Interfaces, Spaces Between
Note: This is part of the active AquaSavvy project. We’re prototyping ideas for rending the data into the visualisation tool.
The conversation started with “How can we visualise our emotions and responses to water?”
Continue reading “AquaSavvy tool ideas: Emotion map”The Open Simulator Community Conference is my first virtual conference!
OSCC2025 schedule: https://conference.opensimulator.org/schedule/
my talk: https://conference.opensimulator.org/events/metaculture-metagaming-integrated-knowledge-infrastructures/
Watch it on Youtube : www.youtube.com/AvaconOrg/
Join the conversation:
The conference Discord is at AvaCon
The conversation in OMI Discord (long term): Inclusive Communities Research
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”
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”.”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”
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”ThisIsColossal shared this beautiful game by Oskar StÃ¥lberg which immediately reminded me of my urban metabolism game (I mention it here).
Continue reading “Beautiful minimalist city builder games”Outlining the steps to work towards an Eden Project in the Western Cape.
Continue reading “EdenHope Project”* just toying with words, indie equus, indiebio + equus … this post is about horsey games.
I’m doing this serious game thing, but I also have to confess my love of match 3, especially PlayRix‘s games. And merge games (Merge Dragons!) and 2048 games that are pretty, like NLabSoft’s Age of 2048. And clicker games, like Abyssrium Tap Tap Fish. I particularly like the low poly designs. I also love horses, and have played many of the horsey games but they get a bit annoying. I would like a horsey game that’s like an aquarium game, or a kitten game. You don’t expect fishes or kittens to do stuff, you can just watch and enjoy them. So I want to make my own horsey games, starting with a reimagining of PlayRix’s Wildscapes game, with horses.
This post is supposed to track my progress, and throw it out to the interwebs in case people can help. Things I think I need to master to get there:
The recent drought in Cape Town taught me that as experts, we are terrible at making complex things understandable to the public. We are terrible at giving good advice; simple, quick actions to take in a crisis, that we feel also helps with the big picture.
Worst of all we don’t contribute to the conversation that builds the trust that we need to draw from in times of crisis.
In an effort to find a way to do exactly that, I am trying to combine the joy of gaming, the beauty of information visualisation and the rigour of urban metabolism studies. Continue reading “Events: The metaverse, gaming and the metabolism of cities”