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I’ve never liked the idea of twitter, but I didn’t know why until I read up on these things.

I’ve often studied the many ways that we communicate with each other, and have an idea of a bit of a spectrum or two on how we do so. Sometimes I chart it out in my head as to how intimate the connections are, with one extreme being two humans melding minds and reading thoughts, and the other being seeing some writing on a wall.

Twitter exemplifies another scenario in my head, which is basically ‘what is the smallest unit of diary-esqeu documentation can you make…’ It’s based around the concept that you’re technically answering the question “what are you doing right now?”

I’ve come to realize at this moment, though, that I don’t like twitter because it’s exactly too technically interruptive in my life. I have big issues with focus, flow, and being ‘in the zone’ in terms of work. I long for a job where I’ll get my own office, where I can focus and concentrate and not be distracted by people walking around or music playing or having to prevent myself from eavesdropping. Basically I have trouble getting in the zone:

Getting in the zone takes time. And that’s why interruption is your enemy. It’s like rem sleep – you don’t just go to rem sleep, you go to sleep first and you make your way to rem. Any interruptions force you to start over. rem is where the real sleep magic happens. The alone time zone is where the real development magic happens.

Another example I stumbled upon when looking into this stuff:

Here’s the simple algebra. Let’s say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we’re really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can’t remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he’s sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds).

So this article sums up my main issue:
Creating Passionate Users: The Asymptotic Twitter Curve

The crux of my point is that knowing that there’s a bunch of tweets going on out there constantly, I’m more inclined to check things constantly. You know what I’m talking about when I say I check my email constantly, I check my friends away messages constantly, I check livejournals and forums and communities and feed readers. There’s enough information out there that you can do nothing but ‘check’ all day long. I’m sure you also know what I mean when I say how passively antsy you get when all of your sources of information are ‘caught up’ and there’s no new information to consume. Twitter is the heroin to this vein.

It’s not all bad, I don’t hate it. I think people are doing cool stuff with twitter like this: twistori

I, of course, went ahead and made a twitter account and will likely play with it. I’m fascinated by the idea, I really truly love the idea, but I can’t suffer any more distractions. I know I won’t use it but, like with most all of my other ’social networking’ things, I will make one so I can at least participate.

Because you asked, here is a brief list of the “Eight Kinds of Fun.”

This particular author has come to the conclusion that there are ‘eight kinds of fun’ when dealing with making games.

The collected game design rants of Marc LeBlanc

Amongst the group’s findings was that Bejeweled had a 54 percent stress-reducing affect on test subjects, while Peggle was found to raise mood levels by 573 percent, something that study director Dr. Carmen Russoniello called “not surprising… given the game’s over-the-top celebration of players’ success each time they complete a level.”

Now that there’s a tangible, yet biased study on this, I’m sure other heavily corporate casual game developers are going to quickly meet up about this and try to “Push the Envelope.” I can imagine the scenario now, where a boardroom full of execs are yelling at each other trying to figure out how to make a game that has 600% mood level increase.

Gamasutra - PopCap-Underwritten Study Shows Casual Games Positively Affecting Mood

The international team of researchers suspects this abnormal behavior is the result of the brain attempting to save effort on a task. When the brain goes too far, errors occur.

Scientists decode brain farts - Behavior- msnbc.com