The Atlantic: The Zynga Abyss →

90wpm:

The Atlantic published an excerpt from my essay for Distance today. It’s a little over 1500 words, and covers some of the main points in the essay.

It also includes a fantastic photoshopped stock photo of a lab rat playing FarmVille in a Skinner box.

Here’s a small snip:

In the 1890s, while studying natural sciences at the University of Saint Petersburg, a Russian mathematician named Ivan Pavlov was analyzing dogs’ saliva output over time. Pavlov noticed that dogs tended to salivate more before eating and that merely the sight of a white lab coat would induce salivation — even if no food was on the way. So he tried ringing a bell before presenting them with food, and found that over time, the dogs would salivate even if a bell was rung with no food presented. Pavlov’s research defined classical conditioning, in which a primary reinforcer (one which naturally elicits a response, e.g. food or pain) is associated with a conditioned or secondary reinforcer, such as the lab coat or bell.

Forty years later, Burrhus Frederic Skinner built upon Pavlov’s observations as a young psychologist in graduate school. He constructed a soundproof, lightproof chamber that housed a small animal; a lever was placed within the animal’s reach, which triggered a primary reinforcer. Called the Skinner box, the device opened up many possibilities for experimentation, leading to breakthroughs in later research: from the relative addictiveness of cocaine in isolation versus in a larger community, to the question of whether rats have empathy.

I’m really, really excited about the impending release after Feb. 17, especially given the awesome essays that Vitorio Miliano and Jon Whipple are working on alongside me.

Anyone curious about social game design, behavioral psychology, or even just why FarmVille is so damn addictive should take a look at the full excerpt.

(via theatlantic)

1 day ago  /  25 notes  /   / /Source: 90wpm

Our Unimaginative Internet Economy →

Yes, Google and Facebook make their billions by selling millions of beautifully-targeted ads. How innovative, how ingenious, how high-tech. Oh wait, no it’s not. It’s the most unimaginative way to make money in the media business. It’s really no different than a TV network making money from commercials. As with TV, on the Internet you buy the hardware (a computer/tablet/TV set). You pay for the transmission service (it’s not a coincidence that TV and Internet services are bundled together by the same provider). Then you get the content (TV shows, web sites) for free.

The TV model of media monetization is actually a little worse than the newspaper model. In the paper era, you also paid for the “hardware” (the paper on which the newspaper stories were printed) and you paid for the “transmission service” (the cost of sending the newspaper to your door, from truck to paper boy) through your subscription to a newspaper. However, these subscription fees went back to the media company that created the newspaper. In the Internet era (as in the television era), the media company only collects the fees from advertising. Fees for hardware and transmission services go to hardware manufacturers like Apple and phone and cable companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast.

Internet companies which provide only services, like Facebook and Google, are parasites on the rest of the economy. They make their money by selling ads to actual companies that make and sell actual goods. They don’t try to create or sell digital goods, because they know that content value is a function of content scarcity, which free digital copying has destroyed. They do provide social and information services, but they give these services away for free. They rely on ads, an old and unimaginative monetization model that pre-dates the Internet while creating an expectation in the consumer they they will never have to pay for any digital good. Truly the Internet economy is run by geniuses!

1 week ago  /  21 notes  /   / /Source: azspot