UPDATE 6/11: See the results of the pool, and my take on the Sopranos finale, here.

In anticipation of The Sopranos series finale this Sunday, everyone I know is making predictions about who lives, who dies, and all other kinds of plots and events. To help make the speculation even more interesting, I’ve put together this handy-dandy grid of characters and plot developments to help you keep track of how good your predictions are.

Download the Sopranos Finale Pool (33k PDF, two pages including grid and rules)

If you’d like to make all this predicting a little more interesting, I’ve also included some suggested rules that you can use if you want to turn this into a good old fashioned high-stakes office pool.

Suggested Rules

1. Choose any number of combinations of characters (along the left side) and fates (along the top), then initial each of your predictions in the corresponding cell.
2. Each prediction (each cell) will cost you ____ of play money.
3. Hand in your game sheet and play money by ____ to the game administrator, ____.
4. Winning cells will be identified by the game administrator during the final episode of the Sopranos on June 10, 2007 (ex: If Uncle Junior commits suicide, C-17 will be a winner. If Dr. Melfi has a hallucination, P-9 will be a winner). The game administrator makes the final decision regarding any plot ambiguity or dispute.
5. There will almost certainly be multiple winners, in which case the pot is divided proportionally among the winning players according to each player’s number of correct predictions. (ex: If one player makes six correct predictions, a second makes three, and a third makes one, then the pot is divided 60/30/10% among the three winners.) The game administrator is responsible for all mathematical calculations!

FAQ

Q: Where’s [missing character]?
A: Not every character is included. Whaddaya gonna do? Game administrators may, however, add additional names in the blank spaces provided along the right side of the grid (optionally, admins may also permit players to add their own characters).

Q: What about [your personal plot prediction]?
A: As above, the game administrator may add several additional plot events in the blank spaces provided along the top of the grid (and, as above, admins may extend this privilege to the players if they wish).

Q: But [character] is already dead!
A: In order to both (a) avoid spoilers for those players who may have missed a few episodes, and (b) permit flashbacks, dreams, and other alternate-reality developments to occur, a small selection of deceased characters have been scattered throughout the grid. (Predicting that a character will die who is already dead does not count as a correct prediction, smart-alec!)

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It’s been a little less than a week since my IA Summit presentation. To my great surprise, it went really well. I mean really well. In the next day or so I will be posting a summary of my experiences preparing and discussing my topic, which was, in a word, style.

Many people came to me after my presentation asking me not only to post the slides themselves, but also to post the reading list since I did discuss a lot of books and sites that deeply influenced my thinking. So here’s all the stuff:

Slideshow

• Slideshow as PDF (19mb PDF)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 1 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 2 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 3 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 4 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 5 of 5)

Reading List

These readings are in roughly the same pedagogical sequence that the concepts appeared in my presentation. Note that not all of these were actually cited in the talk, but I did have all of them either at hand or in mind as I wrote.

MORE…

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Six Apart, maker of MoveableType and TypePad, has apparently been recalibrating their product development away from targeting professional web developers like me and towards the massive “teen/tween” market. TypePad was the first step in this direction, but now they’ve been working on a new social networking app called Vox which is obviously designed to enter the MySpace arena.

Khoi has been test driving Vox over at Subtraction, where Jeff Croft expressed a very interesting concern about the crowded social networking marketplace:

Does MySpace’s early lead mean it’s the final winner?

I fear so. One of the interesting things about social software from a business perspective is the “accidental lock-in” that occurs with it (perhaps it’s not actually an accident anymore, but it certainly was at one time). What I mean is this: I’m locked into AIM, even though I don’t believe AIM tried to lock me in. They’re not keeping me from getting my data out, they’re not penalizing me for switching — they’re not holding me back at all. The reason I’m locked in is that all of my friends are on AIM. I could switch to Google Talk or Yahoo Messenger, but then I’d have no one to talk to. Same thing goes for Flickr. Is a better photo sharing site came along, I’d still have to stick with Flickr, because that’s where all my friend’s photos are. Social software becomes exponentially more valuable if you’re friends are on it, which makes switching away from what you’re on very hard.

While I have in the past shared Jeff’s concerns about “lock-in” (I have, for example, been reluctant to invest much time tagging my bookmarks in del.icio.us), I’m not sure I agree that this lock-in effect is really a problem at all. I don’t think it’s a problem for most consumers who want to try new social networks, and I don’t think it’s a problem for entrepreneurs who want to get into the social networking business. MORE…

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Yesterday I took my FIT students on a field trip to see the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibition at the Science, Industry and Business Library of The New York Public Library. It’s a modest little show consisting of several dozen examples of maps, globes, and information graphics — as exemplified by Edward Tufte’s much-beloved “Napoleon’s March to Moscow” by Charles Minard (seen here), which illustrates the utter devastation of Napoleon’s army as he attacked and retreated from Moscow in the deadly winter of 1812.

I was a little surprised at the close attention my students paid to much of the work, examining and discussing some of them pretty intensely. I knew they’d be interested, but I didn’t expect them to really investigate and talk about the works in detail as they did.

But I think I understand why: The maps on display have a puzzle-like quality to them, which is I think part of the aesthetic and experiential appeal of information graphics. People like to try to figure them out. MORE…

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Everyone bunches up near the top to escape the enraged atomic volcanoes!

[continuing the theme of my previous post, here’s some more multiple-exposure stuff…]

Check out “Averaging Gradius“, a great project by “Mr. R. LeFeuvre” at The New Gamer. This amazing video uses multiple-exposures to compare the game playing tactics of ten people playing “Gradius”, a classic 80’s sidescrolling arcade game.

The resulting movie is a fun and fascinating comparison of the gameplay strategies of ten different gamers, showing what they do in common and what they do differently when playing a game that, true to 80’s game design conventions, ran the same way every time and which essentially had an underlying pattern throughout the game. LeVeuvre’s article has more insights into the results, too, and is a fun read.

And make sure to put on your headphones for watching “Averaging Gradius”: the audio track has as much information as the video, and is equally beautiful.

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Hezbollah has published a video game called “Special Force“, in which the player’s job is to, well, kill Israeli Jews. Many are surprised to see politics injected into the fantasy world of video games.

To me this isn’t surprising nor is it new. Any game which simulates real-world events is inherently political. A typical example of this is “Sim City“, where your city’s success is dependent on certain sociopolitical assumptions that are, in the real world, still subject to a lot of debate. Even “The Sims” has political issues inherent in the behavior of its citizenry, which only promise to get more controversial as the Expansion packs expand their simulated social horizons.

War simulations are no less political. The more representational (of real-world nations and events) the simulation is, the more political it is.
The “Special Force” game seems especially political because the protagonist (and the game designers) are “the bad guys”… but games made by “the good guys” are political, too. There are countless games where the goal is to defeat The Soviet Union, the Nazis, etc.

There’s a *huge* number of games where the goal is to defeat Hezbollah-like groups, as the “Special Force” creators are quick to note. Are these games not also political?

To muddy the “good guy/bad guy” waters a little bit, there was a popular game a few years ago in which you played a Russian soldier and the enemies were Chechen terrorists. Or Chechen freedom fighters.

In the art/game area, John Klima’s “Serbian Skylight” and “The Great Game” use video game motifs to explore the politics of war.

I used to be a nationally-ranked online Quake player, but when it comes to playing war simulation games in which I am fighting my way through a poor village on our own planet Earth, fighting other human beings, using real-world weapons (as opposed to plasma rifles), the politics of the simulation usually becomes too much for me.

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