Pick One

When it comes to little Internet thingies that get tweeted or blogged like crazy, I usually get bored in about 10 seconds. Here's one that held me for quite a while though: Pick One. There is nothing to explain, really: Two words show up on your screen, and you click on one of them. And repeat. As much as you want.



This is probably not unique to me at all, but when faced with either-or choices, my initial gut reflex is to frame the two options as being on opposite ends of a continuum. So you can imagine how amusing these were:









Here were the toughest ones for me:








(I'm not a socialist creep, I just have issues in the mornings)



And the easiest:





The more I clicked on choices, the more I started framing my decisions in different ways. If it was a tough decision, I framed the two as, "Which one would I miss the most if it went away?" and "What would be a comforting alternative if I lost X?" Images of flying to Tokyo to save music and switching to the Wall Street Journal to keep eating cheeseburgers came to mind. Then I started thinking about what an interesting personality test this website would make. What do you think?

EDIT | Prominent blogger Eric Tabone just informed me that this site is something like 3 years old. Good, I was starting to think that I was actually up on things for once!

There's a lot more to board games than I thought.

Tonight I read an article called Monopoly Killer in Wired. It is one of the most interesting things I have read in recent memory, and my brain felt like a pinball the entire time. It's about a game called The Settlers of Catan, designed by a German man named Klaus Teuber. Over the past 14 years, it has become one of the biggest smash hits to ever happen to board games, translated into 30 languages and selling 15 million copies globally (FIFTEEN MILLION!). The article weaves Teuber's story into a brief history of board games, pointing out that German ones in particular seem to "get it" (in terms of how engaging and dynamic they tend to be).

Board games were pretty much nonexistent for me growing up, unless I was visiting my relatives in Germany each summer – my cousins and neighbors always had a ton laying around, and we played them all the time. Maybe the fact that I was indeed a kid played a part in this next thing, but over there it always felt like I was actually in the game rather than simply playing it. A glimmer of this memory came back when I read that as Teuber designed The Settlers of Catan, he "felt like [he] was discovering something rather than inventing it."


I never realized how culturally significant board games actually were in Germany until tonight – more are sold per capita there than anywhere else. Germany even has a special award for them called the Spiel des Jahres prize, which is a huge deal in the gaming world (the one Teuber won for Catan was his second).


"Part of the reason we don't play much Risk and Monopoly as adults is that those are actually poorly designed games, at least in the German sense"
Two of the interesting differences pointed out between American and German board games are about the dynamic the players have with each other. One difference centers around "conquering your opponent" vs. "having a good, competitive time" (I am paraphrasing).

"Monopoly has you grinding your opponents into dust. It's a very negative experience. It's all about cackling when your opponent lands on your space and you get to take all their money." Monopoly, in fact, is a classic example of what economists call a zero-sum game. For me to gain $100, you have to lose $100. For me to win, you have to be bankrupt.

Instead of direct conflict, German-style games tend to let players win without having to undercut or destroy their friends. This keeps the game fun, even for those who eventually fall behind. *

The other difference is about how engaged each player is throughout all points of the game.

Most of [Monopoly]'s interminable three- to four-hour average playing time (length being another maddening trait) is spent waiting for other players to roll the dice, move their pieces, build hotels, and collect rent. Board game enthusiasts disparagingly call this a "roll your dice, move your mice" format.

[German games] are balanced, preventing one person from running away with the game while the others painfully play out their eventual defeat. And the best ones stay fresh and interesting game after game.

Reading this article taught me a lot about how complicated designing a game is, in general. Statistics, engineering and probability are all taken into account to allow for a huge number of possible scenarios with not a lot of rules (Did you know that there are more potential moves in Chess than there are atoms in the universe? WHAT?!). There are actual such things as board game scholars and game experts (ludologists).



After doing a little personal research, I learned that my two favorite board games as a child were actually not designed by a German, but rather an American named Alex Randolph! Will you look at that. Both games have won Spiel des Jahres awards :)

* One of the reasons for this difference is actually rooted in a broader cultural shift: Violence in particular is taboo in Germany's gaming culture, a holdover from decades of post-World War II soul-searching. Wow.

Colonia Tovar

When I was little, my mom told me a crazy story. This is the way I remember it, twenty or so years later (I actually called her just now to make sure I didn't get it completely wrong):

A looooooong time ago, a congressman in Venezuela invited a small community from Germany to come across the ocean. They promised Germany land, and said they were free to integrate themselves into the population if they wanted to.

It apparently took the Germans a while to get organized, gather a group together and travel all the way to South America. By the time they got there, the congressman was no longer around. Venezuela didn't quite know what to do with this group of Germans who seemingly appeared out of nowhere, so they said, "Well, just go figure out where you want to be and let us know and that's fine." They did some exploring and found an area in the mountains that reminded them of the Black Forest.

The Germans established themselves there and seemed to disappear; nobody ever heard from them again. Many, many years later, a Venezuelan was wandering around and found this German village in the middle of nowhere. Imagine a Venezuelan's surprise at stumbling upon a perfectly preserved Bavarian village, full of blonde and blue-eyed people, caring for their own crops and animals, etc.

Roads started being built between this village and Caracas (the nearest city in Venezuela), and now it's a tourist destination. Before this, they all spoke in a German dialect; now, most of them don't speak it at all. Dad and I went once and he started speaking to a girl in German (she was in full Bavarian style clothing), and received a blank stare in return.

I remembered this a couple of years ago, when my parents were telling someone else about this Colonia Tovar (the village's name). It was at this point that I realized that this actually happened and wasn't just some nice bedtime story that my mother had made up. I told MT about this in an airplane somewhere between Brazil and Colombia last year. When we got back to New York, she did some investigating and found some more information for me. It turns out that I remembered the story fairly accurately:

Founded in 1843 by German settlers, the city remained isolated from the rest of the country for decades, a factor that permitted the inhabitants to keep their culture and traditions. The majority of its residents are descendants of Germans and have a Northern European appearance. The Alemannic dialect of German, known as Alemán Coloniero ("colony German"), is nearly extinct.

It also mentioned that one would be "unlikely to find anyone who understands German fluently," which explains the blank stare my father got when he visited.

I clicked on the official site link in the Wikipedia entry, looked at some photos, and WOW. This place looks just like the village my father grew up in in Germany!






This is incredible. I love stuff like this. If anyone has a similarly mind-blowing story like this, please please share.

EDIT [13 August 2008] For anybody who stumbled upon this, apparently my parents' information and most of the stuff on the web is a bit off. Here are some edits, thanks to Ed.

The colonists were not forgotten, nor did a long time pass between the government agreements and the arrival of the Germans. In fact, it took less than two years to get everything set up (including the arrival of the Germans). They did not wander aimlessly; the land was actually donated and chosen specifically by the government who took into account cultural differences and geographical specifications in order to properly accommodate the arrivals. Regarding their isolation, part of the agreement between the governments and the new settlers was to allow the colonists to remain as a closed society until they felt the desire to integrate to the rest of the country, which they finally did in the mid 20th century. By this time the colonists were fully able to marry whomever they wanted outside of the colony as well. Lastly, regarding their language, their German dialect wouldn't be understood by most Germans nowadays since it is either extinct in Germany and/or spoken by a small minority on some rural areas of the previous Baden Duchy. Just thought I'd set the record straight, as I was born in Venezuela and spent a great part of my childhood in Tovar.

Thanks again for clearing those things up, Ed.

Clay Shirky

A few days ago, I went to a small event at Daylife that my friend Michael invited me to. It was framed as cocktails and conversation with Clay Shirky; the email mentioned the topic of Clay's talk as being "the difference between sharing, cooperation, and collective action when designing group software." Now, that kind of sent me into a panic because I pictured myself in a room full of designers nodding with great understanding of "designing group software" and me sitting there drawing a complete blank, since all I know about design is that I like minimalism and typography.

Well, I was pleasantly surprised. No, I was explosively surprised. According to Wikipedia, Clay is:

an American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He teaches New Media as an adjunct professor at New York University's (NYU) graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). His courses address, among other things, the interrelated effects of the topology of social networks and technological networks, how our networks shape culture and vice-versa.

And that's what he talked about. He essentially spoke of what my Great Love was in college – social cognition – and added the dimension of The Internet to it. I was on the edge of my seat the entire time.

His theories were fascinating, and his book that the talk was based off of – Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations – is coming out very soon and I am very much going to buy it. Shirky gave three examples of online platforms leading to sharing leading to cooperation leading to collective action; my favorite one was a story of teenagers forming an ice cream-eating flash mob in October Square in Belarus. They organized it on LiveJournal, so it obviously wasn't a "secret conspiracy," but in any case it is illegal to form a group in October Square (Lukashenko apparently outlawed it, declaring groups in October Square a sign of plotting to overthrow the government). Five of the kids were arrested and others were harrassed. One blogger wrote, "The whole world will be laughing.” As Clay said in his talk, "Nothing says dictatorship like arresting people for eating ice cream." brilliant.


Two added bonuses to this whole thing were:
1. Clay Shirky is super friendly and approachable and I want to be his friend,
2. I saw Nick Denton there; he was in my "people as corporations" column that was published 2 days earlier. neat.

[images from litota_'s LiveJournal and Amazon]