There was an expression that got floated around Flickr a lot about
building "small tools for self-organization".
Which meant that you designed something with an actual goal or function
in mind but whose functional "fence posts" where only high enough to
channel the behaviour but no so high that they couldn't be easily jumped.
This happened all the time. People build elaborate "games" on top of
tagging and groups. Given any system that is both easy and fun (or
reward enough) they will build a "game" around it because it makes life
a little bit better.
Denis Crowley's history of the badges at 4sq remains one of the best
examples of this. To hear the story the badges started as a funny-haha
thing and it was the users themselves who turned it into a "game".
The problem is that geo has always been a game; if map projections
aren't a game then I no longer know how to make sense of the world.
It's not clear to me whether we're talking about play or just a TO DO
list (tasks) dressed up as a game.
It seems like a tricky road for GIS in the abstract, and OSM
specifically, to go down because both are (mostly) concerned with a
more-accurate-than-not ground truth. That will out of necessity make for
some pretty cerebral games.
Tweaking the OSM tagging system to show the LHC at CERN is awesome
(really) but the project becomes something else entirely if everyone
uses it as a continual partial mood-ring.
Rather than thinking about "gamifying" geo maybe it's more useful just
to think about specific goals with clear reasoning and simple, elegant
interfaces for accomplishing them.
Which sounds a lot like...
Cheers,
On 9/25/12 3:07 AM, Stefan Keller wrote:
Anselm,
I think one should differenciate between "Serious Games" and "Gamified
Applications".
You are describing educational games aka "Serious Games" (and
http://lemonopoly.org is actually cool!) - and I'm more after making
repetitive (but high level) tasks inside a broader application more
fun. In the latter there's a grey zone to pure entertainment, like
"play as you commute" or when you are idle, while in fact you are
contributing to capturing and quality checking of map data.
Yours, S.
2012/9/25 Anselm Hook <[email protected]>:
Echoing Kevin: 'gamification' doesn't really make sense to me; it
doesn't capture the essence of what is going on - it's not an awful
term but it is kind of like a bubble gum theory - it doesn't explain
it just recasts in new language.
The term I like more is 'cartoonification' : taking the complexity of
the world and translating into something that anybody can understand.
People are pretty busy and don't really have time to understand
complex ideas in every domain - games are a way to connect goals to
primal human instincts... and well I dunno.. more fun.
Recently my team launched an app called Dekko - http://dekko.co that
explores the technical requirements around this; we're doing "strong
AR" where we tightly bind augmented information on top of the real
world by building a 3d point cloud in real time that you can overlay
data on. It could be used for those kinds of apps ( as the technology
improves ).
For example some day (as I've mentioned ad nauseum) I really want to
try build a watershed modeler where you can hold up AR glasses and
look around you and see nearby watersheds and cartoonified versions of
some of the wildlife. I was thinking fishes would be easiest. Each
fish would be a proxy stand in for say 10000 fish and it's health and
demeanor would hint at the underlying data. The idea then would be to
try daylight streams, remove dams or tires and garbage, remove
concrete channels etc - and otheriwse heal streams. The fishes would
become your friends and thank you as the river system health
improved... (or die horrible deaths).
Also, personally my friend Chach and I recently did
http://lemonopoly.org which is a slow game - designed to be played out
over a period of a decade or so. It is an urban agriculture focused
experience where the win condition is "to make the Bay Area lemon
independent". There are viruses affecting lemon trees and other
concerns which help connect a fun light game experience to something
that has real meaning.
I usually have 3 critieria for work: 1) It should be fun to do 2) It
should cover its own costs 3) It should have meaning. I like the idea
of connecting games to the real world because the real world is
awesome and I don't really like being inside very much anyway; so
helping other people value the outside too I figure would make more
outside exist.
There's a huge community of experience designers in the bay area who
do stuff like that - JTTEON is an amazing example of this. Has totally
changed how I see city streets. There's also the Come Out and Play
festival going on soon... http://comeoutandplaysf.org/ ... and too
much other stuff to scribble in the margins of this brief note...
a
On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 8:17 PM, Eric Wolf <[email protected]> wrote:
The USGS National Map Corps ( http://nationalmap.gov/TheNationalMapCorps/ )
is hoping to use game-like concepts in the future. There is a stated intent
to engage Scouts, 4H and schools. Because the program only works on a small
set of features, it's easier to guide people towards quality rather than
quantity. The USGS is specifically trying to create program that is
sustainable and ensures completeness. There will be an "editorial" level
called Adopt-a-Quad which is designed to encourage quality review. The great
thing about something like a scout badge is that every year there are new
scouts reaching the level where they want to acquire the badge
(sustainable). By "gamifying" the Adopt-a-Quad, the more remote areas stand
a better change of being mapped (completeness).
-Eric Wolf
(Speaking unofficially)
P.S. The USGS is still working on the Open File Report on Phase 2 of the
program that includes data relating quantity and quality. Watch for those
publications soon.
-=--=---=----=----=---=--=-=--=---=----=---=--=-=-
Eric B. Wolf 720-334-7734
On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 4:49 PM, Stefan Keller <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi,
Recently I stumbled upon Gamification. Seems to be a hype now.
Does anybody have experience with (or ideas about) "Gamification of
GIS" and/or "Gamification of OpenStreetMap"?
Yours, Stefan
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