I don’t remember how I first came across it, but I found this cool looking upcoming indie game: World of Goo Yeah, looks kind of interesting doesn’t it. I’ll be sure to let you know how it turns out, as I’ll be keeping my eye on it in the future, but that’s not the point of this post.
One of the two developers of the game made this very simple website as an experiment out of curiosity which he explains on his development blog for World of Goo. It’s very basic: You visit the site, humanbraincloud.com, and you are presented with a word or phrase. You simply type the first thing you think of into the box and hit enter. If you don’t like what it gives you, just hit enter without typing anything to skip the word and move on. You could spend hours doing just this, but that’s just half of the game. All that time you were contributing words to a relationship database that remembers what words and phrases people associate with others. If you respond with something the system hasn’t heard of before and it seems like a legit response then it will be added to the dictionary and others will be presented with it to see how it associates with things in their brains. This is actually how the whole word database has been built. It all started with one word: volcano.
The fun part is that he has written a fairly well polished flash interface for viewing this database. When you click to view the cloud it starts out by picking a random entry and showing you all the things that people relate with it and with its closest relation as little wobbly black blobs connected by lines of varying width and opacity depending on how strong the relation is. Over time these relations disappear but a new random one will soon appear. The fun begins when you strart clicking on different nodes, at which point it will display all the entries that have been related to that one. It’s interesting to see where your train of thought can lead you in a more visual way, not to mention just to see where some people’s minds go when presented with a word or phrase.
If you don’t get it, maybe his explanation here will help, or maybe you should spend five minutes playing around with it. You’ll figure it out quickly.
I am unbelievably happy that one of the words associated with “protagonist” is “Hiro.” (On a related note, if you haven’t read Snow Crash, you’re missing out.)