The Uni has been in transition for some time. Courses have started to pay their way, schools are having to justify their budgets under more and more pressure. The endless tension between the "The University as Vocational Training Provider" and the "The University as a seperate world of pure quest for knowledge" points of view are still alive and well.
For me, this is no bad thing. As I see the Vocational Training market as a very goal directed activity. Its simply a business. Deliver the product as efficiently as possible and go home. Cheap, push the cost onto the consumer, pay the staff a minimum wage, get accredited every so often, strip the library and the infrastructure down to the minimum. Get Focused and go hard. The infusion of this point of view
On the other hand is the purist pursuit of knowledge through research and discovery. (A secondary objective is training more researchers for the next generation) which has no relationship between input and outputs, no firm time frames and no clear value proposition for the community. (Every one acknowledges that value is generally created over the long term but its a bastard to put a number or a time frame upon beforehand). The point is that the two processes are so completely seperate in funding model, return model, staffing model, mindset... everything.
Somewhere in the middle is "Commercial Research" and "Private-Public-Partnership Research" which is complicated because its usually managed as a goal directed activity, but suffers all the uncertainty of cost/labour/time/outcome any other form of "research".
Additionally there are all the other lifestyle derived agenda's ( mooching, freedom to waste time and money.... free food, travel, going to conferences as you like, publishing anything that goes through your head, retirement with pay, having slaves to do your photocopying, being worshipped by students, allowing your ego time to grow unconstrained.... endless access to books, talking shit with other smart people, meeting and breeding with other clever people) are desired but difficult to publicly support in these times of fiscal constraint.
I think its a game of state-the-obvious that most of the above agenda's do not fit with the "The University as Vocational Training Provider" model.
Showing posts with label Social Engine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Social Engine. Show all posts
Friday, October 19, 2012
Saturday, October 6, 2012
Social Isolation...
I'm intrigued by the affect of social isolation and loss on social individuals.
How do you model and predict the behaviour of an agent who is defined by their social context and environment when they are removed from it.
I have been watching some interesting movies and tv shows and have come up with the following groups of scenarios.
1) Foreced removal from society.
-- Prison
-- castaway / Marooned
-- Medical isolation
-- Disfigurement and social rejection
-- Mental illness (Its a bit broad...)
-- Long distance travel (Ship, space craft)
-- Remote working location
2) Small group isolation
-- remote working camp/installation, weather stations
-- Submarines, warships, slow freighters
-- One way trip to Mars
--etc
All these scenarios are underpinned by the knowledge that the society still exists somewhere and may or may not be accessible to the agent. They are also aware that society has not ground to a halt without them... which highlights their insignificance.
The second group is the opposite, where the individual or group knows/suspects/fears that society as they knew it is gone.
3) Post apocalytic
-- After the plague/ware/virus etc
-- Alien invasion / Extermination
-- Time Travellers and Rip van Winkle types. Also long term Coma patients.
The key part of this scenario is the individual / group knows that its all gone and the context they were familiar with has fragmented. There will be surviving fragments but there is no overarching "social context".
4) Alternate Society
-- Cult / Sect / Secret Society etc
-- Family in foreighn country
-- Refugees
-- Gullivers Travels
This is the concept of your micro society being surrounded by an Alien group, who may not wish you harm (or they may) but are trying to consume and suplant your society. How do you deal with isolation and lack of contact with the familiar.
The question on my mind is just what happens and what drives social creatures once their social context is removed. How much of them "is lost", how much "remains" and what grows in its place.
How do individuals deal with the big questions when there is no one around to see it happen.
How do you model and predict the behaviour of an agent who is defined by their social context and environment when they are removed from it.
I have been watching some interesting movies and tv shows and have come up with the following groups of scenarios.
1) Foreced removal from society.
-- Prison
-- castaway / Marooned
-- Medical isolation
-- Disfigurement and social rejection
-- Mental illness (Its a bit broad...)
-- Long distance travel (Ship, space craft)
-- Remote working location
2) Small group isolation
-- remote working camp/installation, weather stations
-- Submarines, warships, slow freighters
-- One way trip to Mars
--etc
All these scenarios are underpinned by the knowledge that the society still exists somewhere and may or may not be accessible to the agent. They are also aware that society has not ground to a halt without them... which highlights their insignificance.
The second group is the opposite, where the individual or group knows/suspects/fears that society as they knew it is gone.
3) Post apocalytic
-- After the plague/ware/virus etc
-- Alien invasion / Extermination
-- Time Travellers and Rip van Winkle types. Also long term Coma patients.
The key part of this scenario is the individual / group knows that its all gone and the context they were familiar with has fragmented. There will be surviving fragments but there is no overarching "social context".
4) Alternate Society
-- Cult / Sect / Secret Society etc
-- Family in foreighn country
-- Refugees
-- Gullivers Travels
This is the concept of your micro society being surrounded by an Alien group, who may not wish you harm (or they may) but are trying to consume and suplant your society. How do you deal with isolation and lack of contact with the familiar.
The question on my mind is just what happens and what drives social creatures once their social context is removed. How much of them "is lost", how much "remains" and what grows in its place.
How do individuals deal with the big questions when there is no one around to see it happen.
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
More Agent Based Modelling Links
http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/abmread.htm#Readings
http://www.nd.edu/~gmadey/sim06/Resources/resources.html
http://www.openabm.org/journals
http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/ace.htm
http://www.nd.edu/~gmadey/sim06/Resources/resources.html
http://www.openabm.org/journals
http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/ace.htm
Friday, January 20, 2012
Social Context
Just reading something that made me think around a new corner.
The social environment in a town or region is probably fairly stable ( or moving toward a status quo) as long as the physical environment, employment etc is fairly constant. Its only when there is sudden changes that the social environment changes radically... think of various towns or cities in decline or undergoing major addition or loss of significant employers. In these cases the social context of the population will undergo some transformation.
So what are the levers for social renewal? Really only some signficant change in major percentages of the population. Which suggests that people will keep doing the same thing and not change their individual social habits, its just the aggregate change of population that changes to social scene. Which can have more granular effects on the social habits of the individual simply by removing some other individuals who they previously had relationships with and adding new people with different habits who they now need to have relationships with.
Immigration, migration, ecconomic decay or renewal, drought, environmental changes, legeslative changes etc. What else?
This ties into the community resiliance research area.... also something I was mulling over while driving about renewal of staff in an organisation.... again feels like stating the obvious....
The social environment in a town or region is probably fairly stable ( or moving toward a status quo) as long as the physical environment, employment etc is fairly constant. Its only when there is sudden changes that the social environment changes radically... think of various towns or cities in decline or undergoing major addition or loss of significant employers. In these cases the social context of the population will undergo some transformation.
So what are the levers for social renewal? Really only some signficant change in major percentages of the population. Which suggests that people will keep doing the same thing and not change their individual social habits, its just the aggregate change of population that changes to social scene. Which can have more granular effects on the social habits of the individual simply by removing some other individuals who they previously had relationships with and adding new people with different habits who they now need to have relationships with.
Immigration, migration, ecconomic decay or renewal, drought, environmental changes, legeslative changes etc. What else?
This ties into the community resiliance research area.... also something I was mulling over while driving about renewal of staff in an organisation.... again feels like stating the obvious....
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Chaos, randomness and predictability in social engine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuous_circle_and_vicious_circle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_failure
Read these to expand your mind... then read them again. Some nice summaries.
The point is not about being able to build an emergent and adaptable social engine, the question is what happens when someone "tests" it in ways that we have not anticipated?
What about players with mental illness or filthy minds? How will the system adapt to them?
What would happen if multiple people are playing the same game session? Swapping in and out... how would the system adapt to the changes in skill, ability, reaction time etc?
How quickly should the system detect the change in play style and adapt? Is adaption one way? Should the system remember previous adaption states?
What happens when a player puts the game down... then returns to it at a later date when they have lost their edge? (Ok, I know the answer to this one, I'm just including the question here for completeness)
Some answers
As for testing the system (find a reference to players torturing "Creatures" and the whole spiel on "killable children in games"). The point is that people play games for more reasons than are easily guessed. Out on the fringes of the bell curve things get really... unexpected.
Ethically, do game designers have the right to impose their morals and values on the players? Alternately, do game designers exist in a moral vacuum? ( ...mmm No.) They are answerable, often very publicly for their choices in many ways. So for practical purposes, Game developers and through them designers etc need to be careful with their choices.
By extension, developing libraries that deal with sensitive topics like social issues need to exercise some responsibility. There are things that should and should not be exposed as "options" for players to manipulate.
Issues surrounding equality, diversity, age appropriate material, right and wrong etc all need to be respected.
Its easy to visualise ways to missuse a social system for fun and novelty of a fratboy humor level... but once you move into the realms of socially objectionably scenarios and worse... the repercussions could be extreem.
The question is how to design a system that can support a broad range of structures and magically prevent missuses? Its a toolkit specifically intended to be able to model any social scenarios... which cuts all the way across the ethical spectrum. Kind of diametrically opposed objectives, one would suggest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuous_circle_and_vicious_circle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_failure
Read these to expand your mind... then read them again. Some nice summaries.
The point is not about being able to build an emergent and adaptable social engine, the question is what happens when someone "tests" it in ways that we have not anticipated?
What about players with mental illness or filthy minds? How will the system adapt to them?
What would happen if multiple people are playing the same game session? Swapping in and out... how would the system adapt to the changes in skill, ability, reaction time etc?
How quickly should the system detect the change in play style and adapt? Is adaption one way? Should the system remember previous adaption states?
What happens when a player puts the game down... then returns to it at a later date when they have lost their edge? (Ok, I know the answer to this one, I'm just including the question here for completeness)
Some answers
As for testing the system (find a reference to players torturing "Creatures" and the whole spiel on "killable children in games"). The point is that people play games for more reasons than are easily guessed. Out on the fringes of the bell curve things get really... unexpected.
Ethically, do game designers have the right to impose their morals and values on the players? Alternately, do game designers exist in a moral vacuum? ( ...mmm No.) They are answerable, often very publicly for their choices in many ways. So for practical purposes, Game developers and through them designers etc need to be careful with their choices.
By extension, developing libraries that deal with sensitive topics like social issues need to exercise some responsibility. There are things that should and should not be exposed as "options" for players to manipulate.
Issues surrounding equality, diversity, age appropriate material, right and wrong etc all need to be respected.
Its easy to visualise ways to missuse a social system for fun and novelty of a fratboy humor level... but once you move into the realms of socially objectionably scenarios and worse... the repercussions could be extreem.
The question is how to design a system that can support a broad range of structures and magically prevent missuses? Its a toolkit specifically intended to be able to model any social scenarios... which cuts all the way across the ethical spectrum. Kind of diametrically opposed objectives, one would suggest.
Intermediate Social Engine data
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2011/11/18/why-il.aspx
Nice little aside from the Roslyn project about Intermediate Language targets as a solution to the permutation of platform targets. Mentions the economics of compilers and intermediate forms of representation.
This got me thinking about intermediate forms of some of the things I have been working on recently. Would it be possible to transform social engine data into some sort of intermediate form... but as there is really only one runtime platform its not solving much of a problem at the moment. More of a potential future problem.
However as a thought exercise it does suggest a number of issues that might arise in the future which could be avoided by a big of forethought.
Can a social engine data set be portable between games? Could it be expressed in terms of a different set of game assets? Would it be the same game with a different paint job?
What differentiates games of similar genre? Bugs? Scenery? Unique rulesets? Different loot? Skill trees? Scenario? Mythologies? Price? Economic models? UI? Are these things significant or just decorative?
How ties into all this stuff is the social layer? It certainly ties into the players experience so its not insignificant.
Like all really abstract library systems, there is an increasingly high cost to applying an abstraction that someone else has developed, in that if you can't "see" how to implement your solution using their abstraction, its often easier to build your own, no matter how bad it may be rather than trying to use an abstraction that is an ill fit for your mental model.
Its an ugly problem that boils down to "people factors".
Modelling this stuff at a concrete level is hard enough, build a reasonable and bulletproof abstraction for the model with some options is exponentially harder. Even harder when we only have a few examples to test it all against. This is due to the fact that most social systems in games are really really bad. Trying to use them for testing is like trying to test an iPhone with a hammer... somethings going to happen but its probably not going to provide a useful test scenario.
Nice little aside from the Roslyn project about Intermediate Language targets as a solution to the permutation of platform targets. Mentions the economics of compilers and intermediate forms of representation.
This got me thinking about intermediate forms of some of the things I have been working on recently. Would it be possible to transform social engine data into some sort of intermediate form... but as there is really only one runtime platform its not solving much of a problem at the moment. More of a potential future problem.
However as a thought exercise it does suggest a number of issues that might arise in the future which could be avoided by a big of forethought.
Can a social engine data set be portable between games? Could it be expressed in terms of a different set of game assets? Would it be the same game with a different paint job?
What differentiates games of similar genre? Bugs? Scenery? Unique rulesets? Different loot? Skill trees? Scenario? Mythologies? Price? Economic models? UI? Are these things significant or just decorative?
How ties into all this stuff is the social layer? It certainly ties into the players experience so its not insignificant.
Like all really abstract library systems, there is an increasingly high cost to applying an abstraction that someone else has developed, in that if you can't "see" how to implement your solution using their abstraction, its often easier to build your own, no matter how bad it may be rather than trying to use an abstraction that is an ill fit for your mental model.
Its an ugly problem that boils down to "people factors".
Modelling this stuff at a concrete level is hard enough, build a reasonable and bulletproof abstraction for the model with some options is exponentially harder. Even harder when we only have a few examples to test it all against. This is due to the fact that most social systems in games are really really bad. Trying to use them for testing is like trying to test an iPhone with a hammer... somethings going to happen but its probably not going to provide a useful test scenario.
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