Valve Releases Data

As I talked about in a previous post, Valve has a system set up to get data from users that use their games. Today, they released a report of some of the game data from one of their newer games. It's not interface data, rather it's gameplay data, but it's representative of the kind of data collection that could be brought to bear by modern networking technology.

Evaluation

This week's reading put me in mind of the Steam content delivery system's fabled statistics gathering functionality.

Steam is a framework for buying, downloading, and playing various games. It is rumored that, behind the scenes, there is massive data collection in place, sending back reports of what players are doing in the games, presumably to help improve the experience. It's not talked about, but occasionally Valve, the company that makes Steam, will release an update that fixes something, citing their statistics gathering as the tip off that there was a problem.

I can only imagine this kind of information gathering becoming more and more useful, as computers are becoming pretty much always online, and software updates are being done automatically in the background. For Steam, since the data being collected is recreational, there are no real privacy concerns (presumably, they don't send back personally identifying information, though really, no one knows for sure,) but for other applications, this could be a problem.

However, with the right EULA and the right data retention policy, this risk could be mitigated.

On the other hand, speaking as a paranoid end user, I'm thankful for my outgoing firewall.

Hyperland

Today's lecture put me in mind of a documentary I watched a while ago. Thanks to the wonder of Gooogle Video, I can share it with you.


"This is a fantasy documentary. The pioneering work shown in Hyperland, however, is very real."

Hyperland is a documentary from 1990, written by Douglas Adams and featuring fourth Doctor Tom Baker. It talks about a hypothetical future of interactive multimedia, where the world's information is collected and organized with hyperlinks. Tom Baker plays a smart agent, who helps Douglas Adams to make sense of the information available to him. The vision of the world wide web is highly visual and has a lot of video elements. This could have been to make it interesting for television, but it also makes it even cooler that I'm watching it on Google Video.

I haven't watched the whole thing in months, but about six minutes in, there was a list of hypothetical names for the world wide web that I quite fancied:

Dynabook
Hyperspace
Cyberia
Infinite Virtual Address Space
Intelligent TV
Interactive Television
Interactive Multimedia
Hypertext

It's hard for me to tell, in retrospect, which of these were meant to be facetious, if any.

Interview with Ted Nelson at 8:05. Vannevar Bush and Memex segment at 9:30. The whole thing is worth watching.