Deus Ex Machinatio

How Many Licks DOES It Take? A Challenge!

Let's let the owl explain:

And thus was the challenge issued. You can't let a statement like that go unanswered, can you? I set out with my daughter to do a trial run, but her result -- 614 licks -- is merely one lonely, unscientific anecdote. (I didn't manage to actually count at all. Oops!)

There have been a few valiant efforts to find the truth of this matter, but none have achieved anything like a conclusive sample size, and have omitted factors that might be key to finding your PTPLE (Personal Tootsie Pop Licking Estimate), such as tongue width and Tootsie Pop flavor. Even if I were to lobby every friend I have to conduct this experiment, few would follow through, and I would wind up with paltry tens of data points, if that.

But we live in an era of phenomenal crowdsourcing and collaboration. There is no reason we can't all get together to create a conclusive formula establishing the PTPLE. And so, one and all, I invite you to conduct your own one-person Tootsie Pop experiments and record the results in our Google Spreadsheet.

Soon, thanks to all of you, the world will finally know... how many licks DOES it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?

Digital Storytelling Brings Kids Together

This isn't what usually springs to mind when I think about digital storytelling, but it certainly caught my attention. There's a storytelling program going on right now connecting high school kids in Aspen, Colorado, and Oakland, California:

Using MP3 files transferred via the website Words.Sound.Life, which bills itself as “the social network for digital media learning,” students at Oasis High School, an alternative school in the Oakland District, recently shared personal stories with students at Rifle High School.

...

Now the students will convert each other's stories into both written work and art projects — and in the process, learn about art and writing.

So we have teens coming together via technology to share life experiences and collaborate on different creative ways of conveying their personal stories. I love this to pieces, because it widens kids' horizons by exposing them to people with vastly different life experiences; it fuels that idea that everyone has a story to tell; and it encourages kids to dabble their fingers in making stuff.

In an era when practically all we hear about education is that students are mainly being taught to excel at taking standardized tests, this is quite a breath of fresh air.

Is Today Fired?

Have you ever hated a day so much you wished you could have it clean out its desk and escorted out the door by security? Good news -- now you can! Join in the fun at Is Today Fired? and vote on the HR fate of your day.

And now, for a few special, magical days, yours truly is guest-hosting there. Come on over and join in the fun!

ARGology! It Lives!

And now that I'm a solid three weeks behind the news, I'd like to officially announce ARGology! This site is a volunteer effort by members of the IGDA's ARG SIG to create some much-needed resources for people who are trying to learn about the genre, or trying to tell others about the genre.

The ARGology effort has been spearheaded by the priceless-beyond-rubies Christy Dena with hosting and technical matters generously taken care of by the equally irreplaceable John Evans. This is in no way meant to minimize the contributions of the other volunteers who made ARGology a reality, name-checked along with their contributions in our announcement notice.

One thing about ARGology you may not know without poking around a bit: There's a listing for developers, including both studios and freelancers in the field. If you're interested in being listed here, drop me a line and I'll add you in.

Keeping Up With Voices

Want to keep up with Voices, but you're not sure what to do or how to start? Here's a helpful tip. Just go to the Recent Changes to see what's going on. Better, subscribe to the RSS or Atom feeds. This way you'll always be able to keep track of what people are saying and what updates are going on without the need to search around to find something different. Yay!

Let Me Hear Your Voices

Some of you may remember me tweeting about the need for a private wiki for a Sekrit Project several weeks ago. (And I got a wonderful avalanche of volunteers, too. Thanks again!) 

Now I'd like to introduce that project: Voices. 

As it stands now, Voices is the seed of an exploration of narrative in the wiki format, and I hope to include elements of collaboration and branching storytelling as it goes forward. But to do that... I need your help. 

The structure of Voices is two-tiered. There are content pages, which only I can edit, and discussion pages, which can be edited by anyone with a user account. (I apologize for the need for a user account, but a stunning volume of pharmacological spam in the planning phases for Voices made that necessary.) The story will grow slowly over time, in response to the participation of, well, YOU. So we'll be making this thing together, you and me. Teamwork.

I've also included a page for donations to CARE, a reputable non-profit organization, and I'm hoping to raise a respectable amount of money for them. 

Obviously this won't be a successful project if I can't get anybody to come play with me. It should be fun, and it's all in a good cause, so go and raise your Voices right now. Tell a friend, email your buddies, Digg it, spread the word however you know how. Let's see where this thing can go!

Packrat

I've been playing a little game on Facebook called Packrat. (OK, I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, but there it is anyway. So sue me.)

There's an interesting sociological phenomenon going on here, though, and I thought it deserved a few minutes of prodding. See, on the surface of it, this game is designed to be absolutely cut-throat competitive. The object of the game is to collect matching sets of digital picture cards; there's a collection of candy-themed items, for example, and a tiki set, a zoo set, and so on. To do this, you can purchase items with money you randomly accrue while looking through your friends' current packs... or you can filch an item from a friend (and leave another item in return).

If you don't want an item taken, you can lock it by buying a lock and playing a minigame -- but another player can always try to break the lock by playing the same minigame and scoring better than you. Once you find five items from a matching set, you can vault those five things, adding it to your permanent collection and making them unstealable. But there are, in every set, numerous items that can only be built by acquiring and combining other items. So for example, to make a hula dancer, I'd need to combine a coconut palm, a grass skirt and a lei.

Some items are very scarce, and never sold in markets at all. And there are several rats -- basically faux friend profiles -- that will try to take your stuff; and there are some items that can only be built by combining several different levels of items. (There's an item in the Montezuma collection, for example, that can only be built by combining 27 maizes, 27 gold coins, and one rare two-headed serpent.)

With this setup, you'd expect to see a lot of nasty behavior, right? Lots of stealing that rare item from under a friend's nose, intense competition for the same super-rare item from an expired set that you might never see again. If this were how the game was currently being played (at least among my peers -- and I have no doubt it's being played that way by other groups) then it would be absolutely zero fun to me and I'd have stopped playing as soon as it became apparent.

In practice, though I see people making sets and completing collections in a community-based, collaborative fashion. If I'm working on the shoe set and I need the rare Fellini Eight Point Five pink pump to drop, I tell my friends, and they keep an eye out for me. If a rat turns up with something I need, a friend will steal it for me; and if one of their friends has the shoe but doesn't need it, because they don't want to collect that set, or because they've already vaulted that item, then it's going to make its way toward me.

I even have one friend who's working toward vaulting a set of items from a collection that expired in early March -- and he's got four of the five items he needs, because he has a broad network of people looking for him.

I'm just fascinated at how this really friendly, supportive community has grown up around something that at first presents as an astonishingly competitive game. I wonder if this was a conscious choice on the part of the designer, or just a decision to build up a more satisfying set of rules around the existing framework of the game on the part of the player community?

If somebody knows the designer for Packrat and could put me in touch, drop me a line. I'd love to hear about it.