups impact a corporation’s social computing strategy?
  • The panelists all agreed that this observation was important to note.  Frankly, there are only so many Mavens and Connectors in the general population.  This really calls into consideration the need to conduct the necessary research to identify the real population of active participants to engage in online dialogues.  It also underlies the importance of understanding how average/non-participating consumers find and trust the information they are reading from citizen publishers or via word-of-mouth.

• Who is responsible for setting a Web 2.0 agenda within an enterprise?  Are there any examples of how information derived from social computing efforts is captured, distributed, and taken into serious consideration so that real change may occur?
  • None of the panelists were able to point to any single method.  It varies drastically by industry and by the tactics used to garner feedback or promote dialogue.  I stated that this question fundamentally needs to be answered by the CMO.  They are in the best position to determine what strategies to deploy and to effect corporate policy in regards to distribution and use of the intelligence provided by such efforts.

All in all, I feel the panel was an undeniable success.  MITX and One to One Interactive did an excellent job identifying a timely topic and attracting some of the industries top minds to engage in thoughtful and intelligent debate.  Stay tuned for the second panel in this series that will focus on IPTV, Broadband Entertainment, and the future of Television.

Jeremi Karnell-President, One to One Interactive