This is a talk I gave for the Distributed Immersive Participation group, Stockholm University on 28 March 2025. I was happy to have a reason to update my talk, as the ones I gave on this topic in 2019 and 2022 were terribly out of date by now.
Slides: https://indiebio.co.za/curiosity_metaverse_adapted_24mar2025.html
pdf (27MB)
recording: on youtube
Abstract:
The potential for emergent games to foster curiosity
My project explores the potential of emergent games to foster curiosity-driven learning and facilitate new knowledge alliances in interdisciplinary fields. By combining emergent game design, open process practices, and a feminist ethic of care, my collaborators and I aim to create a platform that promotes curiosity and accountability while exploring politically charged scientific questions.
In one such collaboration, the Industry of Integrations (IOI) project (Nevelsteen 2021) will be applied to scientific databases, known collectively as Open Data Infrastructures (ODIs). We intend to use these ODIs at high levels, and integrate them with Collaborative Data Platforms at more local levels (for example through Citizen Scientists) to create a citizen-driven ecosystem. In this system people can build integrations, bridging scientific ODIs between different disciplines, and integrate with their own citizen contributed data – the scientific equivalent of user generated content (UGC). In addition, we hope to bridge scientific ODIs and game platforms, to allow the incorporation of physical world elements into casual games. In this way, by bridging science and creativity, we can dissolve the boundaries between laypeople and experts, and build new knowledge alliances. And also build super cool games.
TL;DR
Transformation of expertise: Facilitate new knowledge alliances, through:
- Planning for Playfulness
- Open Culture
- Visual Power
- Curiosity
and technically:
- Open data provision
- Structured data
- Data format: The platform
- IOI integrations
- Data representation: The tool
- (Tooling for) The game(s)
Structure of talk
- Background – who am I and why am I doing this
- What am I trying to do: Facilitate new knowledge alliances
- How am I trying to do this: My project
- Social aspect
- Technical aspect
- Current work
- Next steps
Bernelle: indiebio
I started my career as a biologist, and bioprocess engineer in research, looking at value from wastewater in sanitation. Through my time here and working with the Future Water Institute, at the University of Cape Town in South Africa I was involved in urban water infrastructure work too.
My interests are in open source software, open culture and volunteering, water, toilets, and I am currently a little bit obsessed about the metaverse.
Now I am looking for a home to do this project through a Post-Doc.
Running out of water
My story starts here. During my time as a researcher, we experienced a very bad drought in the Western Cape, South Africa.
This graph shows the stored water levels that is intended for the people in Cape Town, a city of 4.5 million people. The Western Cape is a winter rainfall region, so the blue line goes down as we use the water in summer, and then it should go up in winter as the rain fills the dams back up again. This is in the Southern Hemisphere so summer is at the end of the year, hence the dates including two years, e.g. 2013/14.
So these dips, where the dams were at their lowest, dipped lower and lower. By 2016 we had minor restrictions, like, don’t water your garden, but then it just kept getting worse. By 2018, at the worst stage of restrictions, people were restricted to 50L of water per person per day, for everything. Shower, cooking, drinking, everything. This was extremely stressful.
It was particularly bitter to walk past rich people’s houses who had green lawns. They sunk boreholes and carried on as if nothing has changed, they didn’t care. It was an incredibly visual picture of how the wealthy steals from our common wealth – in this case our groundwater that was effectively stored underground.
While this was going on, there were also political controversies, of course, and some people even said the drought was not real?! I really don’t understand this.
And then, towards end March 2018, it was announced that Day Zero, a theoretical point where the dams are at 13.5% storage capacity and water can no longer be abstracted, was two weeks away (announced end March 2018 as on 12 April 2018), and a city of 4.5 million people was at risk to run out of water. Then we were supposed to queue for water and I don’t know if anyone ever thoughts through the logistics of that, but that was where we were.
So during this incredibly stressful time, two things happened to me. Every moment of every day was about water, I became so conscious of every drop of water. That has stayed with me. I would like people to be that conscious of water, of the world around us, but of course without all of that stress. Because being that in touch with what sustains us, could be, should be, a really beautiful experience.
The second thing was that I lost the last bit of trust in authority, and expertise I managed to hold on to. Because I saw the researchers and the experts and the politicians, I sat in those rooms and saw how little control we had, how little we knew what to tell people who were desperate. This was not working.
WTF?!
And this is getting worse! How people are dealing with climate change, how we dealt with the COVID pandemic, how we are dealing with democracy right now. It’s a mess!
“Crisis” of expertise
So I started reading about this more and it is depressing. This crisis of expertise is commonly interpreted in two ways, that either
- People are stupid, that we’re turning into an idiocracy. Expertise is dead because no one believes it in anymore, or,
- Expertise is changing.
The first way to interpret this is that the people who are now believed are basically, influencers. It about how loud or entertaining they are, not about what they know or if what they say is true. They can say whatever they want because there is no accountability. This I call a crisis of authority instead. And maybe this has always been what politics is, but now anyone can do that, with the help of the internet.
One good resource is this book by Gil Eyal. And he says,
the experts are playing politics
– Gil Eyal
Running out of expertise
Then I read this article by a colleague:
Expertise discovers its limits when the predictables are no longer predictable.
Expertise that is based on “command and control”, is based on the idea that expertise has no limits.
Lesley Green, Environmental Humanities South
So we can see that in this unpredictable world that we are in right now, top down expertise on its own, simply does not work anymore. Lesley was talking about the “end of expertise”. But she was talking about it in a way that suggested she knew of a better way. She spoke of an ethic of care, and I was intrigued. So I kept looking. I slowly learned that another way to interpret this crisis is that the type of expertise that is in crisis is the top-down, command and control type of expertise, and it’s a good thing this is in crisis. Expertise needs to change to take into account a rapidly changing, uncertain world. It needs to be more caring, more relational. So how do we help this happen?
Transformation of expertise
Then I found an article by Lisa Stampnitzky. She agreed with Eyal that expertise is a social construct, that it is made of relationships. Rather than being in crisis, she said that expertise is transforming. Those relationships, connections, or as she calls them, knowledge alliances are changing.
This challenges the idiocracy idea. People are not stupid. People are searching for new ways to find expertise. People are building new networks, new relationships, new knowledge alliances. For better, and for worse.
Building connection across boundaries
And when we experts think we know best, we break those relationships. Then it becomes about “us” and “them” and calling each other stupid.
By assuming we know best, we break relationships.
Stuart Waters (paraphrased), The Source Magazine:
Letting go of the need to know
By the way, the full quote reads
“By imagining that we and our peers have the necessary expertise to solve problems we limit the experience, wisdom and insights that we draw on in finding solutions, thus hampering innovation.”
“By assuming we know best, we break the all-important connections and relationships that integrated, systemic planning is built on.”
Facilitating new knowledge alliances
So that settled it. I want to help create these alliances. How can I do this? And, also very important, how do we maintain accountability? How do we as scientists, as experts, adapt and share our knowledge, not as “the expert” but as one node in this network, having as much to learn and share as any other person?
I think you will agree with me that this transformation is very closely linked with the digital transformation. As Anthony Giddens says
“politics look different with a supercomputer in your pocket”
I think we need both technical and social approach to this, and they need to be tied very closely together. This, I roughly call “applied STS” where STS is the academic field of Science and Technology Studies.
How: Social aspects
From a social science lens, and this is an ever evolving perspective, I want to consider four aspects:
- Planning for Playfulness
- Open Culture
- Visual Power
- Curiosity
1. Planning for Playfulness
I’m not quite sure what to call this, if it is game design for science, or play, but for me it’s about considering what we can learn from how people design games to better approach how to create connection.
Why? Because play creates possibilities. I am inspired by Katriina Heljakka, who also did work on play as resistance. When we play we can imagine, we don’t have to be constrained by what is possible, or compromise on realistic things.
I am interested in emergent game design, and here I have some things that is really important to me. I feel strongly that we need to consider ALL the player types, not just the “well-behaved” ones. I take issue with so-called serious games because often these are constrained in what you can do. You can’t wreck stuff if you wanted to, and where’s the fun in that?
Secondly, it’s about designing systems, and letting the users generate content. Sandbox platforms like Minecraft and Second Life work like this.
Then, while I was over here having an existential crisis and feeling so isolated, not being at home in research, and people doubt what we as experts do and ridicule us and doubt science altogether, I saw the game communities and that sense of belonging that people have in entirely fictional places, and I was jealous. I want that! What can we learn from these?
So in summary, how can play help facilitate knowledge alliances beyond “gamification”?
2. Open culture
I’ve spent maybe the last ten years or so volunteering, and being involved in open-source software communities, and I think there’s a lot to be learnt from these open cultures. They go by different names, whether you consider volunteering, or maker communities, or hacking, or DIY, these are communities of choice. Instead of forced communities, where you belong because of where you were born, or what religion your parents are, or what company you work for, these are communities that are formed because of common interests.
These cultures are ideal in principle, and one can easily imagine them as the true way to do democracy, but they can also be really problematic in practice. So while I want to learn more about these, and contribute to their research, I do not want to uncritically accept this as the way to go.
3. Visual power
I think experts have not quite harnessed the power of the visual yet. Back in the day, we had tables like this. It’s better than words, but nothing really pops out at you. Yes, some numbers look bigger than others, but chances are when you read a report, you just skim over the table. This table comes from my thesis, showing the volumes and pollutant concentration in each.
All I did was converted the table to a bar graph, and this made a huge difference. We knew we had a lot of treated municipal wastewater, this is the dirty water from your toilets and showers, that sort of thing,and this is where it exists the treatment works, so after it has been “cleaned”, and we knew that this water was still dirty, but the prevailing knowledge was that as the pollution is so dilute, it’s not really a problem. But seeing it in this bar graph made a big impact – and this was important to my work.
But if you are not an expert, or you are not interested in water, this graph still does nothing. Yes, you may see a blob of colour on the left and that means something big, but nothing hooks you, nothing tells you why you should care.
So next we have an infographic, and this can start building a relationship with the viewer. Here for example we have houses next to a river that is polluted by mine waste. One can imagine if you were in these houses, how you would feel if the river changed colour or started stinking. (Side note, as a scientist I find these images close to useless; I want the numbers and things. I would like to be able to combine this human-centric image with the data overlays or interactive ways to access the data).
There’s even animated infographics. This is the main dam from that drought period, and it shows how it ran dry. It is a very visceral visual reminder of what was going on.
But all of these things are still information being delivered at people. It is about some people deciding what information gets displayed, and how, and we are expected to accept it as is, to believe it without question.
What would it look like if the information could have a conversation? Information in the age of the internet is no longer a static thing. How can we use information, together, to enable collaboration? To build relationship? (one feedback suggested to look into, immersive analytics)
4. Curiosity
Lastly, and most importantly, curiosity.
The drought coincided with Trump’s first election, and so there was a lot being written about why there were such stark political differences, and why people could not bridge the divides. Why there was so much polarisation, so much us and them, so much “othering”. I was fascinated with why people would choose him? Why would people believe things that were, to me, so obviously wrong? It opened my eyes that we in our ivory towers don’t really get the ground zero challenges people face. Sure, Trump doesn’t care, but I got the sense that nobody else in power really does either, so why not go with the wild card? People have lost trust in the experts, in government, in everything. In science we talk about citizen science and citizen engagement and being for the people and the touchy-feely stuff but really, I feel it’s not true. We engage with people to tick a box, yes we “engaged”, not to really talk with people. People are on their own, and they’re angry, and scared and looking for alternatives.
An article by Tim Harford struck a nerve. The bottom line was that curiosity brought people together in a way that mere facts did not.
But the full quote is more interesting.
Scientifically literate people, remember, were more likely to be polarised in their answers to politically charged scientific questions. But scientifically curious people were not.
Tim Harford
Curiosity brought people together in a way that mere facts did not.
It said that educated people, people with conviction, were not successful in convincing others. I don’t know about you, but polarised people have never convinced me about anything. It’s more likely that I would avoid them, alienating me, ending the conversation.
But we can also appreciate that being curious is hard, and maintaining an open curious mind is really difficult especially when we talk of important things, as any family gatherings over christmas holidays can attest.
Cultivating Curiosity
So the thing is then to cultivate curiosity. Here I am inspired by Carol Gilligan, and her ethic of care. She talks about ways of listening, with a key take-away to suspend taboo;
replacing judgement with curiosity. This to me indicates play.
How can we build tools, and games to encourage this?
Next is the technical aspect. How can we use technology to bring this playful, open, visual power to life, to cultivate curiosity? I see it as these 5 things, and again, this is evolving as I learn more.
- Open data provision
- Structured data
- Data format: The platform
- IOI integrations
- Data representation: The tool
- (Tooling for) The game(s)
Importantly, none of these are “the Metaverse”, but it illustrates how my collaborators and I see the Metaverse working, and why we are so excited about it.
What is the Metaverse?
If we are going to talk about the Metaverse then I guess we need to talk about what it is. But, I am not going to fall into that trap and get involved in an argument about what is the correct official definition of the Metaverse. I am going to dodge that and say, simply, Whatever you want it to be.
To me, it is an emergent, playful, open place, built from layers of data (and metadata). The first time I learnt about the Metaverse was through this image of the Magicverse, and I really liked the different layers of data connecting the different aspects of our lives.
That is my vision. I invite you to add your vision at the fun self-interview on Discord in our OMIgroup – the Open Metaverse Interoperability group.
1. Open data provision
One aspect of this project is to visualise and represent data in a way that is useful to everyday people. But the type of data that is likely to be useful to everyday people may be at a local resolution that often does not exist. The street someone’s house is on, or even the whole neighbourhood, is often unavailable. In other words, we do not have the data at local enough resolution to facilitate bottom-up decision making.
In the same way that community mapping took off in OpenStreetMap, and how community knowledge contribution worked in Wikipedia, I want to facilitate open data contributions in a similar way. There are some differences, notably about privacy, so I want to distinguish between two groups of data repositories.
Firstly, there are ODIs, open data infrastructures, like Copernicus, EMODnet in Europe, and globally the already mentioned OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia etc.
Then there is a second group, CDPs, meaning community data platforms. These are private, bounded, local. The communities can decide what data to contribute to the global platform.
Then I was wondering, are open data contributions like user generated content in games? What would that mean in terms of “game design for science” or “game design for curiosity”?
Structured data
This data needs to be in a usable format. Often, even the data we do have, is in silos, sometimes unstructured, often in isolated databases. Databases are not a good way to have this data, they keep data prisoner.
Structured data, on the other hand, makes AI, collaboration, interoperability, the Metaverse possible. Perhaps a bit counter-intuitive, structured data, lets the data flow. And we need to let the data flow! To be used and represented in different ways, suited to different audiences and use cases.
I don’t know too much about this, but it has to do with Resource Description Framework (RDF).
The platform
So this data needs to live somewhere, and integrated with other ODIs. This is where the platform comes in, which allows verified data contribution through CDPs. The platform is
concerned about the data format, and the interoperability of that data. It needs to allow integrations with other platforms to allow representation of diverse data sources.
Maybe this platform should be called “OpenResourceMap”?
“OpenWaterMap”?
IOI: Industry Of Integrations, using IPSME
Then it’s time to talk about what makes this possible. Learning about this integration method, using IPSME. This method was
designed to transform gaming
by establishing a player-driven ecosystem, where anyone with API knowledge can
build and monetize integrations,
bridging diverse platforms
dissolving sandbox boundaries.
IOI for science
When I learnt about this and started working with Kim, I wondered, could this be used to integrate scientific databases? So, in a similar vein IOI has the potential to be
designed to transform expertise
by establishing a citizen-driven ecosystem, where anyone with API knowledge can
build and monetize integrations,
bridging diverse scientific silo’s
dissolving expertise boundaries.
(I keep the “where anyone with API knowledge can build and monetize integrations” in there because I think it is important to acknowledge that this may still have commercial potential, and that’s a good thing. Like A-rated casual games incorporating physical world assets.)
The tool
Distinguished from the platform as a “back-end” that manages the data, is the visualisation tool “front-end”. This is where the data gets represented, and visualised in a way that makes sense and is useful to everyday people. Now I don’t know what this looks like, because it depends on the needs of the users. Having said that, the tool is using the data in the platform so it can be used in many different ways – even in games.
(Tooling for) The game(s)
Speaking of games, I would love to see this platform be developed to provide tooling to bring physical world elements into games. My dream is to have something like Godus, which is where this screenshot is from, but with the physical world. That would be amazing! That’s what I want.
A transformed society?
So if I think about translating between different scientific silo’s and then this was designed for games … Could we have something that is
designed to transform society
by establishing citizen player-driven ecosystems, where anyone with API knowledge can
build and monetize integrations,
bridging diverse expert, scientist, political, geographic silo’s
… AND game platforms
dissolving all sorts of boundaries!
Can you imagine what magic could emerge then?
So that’s the talk. Two more slides, about what I am busy with, and next steps. Right now I am leading a proposal to develop the first prototype for this platform and tool.
DUT AquaSavvy visual canvas tool
This project is explicitly focused on water, with the challenge being that modern water systems are mostly invisible, and the data describing these systems are complex and constantly changing.
So in this project we will create a visual, interactive, web-based platform and tool to highlight and explore these challenges. It is a people-centric “digital twin” through a water-focused lens, and I use the word “digital twin” but we don’t yet know what it would look like, because it depends on the people we work with. We have two case studies: Orø, Denmark, and Bursa, Türkiye, but the project will also encourage wider use of the tool as well as a competition – so there is collaboration potential!
This slide just shows how I see the bits and pieces of this project fit together. It’s also, constantly evolving, of course.
Get in touch!
So, what’s next? I need an academic home, and funding, to do this project as a Post-Doc. Then, I would like to build a consortium and apply for funding for one more project that is more explicitly focused on the tool itself and apply it in a more creative sense. If you are interested, have feedback or input or critique, please let me know. I am indiebio on all the socials – Discord etc.
Thank you!