Incorporating game culture into community driven knowledge networks.
I’m applying to another post-doc position, this summary shook out from that.
Continue reading “MetaCulture = Metagaming + Integrated knowledge infrastructures”Sci-Curious – final
A month ago I submitted this project to the MCSA-PF fellowship call. It is a very competitive call, the chance of success is about 9.6%! I really enjoyed the process of unpacking my idea to the core essence so I consider it a win anyway. (but man I want the fellowship so bad!)
Cultivating scientific curiosity: Digitally-mediated approaches for enhancing engagement and behavioral transformation.
The overall aim of Sci-Curious is to develop a method that cultivates scientific curiosity in
participants, leading to better engagement in and between contributor groups who deal with politically charged scientific questions. This will be achieved through developing a digitally mediated deep canvassing method that incorporates scientific challenges through digital knowledge infrastructures. This method balances a feminist ethic of care with critical accountability. By bridging scientific rigor with transformative societal engagement, this project promises to unlock new pathways for addressing intractable scientific challenges and affecting societal transformation.
MetaPlay: Biosphere reserves, glass cliffs and the project in a sentence
The sentence, drumroll, is:
Any approaches that embrace a feminist ethic of care need to balance that with scientific rigour and accountability.
(OK, it doesn’t talk about how to project addresses that, and what the aim and objectives are. So not really the project in a sentence. But it’s the crux of it.)
Continue reading “MetaPlay: Biosphere reserves, glass cliffs and the project in a sentence”What we play is life, version v5.2 – methodology development, causing yet another total rewrite
The previous post – version 5.1 was a mess and I found it really hard to work through all that stuff. Part of my frustration is the feeling that I am doing this to get academic research funds, but I don’t really care about this aspect of the academic rigour, and that doesn’t do wonders for the motivation. That changed this week. I’m really starting to see the value in it, for designing an actual game, for example, and I’m having fun! My brain hurts, but hey.
I’m currently looking at building something like a participation curiosity scale or something like that, inspired by Kahan’s article. I’m a bit embarrassed to say I’ve been quoting Tim Harford left and right since 2017, but only actually read the article that he quotes this week, spurred on by Ricardo’s mention of causal approaches and me having a panic about how one measures ‘replacing judgement with curiosity’.
Scientifically literate people, remember, were more likely to be polarised in their answers to politically charged scientific questions. But scientifically curious people were not.
Curiosity brought people together in a way that mere facts did not.
Continue reading “What we play is life, version v5.2 – methodology development, causing yet another total rewrite”
What we play is life. Project v5.1 – focus on measuring behaviour change, or: focus on the “play”, and less on the “what”.
After thinking through the fifth iteration and asking for help about being stuck in the weeds, Ricardo reminded me that what we’re trying to do is influence behaviour, more than contributing to understanding it (because I was also inspired by Chan’s article about a cohesive theory of value). I was really stuck with my methodology, and he suggested I look into causal approaches. Things that measure actual behaviour, not just what people say they would do, or like, or believe in.
Continue reading “What we play is life. Project v5.1 – focus on measuring behaviour change, or: focus on the “play”, and less on the “what”.”What we play is life
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”Notes from Henry Jenkins book: Convergence Culture
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”Talk: The potential for emergent games to foster curiosity
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
AquaSavvy (regenerated)
A group of us recently applied for EU funding for a DUT project, to, basically, bring water into the metaverse. Here’s the TL;DR of what the project is trying to do, should we be successful. Update: we made it through to the final round. We will know if we were successful in July 2025. I’ve updated the abstract to reflect the improvements we did in round 2.
Continue reading “AquaSavvy (regenerated)”Project 3.0
Some days the writing comes down on you like you need to take an urgent loo break. Today is one of those days.
I’m about to email my potential posts-doc supervisor explaining why I went silent for a long time. Two pivots, that’s why.
Continue reading “Project 3.0”