Category: Uncategorized

Or, Education as an emergent game, where metagaming is core to play. I’m presenting this at the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education: Insights conference, happening online in SecondLife March 19-21, 2026. This is adapted from a piece submitted to the Virtual Education Journal which in turn led from a presentation at the Open Simulator Community Conference.

I’ve been feeling lost in my work, like I’m drowning in (bureaucratic and very stressful admin) details, and forgetting what it is I’m doing in the bigger picture. Cue sleeping a lot and watching Netflix. I then stumbled on the documentary “Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere“. It wasn’t very good. Theroux spends most of his screentime in mute shock, and I guess they thought that keeping this in the final edit means the audience will fill in the blanks. While the doccie does well at showing to some extent why men would choose to go down this road, it doesn’t clearly show the flaws in their thinking or what to do to change this situation. And the deeper problem is that the audiences will fill those gaps with all sorts of weird things, because most, if not all, the reasoning from these men start in a legitimate place, and we have to acknowledge that.

Fortunately for me and my limbo, the “more like this” button suggested “Beyond Men and Masculinity” which is also available free to watch on Youtube. As I watched I remembered what I’m doing in the bigger picture. I remembered my post – Building an ecofeminist metaverse. And then I heard Carol’s voice before I saw her and it was like seeing an old friend!

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 Through a rabbithole I stumbled across Nick Yee’s site, and because that seemed a bit out of date I went to his company site, and THERE I found what I was looking for: Gamer Motivation Model (Quandry) His three clusters of gameplay motivations relate to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.

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.

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.

I was doing a web search for hits that contain both pluralism and feminism and found this article by Esther Turnhout, which is adapted from her inaugural lecture as Chair of Science, Technology and Society (STS) at University of Twente: A better knowledge is possible: Transforming environmental science for justice and pluralism. Articles are written in such terrible ways, so I read the lecture instead. It explains a lot of the concerns I have, and I mostly enjoyed reading it. Here’s some bits I highlighted, and then some thoughts about how this relates to my work going forward.