Tweetdeck Maintains Integrity At The Cost Of A Rich User Experience

For this final blog post I decided to tackle the topic of rich user experience, with Tweetdeck in mind. What gives Tweetdeck an edge over other Twitter applications is how it utilizes multiple columns to divide search and tweet streams. Unlike the standard Twitter layout where searches must be done in lieu of viewing your own timeline, or following someone still obscures your ‘Home’ tweet stream. Tweetdeck places all of these in thin columns spread along one window, so a user can view all facets of Twitter at a glance.

Tweetdeck’s other great innovation that many corporate and marketing Twitter accounts have taken advantage of is the idea of being able to tweet from multiple Twitter accounts on the same application without needing to log out and back in. This allows for checking multiple Twitter accounts and sending messages out from what could be different social media arms of a company.

There are a few features that used to be a part of the user experience for Tweetdeck that’s missing from the application since Twitter’s acquisition of the company back in 2011. Integrations of other social networks such as Google+ and Facebook have been absent, as well as an ability to type longer than 140 characters and have the tweet link to a site that states the entire prolix tweet. Twitter has stressed that these features were not in line with Twitter’s overall vision for their platform, but nevertheless, many users have looked to other Twitter applications that have sprung up in Tweetdeck’s downsizing. This brings up an interesting discussion over whether the developer’s ‘vision’ is to be retained over user experience. Before being bought out, Tweetdeck was a much more versatile Twitter application. Now however, while under the Twitter banner and while Twitter restricts other non-Twitter apps from their API (to force users onto non-third party apps), Tweetdeck has been stripped of features that made it stand out among third-party Twitter applications, and Twitter’s own app.

It’s unfortunate that a company must curtail a user experience to fit its own ‘vision’ over what the users would most want out of the product, however a line between a developer’s own artistic integrity and what the user wants must be drawn somewhere.

Developers Enhancing Contributions By Charging Gamers To Play And Give Feedback On An Unfinished Product -- An Analysis of Steam Early Access

With part 2 of “Enhancing Contributions” covered for this week’s lecture, I thought to return to the video game digital delivery platform of Steam. Specifically, the way Steam has integrated a bond between user and developer to guide the development of a game to completion on the “Early Access” model of game release.

Steam’s Early Access system is where a developer will upload an incomplete video game onto the Steam platform to allow users to buy and play, and contribute to development as the video game progresses through alpha and beta phases of development. This could be a positive and interesting concept in theory that benefits both the avid gamer wanting to try the game, and the developer, who may be unsure what the best route is to polish and evolve a game’s features to something people will want to buy.

Unfortunately, Steam Early Access as it is at the moment stands for developers exploiting the hype and excitement of a gamer by asking them to pay full price for a product that can be anywhere from 10% to 95% done. The user can still contribute to the ongoing development of the video game, but as Totalbiscuit points out, in many cases the gamers are simply being used as stress tests for multiplayer servers, and reporting of bugs and other requested features are either addressed slowly or not at all. A subset of this issue is the idea that users won’t get the game they were promised, and as such when paying full price for a game, they are relying more on the developer being trustworthy than knowing they’ll get what they paid for.

Game critic Jim Sterling covers this issue well, and his opinion is that Steam Early Access is far too unregulated and frequently exploited to have a user pay full price for the bare bones of a game. Totalbiscuit’s assessment of this system of user contribution to game development is even more ominous, and states that a game could evade criticism by saying “we’re early access, go easy on us!” and conceivably never come out of the beta phase. At the most cynical level, once a developer has the user’s money, why should they continue working on the game? The transaction has already taken place and the developer already has the fruits of their labour.

The Escapist : Jimquisition : Early Access

Enhancing user contribution by providing an ongoing platform for users to play test a game is a good idea on paper, however to implement this with little supervision from Valve, the overseeing company of the platform, and the ability to charge full price on a game that’s anywhere from barely started to near completion, leaves the margin far too wide for exploitative practice and conning gamers with half-baked games. Having a closed beta that’s free, to try a select portion of the game, would be a far better implementation of a system such as this to enhance contribution to a game’s development.

Fostering a community behind a game in its development phase is an excellent way to build a playerbase and deliver the best game possible to gamers; however developers and users must be careful not to take such a fragile relationship for granted.

Ingress and Field Trip: Powered By User Data

Ingress is a virtual reality game utilizing Google Maps that relies upon user to give location data for the game. Users will upload landmarks to the app and Niantic Labs (the company that owns the app) will approve the landmark to be a portal. Users are in two factions, and these can control the portals, and link them using ‘portal links’. The game is one of the most popular GPS-based games, and the portals can be viewed all across the world.

What makes this game relevant to both enhancing contributions and use of user data is the information required for a portal – the name, photograph and GPS location of a landmark, is mined by Niantic Labs and kept for their other app called Field Trip. Field Trip acts as a tourist-style app for the user, showing landmarks, historical sites, shops and roads, and giving background about them in the form of videos, photos and a few short paragraphs of information. The data required to set up these landmarks is taken from Ingress and adapted by Niantic Labs into a bite-size factoids explaining the area around the users of Field Trip.

Both apps encourage users to explore the space around them and upload their areas, and their integration mean that history tours and tourist explanation of places can be far more in-depth and numerous, as opposed to an ‘official’ tour guide that would cover seven or eight places, these apps have hundreds of spots, curated by the developers but created by the users.

A scarier side to all of this is the wider implications of Google owning Niantic, and overseeing both Ingress and Field Trip. User data is being uploaded all the time to Google servers, and there is legitimate concern that the information pertaining to a user’s whereabouts and their daily routine being used for purposes not outlined the terms of agreement with a user.

Steam rising as collective intelligence opens up the PC platform

Valve is seen by many, both gamers and industry analysts alike, to be the most innovative company currently in the games industry. This is chiefly because they understand the idea of web 2.0 – a community dictated by a shared intelligence. Even the company employees work using a shared intelligence, just read the employee handbook! But a discussion of that is for another blog entry.

Valve's first web 2.0 innovation came with the idea of a digital delivery service. When Valve went public with its video game digital distribution service, Steam, in 2004, digital delivery seemed inconceivable for such large things as video games. According to games journalism site Kotaku, the concept of a product being unlocked digitally andretained digitally was a foreign one to the consumer, and at the time the demand for such a product meant that the traffic going through the distribution service overloaded and people were unable to play the game. Suffice to say, people weren’t happy with Steam to begin. Over time, people have realized the ease at which this distribution works. It was far better than buying from the real life retailer.

Valve understood the idea that breaking down the barriers between customer and developer with this flagship service led to fierce consumer loyalty, a lowering of price, and an infinite number of products being sold. The weirdest part of this is the innovation came as a result of illegal activity on the part of the disillusioned consumer, sick of the high video game prices. In a way, Steam single-handedly saved a dying PC games industry. Publishers were willing to give up on developing for the PC, as it was deemed too easy to illegally download games. Valve saw this phenomenon of people sharing and digitally obtaining copied files that went together to make a game on torrent sites, and decided itself to create a platform that charged consumers to digitally deliver the game straight from the publisher, thus making it legal while retaining the easy delivery online. No longer would PC gamers have to wander down to the local PC store to buy a bulky box to get a game which was twice the price, mostly to cover the costs of making the box, the cost of having it on a console, and to cover the profits of the retailer. The collective intelligence of the internet informed Valve's decision to embark down this road of digital delivery, and they've never looked back.

Suriowecki refers to Collective Intelligence as a developer effectively using user data provided to them from the user to improve their product. This is a guiding principle in how Valve conducts its business and is perhaps best exemplified in how Valve has increasingly outsourced both quality control and prominence of games across the service.

Two case studies -- the flawed Steam Greenlight system, and the recent Steam Tags, show how the user en masse can be a better arbiter for what sells than Valve or publishers themselves. Fundamentally, this is changing the way the games industry conducts its business. The digital revolution is causing publishers and developers to reevaluate their distribution and the products they sell based upon real-time user data.

Valve’s acceptance of indie games became an increasingly lengthy process with the amount of developers submitting their games and the testing as to quality and suitability for sale on Steam. As a way to mitigate the amount of developers submitting and possibly rid this bottleneck, Valve outsourced its sorting of indie games to the user in a system they called Steam Greenlight, asking them to vote on which games they’d like to see on the Steam platform. Additionally, developers could pitch ideas to the ‘Greenlight’ system, and if they were without publisher, Valve insisted that they must undergo the Steam Greenlight. While the submission pool shrunk due to user input, the floodgates flew open as to at what stage a game could be successfully greenlighted. Valve did not put restrictions on developers submitting, so there was everything from joke game ideas almost being greenlighted to developers swiftly shortcutting the system in favour of getting a publisher onside.  Valve eventually put a $100 fee in place to deter all the troll game ideas, but this complicated things further, as some game developers can’t afford to throw $100 away on a game that may not be successfully voted through by the crowd. Acknowledging the limits of collective intelligence, and perhaps that Valve needs to be involved in some way in the choosing, founder Gabe Newell has since said they are looking to abandon the Greenlight system.

A recent innovation in Valve’s crowdsourcing came from the decision to let game float the game's popularity and relevance to keywords with a system called Steam Tags. Users could tag a game with any genre or word, and based upon the number of people tagging a game with the same word or phrase, it would begin to show up under that particular tag. The more people tagging, the more prominent the game would be. For example, Dota 2 is listed as being first under the “Action” tag, and as a result when the user types “Action” into the Steam search Dota 2 will appear first. 

This is an innovative way for the user to decide what should have prominence in a word cloud and how a search should be aggregated. By letting shared intelligence choose how to order games under certain tags, it takes the power away from publishers artificially paying money to promote their game on Steam and putting it in the hands of the gamers themselves to decide which games are worth playing, and what genres and search terms are most fitting. But, as with Steam Greenlight, crowdsourcing this kind of quality control comes with drawbacks. Gone Home, an indie game that launched to critical acclaim for its narrative elements last year has been labelled by the wider internet community as the condescending “Walking Simulator” tag (Gone Home is an exploration game) or the downright offensive “Cis scum” for having a story that touches upon LGBT themes. Call of Duty: Ghosts has “dog” as its most popular tag, despite being an action game that has very few levels with dogs in it, or “9 year old online daycare” as another tag for the game, in an attempt to discredit the online players of this first-person shooter as young and immature. These tags are unhelpful to a user’s search and range from mildly annoying to offensive, and while Valve has implemented a feature within Steam Tags to report offensive tags, this still doesn’t get rid of the large number of misleading or silly tags being applied to group these games together.

Valve is one of the few game publishing platforms that continually innovates, with everything from being the first to use digital delivery as a means of purchasing games to crowdsourcing the grouping of games in Steam’s store. With the kerfuffle surrounding Xbox One’s initially clumsy approach to digital content management and competitor game publisher EA’s Origin (seen by many gamers as a sour knock-off of the Steam platform), I believe Valve will continue to lead the way in the web 2.0 space for many years to come.

While at times the idea of trying to crowdsource crucial elements of the platform may not work in anyone’s favour, more often than not the wisdom of the crowds have it right in terms of placing value on a product. And if the Steam Charts are anything to go by, there are plenty of people who adhere to an open platform for content delivery.