Monthly Archive

I’m heading off for the Austin Game Developers Conference this afternoon.  I’ll be there through Friday evening, if anyone wants to meet up.

I realized recently that I speak mostly in conclusions. That is to say, I am really bad at exposing my thought processes to other folks.  It’s one of the reasons why I blog so infrequently.  I only feel comfortable blogging fully formed thoughts - ones that have relatively well tested hypotheses.  But so much of relationship formation and bonding - the good stuff - happens in the in-between spaces.  I decided I need to actively work on exposing these thought processes.  

So I guess I’ll try posting more casually to my blog. I don’t have a lot of faith in this yet, but I suppose it’s the kind of thing that takes practice.  =)

I had a very enjoyable conversation yesterday with Byron Reeves.  Byron’s the Director of Stanford’s Language and Information Program.  In his spare time, he does a lot of consulting and startup work in the area of virtual worlds and virtual economies.  He told me about some fMRI work he’s done, studying people’s brains while they play World of Warcraft.  And the difference in people’s brain responses depending on whether you tell them the other characters they are interacting with are other people or NPCs (computer AI.) 

One of the companies he’s working with is Seriosity.   They are basically creating a platform to allow companies to create virtual economies by assigning currency values to different types of interaction and communication.  They are coming up with all sorts of very interesting, unique data about how virtual currencies drive behavior and group dynamics. 

Anyways, a few random thoughts have been percolating in my brain:

- What does it do to a [company's] culture if all interaction can be boiled down to some quantitative representation?

- Isn’t a company’s culture really just some expression of a collective utility function?

- And, has anyone done any studies measuring what type of correlation exists between the rate of change of a [group|country's] economic growth and the rate of change of its language? I guess I’m curious if various Chinese dialects are changing more quickly than languages in more static socioeconomic conditions.  I feel this must be true to some extent, but I wonder to what degree.