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.
Project 6.0: Sci-Curious
Cultivating scientific curiosity: Digitally-mediated approaches for promoting societal transformation through scientific curiosity and capacity.
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
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”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”Playfulness and truth.
Four recent blogs inspired me:
Starting with how to represent truth, moving to play, and then to belonging. The TL;DR:
The advances of structuring data in mapping unlocks potential for using physical world assets in games. Using physical world assets in emergent approaches to game design is well suited to allowing players to interact with their game worlds in varied ways. Exploring playing with the physical world – morphing and changing it – through games can allow us to learn about the world not through a top-down education, but through a curiosity that does not even have to involve the truth. Through these games we can build a new sense of belonging, that builds a common language across polarised opinions, because it’s just for fun, after all.
Continue reading “Playfulness and truth.”