Friendster Pachinko (2004)
Sound by Yoshi Sodeoka
Java

Pachinko is a form of quasi-legal gambling in Japan. A player purchases metal balls and feeds them into a machine similar in appearance to a vertical pinball machine. These balls bounce around the playing field, most disappearing into a trough at the bottom. Some, however, fall into special holes, rewarding the player with additional balls. A player can cash out his balls by taking them to a cashier and trading them for small prizes.

Friendster Pachinko is a critique of online social networks that gives one the opportunity to gamble with "friends" instead of shiny metal balls. The pervasiveness of networks such as Friendster has encouraged the competitive accumulation of friends. People whose profiles have more friends are perceived as being more desirable, and as a result, many social networkers scramble to accumulate as many so-called friends as possible to boost their public image. The idea of gambling with profiles grew out of witnessing this social behavior.

At the beginning of a game of Friendster Pachinko a Friendster is chosen (a good choice being one with a large number of friends) and his or her friends are loaded into a "friend pool." The space bar is used to launch an individual from this friend pool into the playing field: the person bounces around the array of pegs in the middle of the screen before splashing into the water at the bottom. Along the way, the individual may bounce off the back of a rubber duck or be blown by a fan across the screen. If a person finds his or her way into the special cave at the bottom of the screen, the individual’s friends are then loaded and added to the friend pool (similar to the way additional balls are awarded in regular pachinko). The Friendster image of this person, and his or her name and number of friends also appears to the right of the play field. The game is over when the friend pool is empty.

As Friendster does not allow easy access to profile and friend information, special spidering software was written. Over the course of 6 months roughly 3 million Friendster profiles were spidered and added to a database. It is this data that drives Friendster Pachinko.

• Exhibited
• 2005, Web Biennial, Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum