Alberto Romero on rigid structures

by javier on 28/10/2008

We like the definition of the game as “free movement on a rigid structure”. The more rules the game has, the funnier it is. These limitations -or explicit rules- encourage the creation of other implicit ones: for instance we now have groups of users setting the topic of the day and postng videos on that topic. That is much funnier and exciting than a user posting all the videos from his favorite band in a single day.

Alberto Romero on designing unvlog.com (Spanish)

There are 5 comments in this article:

  1. 28/10/2008mort says:

    I’ve been obsessed (mildly) with reinterpretations of software as rulesets. You start to think like this you get the sofware-as-games, software-as-markets, software-as-narrative, software-as-architecture, software-as-politics, etc.

    It depends on which ruleset you wish to overimpose on the software to interpret it. And of course it all gets much more amusing when you consider the extent to which the different rulesets collide among themselves and share common properties: games-as-politics, games-as-narrative .. The mind boggles.

    Any way, I don’t want to hijack your blog for too long. All I want to say is that one early post that got me started on all this was one by Tom Coates (1). I still find it fascinating and ripe with ideas worth of exploring. Also, the comments refer to Nomic (2), which it’s interesting by its own merits

    http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2006/05/selfreflexive_rulesets_in_online_communities/

    (2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic

    P.S. I don’t know if you heard about this already but the merry people at The Cocktail came up with their own implementation of Nomic. Something to do with coffee ;)

  2. 28/10/2008Ale Muñoz says:

    “Design depends largely on constraints”

    — Charles Eames

    : )

  3. 4/11/2008César Astudillo says:

    In other words, design is a way of tackling a problem in a solution space with too many degrees of freedom to use engineering. The designer uses her experience and skill to renounce to all the degrees of freedom one at a time, by taking design decisions (defining constraints), until she comes up with a single point in the solution space. All this in an environment such that there is not such thing as an objective measure of the degree of fitness of a given solution.

    Arbitrary rule sets reduce uncertainty, prevent the creator’s block, and encourage creativity. They give you a limited playground, but limited is not equal to finite. Most limited playgrounds are still infinite.

    Example 1: the list of “things I like / things I don’t like” in Unvlog’s user profile page is exactly the kind of creative exercise I was given in the first day of a writing workshop in order to overcome writer’s block and get people to write.

    Example 2: the video format “4×4″. It does not yield particularly good results, but it is really good at encouraging people to edit their first videos.

  4. 12/12/2010Lorencopen says:

    Did you know that USA and Europe blocked Wikileaks? What do you think about it?
    Thank you

  5. 15/01/2011Assangekab says:

    What do you think about WIKILEAKS?
    Thanks
    bye bye ;) )

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