Littlecosm Games Twitter Sentiment
Littlecosm is a massively multiplayer Twitter client that is due out in January 2011. Being designed by Tokyo-based Yongfook, it promises to be an interesting mashup of real-time status updates, sentiment analysis, and dynamic gaming elements.
According to Yongfook's blog post:
Emotion plays a huge part in Littlecosm. Littlecosm analyzes your tweets and figures out if you're in a good or bad mood. If your tweets are mostly "bad", your character will turn out "bad" (you can see some "bad" characters in the screens above) - and vice versa.
Along with being a game powered by emotions, I wanted Littlecosm to be emotive.... I turned to nostalgia. Littlecosm is a game about collecting memories... Every memory you collect in Littlecosm has nostalgic value. I think about how much fun I have talking to my friends about retro games, 80s music, tv shows from bygone eras, hypercolor tshirts... and the strange sense of discovery I feel when we talk about these things that we have already experienced. That is the exact feeling I want to get from players of Littlecosm.
What Littlecosm looks to do is turn everyday behavioral data points into game mechanics. Yongfook is programming very deep human elements into this thing. Stamen's work for the VMA's and area/code's Sharkrunners are similar examples; both take dynamic real world data (people tweeting and sharks swimming) to game reality. Maybe it really is time to "program or be programmed".
Watch a quick demo of Littlecosm here:
