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.

Shoogle

Here's something else that's cool. Shoogle is a system for generating tactile and auditory feedback regarding the state of a handheld device. The user shakes the device and it feels and sounds like there are objects rattling around inside. The objects can be a metaphor for waiting messages, or battery power remaining, etc.

Self System

The lecture on Thursday was pretty darn cool. One of the highlights was the video of the Sun Self System. It really sparked my imagination.

Basically, it's a programming environment with no edit/run modes. All editing happens in runtime. Objects can be deconstructed and their properties and methods dragged around like so many Legos.

The only problem in my eyes was that it was discontinued in like 1995. I wished there was something like it still. I searched around for keywords that I thought would result in projects in the same vein as Self. And, lo, what was the first hit but Self itself!

Discontinued means something very different in software as compared to hardware.

So, I quickly downloaded the Self OSX binary and installed it. I ran the demo snapshot and it opened an OpenGL window and I was in. It had the same demo used in the video, with gas particles in a tank, bouncing around.

Click for larger image

I played around with the controls a bit, but I couldn't get the hang of it. It's a very different method of programming from what I'm used to.

I don't think I'll ever use it again, but it's a interesting idea. I'm sure it will give me perspective in the future, if I'm tasked to design an interface.