Quite addictive

Gracious! This blog was almost not to be, due to my newfound, maniacal obsession with ESPGame! Okay, maybe "obsession" is a bit of an exaggeration, but nonetheless, I'll be returning to site before retiring this evening. Since a link for ESPGame was listed in this week's content, and described in Lambeck's article Trouble in Paradise, I'll refrain from going into too much detail about the little group classification exercise, but this seems to be a relatively novel approach to social indexing (as far as I'm aware, anyway). Unlike sites like Wikipedia or Flickr.com where conflicts often arise due to disagreements over an article's content or what tags are the most appropriate for a particular item or image, ESPGame maintains total anonymity between its players and leaves no means for the members of this "community" to exchange information. However, this probably doesn't mean that those taking part in this tagging project are immune to moments of contention. Personally, there were numerous times throughout the game where I was cursing my anonymous teammate on the other end for not coming up with an "obvious" descriptor, and I'm sure these feelings were reciprocated.

I wish the folks behind this game were a little less reticent about how the overall process works. For instance, what constitutes an official tag assigned to an object? Does this take place anytime two individuals simply agree on a term, or must the same terminology be agreed upon by a number of participating couples? Well, now it's time to see if I can redeem myself and shed this preposterous "novice" status.