from chaos

I came across this game last weekend, catching up with some friends at Tech. I’ve been collecting games to write about lately, but this one was different enough from what I’ve been playing lately to jump the line.

Strictly speaking, you’re not supposed to tell people how to play before beginning, but it’s easier to get people playing if everyone has some idea how the game’s played beforehand.

Materials

Mao uses Uno or (folks suggest) a pair of standard card decks.

Key rules

• No talking
• No touching your cards until game is in play
• No not-touching your cards while the game is in play
• When you’ve played down to one card left, say “Mao” (like saying “Uno” in Uno).
• Any rule infraction carries a one card penalty, to be enforced by the other players at their discretion until you stop breaking the rule.
• The winner of a hand gets to add a rule to this list, which he or she must then enforce uniformly upon the other players (no playing favorites, point out situations where you didn’t enforce the rule if you forget). Don’t tell everyone else your rule, just enforce it by awarding penalty cards and explaining what the penalized party failed to do. The other players have to figure out your rule themselves.

In the creating and enforcing of new player rules comes the challenge, the fun, and the frustration.

Regular card play follows a basic Uno/Crazy Eights pattern. Try to shed your cards before everyone else, play same color/suit or same rank (number) on one another. If you don’t have a playable card, draw one. If it’s playable, play it, if not, you’ve got another card to hold. If playing with Uno cards, ignore the Uno effects of draws, skips, reverses, wilds let the next player play anything.

Player rules

Player rule requirements can vary but tend toward requiring players to say something when a rule-triggering event happens. This works very nicely with the No Talking rule, because when people speak out of turn as they try to figure out someone’s rule, you can slap them with a penalty for talking. It also avoids the potential injury associated with elaborate physical feats.

To maximize the range of available rules, triggering events for rules can vary from simple to complex (someone plays a Skip, recent cards played add up to a specific number, the last 3 cards complete 3 numbers in the Fibonacci series). Who is required to speak can also vary, though many times they’re tied to the person playing a card. What people are required to say can be any sound from the wide lexicon of human utterances (though many will want to lay some ground rules beforehand).

The most elaborate rule in our recent play session was that after someone played a card following a draw card, the person to the left of the player putting down the second card had to say the name of the month corresponding to the draw number (2 or 4) plus the number value of the card played on it. So if I played a 7 on a Draw 2, the person to my left would have to say “September” or get slapped with a penalty.

Play experience

It was great fun, though rule fatigue can set in quickly, as you each try to enforce any rules you’ve set, work out any rules you haven’t figured out yet, and remember to keep all the rules you understand. (After 5 player rules get added, you start feeling the burn.) The game runs heavily on cognitive load and people crumbling under the weight of remembering many arbitrary rules.

In checking to see what’s available on the net about Mao, I came across a reference to People’s Democratic Dictatorship, a variation that allows each player to set a rule at the beginning of the game and enforce that rule, rather than awarding rules for winning hands. I’ll have to try that approach out next time.

Austin Govella gets an interesting conversation going about technological developments swirling around what some are calling the “come to me” web. Structured content, microformats, json, rss and atom flavored web feeds, and other technologies are making our information more portable, but where do people fit into this improved info portability world? How will people use this portability?

Or more to my mind… how can we most effectively introduce these technologies to users who don’t know what an RSS is, so they can reap the benefits of these great new tools?

I live by my feed reader and my favorite blogs’ feeds, but I doubt that most of my non-designer friends make use of the tools that the more “web 2.0 savvy” use daily. We see amazing possibilities with these new technologies, but how will we present those possibilities to users? Will our presentation help users see how these new tools get them what they want, or will we trip over our excitement over the next big thing?

If you tell me why RSS is great, I’ll think it’s cool, but if you show me how much faster I can get at posts on my favorite blogs and share my own posts (or del.icio.us bookmarks or last.fm charts) with my friends, I’ll love you forever… and actually use this cool new thing.

Mark Wubben points out one of the rough edges of the “DHTML bad, DOM Scripting good” direction of a lot of recent talk about popular best practices in JavaScript use.

In our zeal to point at how great DOM scripting and unobtrusive JavaScript are, it’s worth remembering that one of the key differences between these practices and the DHTML of old is that (as a group) we’re doing a better job of using good programming practices in our DOM scripting/unobtrusive world of today than we did when DHTML was the buzzword du jour.

Yes, there are new technologies involved (standard DOM across browsers, XHTTPRequest, sweet open source object libraries), and yes, recent trends in JavaScript programming are something worth getting excited about. But the greatness of the methods getting so much buzz right now is in the way more of us are using the kind of programming best practices we all should have been using for years now, and some people had been back in those “evil” DHTML days.

Kathy Sierra’s got a great post applying the Web 2.0 jargon to a management approach in the vein of Tom Peters and his spiritual colleagues. Creating Passionate Users: Manager 2.0

One of the best companies I’ve worked with does their best to take a “2.0″ approach to running the business. In 2000, the principals took heavy shipments from the Cluetrain and from then on have done their best to run a shop that focused on employee community and conversation over organizational hierarchy.

The approach has served them well, but one problem comes up from time to time: for this kind of approach to really work, you’ve got to surround Manager 2.0 with enough Employee 2.0 to establish the kind of community of practice that Manager 2.0 thrives in. If you don’t, all the 2.0 management goodness gets lost to community destroying Employee 1.0 distrust, apathy, hierarchy building, and turf guarding.

Jensen Harris has a fine post on her MS Office user interface blog about steps they’re taking on the new version of Office to keep the interface consistent on day 101 to what it looked like on day 1. (So after months of using Word you don’t have twelve floating toolbars in your face that you don’t need because you’re afraid you’ll never find them again if you close them.)

Or put more eloquently, Designing Against a Degrading Experience.

Thanks go to José Zagal for pointing this out: a visualization of common approaches to the first level of Konami’s Gradius.

The New Gamer‘s R. LeFeuvre overlaid a series of Gradius playthroughs to provide an idea of the average paths players used in proceeding through the level.

If you’re familiar with Gradius, you’ll find some of the variations interesting. And it gets you thinking about how other games would average out with a similar averaging map.

At this point I’m especially curious how top down pathing visualizations through frequently run 3d maps (like WoW raids or instance dungeons) would turn out. I’m guessing you’d see some very well established cowpaths between the key encounter areas and techniques for each area. But then, optimal approaches to maps and encounters are the currency you trade in when playing MMOs.

In my regular blog rounds, I tend to keep an eye on Jorge Arango’s jarango blog. Part of it’s a common interest in IA, but a large part of it’s been to see how another IA bilingue handles the issue of blogging in multiple languages.

Until recently, jarango had separate English and Spanish language sections, ceding to the impracticality of writing in one language or the other then translating the content so everyone can see it. In planning out plainasm (the precursor to the current blog), I flirted with the idea of the same approach, until I realized how little IA work I do in Spanish and how little benefit potential readers would get out of the occasional post I might write in my adoptive tongue. (This has changed over the past year as I’ve become involved in the IA community in Costa Rica, hence the current blog’s English and Spanish editions.)

Honestly, I’m sad to see the Spanish section of the site go into archive mode, but I think Arango did the right thing. One’s best hopes for providing content in multiple languages can end up holding back content in either language.

This may feel like a blast from the past now, but let’s flash back briefly to Burke’s Knowledge Web (KWeb).

Looking at Burke’s KWeb, I love the idea of tracing networks of thinkers, inventors, scientists, political figures, and key innovations to investigate the history of technology. Because it provides the opportunity to study innovations from any of a number of starting points, and allows for free motion among the various people and innovations, it allows users to investigate the innovations and people that most interest them, leveraging the learner’s own curiosity.

But what about looking at the system the other way round? How about constructing your own knowledge webs?

Burke has noted that KWeb provides a facility for creating one’s own webs, so this isn’t a new idea, but I’d like to look at it through the lens of turning recent Wikipedia conversations on their ear… rather than worrying about whether Wikipedia can ever really represent “the sum of all human knowledge,” what about using it as a tool to help people construct knowledge and learn to source that knowledge?

When I was at Tech there was research going into wiki based knowledge systems for higher education courses. I’ll chase some things down when I get a few minutes to rub together.

In educational technology circles, people (rightly) talk a lot about the value of constructivist learning and invest a great deal of research into computer-based learning systems that support it. At the heart of this kind of learning are the ideas that

• we learn by making things
• we learn best by making things that interest us (in part because these are the kinds of things we actually finish)
• as we stop to think think about how we make things and about the things we’re making, we learn more effectively about the things we’re making and the process of making them than if we just make things without reflecting on what we’re doing. (What education researchers call intentional learning.)

While events in the news sparked some discussion over Wikipedia‘s value as a knowledge resource that users consume, I’ve seen less talk recently (possibly because I don’t keep up as well on education technology as I’d like anymore) about the value of the Wikimedia foundation‘s MediaWiki in providing students a platform for constructing and sharing their knowledge.

More to come…

Last spring the music baton meme raged through the web development blog community like a campfire through the Southern California brush. Looking through it, I’m curious whether the meme would stand up without the “I tag/pass to” part of it, so here’s my thinking on memes, an experiment, and my version of the meme.

On memes

• Memes are essentially ideas or portions of an idea that catch hold and travel from person to person.
• A proper meme is self sustaining. That is, people pass memes to one another because they find the meme or the conditions under which they encounter it so interesting that they can’t leave it alone.
• Memes live is an ecology of ideas where the interesting survive and are passed on, at times despite social pressures to the contrary.
• Memes that propogate by obligation will survive only so long as social pressures press people to propogate the meme, after which they will be hunted down with extreme, derisive prejudice.

A little experiment

And here’s my little unscientific experiment. I’m going to place a modified version of last spring’s Music baton meme on the ground here and see if…

• the meme succeeds in passing itself on (without the social pressures that come with people specifying who they’re passing it to)
• the meme proceeds beyond my own direct social network into the great out there (from which I’ll need people to kindly trackback so I can see its progress)
• social pressures against another run of the music baton smash this version of the meme (hate that music baton meme… just hate it!)

Music baton plain pick-it-up meme

Total volume of music on my computer
12.39 Gig

Last CD I bought
Get9 (import), Yoko Kanno

Song playing right now
“Clouds,” Cibo Matto

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me

• “I Want to Break Free,” Queen
• “Fortunate Son,” Credence Clearwater Revival
• “Noel: Christmas Eve, 1913,” John Denver & the Muppets
• “Solsbury Hill,” Peter Gabriel
• “Super Powers,” Ookla the Mok

I picked up this meme from

[link or trackback the blog/person you got it from to help track where the meme's gone]

Reviewing my posts thus far I find I’m running afoul favorite pair of writing difficulties: It’s too long, son! What do you need all those words for anyway?

This weekend’s Buffy entry really drove the problem home. That is, the fifty times I’ve looked over my little 2 page essay and realized that it boils down to “I like Buffy because it’s about self-denial for the good of others and about fixing your mistakes.” Sure, that’s simplifying. I’m leaving out all the bits that point out that there’s more to the show than what I’m pointing out, but once I was finished hedging, did you really care what I was saying anymore?

I like to tell clients how important it is to tailor your tone to your audience, let’s do the same here. Time to go conversational.

You may also notice from today’s earlier post, I’ll be indulging in the occasional “lookie there” post, since there just isn’t time to write my own comments on all the cool things going on out there.