Securiplay.com

Category Archives: strategy

How a gamer is gaming YouTube to become the top channel

Posted on by Posted in adversarial gamification, gamification of performance, gamification of results, strategy .

Full disclosure, I am not a fan of YouTube as a medium for intellectual growth. My children, on the other hand, find deep meaning in watching game videos that they find humorous, engaging, and that I find to be crude representations of teenage idiocy (you kids get off my lawn!)

But I always find a measure of brilliance in anyone who can figure out how to game a system in order to optimize their results. Enter PewDiePie…

So a young swedish guy plays video games on Youtube, does and says ridiculous things and becomes the number one Youtube Channel… Sounds like a hack, in the classical sense of the term, right?

The Game Theorists YouTube channel did a remarkably astute summary of how to use Youtube’s algorithm’s to create a cycle of new views, explaining PewDiePie’s success. You can watch it here:

http://youtu.be/EgMqhEMhVV8

Interesting way to drive engagement. Too bad I can’t go back and video marathon gaming sessions from the late eighties and early nineties to capture crude juvenile humor and make YouTube video stars out of my own group of geeks…

Game Theory explanation of Spite as a fair play motivator.

Posted on by Posted in adversarial gamification, game theory, strategy .

Very interesting article at NY Times about spite as both a motivator of human behavior, and as a means of promoting fair play. My favorite part is this:

game participants would reject a partner’s stingy offer indignantly, an apparent act of spite that left both empty-handed — at least for the moment.

“It’s probably not spiteful when you’re looking at the long term,” Dr. Marlowe said. “If you get the reputation as someone not to mess with and nobody messes with you going forward, then it was well worth the cost.”

This is particularly interesting when you feel like you are likely being cheated. If you feel that the other person is likely to cheat, do you feel obliged to increase the stakes in order to improve your own position, or to deny the other person satisfaction? Very interesting dilemma.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/science/spite-is-good-spite-works.html?_r=0

Turing’s frequency analysis used to analyze neural activity

Posted on by Posted in adversarial gamification, game theory, gamification of awareness / knowledge, strategy, Uncategorized .

Ok, so this is wicked cool.
http://nautil.us/issue/6/secret-codes/safecracking-the-brain

Using Turing’s frequency analysis tests, researchers at UPenn are figuring out how to decrypt brain signals. Imagine the usefulness if they were to put cryptanalysts in to an fMRI to monitor their brain activity… Seems you could crack the process that people use to make logical-intuitive leaps?

Jessica Hagy’s Interpretation of Sun Tzu the Art of War.

Posted on by Posted in game theory, strategy .

Jessica Hagy draws some awesome Venn diagrams, and really cool thought provoking visualizations at Forbes.

She is publishing the Art of War with her cool charts!  Here is an excerpt

The consummate leader cultivates the moral law, and strictly adheres to method and discipline; thus it is in his power to control success.

There are 4 parts up so far, I hope she will publish this as a coffee table book, because its a brilliant adaptation!

Well Done Jessica!  Well done indeed!