The Opposite of Avatar
May 29th, 2006, By Duncan Gough
Personally, I’m beginning to think that playsh isn’t about play, it’s about code. The relief and the fun in writing good code. Isn’t a tool to promote happy hacking? The whole idea of creating verbs out of complicated actions is the refactoring process. It’s an interactive example of what David Heinemeier Hansson spoke about at the Snakes and Rubies conference a while ago. Boiling down code until it became readable, terse but also more than just functional. Making the safest thing also the simplest thing by reducing the boiler-plate code to domain specific elements.
Bud.com talks about making a game out of your online existence, whilst m3mnoch brands passive gaming as the perverse invasion, which just sounds so good it must succeed. Both of these feel like they tie into something I’ve been thinking about regarding avatars. For web-mogs, avatars could well be the only graphical representation of the world that you see. Avatars of yourself, avatars of your friends and enemies. If web-mogs move to integrate more social networking features, then tagging, for example, is something that they should usefully adapt.
My concern is that avatars are our chosen, public facing likeness. My avatar is how I should look to you, it’s how I see myself and how I want to be seen. For web-mogs you can see the neccessity where there is little animated action, where so much is left to the players’ imagination.
What has been nagging me for some time, though, is the opposite of avatars, the real you. Reading Techcrunch the other day led me to a story about the silent apps, the customer profiling that companies like Flickr use to create adminstrative tools to monitor the popularity and trends on their site. Almost all web-apps have some kind of admin section and more often than not it contains user-specific features. Who does what, when do they do it. Where did they come from and where are they going? And that’s the opposite of avatar. The hidden self-expression through private actions – where you went on our website, what you used it for. It’s what Bud threatens to expose, which is why the idea of a game based around the metadata of web surfing is so appealing.
If the next generation of web apps are picking up on the element of play, then the next generation of web games need to pick up their counterparts sense of trivia. Statistics, user profiling and data warehousing need to become as much a part of the process of game design as play. The rewards may be oblique, but they are worth it.