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A little late to be posting this, but the Nicholson Baker piece on Wikipedia in the NY Review of Books is pretty interesting for its insights, what it says about the NYRB, and for the author.

First, the author. Nicholson Baker is a fascinating person, and an interesting choice for the NYRB piece. In the past he has:

• campaigned against libraries destroying books and card catalogs
• saved the Rochester Public Library Card catalog from destruction
• wrote an article about the books that appear as props in IKEA rooms after having read a large volume of them
• worte a lengthy but illuminating New Yorker about how he organizes the 6 * 6 bookshelves that he limits his book collection to at home
• unrelated, but interesting, he wrote an intimate confessional about his obsession with John Updike (U and I), in which he tortures himself by comparing his prose to Updike’s, obsesses about why Updike plays golf with some writers but not him, tries to remember his favorite passages from Updike’s work, only to be frustrated at the inaccuracy

There’s an obsessive self-reflectiveness to Baker which, coupled with his openness and honesty, makes him an ideal writer about user-generated content. The piece itself is ostensibly a review of Missing Manual for Wikipedia, by “cheery electronics expert David Pogue.” It’s a charming conceit of NYRB to throw a single title into the mix, force the writer to make a few comments about it, and then let them get on with the business of commentary.
Baker is the perfect blend of NYRB snob, but one who not only gets the internet, but gets into it. He’s not slumming, and he’s got enough literary juice and openness to unabashedly enjoy Wikipedia:

Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It’s fact-encirclingly huge, and it’s idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies—and it’s free, and it’s fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, “Diogenes of Sinope,” or “turnip,” or “Crazy Eddie,” or “Bagoas,” or “quadratic formula,” or “Bristol Beaufighter,” or “squeegee,” or “Sanford B. Dole,” and you’ll have knowledge you didn’t have before. It’s like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks.

He also looks at it as a literary/writing phenomenon, and manages to keep some level of snobby, bookish aloofness:

[Wikipedia] asked for help, and when it did, it used a particularly affecting word: “stub.” At the bottom of a short article about something, it would say, “This article about X is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.” And you’d think: That poor sad stub: I will help. Not right now, because I’m writing a book, but someday, yes, I will try to help.

And when people did help they were given a flattering name. They weren’t called “Wikipedia’s little helpers,” they were called “editors.” It was like a giant community leaf-raking project in which everyone was called a groundskeeper.

Despite the de rigeur snobbery in the preamble, Baker is genuinely enthusiastic about Wikipedia. In fact, Baker goes almost completely native in its culture. Not surprisingly, Baker, the man who preserved Ikea display books from obscurity (however briefly) and books and card catalogs from the shredder, became an active protector of articles slated for deletion. He put hours of time into making the case that an obscure beat personality, the Jitterbug telephone, unknown Russian poets, and the author of a ‘naps will change your life book’ deserved an entry in Wikipedia if someone was willing to write one. He followed them with the petty but real passions we’ve all experienced in bulletin boards, usenet groups, or any kind of forum that we know takes up too much headspace, but we allow it to anyway.

I stopped hearing what my family was saying to me—for about two weeks I all but disappeared into my screen, trying to salvage brief, sometimes overly promotional but nevertheless worthy biographies by recasting them in neutral language, and by hastily scouring newspaper databases and Google Books for references that would bulk up their notability quotient. I had become an “inclusionist.”

Baker is good-natured about his emotional attachment to these struggles: “When I managed to help save something I was quietly thrilled — I walked tall, like Henry Fonda in Twelve Angry Men.” He also observes that:

All big internet successes have a more or less addictive component — they hook you because they are solitary ways to be social: you keep checking in, peeking in, as you would to some noisy party going on downstairs in a house while you’re trying to sleep.

Not sure that all big internet successes rely on that hook, but he does highlight a powerful dynamic around safe ways to put one’s self out there, and his willingness to look at user-generation dynamics without condescension, especially a user-generated encyclopedia!, is refreshing as well as interesting.

The article has some nice higlights and Wiki-historical bits as well. He references over a dozen wars, vandalisms, deletions, hot-button entries. For my part, I did not know that Wikipedia was seeded with public domain content: the Encyclopedia Britannica 1911 edition, Dictoiary of Greek and Roman biography, two biography dictionaries, and a bible dictionary. Clever that.
Oh yeah, I think he recommends the Missing Manual: “this manual is enlightening, well organized, and full of good sense.”

I am always wary of showing (middle-aged or baby boomer) co-workers some interesting user-generated fact, content, tidbit, gewgaw. More than 50% of the time, the response is a vaguely contemptuous “someone has too much time on their hands” and I can never tell if they’re talking about the person who did this cool thing, or me. So, when GotMedieval, “A [intermittently updated] tonic for the slipshod use of medieval European history in the media and pop culture”, says fan fiction goes back to Chaucer, I feel vindicated.

Chaucer seems to have attracted this sort of activity more than other writers–or possibly, we modern readers are more interested in tracking down this sort of thing when it’s done to a writer we admire as much as Chaucer. Chaucer left a lot of gaps in the Canterbury Tales, and other writers stepped up to fill them, writing tales for the poor Ploughman who never got one in the original, an extra tale for both the Merchant and the Cook, and a whole story about what the Pilgrims did once they got to Canterbury

While recycling, baking tofu, cleaning up and running errands, I’m listening to lectures about Old Testament scholarship. We’ve moved into the folklore analysis phase as Genesis starts to tell stories of more human-like heroes. The lecturer gives an explanation of Vladimir Propp’s theories of narrative, reviews 6 of the 31 narratemes that are relevant to the story of Joseph, and moves on. I wikipedia it, and find the 31 narratemes, and lo!, find too that an industrious student at Brown has written a fairy tale generator (seen above). Since everyone in the marketing/advertising/interactive industry is obsessed with narrative, I thought it would be fun to post.

For quick background, Propp’s theory is the one that most everyone has heard of in some form similar to this: “some guy studies stories and decided that every story is somehow made up of several of a couple dozen narrative components.” The Star Wars generation got a dose of this when they dug in a little and heard of George Lucas’s admiration for Joseph Campbell and his monomyth theory of the hero’s journey.

Looks promising as a tool for generating advertising narratives! I can choose a narrative based on “lack” and “absention” (clearly a customer need). The “receipt of a magical agent” (product) with “branding” (of course! brands are as eternal as archetypes and categories, surely someone has blogged that somewhere) should yield a “solution” (product in situ) that has “transfigurative” powers (need is solved with some additional emotional bonus like getting laid, crushing co-workers, or wealth). Hopefully, I can do this without “difficult tasks” or “struggle”, cuz I’m an American marketer so that would suck. And what could be wrong with some “unfounded claims” if they work. Here are some excerpts:

The little man handed what looked like a small wooden piccolo. The small, thin object looked old but not dusty like the man’s worn garments. “A single note from this musical stick will bring rain from the heavens to satisfy this thirsty land,” the little man said to me. “But heed my words, should you be tempted to produce sweet melodies to entertain yourself and those around you, mother nature will heighten the aching of the earth around you: the sky will heave torrents of rain producing a monsoon that will be echoed by the quaking of the earth as it splits, spewing forth fiery magma that will consume you and your vanity.

Probably don’t need the torrents and magma of warning.

And it turns out that “branding” requires us to dial some things up or down:

Dizzy and hallucinatory spells yielded me to the man’s desires. As I played his game he pressed one of the playing tablets to my forehead. There it left a mark of doom that I thought would signal my inevitable fate.

The blade struck me against my face and left a blood spot in the shape of a star.

Burned marks of fire and hot metal left my body colored red with pain.

Still it’s workable if we think of it as being like a piercing, temporary tattoo or breaking in some new kicks.

And there’s a killer opening: “A serpent in the stream asked me, “What do you have in your bag?” I must find a client that this works for: What do YOU have in your bag? or What do you have in YOUR bag.  Sssssssss?
———-

One thing I particularly love about the generator is the pre-sets: Cinderella, Hansel & Gretel, Snow White.

In grad school, I got footnoted in a couple of labor economics articles. Since it was my first (and ultimately only) year in grad school, getting footnoted was a big deal . . . enough of a big deal, in fact, to get a bitchy comment from the TA.

So why write about it? Cuz I owe that footnote to playing Dungeons and Dragons.

D&D and grad school: Labor economics is all about mathematical models: functions that describe labor supply and demand, or which model the elasticity of the labor market, or combine all the factors (in a weighted relative, interacting fashion) making up labor decisions. This is probably true for all economics.

Anyway, a labor econ class has a lot to do with walking through these formulas. The prof puts it up on the screen and explains each factor, the math being done to or with it, and gives citations and articles backing up each number and variable. During one of these classes, I caught two mistakes (which were later called refinements in the article). A few of the students, including the pissy TA, were somewhat mystified.

How’d I do it? THACO and D&D formulas.

THACO is the most basic formula in Dungeons & Dragons. It stands for “To Hit Armor Class 0″ and it’s a complex enough math model to be the source of my greatest academic success (a footnote!) in grad school (before I quit, of course, I’m sure greater successes lay ahead had I stuck it out). So let’s dissect:

Armor Class 0 — that’s a person who has no armor, no defensive skills in combat. Armor Class -1 (AC-1) is a person who has the flu and is even easier to hit than usual. Adding armor, or taking theraflu improves, or adds points to AC, while drinking alcoholo or going to sleep in a combat situation decrease points.

To Hit — now we get into dice rolls and probability. If I’m a butch guy, with fighting skillz, I’m very likely to successfully hit a person with AC0. If we describe that as 75% likely, D&Ders will turn that into a dice roll: roll a 20 sided die (d20), and if I get 1 - 15 (75% of the possible rolls) I hit the person. Like the recipient’s AC, the TH can be altered, sickness can reduce my likelihood of landing the punch, steroids can increase if not the likelihood, the power of that punch. If I’m a spaghetti arm, I have THACO of 1, 1 chance in 20 of hitting the guy.
How simple, but rich, is that? We have a model that describes all combat interactions between two people. Labor economics models some basic forces: the likelihood of hiring, the likelihood of taking a job, and attaches a zillion factors to it. Having learned the basics of modeling behaviors, understand the different impacts of multiplication, division, addition and subtraction, and how to use coefficients as amplifying or diminishing forces, I had the basic tools for grad school economics.
D&D, along with typing, AP English, debate, and learning to program the TRS-80 were the most important things I got out of high school.

Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons, passed away yesterday. He was a gaming geek to the end, apparently, playing in a regular game at his home and welcoming gamefanboys who made the pilgrimage to his home.

The NYT had some interesting coverage (alongside lesser issues like goings-on on Ohio and Texas).

While Dungeons & Dragons became famous for its voluminous rules, Mr. Gygax was always adamant that the game’s most important rule was to have fun and to enjoy the social experience of creating collaborative entertainment.
“The essence of a role-playing game is that it is a group, cooperative experience,� Mr. Gygax said in a telephone interview in 2006. “There is no winning or losing, but rather the value is in the experience of imagining yourself as a character in whatever genre you’re involved in, whether it’s a fantasy game, the Wild West, secret agents or whatever else. You get to sort of vicariously experience those things.�

E Gary Gygax didn’t WoW:

These days, pen-and-paper role-playing games have largely been supplanted by online computer games. Dungeons & Dragons itself has been translated into electronic games, including Dungeons & Dragons Online. Mr. Gygax recognized the shift, but he never fully approved. To him, all of the graphics of a computer dulled what he considered one of the major human faculties: the imagination.“There is no intimacy; it’s not live,â€? he said of online games. “It’s being translated through a computer, and your imagination is not there the same way it is when you’re actually together with a group of people. It reminds me of one time where I saw some children talking about whether they liked radio or television, and I asked one little boy why he preferred radio, and he said, ‘Because the pictures are so much better.’”

AD&D is one of those “Everything Bad is Good for You” parts of culture.  Gygax was originally a tabletop wargame guy and the AD&D system is extensive in its attempt to model behaviors and create a generative system.  Along with typing, a semester of programming the TRS-80, and AP English, AD&D was one of the most valuable things I did.  From it, I learned how to model things in formulas, became extremely numerate, and learned the generative power of random().

This reminds me of a blog post I did from about three years ago, about another famous game designer, Sid Sackson.

http://kipvoytek.com/blog/2004/06/when-game-was-noun-not-verb.html

Not sure I completely understand this, but Rock, Paper, Shotgun is reporting an MMORPG which is being created by one developer (Eskil Steenburg) who is using generative design techniques to create his world. The idea of a single programmer/artist creating anything game-like is exciting in the age of 30 person EA teams being needed for everything. But to have it be a generatively designed world, and one that looks like the screenshots here, is amazing. RPS is also gaga:

Since Steenberg is a one man show, he’s relying on clever maths to build the world for him and then clever gamers to come in and help him figure out where to take it, and what to do with it.So far he’s already populated it with weird animals and wondrous, gaseous visuals, and he intends to build the world into a kind of communal adventure, where gamers work together to furnish a central village, defend it from enemy attack, and explore the surround world and its many dungeons. Players will be able to do things like deform elements of terrain, allowing them to build tunnel networks or walls to defend their property. Items will also be intended for the good of all as Steenberg creates them and drops them into the world. You won’t be picking up rifles in your adventures, but more likely the plans for the rifle-building machine, that can then be utilised by everyone in your village. Part Zelda, part Tale In The Desert, part adventure shooter, and wholly abstract and beautiful, Love looks the kind of amalgam of art, programming and internet savvy that we’ve desired without even being able to imagine. It has the potential, and Steenberg has the huge intellect, for this to be one of the most precious events in PC gaming.

The glowing passage above arose from seeing Steenberg (the programmer) at GDC. (i’m not sure I’m all that excited about ‘gaseous visuals’, but the rest sounds nifty.) The site for the game is a cryptic mix of vision language for the game (love is . . .) and techno-speak describing the engine and tools for creating within it. Probably wisely, there is no place to sign up. Steenburg is saying he only needs a couple hundred players to validate and build the world.

Konigi has a post today about Blind Text Generator, shown below:

It’s got the traditional greek more accurately labelled with the Latin Cicero, it’s got some Kafka text (from Metamorphosis) and does a nice job chopping it up into paragraphs, and character counts.

The Konigi post has some comments about the laziness of using greek:

I prefer not to use dummy text, because creating wireframes and comps that reflect how they will really look and function is what people pay me for, and is a sign of a lazy IA/IXD. Plus it can be really enjoyable to write real fake copy.

Real fake copy, however enjoyable to write, can also be messy, so I don’t buy the notion that it’s laziness (especially when one is creating systems for content delivery — article templates and the like). But, if one wants something that feels more real, and is actually kind of eerie, I recommend Hexatron’s wisdom generator. (Scroll to the bottom of the page and look for “Endless Wisdom”.) It’s based on an algorithm from Kernighan & Pike that chops up a real piece of text and reparses it into something that feels like the real thing . . . until you try to parse it. Check out an old testament passage generated by the algorithm:

The Bush speak one is also fun.