Author: Cosimo Accoto

[…] To sum up, and provide a tentative and sufficiently broad definition, a game metric is a quantitative measure of one or more attributes of one or more objects that operate in the context of games. Translated into plain language, this definition clari-fies that a game metric is a quantitative measure of something related to games.

An object can in this case be anything operating in the context – a virtual item, code, a player, a process, a person, forum post, etc. etc. With context is meant that the metric has to be tied directly to the design of one or more games, the process of de-veloping, supporting and maintaining it, technical performance of the infrastructure, quality assurance, the business aspects that tie directly into the game (e.g. number of virtual items sold), the behavior of the users, etc. All of these form the game context. To clarify with a few examples: a measure of how many daily active users a social online game has; a measure of how many units a game has sold last week; how many times players completed level seven; task completion rates in a production team for a specific title, etc. – are all game metrics, because they relate directly to the process, performance or users in relation to one or more games.

Conversely, metrics that are unrelated to the games context, for example the revenue of a game development company last year, the number of employee complaints last month, etc., are business metrics. The distinction can be blurry in practice, but is essential to separate what is purely business metrics with those metrics that relate to the games themselves, of which a number are unique to game development compared to the remainder of the IT industry (in how many other IT sectors can “number of orcs killed per player” be a business-relevant metric?).

Chapter 2: Game Analytics – The Basics (Anders Drachen, Magy Seif El-Nasr1, Alessandro Canossa)

[…] Computers have conflated memory with storage, the ephemeral with the enduring. Rather than storing memories, we now put things “ into memory, ” both consciously and unconsciously. “ Memory ” — computer memory — has become surprisingly permanent. As Matthew Kirschenbaum has argued, our digital traces remain far longer than we suppose. Hard drives fail, but can still be “ read ” by forensic experts (optically, if not mechanically); our ephemeral documents and other “ ambient data ” are written elsewhere — that is “ saved ” — constantly. Again, to read information is to write it elsewhere. At the same time, however, the enduring is also the ephemeral. Not only because even if data storage devices can be read forensically after they fail they still eventually fail, but also because — and more crucially — what is not constantly upgraded or “ migrated ” or both becomes unreadable. As well, our interactions with computers cannot be reduced to the traces we leave behind. The experiences of using — the exact paths of execution — are ephemeral. Information is “ undead ” : neither alive nor dead, neither quite present nor absent” (Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, The MIT Press, 2011)

[abstract] In this position paper we argue that certain types of social media systems, such as Instagram and Foursquare, can act as valuable source of sensing, providing access to important characteristics of urban locations and urban social behavior. We discuss some of our previous studies and present our thoughts about the future of this eld based insights obtained from them.

Click to access silva_sencity13.pdf

[…] “The primary goal of the model of digital media developed above is not found in its individual components. My main hope is not that readers will come away with an understanding of every nuance of what I mean by data or surface. Rather, my hope is that a basic understanding of these components will provide the foundation for a new approach to thinking about digital media (and computational systems more generally). I use the term operational logics, described further below, to name a new type of thinking can help identify and analyze. When a work of digital media operates, this can be seen as an interplay between the elements of the model discussed so far: data, process, surface, interaction, interplay can be informative. Is the system actually doing what it is described as doing? What unspoken assumptions are built into the ways in which operations proceed?” (Noah Wardrip-Fruing, Expressive Processing. Digital Fictions, Computer Games and Software Studies, The MIT Press)

[…] What can be learned from software? The introduction of this book suggest that making an ontology of software would could heighten sensitivities to one contemporary site of mutability, contingency and necessity. It argued that software is a symptomatic present-day object that leads a complicated, circulatory existence. Software is a neighborhood of relations whose contours trace contemporary production, communication and consumption. Code is a multivalent index of the relation running among different classes of entity: originators, prototypes and recipients. These classes might include people, situations, organizations, places, devices, habits and practices. In code and coding, relations are assembled, dismantled, bundled and dispersed within and across contexts. Such relations are inextricable from agential effects, from some asymmetry between doing and being done. Indeed. agency is nothing without relations (A. Mackenzie, Cutting Code. Software and Sociality, p.169)

“Why account for software ontologically?” (Mackenzie, Cutting Code. Software and Sociality)

[…] “In the third part, “The Violence of Participation,” Mark Andrejevic reports from the new frontiers of data mining. He makes the case that the commercial appropriation of information meets an abstract definition of exploitation. Andrejevic argues that it is indeed the sign of a certain kind of material luxury to be able to be exploited online—to have the leisure time and resources to engage in the activities that are monitored and tracked. Google tracks its 1 billion unremunerated users and sells their data to advertising clients, who consequently target users with ads. The intertwining of labor, leisure, consumption, production, and play complicates the understanding of exploitation, but Andrejevic remarked that the potential usefulness of an exploitation-based critique of online monitoring is that it invites us to reframe questions of individual choice and personal pleasure in terms of social relations. Andrejevic also discusses peer pressure and the obligation to network online, which is becoming institutionalized, and the fruits of this labor are recognized as a source of value. Commercial surveillance has become a crucial component of our communicative infrastructure, he observes. Exploitation, however, does not mean that workers don’t take pleasure in the success of a collaborative effort. There are moments of pleasure despite the fact that we are losing control of our productive and creative activities. While his critique of exploitation does not disparage the pleasures of workers, it also does not nullify exploitative social relations […] The violence of participation is about data mining on the one hand and the personal and professional price they would pay for their refusal of mainstream social media services on the other. Refusal would be tantamount to social isolation” (from the INTRODUCTION “Why Does Digital Labor Matter Now?” Trebor Scholz, Digital Labour: the Internet As Playground and Factory, Routledge, 2012)

http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/collaborative-media

” […] The development of IA, which is seemingly analogous to architecture as the design of the built environment, is not only a potentially new design field in which architects can work, but it is also a challenge to the profession. Reflecting on the notion of the virtual library for example, the architectural theorist, William J. Mitchell, reflects on the impact on architecture as it is traditionally conceived once digital edifices have replaced physical ones: The task facing the designers of [the] soft library is a transformation (with some invariants but many radical changes) of what faced the Smirke brothers and the librarian Panizzi as they evolved the design for the British Museum and Library. The façade is not to be constructed of stone and located on a street in Bloomsbury, but of pixels on thousands of screens scattered throughout the world. Organizing book stacks and providing access to them turns into a task of structuring databases and providing search and retrieval routines. Reading tables become display windows on screens …. The hugestacks shrink to almost negligible size, the seats and carrels disperse and there is nothing left to put a grand façade on (Mitchell 2000: 56–7). In Mitchell’s description, architecture has clearly been reconfi gured and perhaps replaced by a new IA. Although he places emphasis on the radical changes that are being brought about by digital technology, particularly in terms of the storage and retrieval of information, he notes that there are certain ‘invariant’ characteristics. From the very notion of an information architect, through to the building analogy used by Rosenfeld and Morville (2002), it is clear that traditional notions of information and of its representation in physical space provide a conceptual framework, linking information, its organization, its display and its navigation in new digital contexts. Where, if anywhere, is the architecture in information architecture?“ (The Architecture of Information. Architecture, interaction design and the patterning of digital information, Martyn Dade-Robertson, Routledge, p. 14)