Interfaces, Spaces Between
This is the fifth iteration of my project idea. Wow. Previous version: The potential for emergent games to foster curiosity
The quote “What we play is life” is attributed to Louis Armstrong, and suggests that the way we approach and engage with activities, whether they are games, hobbies, or even daily tasks, reflects our attitude towards life itself.
Continue reading “What we play is life”This came from a Friday evening casual chat in the OMI group discord, where we were wondering about how to retain members amidst different personalities, while attracting, and more importantly, retaining new members. We spoke about herding cats, and that you don’t herd cats, you throw some tuna where you want them to go – the tuna being the shared vision that people want to be part of.
But this wasn’t the full story, and fuelled by my most recent project iteration (blog forthcoming but this note pad has rough thoughts) and a bit of beer, I thought, it’s not just about tuna. So I shared my cat situation along with how I think this translates to community management. Writing it up sober, I still think it works well. Also adding cat-specific details for posterity.
Continue reading “Community engagement using cats as metaphor”
I started reading Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006) up to where the free sample ends, around page 78. Right before I chose to buy the ebook, I found a more recent book, Participatory Culture: Interviews (2019) as well as his blog, https://henryjenkins.org/. Ooh, and then also the book Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change (2020). So, distracted. But great notes here and the thoughts they triggered.
Continue reading “Notes from Henry Jenkins book: Convergence Culture”
I was looking for an updated game player categorisation. Everyone still talks about the Bartle player types (achievers, socializers, killers explorers), but they don’t cover what I think needs to be covered. Through a rabbithole I stumbled across Nick Yee’s site, and because that seemed a bit out of date I went to his company site, and THERE I found what I was looking for: Gamer Motivation Model (Quandry) His three clusters of gameplay motivations relate to achievement, social interaction, and immersion.
After that I had to read his book too: The Proteus Paradox. It was published in 2017, and a lot has happened since then, but it really inspired me. Some notes here. It’s a lot, so I will make another post with the more relevant stuff.
Continue reading “The Proteus Paradox – notes from Nick Yee book”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
This is a complement to another post focusing on the ethic of care as it relates to my next project. In that post, I try hard to remove any man vs woman, masculine/feminine, patriarchy mentions because it triggers things I do not wish to shine a light on in that context.
But the whole point of the book is about those splits. In my project I am trying to apply it in a different way, but some things deserve to be mentioned. So, another post then.
page 17: where patriarchy is in force and enforced, the human voice is a voice of resistance.
Continue reading “notes from in a Human Voice for the patriarchy stuff”Carol Gilligan wrote an article in 2014 “Moral Injury and the Ethic of Care: Reframing the Conversation about Differences” and it has stayed with me. An ethic of care is a core tenet to my next project, and I would hope the next stage of my academic career. So I was more than pleased to see this book published in 2023, updating her thoughts.
Continue reading “notes from In a Human Voice – Carol Gilligan”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.
Continue reading “The potential for emergent games to foster curiosity”
I enjoyed reading this book; a lot of nuances I didn’t quite get before is explained – like the ongoing grumbles between the “Free” and “Open” camps, what KDE and Gnome is, why there’s a Wayland and why despite it being better I have to keep going back to X11 instead. I also read this book to try and gaze into the crystal ball to see if we could perhaps learn from the mistakes of the earlier FOSS developments as we build the Metaverse. I add some questions regarding that after some of the highlights below.
Continue reading “Notes from the book For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution by Christopher Tozzi”Graham took out his earrings when he went in for some dental work, lost some of them, and we were wondering if the holes were still open. So I unpacked my earrings to lend him some, those not lost over the passage of time and many moves, and fell down a rabbithole in memory lane.
