ITT: I take credit for your work and declare a New Project.

[Faust]

someone give me an arbitrary statists grid and experience points and I will pretty much do whatever you ask to level up

[tyrannosaurus vex]

arbitrary experience points are an excellent idea. like the scoring system on Who's Line is it Anyway

[Faust]

and something to spend it on or have levels, otherwise it doesn't feel the same.
even if its just access to someones gif folder I would probably do it.

[Cramulus]

I just had an OMGASM all over my keyboard

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I will probably voice a great deal of support and offer my resources, but never really follow through with the legwork.

You and the rest of the world.

What could we do that would encourage your participation?

Sex?

No, but really, the best incentive for me is peer enthusiasm.

[Cain]

I agree.

I slept and thought on it and I don't believe the game model works well unless you are already working with people predisposed to doing whatever your game is based around anyway.  For example, Actual Reality Gaming.  I've watched tons of whiney bitches descend on a really decent, well thought out game, only to drop out because it either didn't live up to their fantastical expectations, there was a lull in activities or some equally bizzare and pointless reason.  People only committed if something piqued their interest, and the things that invariably get most interest are those they cannot PROVE are not a game of some sort. 

I believe people will be more inclined to join if they can see personal benefits, as well as a hint of danger, conspiracy and excitment.  A game contradicts 2 elements of this I believe.  Games get higher buzz, but much lower returns.

[Cramulus]

I'm not sure if you're responding to Vex's proposition of The Game as a metaphor for the kind of grand-scale project we're creating, or responding to my proposition of a game structure to encourage certain types of Discordians to participate. But I'll take it as the latter...

I slept and thought on it and I don't believe the game model works well unless you are already working with people predisposed to doing whatever your game is based around anyway.

The game is based around doing Discordian activities. It's literally whatever people make this project into, be it pranking the election cycle or drawing moustaches or whatever. Any project we propose to Discordians has to be fun in of itself... otherwise you need to convince people to participate using rhetoric or authority. And those carry the exact same potential for people to "drop out because it either didn't live up to their fantastical expectations, there was a lull in activities or some equally bizzare and pointless reason."

But I think it's clear, it's totally transparent, that the points and the rules and the game and bullshit are just bullshit. The real point is to do activities, not to get scored on it. The game is just a framework which lets everyone reward each other based on their level of participation - even if those rewards are total bullshit - a fact we admitted openly and proudly right at the beginning.

The real rewards are
(A) that if you participate in others projects, it raises the likelihood that others will participate in your projects. (a rule fully functional here at PD) and
(B) the tasks are supposed to be FUN in of itself. If what we're doing isn't fun, nobody's ever gonna do anyone else's bidding anyway.




I'm just not sure how you can be shooting down any one approach to getting Discordians to work together, being that you've called for as many different sub networks as possible. Especially since "whatever [the] game is based around anyway" is something we've talked about for less than three posts.

[Cain]

I can shoot it down because I honestly don't believe its a functional or useful model, especially for the netwar system I described but also for various other activities.

Or are you suggesting my disagreement with you isn't 100% sincere?  In which case, fuck off because this conversation is over and we have nothing more to say to each other.

[Cramulus]

I can shoot it down because I honestly don't believe its a functional or useful model, especially for the netwar system I described but also for various other activities.

Or are you suggesting my disagreement with you isn't 100% sincere?  In which case, fuck off because this conversation is over and we have nothing more to say to each other.

I didn't say you weren't being 100% sincere.

but if you're gonna get all "this conversation is over and I'm done talking to you, fuck off"...

[Cain]

Well you're the one who turned the argument into my personal viewpoints and about me, so as a matter of fact I do think I have the right to react in such a way.  You insinuated my disagreement with you was not sincere since I was the one constantly badgering for more activities.  And I don't see why I should have to put up with such bullshit when I'm doing everyone here a favour by applying some critical thought to the subject at hand.

[Triple Zero]

so, the internet has mutated Operation Mindfuck.

classic things that needed player/master relationships for organisation are not always necessary anymore. the classic player/master relationship has always been, for a large part, a boring job of logistics. this is the robot future, so let the machines take care of it.

in web2.0, you can simply let something loose, inform a shitload of people via whatever channel and a whole army of bots, spiders, agents, pipes and feeds will take care of the logistics for you.

allow me to demonstrate:

i registered an account at http://del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site.
http://del.icio.us/triplezero (some evil bastard already stole "000")

on this account, i bookmarked the URL to Cram's "To Kill A Religion/Joke" manifesto. then i tagged it with "gasm" (and "eris", "discord", "discordia", and such so it might get some exposure).

now check this out:
http://del.icio.us/tag/gasm

showing all URLs tagged with "gasm". there's some other links below it about the GNU Assembler, but nobody cares about that and if this thing takes off we'll swamp them anyway.
and, del.icio.us being a social networking site, also allows you to create a "network" of users (other discordians/GASManiacs) so you can keep track of what they do and/or tag.

but there is more. you wanna keep track of what's going on in the GASMsphere, right? so subscribe to its RSS feed:
http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/gasm

there's even more features on del.icio.us, and with some creativity and a slight hack of code here and there (del.icio.us was one of the first web2.0 apps, and has since then kinda turned into the ducttape of the web2.0 mash)

next!

so, Cram's cabal wants fake moustaches everywhere?

so first Cram writes up a nice recruiting article, telling people to put moustaches everywhere and photograph the evidence.
he also instructs people to place the photos on flickr.com and tag them with 'moustachegasm'.

post this article anywhere, a forum, a blog whatever. then bookmark it on del.icio.us, tag it with "gasm" and "moustachegasm" so everybody subscribing to the "gasm" feed on del.icio.us gets the message (then proceed to spam the URL all over the place, anywhere, for more extra exposure is always good).

this way, Cram's cabal can follow the progress of their moustachegasm nicely simply by keeping track of this page:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/moustachegasm/
(and yes, it also has an RSS feed)

(btw maybe it's easier to use photobucket, as everybody here already uses and knows photobucket. it also has a search page with an RSS feed: http://photobucket.com/images/moustachegasm/ it seems like you gotta set your album to public before images appear in the search page though)

easy as that.

(someone in) Cram's cabal also subscribed to the "moustachegasm" feed on del.icio.us, so if anybody wants to communicate, or draw the moustachegasm-crowd's attention to anything, they just post a bookmark to del.icio.us tagges with "moustachegasm".
if they don't want to use flickr, they can post imageshack or photobucket links to del.icio.us tagged with "moustachegasm".
if some cabal on a forum far far away decides to do a whole lot of moustacheing and talk about it on their forum--they post a link.

there are lots and lots of little web2.0 social networking services and tools out there and with a littlebit of creativity, the possibilities are endless.

a few more things, that might prove useful:

http://calendar.google.com - google calendar. is an online calendar application, a bit reminiscent of microsoft Outlook. the cool thing is that it is coupled to a gmail account, and that you can allow other gmail accounts to view and even edit your calendar. (one of my friends uses it and tells people "if you wanna meet up for coffee, i added you to my calendar, check when i'm free and reserve a spot" ) anyway, for your purposes it might be useful to set up a shared calendar describing a roadmap of certain longterm gasms. and a public calendar can of course be read through an RSS feed, if you wish.

http://docs.google.com - google docs. three in one: an online word processor (compatible with Word), online spreadsheet (compatible with Excel) and online presentation (compatible with PowerPoint) applications. similar to calendar you can share everything with selected users, for great collaborative projects. especially powerful if you know to work some Excel magic (formulas, procedures, etc).

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes - yahoo pipes. "Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web." this is the superglue of the internet. a bit advanced, but you can convert everything and anything to a feed, loop it through a bunch of filters, post it to a blog, del.icio.us account, search the web, you name it. it's like Lego for the web. and you don't need to know how to program.

http://twitter.com/ - more social networking/web2.0 stuff. this one allows people to send SMS-like messages to eachother through a social network. complete with feeds, tagging, social network, integration etc.

(oh god i'm just looking around .. this stuff is sweeeeeet http://ponderer.org/del.icio.us hehe. i'm using del.icio.us for a week or two now, imported all my bookmarks from Opera (it's easy, also for IE and FF), they're not shared, but at least i can easily access them from anywhere now)

sorry i digress. i'm a tech guy you know?

---

some more thoughts:

Cain wrote:

> I don't believe the game model works well unless you are already working with people predisposed to doing whatever
> your game is based around anyway.

> I believe people will be more inclined to join if they can see personal benefits, as well as a hint of
> danger, conspiracy and excitment.

Cain, these three elements seem to be what makes you predisposed to like a game. not for everybody.

on friday/saturday i participated in an online "Diminuitive coding contest", i don't play games that often, but this got my interest. there was no danger or conspiracy involved. i participated because 1) it's something i'm really good at 2) peer enthusiasm / recognition/mittens from others 3) it was a novel combination of a few topics i enjoy greatly.

although i agree that excitement is always a good thing.

[Cain]

Actually, I noted my trends from several month of lurking at the largest online ARG community.  Barring Trent Reznor's Year Zero, every successful game had those elements - especially not appearing like a game.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

Okay.

This is called "The Game," but don't let it fool you. It isn't just a "game" in a traditional sense. By "Game," I meant to stress the idea that an organization might be spawned and motivated by a deliberately designed set of simple instructions, to achieve deliberately designed results.

The set of simple rules is, in practice, the limit of this project's similarities to a mere "game." Cain is absolutely correct -- for anything to come of it, it must not appear like it's just a game. The trick is getting people going through the motions of activity the way people go through the motions of playing a game, especially if you can get them to do it without it ever crossing their minds that they are "playing a game."

In fact, this sort of thing is the building block of the Machine to begin with -- people autonomously going about their 'business' according to the set of rules with which they are presented, absolutely oblivious to the fact that there's no natural law that says those rules have any authority.

Just wanted to try and clear up any confusion early on about what my position is. It is not just that we set out to achieve some result by engineering an organization to achieve it; it is not that we simply rephrase OM to make it more user-friendly; it is that we design an organization with no hierarchy other than a set of rules, that is self-replicating, and that produces results based on the rules we set. We then would launch that 'game' into the wild and see what people do with it, without us holding their hands the whole way.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I rather like how calling it "the Game" kind of implies that it isn't a game at all.

[Triple Zero]

ok just asking cause no one responded to it, i suppose it was kinda offtopic in this thread, but is the web2.0 stuff useful to you guys at all?