Gamify This!

Last weekend I succumbed to temptation, and with the kids watching on in amusement I downloaded a game onto my iPad that I had been curious about for a long time—a game called “Angry Birds".

The premise of the game is that the green pigs have stolen the birds’ eggs and the birds are now attacking the pigs, who lurk in various precarious and increasingly elaborate structures made of stone, wood, boulders and other materials. The gamer’s challenge is to launch each angry bird from a sling shot and hit the pigs and their structures at just the right angles to destroy them. It is very much a strategic problem of physics to determine angles and accurately predict cause and effect—since at each of the many levels you are given only a certain number of angry birds with various capabilities.

The game boasts many sound effects—bird chirps and pig mutterings along with a high-pitched cry of “Wheeee!” from each bird as it is launched by the slingshot, sad little “oofs” and “ouches” when they fall to the side after missing a pig, and of course the smug chorus of pug grunts that occurs each time you fail in a try to get all the pigs, along with the triumphant “Woo hooooo!” from the birds when you succeed.

There are many levels and tasks to achieve, all clearly laid out and tracked so you can see your progress or lack thereof as you cycle through various strategies for getting the most pigs with the fewest birds. Clear and straightforward—unlike the messy ambiguities of life you are escaping when you play the game.

“Be sure to turn off the sound when you’re out in public like on a bus—or everybody will jump you,” advised my son as I sank further into addiction with my new toy. I found myself driven to achieve the next level and to think about the problem at each level and come back to it later to try new strategies. I stayed up past my bedtime working to get just one more level. I did research on the Internet to learn about best practices. I strove to beat my personal best. I did many of the things with Angry Birds that companies want their employees to do.

After a recent acquisition I’m now part of a very large company that, among other things, develops software applications used by companies to run their businesses. And in this company, one of whose goals is to produce “beautiful software,” the concept of gamification” comes up fairly frequently. The idea is that if the same compelling qualities that games possess could be injected into business processes and applications used by employees, those employees would become more engaged, involved, and driven to achieve the desired results, especially if they could understand exactly what they had to do and could always see their standing and progress from both a personal perspective and in comparison to others.

This is an idea I can buy—I saw it in action recently when I signed up for an exercise program at work. Each employee who signed up pledged to do 2100 minutes of exercise in 7 weeks, and record their minutes on an ongoing basis on-line. And each employee could see their personal progress, the cumulative progress for their site, and how they ranked overall in number of exercise minutes—updated every quarter hour.

Many quiet little competitions sprang up over the 7 weeks between people and sites, and I have no doubt more than a few people pushed harder and got more exercise because of this very public feedback, myself included. It was gamification in action, not only at an individual level but at a group level with the site rankings. If we could figure out how to do this for software development it would be very interesting. The agile approach, dividing the group into small scrums and measuring the productivity of each scrum over short periods of time with very publicly demoed results, can be tricky, since the challenges each scrum faces may be very different, and comparisons may negatively impact cross-scrum cooperation. Complex and creative work is not easily measured. And how do you inspire greater individual achievement without discouraging collaboration and teamwork?

Is all of life a game after all? And how do you avoid ending up with a flock of angry birds slinging themselves at throngs of obnoxiously snorting pigs? Gamify that.

Eschewing Techie Twinkies

"Moderation in all things - including moderation." - Mark Twain

Too much of a good thing...are social networks, computers, and mobile devices of all stripes robbing us of our opportunity to truly connect with each other and with nature as well as our basic ability to think in depth?
An article in the Sunday Boulder Daily Camera called "The Technology Diet" likens our constant high tech connectedness to a fast food addiction. Some folks, even 20-somethings, are going off the grid completely, seeking to again hear themselves think and get to a point where they can read a book steadily for more than a few minutes without checking email and Facebook.

The article mentions Lewis Mitchell Neef who has posted about Internet craving and the damage it does in his "Adrenal Fatigue Project," a "satire on the pointless blurbs of misinformation that the Internet constantly bombards us with, inducing a heightened awareness and fatigue." Neef urges not to drop out completely but to "use your time wisely and be present" (good advice under any circumstances). Use the Internet to find real connections and further good causes.

Also mentioned is Laleh Mehran's and Chris Coleman's W3fi movement (pronounced "wee-fy"), showcased recently at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. They outline a three-step approach for being productive and avoiding mayhem on the Internet: know yourself online, be aware how your actions affect others, and know how you can connect with others positively and productively.

Andrew Weil has written another of his excellent down-to-earth books recently called Spontaneous Happiness on finding happiness in the modern world and one of his prime recommendations is to limit digital distractions and seek more connection with others and with nature to find the peace and sense of well-being we all seek.

There was a time I remember, my children, when we didn't carry around cell phones, when we didn't have something called a "digital presence on-line," when we read more, made our own music, had real conversations with each other.

I'm becoming more mindful of that lonely state I find myself in sometimes late at night, continually seeking something real online, long past the point of exhaustion, looking for truth in all the wrong places. That's a strong signal that it's time to power off and tune back in to real life.

Beating Google

M sits across from me at the Bookend coffee shop and googles “left-handed underwear” on his iPad after hearing about it last night from Garrison Keillor on “A Prairie Home Companion.”  He discovers that there are 183,000 hits for this concept including one offering the opportunity to buy the item on line and promising that it will "save left-handed men up to 3, often vital, seconds when visiting the loo" (locating this reference is left as an exercise for the reader).

In an excess of gadgetry we now both have iPads, and we’re enjoying the hell out of them.  I have downloaded several books and now have a rule that I must finish the last one before downloading the next one I’m interested in.  It is incredibly easy and convenient to get them and read them on the iPad.  I’ve eschewed the Apple-developed book reading app in favor of Amazon’s Kindle since I already have a long term buying relationship with Amazon and I don’t want to get too cozy with Mr. Jobs just yet.

Now that M’s learned how easy it is to get connected at his favorite espresso haunts, he’s having a fine old time, indulging in every urge to look up words and phrases in on-line dictionaries and Wikipedia,  reading his email a little more often (maybe), moving just a touch beyond his former neo-Ludditism.  The iPads, which we both carry in our backpacks almost everywhere we go since they are no heavier than a book would be, do bring us a step closer to that thrilling Star Trek nirvana where in every case of curiosity or information deficit, one can simply say in a confident voice, “Computer…” and then ask for what one needs.  After a few days of this, M mentioned that he had tried once again, unsuccessfully, to “Beat Google.” 

“What do you mean, ‘beat Google?’” ask I.

“You know—search for something it can’t find an exact hit for.”

“Ah—have you tried Googling your own name, in full?”

“No.”  Pause.  Blip blip blip.  “Oh.”  Zero direct hits on that search, and another challenge met.  It turns out that M flies so far below the radar in Cyberspace and the world in general that there are no exact hits on his full name. 

Of course, M has also discovered the seductiveness of being constantly on line—the tendency to look something up, then follow a referenced link, then find an interesting article, perhaps on left-handed underwear or some other topic, and then wonder “what was I doing a minute ago, anyway?”

The price we must pay in the modern age.

Are Newspapers Necessary?

Doonesbury has had a string of great strips lately on that antiquity, the newspaper.  To many younger people who are constantly online, newspapers seem old fashioned and ridiculously cumbersome.  I’ve been trying to clarify in my own mind why it’s just the opposite for me, why I’ve been fervently grateful for newspapers most of my life.

On Sunday mornings we get The New York Times, which certainly gives a broader and better perspective for the week than the Sunday Boulder Daily Camera.  Usually, as is the case today, we fold up beloved sections like “Week in Review” and “The New York Times Book Review” and stuff them in our backpacks prior to leaving the house.  Wherever we end up for coffee after our drive or walk, we have them handy and they can be guaranteed to offer up new ideas and happenings--information we do not know we don’t know.   

Today we sit outside Starbucks on Pearl Street in the perfect June air and M points out an article about the appalling idea of implanting e-books into one’s retina.  Presumably newspapers would also be available this way.  For someone like me who is still leery of considering laser surgery to correct my astigmatism, this seems beyond the pale.

Newspapers are more versatile than computers or e-books. You can read a newspaper anywhere and anytime you like, unencumbered by details like unavailability of free wireless Internet, lack of convenient power outlets, failing batteries or electrical equipment.  If you’re on a beach you can get smears of sunscreen sprinkled with sand and seagull droppings on your newspaper and really be none the worse for wear.  After you’ve finished reading the paper you can cut clippings from it to send to children in faraway cities or to be magnetically posted on the refrigerator door.

Long ago on humid summer nights in Indiana, those with the knowhow could shape and twist newspapers into loosely formed balloons and light them on the bottom edges.  The fire balloons would then gently lift and soar aloft, rising with the heat upward and upward into the dark night sky to be transformed into sparkling gold and black lace against the stars, with only the fireflies the wiser. 

If all else fails and you have no parakeets whose cages need lining or puppies who need emergency haven, you can recycle newspapers and they will live to see another day.

You can truly focus when reading a newspaper if you like, and not be lured to other links and obligations like checking your e-mail again or peeking to see if anybody likes you on Facebook. 

I will not go so far as to say newspapers are essential to my sense of wellbeing but with some good coffee in the morning, they do contribute positively.  Is this, then, an irreconcilable generation gap as the youth reads their news on the laptop screen each morning? To my broad blog readership, especially those under 25, I pose this question:  “Are newspapers necessary?

Clouds, Part II

“I am not going to be in a f*#&%ing cloud, ever,” he proclaims after I try to explain the concept that one could avoid the annoying presence of Windows and all the virus-firewall-security downloads and warning messages by going to a very simple operating system called Google Chrome OS, coming soon to a computer near you.

From what I read, Chrome OS’s only job is to get you online, where all the apps you need, along with all your personal files, are stored and accessible to you, anytime anywhere. Some say that an “operating system = browser” approach is unnecessarily limiting and even claustrophobic; however, this level of simplicity would seem to be potentially attractive to my neo-Luddite soul mate who gets so frustrated when unexplained and mysterious events occur during his computer usage. On the other hand, the absolute need for an Internet connection to do anything useful could be limiting as well.

He says he doesn’t trust the Internet, but Too Late—he does most of his banking on it. He was finally able to buy the right size jeans (31 in seam, not easily found in brick and mortal establishments) by ordering them online last week. He recently discovered how cool it is to send an e-mail to a family member and get an almost instantaneous reply.

Could we stomach yet another high tech device on top of the two cell phones, conventional PC and Netbook we already have? I am not thrilled with the iPad, am thinking about getting a Kindle, but the Chrome OS intrigues me also and makes me think I’ll wait and see what a Chrome-based netbook might be like, keeping all my data and apps in the Google Cloud. Would it be safe long term? I did take one step in that direction a few weeks ago. In my continuing search for a carefree and automatic way to backup data, I signed up for Carbonite, which quietly backs up all your files to the Cloud over a couple of days, and then continues to quietly back up any new files or changes immediately as they happen. So you always have an up-to-date backup on-line. It works like a charm--you can easily see the files anytime, and download them back onto your PC whenever needed. Nevertheless, for the really important stuff I also back it up onto more conventional media periodically just in case. I don’t have my head completely in the clouds just yet.

Thank God for Books

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who read voraciously, necessarily, constantly—and those who do not. I am one of the former. Books are a huge comfort to me, a light in my life, an inspiration, and a reliable way to see the world in fresh perspective. When I am low, I can often climb back out of the sinkhole by picking up a good book.

I observed the recent gadget frenzy over the release of the iPad with curiosity. The idea of reading books via electronic medium is not new, but the iPad is said to reach a new level of elegance and ease-of-use, and to make the act of reading a book a new and better experience than the old-fashioned way with the pages that must be turned by hand, the well-worn covers from rough backpack rides, the used book experience of occasional encounters with strangers’ opinions scribbled in margins usually with no added value, the teetering piles of books on the nightstand and on the floor next to the nightstand, the Tom and Jerry battle between you and your purge-happy spouse who (although also a voracious reader) dislikes clutter and periodically spirits off boxes of what he considers to be “junk fiction.”

After the initial hubbub subsided last week I ventured into the Apple store to see the iPad. I am not an Apple user normally so it took me a little while to figure out the user interface (you press the on button to go back to the main desktop). The one I looked at did not have a book on it to “page” through, which was my primary interest. I look at computer screens all day long—do I want to associate this latest gadget with the pleasure of reading? When I read a book, I like to focus on it, and it alone.  (I know not everybody reads this way but I once almost missed a flight out of Chicago to Paris because I was so engrossed in the book I was reading.)   Do I want my book-reading experience to include the constant option for yet another distraction--the option to be instantly lured away to this or that website whenever I have the urge? My God, have I become a neo-Luddite? Nevertheless, at this point, my thinking is: “Hell no, I won’t go.” But one day, I may well feel differently.

One of my favorite writers, Anna Quindlen, had a great column in Newsweek recently called “Turning the Page,” which was in part about the question of whether iPads and other devices like it foretell the end of books as we know them. She reminds us that some said radio would end when television arrived on the scene, but NPR begs to differ. Her conclusion rings true to me:

“Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that’s why it survives. There are still millions of people who like the paper version, at least for now. And if that changes, well, what is a book really? Is it its body, or its soul? Would Dickens have recognized a paperback of “A Christmas Carol,” or, for that matter, a Braille version? Even on a cell phone screen, Tiny Tim can God-bless us, every one.”

Clouds

One of the latest trends in high tech is “Cloud computing”—the idea that software, hardware and services are all available from a ubiquitous Internet "cloud" and companies or individuals can use them as they would utilities like electricity or water, paying only for what they need. All this without having to worry about buying the hardware and software, maintaining it, applying patches, worrying about whether it will continue to have the needed capacity, and so on. Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Computing (Amazon EC2) is one example.

Of course, all your data is also up there in the cloud somewhere, so security is a top priority, and there’s always the worry that somehow another cloud user or somebody outside the cloud will be able to get access to your valuable information--hackers don’t go away.

But this particular development looks like it might end up changing the whole landscape for software and hardware companies in the same way the Internet has done and as such it has lots of people in the industry pondering it with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Like any world-changing technology it has its pros and cons. Joni Mitchell had some wise words to say about clouds in a song she wrote back in 1969 and as I study the complexities of Cloud architectures, I hear her words:

Rows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feathered canyons everywhere
I’ve looked at clouds that way…

Oh yes, no worries, a thing of beauty, everything taken care of by the ice cream castle, I mean cloud provider, and you pay for only what you need and use. You can truly access your data anywhere, anytime, from any device.

But now they only block the sun.

They rain and snow on everyone.

So many things I would have done

But clouds got in my way…

It’s a game changer for companies, IT departments, end users – all trying to figure out how to manage their huge quantities of data and provide it anywhereanyhow – but keep it safe and secure at the same time. Like any game changer it can make you a little queasy--what will it all mean and how will it all unfold? Get out your crystal ball and think fast.

On this whirling planet change is constant, and there are always ups and downs. The new new thing can be a wave you ride or one that sucks you under.

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now

From win and lose and still somehow

It’s cloud illusions I recall

I really don’t know clouds at all.

As usual I'm faking it til I make it--swimming as fast as I can to understand both sides—NOW

A Passage to India

I had a surreal computing experience a few mornings ago. My Norton Internet Security software was having the same trouble it had once before where the “Live Update” feature automatically downloads all the appropriate updates including the latest virus definitions, but then can’t seem to recognize that it's done this, and insists on starting the process over and over again - while annoyingly warning me that I am “unprotected.”

Oh, yes, those of you have Macs are laughing smugly right now since you didn’t spent your Saturday morning trying to fix this problem (or another one I still have and am too lazy to fix where Micro$oft’s Auto Update keeps trying over and over again to update .Net on my PC each time I shut it down (all the more enfuriating when, as far as I can tell, I have no earthly need for .Net anyway).

I laugh out loud at Apples “Mac and PC” commercials on TV, where the Bill Gates look-alike is repeatedly embarrassed in front of the young and perplexed Mac character. A recent one has Bill in the cobra position on a yoga mat, working off his “stressful year with Vista” aided by a young and lovely yoga instructor who is gently banging a gong at each salient point, while “Mac” observes bemusedly on the sidelines. “Breathe out and expel all that Vista bad energy…”

Eventually the once serene yoga instructor becomes distraught over Vista’s negative impact on her Yoga studio billing software and bangs the gong so hard that it falls over in a loud clatter. Then she rises gracefully, as yoga instructors are able to do, and stomps off while Mac looks on, shaking his head. The PC bashing is well deserved – but I have a PC at work and I don’t really want to switch back and forth between two different operating systems each day. Anyway, I digress.

To solve the more pressing anti-virus software problem I went to Symantic’s website seeking help, and decided to try the real-time 7x24 tech support chat and PC Rescue feature. It wasn’t long before I was in chat mode with “Saravanan,” who I am 99% sure was working from India at what would have been about 10:00 pm local time there. After downloading some “PC Rescue” software, Saravanan took control of my PC with my queasily extended permission, and soon the mouse pointer was moving by itself in ghostly fashion on my screen, working to fix the problem. A reboot was required and then some registry magic, the running of an auto fix program and the restarting of a certain Windows service that had mysteriously been stopped – at which point the problem seemed to be fixed (and has not returned since). Saravanan said that if the problem recurred I should contact them and get an upgrade to the 2008 version.

This was the global economy in action for sure – somebody on the other side of the world fixed my PC. And somebody on the other side of the world is earning a good living doing that. There are many ways in which the Internet is a bane and a curse – but there are also many ways in which the Internet brings miracles into people’s lives. It’s a love-hate thing.

Ease of Use

Apparently my husband Mark thinks that I’m a genius. He believes I’m on the same level as a rocket scientist, in fact. He told me this on our morning walk along the sparkling snowy Boulder bike paths.

Why does he believe I am a genius? Because I understand computers; that is, I can usually fix problems and perform simple maintenance activities on our home computer, which remains to him a complete and utter mystery. Computers are such a mystery to Mark that a question I might ask in preparation for a backup, like, “You do keep all your documents in your ‘My Documents’ folder, don’t you?” confounds him.

And yet, Mark was an early computer user. He was using the first computer I bought for myself, an Osborne Kaypro II, in the early 1980’s. He wrote an entire novel, as well as numerous short stories, using that computer. What’s that sonny? You’ve never heard of a Kaypro II? It had a whopping 64K of memory and a green character display. It used something called “floppy disks” for all, all data storage, and it had an operating system called CP/M. It also had a word processing program called Perfect Writer which could only be used when you inserted the floppy disk containing this program into drive A – then you stored your documents on the floppy disk in drive B. Although not a rocket scientist, Mark managed to use this computer quite adeptly, including its spell checking capability which he sorely needed, as long as it consistently behaved as he expected.

And nothing much has changed today. He can use our Windows XP Home Edition PC, with the broadband Internet connection and the 1 GB of memory and the 225 GB storage just fine for useful work such as financial tracking in Quicken. He can back up the Quicken files onto a CD. He even Googles, now that the browser on his desktop has been set up with Google as his homepage.

(One time I set his browser homepage to point to a document that said HELLO MARK!!! instead of to the usual Google site. The next time he opened the browser it gave him quite a shock: "How do they know who I am??").

Mark can use this computer quite well to accomplish all sorts of useful tasks, as long as it consistently behaves exactly as he expects it to. And this is a key challenge for those of us in the software business--to make it so easy to use that it makes sense to Mark. The more I think about it, the more I think that may be rocket science after all.