betajames

Where in our brain do we keep our ABCs? How does our brain provide us with the use of alphabetic characters without thought? I am handwriting this sentence in my writer’s notebook. The letters flow out of my pen as if they were a fluid flowing from my fingertips rather like sweat. Nothing for which I really have to use my brain.

Professor Fairbairn added: "No doubt all those named contributed to the research. However, I find it difficult to understand how 144 individuals, however close their working relationship, could be involved in writing it.

"I find it even more difficult to imagine how any assessment at all could be made of their contribution when it comes to awarding academic brownie points."

The problem is not new. In 1996, John Hudson, professor of economics at the University of Bath, produced a paper titled "Trends in multi-authored papers in economics".

He noted that while "the economist of the early postwar years was typically a solitary worker ... the economists of today are much more inclined to hunt in packs".

Even when I am away from the computer I am aware that I AM AWAY FROM MY COMPUTER and am scheming about how to GET BACK ON THE COMPUTER. I've tried various strategies to limit my time online: leaving my laptop at my studio when I go home, leaving it at home when I go to my studio, a Saturday moratorium on usage. But nothing has worked for long. More and more hours of my life evaporate in front of YouTube. Supposedly addiction isn't a moral failing, but it feels as if it is.

In essence, the network effect describes the positive externalities (value) of a product, service, or activity as more people use it. An organization taking advantage of the principle may refer to the practice as “crowdsourcing” (e.g. Wikipedia, Dell’s Ideastorm, iPhone Apps) taking advantage of the “wisdom of the crowds”. Individuals may also aggregate and mobilize for a specific cause, be it political, civic or commercial (e.g. Moveon.org, Ukrainian orange revolution). The emergence of the latter can be of spontaneous and real-time nature.

When your health records are sold to a pharmaceutical company without your permission; when a social-networking site changes your privacy settings to make what used to be visible only to your friends visible to everyone; when the NSA eavesdrops on everyone's e-mail conversations--your loss of control over that information is the issue. We may not mind sharing our personal lives and thoughts, but we want to control how, where and with whom. A privacy failure is a control failure.

It is a burgeoning area. In December, Digital Sky Technologies bought into Zynga for $180 million. EA snapped up PlayFish for $400 million and Playdom, whose "Social City" game racked up 10 million players in about a month of existence, scored a $43 million series B.

Most social games as well as some casual games make use a business model of selling in-game "currency" for the purchase of anything from fertilizer to a straight-razor and combining that with player-privileges sales and advertising.

Even though it's simplistic and all too often preachy, the Good/Evil binary solves a simple but fundamental problem with choice in games: letting players know they have one. It's easy to put a byline on a package about choice, but harder to define exactly what that means to the player. By framing choice in such stark terms, it lets players know what to expect. This is great for splitting narrative and gameplay, but it's far too simple to make narrative choices a meaningful or interesting part of gameplay.

Where Farmville differs from other games of this type is the way that goods and values shift by incorporating the game into Facebook’s social network. In order to upgrade the size of your farm, which allows you to plant more crops, you can either “neighbor” a certain number of people or pay real money. Neighboring someone in Farmville is a bit like friending them on Facebook in that you’re probably not going to expose yourself to a total stranger, so this usually means recruiting people from your social circle to play.

Neighbors are also handy to have because you can go visit their farm to gain experience by weeding or fertilizing their crops. This tends to help the person doing the fertilizing more than it helps the one receiving the service, so such motivation is automatic. The ultimate effect is that Farmville creates a strong incentive for players to recruit their friends, and perhaps more importantly, to actively visit each other’s farms and look around. Players cannot negatively impact each other in anyway. They can only help.

My curiosity about Farmville is almost enough to make me reactivate my Facebook account. Almost.

I focused on Harvest Moon: Save the Homeland (along with Morrowind and Okami) in my dissertation. More than once, I've read about the similarities between Harvest Moon and Farmville, thereby piquing my curiosity even more.

notebooks are, in effect, an annex of the superego. My own notebooks play that role at times.They document opinions or enthusiasms that sometimes prove embarrassing, after a few years have passed. But they are also full of injunctions – usually to work harder, or to finish some project now gathering dust in one of the more workshop-like volumes, or to start studying X in a systematic fashion (and here’s the syllabus...).