Letter Griefing

"Someone keeps stealing my letters..." is fascinating to watch.   It's somewhat like an open wiki, but with a constrainted set of symbols.  You've got persistence, scarcity, a lack of any clear goal, a lot of anonymity, and the possibility for user creativity.  Like art, but socially negotiated on the fly.  Sound familiar? 

As you watch the letters, you can clearly see things that seem like griefing and acting out (lots of profanity, lots of letter-stealing) as well as emergent organized behaviors (conga lines, letter-sorting, patterns).  Does anybody have URLs listing other shared sandbox spaces?  Any pointers to research papers directly relevant to this kind of stuff? 

Thanks to Jay Bibby for pointing to this. The link follows, but since it's limited to 75 players at a time, you might wait awhile before checking it out.  <link>

Comments

[Zonk]

1.

Talk about emergent organized behavior...I just participated in the forming of a viscious gang of "K"s. Very cool Greg, thanks for the link.

[F. Randall Farmer]

2.

Ah! Emergent signalling. Gotta love it.

Try this: As fast as you can, move all of one color to a corner. Within 60 seconds people will start sorting the letters by colors into piles.

I'd do more, but it gets boring about 60 seconds later.

[Chris]

3.

It's sort of fun turning people's curse words into phrases with cryptic meanings. Yuck Foo Man :p

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

4.

It was funny how the female U's were harrassed by the male Y's and T's...

[Edward Castronova]

5.

O the humanity

[Kelly]

6.

Hah F. Randall Farmer - I didn't get piles of colored letters, I ended up with a war between two corners. Bottom left won I think.

[Mike Darga]

7.

i was on with a group of anarchists. any attempt at patterns or structures were immediately broken up. usually i guess maybe 5 or so people would help try to pile letters, sort them, or put them in order. the other 70 immediately ripped them apart =)

people seemed interested in making movement patterns though, which was interesting to see. we made some cool ponglike bouncing letters, and made a cloud of electronlike O's that followed around another letter wherever it went.

and yes, y and t sexual assaults have been happening each time i go log on. i've seen a couple aggressive u's turning the tables or cooperating too though heh.

[Michael Chui]

8.

Bah, the y and t sexual assaults are nothing. You should see 5 "I"s chasing an O around...

[Alicia]

9.

This is very odd...:/

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

10.

Alicia, it isn't all that odd. The system makes it very hard to communicate and therefore users use symbols that are easy to understand and that might evoke some kind of response from other users.