« Frantic energy vs calm energy ∞ Ten Years of My Life, softly relaunching »

Noticin.gs

While browsing the new Flickr App Garden I came across this cool game that I think I’ll start playing, called Noticin.gs.  It’s my favorite kind of game, the kind you play slowly, during your day, that attempts to improve the quality of your day while capturing something novel and interesting about it. Along the lines of 8:36pm and Plus 1.

The rules: They seem to be evolving still, but here are the basics. During your day, you take pictures of things that you notice (interesting things, things you might otherwise not notice about your environment, and they can’t be people), upload them to Flickr, and tag them with “noticings”. Once a day, at 3pm GMT (or 8am PST), they bring in all the pictures from Flickr and you will get points for each photo.  What’s interesting is that the scoring algorithm seems to change depending on the kind of thing you noticed, where you noticed it, etc.  For example:

  • +10 for noticing something.
  • +5 for noticing something near someone else’s noticing.
  • +10 for being the first person to notice something in a certain neighborhood.
  • +50 for noticing something during 12pm and 2pm every day for a week.
  • +70 for noticing something every day for a week.
  • x2 for noticing something that has been lost (until Nov 8th, when this rule will change)

Of course, I know that I have a particular fondness for this because of the point system.  And while I REALLY LOVE that there is some editorial process to this (someone has to be there to approve when something is lost, obviously), I worry about how this will scale.  What if the creators stop wanting to do this every day?  Will the game stop?

They also get points for referencing my favorite self-referencing game of all time, Nomic, in their post about rules.  Nomic is a game where each turn involves the players changing the rules of the game.  It’s one of the most mind-bending and interesting games ever invented.

There currently isn’t anyone playing in Seattle, but I hope to change that sometime today.

This entry was posted by Buster on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 7:43 pm. It is filed under Responses, Self-tracking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Noticin.gs”

  1. I love social games like this. Take something people already do (taking photos of original things), create a community out of it, and award points to those who actively participate in the community.

    Reminds me of Gowalla, but with photos and Flickr. Someone should do this but with public napping.

  2. Yeah, my favorite kind of game too. A social game for public napping… that’s awesome.

Leave a Reply