After re-reading Bill Keller’s awesome article on the NYTimes’ dealings with Assange, was interested enough to go diving subsequently into all of the Times coverage in the collected Open Secrets volume that they released a few years back.

Keller’s article is particularly great since it details the drawn out battle of wills that took place during 2010 and into 2011 between the government, the press, and Wikileaks as the Cablegate story unfolded.

It struck me that the strategic situation might work great as a tabletop game, so started working on it in my off-hours over the past few months. The beta version of the ruleset for that game is available here as of today.

I’ll plan to post updated versions here as we playtest it over in San Francisco over the coming weeks. Drop a line to tim@timhwang.org if you want to stay posted on it as we develop it out and make tweaks.

An e-mail list that I’m on has been discussing text adventures lately (and I’ve been playing around a bit myself with Twine). In the usual behind-the-times way of mine, it was revealed to me today that play-by-e-mail RPGs are — in fact — a thing and have been going on for decades at this point (this is just how long they have been going on: “Playing in a PBeM isn’t easy either. The player must be prepared to read his mail at least once a day in a typical game“).

I really like this idea. Modern e-mail has a bunch of affordances that seem perfect for a whole slew of fun text-based game/storytelling mechanics. Threading and archiving gives the ability to produce plotlines that can be dropped or recovered at the will of the GM. You can imagine structuring each e-mail thread as a “room”, separate imaginary location, or adventure where activity can be happening.

The possibilities get more interesting as the PBeM RPG supports increasing numbers of players. You can imagine using BCCs and CCs to bring players in and out of situations, or to allow for them to spy on one another without the knowledge of the other. Interestingly, as long as the e-mail address of the other players are hidden and the full number of users are undisclosed, the GM can relay moves of other players to a single recipient in the story, leaving them unsure whether they are dealing with an NPC or a real player in any given situation.

Ultimately, I’d love to see federated groups of GMs support an even larger number of players, en route to implementing a completely human-driven MMO.

So, I’m officially opening up player registration for a first experiment in this: “5322″ — a light two-week, text-based adventure based around time warping, parallel universe agents attempting to manipulate a series of events to their nefarious and/or heroic advantage with a family of time machines based on a single, core technology: CTSS — a “Compatible Time-Sharing System.” Let me know by March 17th if you’re interested in taking part by sending an e-mail over to tim@timhwang.org. We’ll start the game on Monday, March 18th.

5322 will just sandbox a few things I’ve been reading lately, and play fast and loose with a quickly designed module that I’m putting together over this weekend. I’m also kludging in lil’ 20-sided die based mechanic to resolve actions that I’ll physically roll over here. And, thanks to a recent reading of the old Paranoia R&D Catalog - it’ll probably also feature all sorts of wacked out gizmos to be used by  (and used on, in fine PvP style) the various players. Should be a good time.

Been wanting for awhile to do a content hackathon: basically an event that combines the usual dirty and wonderful multi-day-no-sleep-and-takeout-food binge of the hackathons you know and love but points those efforts towards producing some sort of publication at the end rather than some sort of technological thing.

It’s a model that’s been tried to some success in generating open textbooks, though, in theory there’s no limitation on what the end result could be. That seems to open the door to lever these events for punching out a bunch of neat one-off monographs and essay collections on a wide range of fun topics.

With all that in mind, I’m doing a sprint here in San Francisco with a few others from January 25-27 to write a collection of short pieces diving in and picking apart Adult Swim’s wonderful Hanna-Barbera-homage/monument-to-personal-failure The Venture Brothers. Thinking it’ll be a neat chance to bring together a fun (unprecedented?) collection of content around the show, and also an excuse to re-watch a bunch of old episodes. We’ll be doing a few screenings in advance of the weekend and open to anyone who wants to come along, so give a holler if you’re interested.

You can play at home too! Give a holler if you want to submit anything: imagining we’ll have people working along virtually that weekend, and we’ll go along and get those pieces into the overall collection that comes out at the end.

Introducing TETRIS-SYSTEM – a chess-like system of annotation for tracking the block-by-block moves in a game of Tetris. Developed in collaboration with Parker Higgins for the greater good.

Downloadable here.

To the Most August Members of the Awesome Foundation:

It’s been almost a month, but I’m still wrapping my head around the Awesome Summit.

Like the Foundation itself, the whole premise of the Summit was pretty simple and straightforwards: we envisioned bringing together a meetup open to any member of any chapter of the Awesome Foundation that wanted to show up to Boston to hang out with other members from around the world for a weekend. Incidentally, it ended up being the same weekend as the third anniversary of the founding of the Awesome Foundation, which made it a particularly fitting time to bring everyone together.

No doubt part of the idea was to have an opportunity to discuss issues of common interest to the Awesome Foundation chapters. However, just as important was the basic fact that the Summit would be the first time that such a large number of people involved with the Foundation would be in the same place at the same time. This was big: as we’ve grown, the links tying the far-flung chapters of the Awesome Foundation have been mostly digital. We communicate over e-mail lists, read of each others doings through the communal blog and Skype with one another when the need calls for it. However, I mostly hadn’t met (in person) the people involved with the vast majority of chapters that have exploded onto the scene since 2009. One of the odd results of this (particularly because we’re generally so decentralized) has been that it’s difficult to tell who precisely is behind all the various chapters. In some ways, the Summit was a way for the community to collectively ask, who are all of you awesome people?

And, like any internet community coming together for the first time, it’s always a little uncertain what the outcome would be. Would anyone show up? Would they be complete weirdos? Would everyone have enough in common to make for an appropriately awesome weekend?

Well, the Summit happened. And, frankly, the results I don’t think can be described in any words other than completely remarkable. Participants flew in from all around the world, ultimately numbering close to a hundred total attendees. We had representatives come to Boston from as far as Australia, Brazil and Mongolia. Without exception, everyone I met was inspiring in their own right — ridiculously active people hailing from a staggering array of backgrounds. Best of all, permeating the entire Summit was an immense sense of community, linked by a common effort to play a part in making their local neighborhoods and cities more awesome. I couldn’t have hoped for more.

It’s a sign of the broader robustness of the community that has grown up around the Awesome Foundation. In three years, the Foundation has grown from a single city to an organization that now numbers more than forty chapters in five different continents. As the data coming from the folks on the State of the Awesome team show, chapter growth appears to tracking very closely to a pattern of exponential growth. Most remarkably, the network effect of having chapters regularly supporting awesomeness worldwide is starting to add up: we’re on track to cross the $1,000,000 mark of total amount given sometime in the next year.

If you’re reading this and thinking — that’s ridiculous! You’re right, it is ridiculous. Ridiculously great. Because what the Awesome Foundation has demonstrated by practice is that, quite simply, the model works. Not only does the model work, it scales.

I think that’s a bigger fact than one might think. While the dollar amounts might be on a smaller scale, what we do at the Awesome Foundation is in some ways more fundamental than the latest crowdfunding platforms and applications that have seen so much popularity in recent years. It’s important to remember that these new technological tools are just that — tools. They are nothing without an active, vibrant dense network of human relationships and communities in the real world that use these tools to propose great ideas and support great ideas.

To that end, what we are engaged in at the Foundation is simply the hard, grassroots work for building that human network person by person, grantee by grantee. That community is something more durable, and in many ways more powerful and close to the heart of “crowdsourcing” in driving and encouraging awesomeness globally.

So where do we go from here? Emerging from the discussions at the Summit it appears there are three big shifts going forward with the Awesome Foundation:

• Distributing Awesome: Mostly through historical happenstance and tradition, there’s been a few functions that have been done by a relatively small group of members of the Awesome Foundation. This includes helping new chapters get started, the management of content online and the planning of common events like the Summit. The Summit appears to have kicked off a general movement towards distributing these sorts of functions to a broader set of member around the world. This is really exciting: my sense is that this transition will tend to allow the Foundation to react more nimbly and get more done generally.

• Understanding Awesome: Obviously, the name of the Institute on Higher Awesome Studies is a bit of a joke. But, the concept of “Higher Awesome Studies” might end up being a surprisingly deep endeavor. As a community we’re generating a huge amount of knowledge and a variety of different approaches in how to promote awesomeness in our local communities (and beyond). There’s a general effort towards documenting these methodologies and spreading what we’re finding, both among the chapters and to the world at large. In the long term, this will be a huge asset, since it will allow people to build upon what we’ve learned, both as a template within the Awesome Foundation and in their own organizations and projects as well.

• Growing Awesome: Rumors of Peak Awesome are unfounded. With little effort on our part, chapters continue to spring up around the world as news about what we’re doing continues to spread. We’ll increasingly have to evolve as an organization that can support chapters from around the world and hailing from an increasingly diverse set of backgrounds. As I’ve mentioned, we’ve started to get calls from chapters this past year from places that are geographically and demographically way outside our origins in a group of tech nerds (retirement homes! twelve year old kids!). Like the other two developments, this will be a challenge and also a tremendously exciting boon to the Awesome Foundation. I think a big part of succeeding in this transition is to keep to our existing commitment to being extremely hands-off and letting new chapters run with the Awesome Foundation model. If the history of the Foundation shows anything so far, it’s that this will let the model continue to grow and adapt quickly to whatever local communities need it for.

And so the Awesome Foundation marches on. Personally, I’m honored to have gotten the chance to meet so many members of the Awesome Foundation, and hope it isn’t before the next Summit that we run into each other again. If you’re ever in San Francisco, do give a shout – we’d love to host you.

Tim Hwang, August 2012

The question is simple: what explains the rise of the reboot, the adaptation and the sequel as a (if not the) dominant feature of mainstream big-ticket moviemaking? Particularly this summer season, the number of sequels and franchise adaptations in the pipeline is staggering. I’m personally waiting for the studio fat cats to greenlight the sequel to Battleship — Battleships.

The classic explanation for all this is to wave hands and give a cranky roll of the eyes, declaring that Hollywood has simply run out of ideas. The Art of Moviemaking, so the story goes, is just not what it used to be. To be sure, that’s one potential story we can tell ourselves. Though intellectually it’s frankly a bit pat — and relies on a generalized stereotype of the creative forces behind Hollywood that seems pretty simplistic at best.

Another potential theory might place the blame on the Internet. The argument, it might go, is that the media environment is increasingly disperse and fragmented. This suggests that what was previously a monolithic, homogenized market is now an overwhelming ecosystem of differing preferences and tastes in movies. So, from the point of view of a risk-averse producer, the only types of movies that might reliably (and less riskily) make money would be proven, established franchises. Ironically, in such a model, sequel overload in the big ticket movies is a symptom of the vast diversity of the Internet, the last gasp of an ailing industry under fire.

Another — perhaps more sophisticated — approach argues that the incorporation of film companies into vast diversified business empires tends to change the calculus that studios make when deciding which films to bet on. Since sequels tend to monetize a whole line of different related products — merchandise, DVDs, and so on — the business of movies is such that it is more profitable to release sequels and derivatives that monetize the entire franchise in aggregate, rather than a new, independent media product with no extended product base.

All these are plausible stories that explain how big budget movie production has gotten to the particular distribution of content it has. They are, all three, supply-side arguments for how the movies are like they are. In short, the fault lies with Hollywood. In short, they all posit some change that occurred at some point in the production and business model of cinema that renders big ticket filmmaking filled to the brim with half-hearted derivatives of existing franchises.

But, ultimately, no matter their proposed mechanism, supply-side arguments seem flimsy at best.

Particularly if you buy the idea that the increasingly vast supply of accessible media makes audiences ever more fickle, the vision of Hollywood executives forcing the dreck of yesterday down the throats of an unhappy public seems unrealistic at best. There is no captured, inelastic market of film consumers here to exploit (except, perhaps, in the world of kid films – where each demanding consumer drags along a number of accompanying consumers) — presumably if the studios were really producing films that no one actually wanted to see, those viewers would peel away over time. Moreover, there would be a large profit incentive for an enterprising firm to invest in high quality and novel fictional franchises.

Simply, this is a big, apparent inefficiency in the market, economically speaking. What gives?

My friend Dan Auerbach casually proposed an alternative explanation — The Auerbach Hypothesis — over some nasty-ass fast food at South Van Ness institution Whiz Burger a few months back which is quite fun. I’ve been puzzling over it ever since trying to figure out if it actually provides a better explanation for the observed pattern. You would need more data to tell, and part of the objective of this here post is to see if anyone out there on the Internet has the numbers or a more informed opinion than the armchair speculation I’m engaging in here.

The argumentative gambit is to start out by not finding the source of sequel overload in the supply, but in the demand-side dynamics at work in the movie industry. In other words, it is the public at large which is demanding the remake, the sequel and the adaptation, which is why it is increasingly being supplied.

Then, the next step is to avoid the obvious generalization that the public is stupid and wants dumb remakes. Even if true and measurable, it doesn’t explain why a shift occurred within the past few decades beyond some get-off-my-lawn argument that kids-these-days are less bright than they used to be.

Instead, the proposed mechanism is this: the persistence of franchises provided by inexpensive recorded media and accessibility through the Internet has made it more profitable to mine nostalgia. 

Cheap and instantaneous access to a nearly unlimited library of old media products through DVDs and otherwise allows franchises to stay alive and fresh in the collective memory of popular culture for a longer period of time. It has, therefore, become more profitable over time — rather than less — to release reboots and sequels on existing media products. In the absence of constant reminders of plots and characters that we’ve seen before, it might be less profitable and riskier trying to polish up and reintroduce the movie watching public to an old, otherwise moribund franchise that they’ve long forgotten about. Media technology aids memory, providing fertile demand for that which was seen before.

In short, the media environment acts as a kind of life support for old memes by continuing to circulate them long after when they might otherwise go largely extinct. It seems plausible that this effect might so sufficiently lower the risks as to make the expected value of derivative works relatively higher on the balance than taking a chance on new, untested creative works. And hence, Battleships.

This conjecture seems difficult to prove cleanly. The relaunch of shows like Futurama and Family Guy through their post-cancellation distribution on DVD and streaming provides at least some anecdotal evidence that such a mechanism does exist in the wild, though I’m trying to come up with a good way of measuring and showing this on aggregate.

If true, though, this explanation has a neat, underlying dimension to it: it tells a story which links the changing technological structure of media delivery to the actual creative tastes and preferences of the general public. Old Man McLuhan would be proud.

The mighty conference gods of SXSW Interactive have smiled upon us, so on an early morning a week from now I’ll be doing a panel with my long-time buds Christina Xu and Diana Kimball, on the making of the ROFLCon in 2008, its aftermath, and what we’re going to be doing with the conference into the future. As far as nostalgia goes, I’ll admit I’m a little uneasy simultaneously that (a) that it’s already been three years since we started down that crazy road, (b) that three years is some kind of long enough period to start doing some kind of retrospective panel thing at conferences. I always kind of thought you’d have to be Usenet-old to qualify for doing that kind of conference panel. Though, I guess as an old Tim & Diana episode established, it’s always good to have a bit of pre-nostalgia scheduled in to your conference going, even if only to make sure you have something to do other than twiddle your phones and hide out at the SXSW charging station they always have under the escalator.

In any case, it should be a fun time — one of the great sides of ROFLCon internally is how widely divergent personality and interest-wise the initial team was (you’ll undoubtedly see that in the other posts and comments that are coming out today). There’s a neat trick of Captain Planet-esque synergy in there, and I’m more than certain those contrasts will be coming out in all their glory at the session.

One thing is for certain — what was previously a pretty empty field in 2008 is now crowded all over the place with people wanting to do “let’s bring together all these internet people” events of one sort or another. There’s Digitour, and out in the UK they’re doing KittenCamp, just to name a few. This happens on the level of the internet event, but also on the level of the media itself as well. 2008 to 2011 has seen the establishment of an enormous business infrastructure to develop, promote, and “leverage” internet celebrity across a whole variety of media from books to TV. It’s been talked about a lot within the ROFL-team that when we did the first conference, LOLCats were still up and coming. That’s a crap-ton of internet time, and inevitably stuff has changed.

As a result, what was once a series of pretty nicely delineated boundaries in bringing together speakers has now become a much more mixed field. The idea that internet culture is over “here” (Tron Guy, 4Chan, Mahir Cagri, etc), and all the regular culture is over “there” (American Idol, Two and a Half Men, etc) has been disrupted by the presence of organizations, personalities, and interests perpetually bleeding the edges of the two worlds together in the past few years. That’s not a bad or unexpected or even an avoidable situation, per se, because one of the reasons that “virality” happens on some level is that funny stuff on the internet is just some very good stuff. Like most popular things and, indeed, like the “meme” itself, the nature of most web content is that it gets everywhere and into everything, despite your best efforts to quarantine it into one box or another. That’s what makes it great.

So that leaves us in sort of a weird and exciting spot — struggling ever harder to find ways of slicing and dicing a speaker slate for putting a conference together. Would/Should Charlie Sheen qualify? To what degree should marketers (even successful Old Spice Guy type-marketers) be brought into the conference? We can’t ignore these developments as impacting “internet culture” broadly speaking, but inevitably they don’t seem to entirely gel with the overall culture that ROFLCon’s been good at bringing together either.

Ben Huh over at Cheezburger once referred to what ROFLCon does as “the industry conference,” which is funny on several levels, though I’ve been thinking a lot through that idea recently. While inevitably there will be an ever-growing market into the future for bringing the emerging obscurities of internet culture into the mainstream marketplace, there remains something that’s irreplaceable and valuable about assembling the tight collegiality and shared community of the people most deeply immersed at the core of the cultural ecosystems of the web. In fact, it strikes me that the very popularity of a culture creates a countervailing need for ever-more curated meeting points between people to address the bigger questions unavailable in more popular fora. In a world of SXSW Interactive and Web 2.0 Expo, there’s still room (perhaps even more room) for your TEDs, FOOCamps, and PopTechs. In a world of quick and awesome MemeFactory performances explaining and bringing web culture to the world, there’s still room for the depth of a MemeFactory book. In a world of reams of discussion and punditry about global problems, people still find the need to have get together at Davos and talk about stuff.

A World Economic Forum for the Internet? We know that the internet increasingly makes foreign policy, fields armies (of a kind), and makes cultural trends. Why couldn’t we do something like that? Don’t know what that would look like (yet), but that’d be pretty effing cool.

(photo courtesy ragesoss, CC BY SA)

——

So anyways, if you’re interested in hearing about some of this and talking about where we’re at — here’s where we’ll be: Internets, How Do They Work? Lessons from ROFLCon.

Tuesday, March 15 at 9:30am
Hilton Salon F/G
500 East 4th St.
Austin, TX

The results: tremendously exciting! With only two weeks of coding time, the three competing teams were able to develop bots that, even following rudimentary patterns of behavior, were able to elicit an enormous amount of activity in the social cluster. The winning team alone built 107 mutual connections between its bot and the targets, and elicited close to 200 responses (@ replies, RTs, etc). In all, the bots collectively generated close to 250 responses, and received mutual connections from close to half of the entire target set. And the bots also had a strong effect on the topology of the social graph as well — in the two weeks, the bots were able to heavily shape and distort the structure of the network. This included bringing people together not originally connected, and bringing together a community of activity around the bots themselves (the picture above was the final end-state network graph in the game).

The ultimate “so-what” of this? Beyond just competitions, it opens the possibility of building a class of technologies that could be used to do targeted social shaping on a very large scale. Essentially, Socialbots demonstrates that proof of concept. To that end, swarms of bots with statistically-predictable social outcomes could be built and used to actively sculpt and rewire the connections of social groups online consisting of thousands (or perhaps hundreds of thousands of users).

So we’re setting our sights a bit higher now. What we’re working on now is the “The Narrows,” the first ever robo-constructed social superstructure leveraging and extending the technology from Socialbots to really engage in building mega-scale community architecture. That’s pretty abstract, but the idea behind the project is simple and concrete: we’re going to survey and identify two sites of 5,000-person unconnected Twitter communities, and over a six-to-twelve month period use waves of bots to thread and rivet those clusters together into a directly connected social bridge between those two formerly independent groups. The bot-driven social “scaffolding” will then be dropped away, completing the bridge, with swarms of bots being launched to maintain the superstructure as needed.

In any case, we’re getting a team together to embark on this project and form a social architecture team, the first construction project of a group that we’re calling “Pacific Social.” If you’re interested in playing a role, drop me a line at tim@timhwang.org!

Today, excited to announce that I’ll be chairing the newly forged Web Ecology Standing Committee on the Robotic Corporation (SCRC). The concept behind the committee springs from Web Ecology Camp and various discussions that have sprung forth with the release of PawnFarm — which allows users to pump out their own Amazon Mechanical Turk driven robots to systematically crawl through Twitter and socialize with unsuspecting people.

Specifically, we’ve been struck by a tantalizing idea. Which is that, at its heart, the social nature of the web allows robots to shape, manage, and direct human behavior on a broad new scale.

So, could a script interfaced with the multitude of online labor markets out there — Elance, AMT, ODesk — to power and coordinate everything from end-to-end to spin up a fully functioning corporation? Suppose that somewhere on the internet, a script puts out a job and hires someone to come up with a business plan, then farms out that business plan to be broken into small, distributable steps, and then hires people to deploy the project? Then, after the infrastructure is humming along, hires a group to staff that project?

What if these business ideas became not just sustainable, but highly profitable? Could the robot corporation diversify into investments? Venture funding? Storefronts? What’s the technology that would undergird such an entity? What’s the simplest set of rules for a program you could launch to accomplish this? How might one construct a business or organization that is computer managed, but human driven?

This is the subject of the SCRC.

Like the Web Ecology Camps, the idea will be to meet quarterly to develop out various aspects of the idea, share projects, and eventually move to prototyping/implementing projects experimenting in this vein. At least initially, we’re keeping fellowships on the SCRC capped to keep the discussions intimate, but drop a line if you’re interested in participating!

The first plenary session of the Committee will be held on October 16th, 2010 in San Francisco, CA. Interested parties should drop a line to tim@timhwang.org.

For the past few months, I’ve been hungrily scouring the web in an effort to find and collect that most breathtaking of obsessive compulsive video montage masterpieces: the pop culture megamix.

Lovingly dedicated to curating and documenting every tiny, weird repetitive tic of celebrities or Hollywood plot device, the megamix genre is a thing of beauty. Like watching glitches in some bizarre pop culture Matrix, it’s unsettling — but really in only the best possible way.

In any case, if you’ve spent any amount of time online, you’ve no doubt seen some of these and heard about others. In my opinion, it’s totally worth going back and experiencing them all (and catching up on the ones you haven’t). I’ve collected all the best I could find and included them all below.

So, enjoy. If I’m missing any that you think should be included, absolutely drop a comment!

(Obscenely) more videos, after the jump…

* “Zoom and Enhance” Moments –

* Ice related puns in “Batman and Robin” –

* Sandra Lee saying “Delicious” –

* Shia LaBeouf saying “No” –

* GET OUT OF THERE –

* David Caruso One Liners –

* Montage of “Problem” Scenes In Infomercials —

* I’m Not Here To Make Friends (2009 edition)

* Sheriff John Bunnell: The Definitive Introduction Compilation (thx Rich)

* All The Secret Ingredients of Iron Chef (thx Alex)

* The Surreally Bad Closing Monologues of “Lopez Tonight”