Mr Fante's Games of Judgement could tell us a lot about how we're perceived on Facebook
The psychological theory of "thin-slicing" suggests we are adept at forming accurate impressions of new situations, and more importantly, people, within two seconds of being presented with them. There may soon be a lot of data to prove it, thanks to a fascinating new Facebook game.
Launching on Monday after a successful beta run, Mr Fante's Games of Judgement is essentially a much deeper and more refined answer to the early web craze "hot or not", in which internet users could rate images of strangers for physical attractiveness.
Styled as a sort of Victorian sideshow, Mr Fante allows players to try out a series of mini-games in which they have to make snap judgements about other users of the social networking site. These games will get participants to decide whether someone is straight or gay, single or taken, or how old they are. Other quizzes involve whether they have tattoos, dye their hair or work out regularly.
To take part as a subject, users simply have to provide access to their Facebook profile; the game then uses data from inputs such as age, sex and relationship status. Volunteers are given accesss to a range of graphical "O-Meters" that show how they are being rated in the game in terms of age and attractiveness. These animated meters can be posted to your Facebook wall and shared with friends.
Mr Fante is the work of Sheffield-based developer Rattle, which specialises in using data to create products and services for companies like the BBC and Umbro. Director James Boardwell says the studio has been inspired by our very modern relationship with social networking tools, but has also drawn concepts from earlier research.
"The idea stems from the work of American teacher Jane Elliott who, in the 1960s, found that she could judge the life chances of pupils just by looking at them. In an exercise she ran with her class, she found that eye colour could be used to create positive or negative ideas about racial characteristics and from this showed that prejudice was critical to life chances."
Boardwell also mentions Malcom Gladwell's book Blink as an influence. "It's the idea that people make judgements about others within milliseconds and these judgements tend to be more accurate the more experience you have of the experiences that that person has had. So people who were initiated into the Bullingdon fraternity at Oxford, could probably distinguish other Bullingdon members more easily than people who were not part of that group. And so on. This led us to the fundamentals of the game, using profile data as a means to ask questions about people, to see how well you can read people and, conversely, how well you present yourself as you intend to!"
As all Facebook obsessives and fans of the movie The Social Network will realise, this whole concept harks back to the origins of the site, which started out as a method of comparing the attractiveness of students at Harvard University. Mark Zuckerberg originally called his invention FaceMash, and hacked into the university's website to get the images.
The fact that the game tells subjects how others perceive them is likely to be the key attraction. "When we researched the idea, that's what people wanted to know," confirms Boardwell. "They wanted to find out how their Facebook profile presented them to the world."
Of course, there's a narcissistic element to this, but it might also have practical benefits. With more and more employers allegedly combing social networks for information on job applicants, it might prove extremely valuable to get an idea of the kneejerk reactions your Facebook presence instigates.
At the heart of it though, there is a worthwhile experiment about the accuracy of those all-important first impressions ? even though the findings may not be popular.
"Early on we found that judging other people feels morally questionable. People judge others' all the time, often unconsciously, but when asked to do it some felt uncomfortable. From the sample of testers we had, Social Workers particularly, because of their training, thought it was wrong to make presumptions. However, the same Social Workers found the game compelling."
Apparently, Rattle is looking into ways of extending the game element in future iterations of the title, and providing a sense of progression to the experience. For now, willing volunteers should simply brace themselves for the instant judgements of the social networking community. It might not be pretty.
? Mr Fante's Games of Judgement launches on Monday
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2011/jun/17/games-facebook
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