Curious Game idea

This is bringing together the metaverse data-interoperability idea, with the group level ethic of care – the AquaCurious stuff. Very early thoughts.

past, very rough thoughts:
https://indiebio.co.za/meta-communities/ and
https://indiebio.co.za/building-a-community/

There’s a transmedia aspect to the game. It’s meant to cultivate curiousity about the physical world, and build community, so the links with the physical world and its people need to extend beyond the digital. I’m thinking there’s room for a print-your-own zine in there, co-created by community (see things like APAs), the intended audience being geography-independent – travelers and people who’ve run out of local friends. Also the virtual race idea with the (physical) medals.

So, basically, the “game” has three components.

A physical place – for AquaCurious I use pocket park, but think of parkrun, basically. So the audience is geography-independent, but rooted in physical places, that connect through a common recipe, ritual, holding structure, whatever you want to call it.
A virtual component and community. The metaverse. Think, online games, virtual worlds, Second Life, Minecraft, whatever. For me, OMI is the shorthand for this – the open metaverse interoperability group: the people, the things they’re interested in, the things they’re building. (Sortof related, what is the OpenStreetMap equivalent of ecosystems?)
A monthly community-created print-your-own zine that connects the two together, with challenges and things.

Importantly, you can participate in any of these things without being forced to do the other things. There’s some people who come to parkrun each week, but don’t have the barcode, don’t do the stuff, they just chill with their friends and then leave. It’s fine.

The mechanic: I guess sortof like Wordle meets r/place meets Pokemon Go meets virtual races meet parkrun?

The prompts that make you play the game. This is split into a walk phase and a reveal phase. On the walk, the device (phone in your pocket running quietly in the background, or an actual SI-style dibber if you want to lean into the orienteering hardware) just logs steps and a GPS breadcrumb (Mark Weiser’s “calm technology” concept, apparently). So this is the Pokemon Go getting out there and collecting stuff deal, without holding the phone out in front of you. I also think it shouldn’t be bound to location, it’s just about counting the steps, like the virtual races. Maybe for timed events or special “raids” yes, it is geo-bound.

Then, once you get home, you log in to the virtual game website thingie. It shows you your stats, some pop up prompts, wordle style puzzles, and r/place type things you can contribute to, earned with your steps, and linked to some physical place, either a pocket park or trivia or whatever, I dunno.

Pocket parks as the holding structures, This is the gyms like for Pokemon Go, connected to a physical pocket park. But I also want to encourage virtual participation, so your home gym doesn’t have to be where you are physically. I don’t know, I just feel the virtual component can really relax this geolocated requirement. Maybe checking in can be virtually or by physically going to the place or something.

Timed, social events. This is the “raids” of many games and the parkrun weekly thing. a scheduled, casual, bounded event at a held site, same time, same place, weekly or monthly. Maybe show up and do a light scavenger-hunt-style thing together, done in under an hour. Maybe local knowledge can add bonus points through easter eggs – a couple of clues that are easier if a regular’s standing next to you, not a forced conversation.

XP/leveling. I don’t want to let the “simple gamification” go altogether, it does do a job. parkrun’s model is really nice, less focus on winning (although for the top runners this is a thing, sure) but milestone counts, sites visited, personal bests, tourist stats, and whatever people come up with themselves – parkrun alphabet… And I want the collectables. I want to play a breeding game with the virtual collectables. I want Pocket Park Ponies ala Pocket Frogs.

Streaks. Gone, no Duolingo owl stress here!

The zine idea (working title: Curious Capybara)

The prompt-card mechanic becomes the zine’s connective tissue. Each issue includes, for example, a small set of cut-out prompt cards or collectables, each tied to a real spot somewhere in the world, with, I dunno, dilemmas or puzzles or info to find. People fill them out over the month and either log the answer on the wiki or drop the physical card at a collection point. The completed cards aren’t right or wrong, they’re logged as data points in a shared, printed map or canvas or some installation. (For AquaSavvy in particular, this could be a prompt tied to the Living Lab areas (Oroe and Bursa), things like “where does the rain off this corner end up,” “who last touched this drain,” or values-dilemma prompts. Each month’s activities become entries into the next month’s zine, showing which patches of local water knowledge are thick and which are thin.)

The orienteering/geocaching feature is a nice-to-have activity page that guides people to find things in physical life, maybe like GeoGuessr. The map tells you where to walk; the walking is how next month’s answers get generated. I dunno.

Some sort of “member spotlight” idea. It could be a person, an activity, a specific drain, a specific tree…

And then things that have no relation to any serious stuff. A friendship books/round-robin notebooks / serialized fiction idea, sharing recipes, knitting or crochet ideas, whatever a community likes to have included.

The zine itself has a digital layer (separate to the virtual world, metaverse things), can be as light as a wiki page or even a shared spreadsheet for coordination.

The “virtual tourism” angle.

Islands are economically dependent on tourism, but they are also really vulnerable to the impacts of tourism. I think the digital – really, the metaverse – can bridge this. It can bring awareness to an island without adding to its environmental impacts. However, they also need the economic activity tourism currently brings, however imperfect that trade-off is. A purely virtual layer that gives someone the feeling of having engaged with, say, the Azores,— without any money, labour, or long-term relationship flowing back to the place — risks solving the environmental half of the problem while quietly making the economic half worse.

Giving virtual participants a real way to convert attention into something material could work here. My thoughts are sponsoring or “holding” a role remotely, connected to a pocket park. E.g. paying to keep the pocket park’s tree watered while a local person does the literal watering, corresponding with each other through the zine, buying physical editions (here I’m thinking 3D maps inspired by Lichtbild (and really I want these as jewelry, but hey, whatever), or virtual medals (see e.g. medalmad) even if they never visit, or the virtual tour explicitly functioning as a slow on-ramp toward an eventual low-impact visit rather than a substitute for one.

The “metaverse layer” would give remote participants an actual place to stand, a portable, non-proprietary virtual rendering of the park map, that someone in another country can walk through, see what’s known and unknown, and read the local stories attached to specific spots, without it being locked to one platform’s walled garden. That’s consistent with the “resilient, open-source, fun and well-designed before it’s needed” ethos.

Sources for virtual sports literature (via Claude and these I haven’t actually checked yet):

Then, there is the data-interoperability and data contribution thing, which currently feels like it sits separate and alien. I talk about this more in the pocket parks post, but it links to this article:
Jiang, Y., Wai Michael Siu, K., Yang, J., Zhang, K., Liu, S., & Zhang, H. (2026). From data silos to data agency: The role of local sports communities as data agents in urban governance. Urban Studies, 0(0).

thinking with Claude:

Idea 1: “Waterline”

Wordle meets r/place, for a neighbourhood’s water knowledge. Everyone plays solo, once a day. Everyone’s answers land on the same shared map. Over weeks, the map fills in — showing not what’s correct, but where the group’s understanding is thick or thin. The core loop:

Each day, a player gets one question about their own patch of the pocket park or catchment — “where does the rain on this corner actually end up?”, “who last touched this drain?”, “what would you trade to keep this tree watered in a dry month?” Some are factual, some are values dilemmas with no right answer. (I think this is boring, I’d rather match a pic or collect a pokemon or do a geogache or something.)
Feedback isn’t right/wrong. It’s directional — like Worldle’s distance-and-direction, but pointed at the coalition’s existing answers rather than a hidden correct one: “closer to what your neighbours said,” “further from what the last session decided,” “nobody’s answered near this yet.”
The answer drops onto a shared, visible map or board — not a leaderboard, a living surface everyone can look at. Dense, agreeing clusters show where the coalition already holds shared understanding. Sparse or scattered spots show where curiosity hasn’t reached yet.
Those thin spots are the game’s real output: they become the prompt for the next in-person session — the empty patches of the map are literally where the coalition decides to go look, talk, or dig next.

The solo daily act (Wordle’s ritual) stays individual — nobody’s put on the spot in a group. But the payoff isn’t a personal streak, it’s a shared, growing map (r/place’s collective canvas) that only means something because everyone’s contributing to the same surface. Wrongness isn’t failure, it’s information about where the group’s care hasn’t reached yet — which is the “relational not individualistic” move Velvet Spors argues for, mechanically: the game’s feedback loop is pointed at the coalition’s state, not at the player’s personal score.

Inspiration:

Idea 2: “Waypatch.”

Riffing of Pokemon Go (this tanked and I was impressed by Claude’s comments). I asked Claude to imagine that Niantic came to me and said, great work, we want to really revolutionise the Pokemon Go concept by following AquaCurious principles.. How would you do it?

Claude said, they won’t (lol): The entire current monetization stack – incense, lures, premium currency, individual collection completionism – runs on compensatory, individualist psychology. Waypatch’s relational model is much harder to sell a $5 boost for, because the thing being built isn’t your collection, it’s the coalition’s map. The pitch to Niantic isn’t “same monetization, nicer values” — it’s a genuine business-model swap toward municipal or place-partnership funding (cities, water utilities, parks departments paying to seed and sustain local holding structures), closer to how AquaCurious’s own policy recommendation already points — pre-institutionalizing civic participation infrastructure rather than selling engagement to advertisers.

This isn’t a reskin, it’s asking Niantic to trade a proven individual-collector economy for an unproven coalition-infrastructure one.

Of course, being AI it went with the idea anyway: The interesting part is exactly where AquaCurious principles would fight Pokémon GO’s actual business model

The core swap: Pokémon GO is a compensatory game (basically, reward for tasks done, “simple” gamification) wearing a social costume. You catch, you level, you gym-battle for individual rank; “teams” are colour identity with almost no coordinating labour attached. Under AquaCurious principles, the whole engine flips from individual collection to coalition legibility — the map should show where the neighbourhood’s care is thick or thin, not where your Pokédex is empty. What changes, mechanic by mechanic:

Pokéstops → place-based curiosity prompts. Instead of spinning a stop for random items, you get a Waterline-style question tied to that exact real spot — factual or dilemma, no right answer, feedback measured against what your neighbours already answered, not a hidden correct value. (Actually I still want the collectables. BUT I don’t want to walk around pointing my phone around. I want a thing in my pocket, that I don’t look at, that collects my steps and the geolocation or whatever, maybe pings if I do need to look at my phone or something, and then I get home, and I can focus on the game on my computer or phone or whatever. So I can be present in the moment while I walk. I think this is more like the virtual race model.)
Gyms → holding structures. Not territory to conquer and hold alone. A gym is a real local site (a park, a drain, a community garden) with recurring roles that need filling on a rotation — watering, monitoring, reporting — visible to everyone when a role goes unheld, the way an empty raid slot is visible now. Winning isn’t beating the other team; it’s the site staying held. (This is I think where the pocket park physical location comes in).
Raids → curiosity-driven narrative exchanges. Instead of a timed group fight against a boss for loot, a “raid” is a bounded window where several players with different local knowledge have to actually talk to solve something — closer to deep canvassing than to DPS-checking. The “adventuring party” framing already does a lot of the flavour work here for free. (I don’t want group therapy. Maybe this can be a geocaching event or something. Something that can be like a parkrun, it’s a timed event, you have to show up and do something, but don’t make it work).
XP/leveling → the shared canvas. Your personal rank disappears. What accumulates instead is the neighbourhood’s own map — which patches are well-understood, which are thin — same move as Waterline. Individual play still happens solo and daily; the payoff is collective and visible. (Hmmm. XP or leveling is very effective though, I won’t completely can it. The parkrun model is nice. The top runners maybe compete with each other, but for the rest of us it’s more about personal bests, how many runs I’ve completed, how many different runs I’ve been to)
Streaks → “reason not disclosed.” No guilt-tripping for missed days. Absence isn’t a broken chain, it’s just unlogged — which quietly kills the loss-aversion mechanic that currently drives a lot of Niantic’s daily-open behaviour. (Yes please. No Duolingo owl stress for me!)

The zine idea (working title: Curious Capybara)

The “virtual tourism” angle.

Idea 1: “Waterline”

Idea 2: “Waypatch.”

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