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Read more at the link below:

What Matters More, Digital or Citizen?

The following chart might help show what I mean. The X-axis demonstrates the relative size of reward for completing a task, while the Y-axis shows the relative difficulty in completing a task. This breaks all game tasks into definable categories: Goal, Supplemental, Instructional, and Immersive.

Four Key Tasks in Gaming

• Goal Tasks offer the key conscious reasons we play a game. They offer a challenging difficulty and they a high reward, thus they tend to draw attention to themselves. Goal tasks might be to defeat the boss at the end of the level in a platform game, to gain a new level for your character in an RPG, to complete an important story arc in a narrative game, or to win in a competitive game. Such tasks are not exclusive to the genres, but represent something a player tends to strive for with awareness and purpose.
• Supplemental tasks tend to exist as design fillers and in well-designed games should be quite rare. These Tasks offer low rewards for reasonably difficult challenges. A common issue in character levelling is the mostly empty level used to space out power progression for a character. This is an excellent example of a supplemental task.
• Instructional Tasks help teach the player about the game. A classic example is Link finding his wooden sword in the opening of the original Legend of Zelda or a parent tossing a slow underhand pitch for a child’s first at bat.
• Immersive Tasks keep the player involved in the game. These tasks make up the core mechanics of almost all games, setting the pace with a steady diet of easy challenges and minor rewards. Hitting a target, initiating dialogue, gaining a yard, and stomping a Kuppa Troopa all represent Immersive tasks.

Now, how well a challenge works or how fun a game is can’t likely be determined too easily from this setup. It doesn’t in and of itself speak to balance, playability, or fun; however, it can trace focus points of games and it can try to uncover what a game is trying to teach you. There’s a good chance that anything falling into the Instructional Task quadrant is considered vital to the mission of the game. There’s an equal likelihood that anything in the supplemental category is either poor design or a countering measure for game balance (plenty of designers might consider these the same thing). My hope is to have some volunteers plot challenges from a few games on the chart to see how well these descriptions hold up to live testing.

 I strongly suspect a player enjoys games with a denser flow between Goal and Immesrive than Instructional and Supplemental flow because of the equity of balance. Yet, I mixing in the other two in dashes does create excitement in the unexpected.

More to come, but I welcome your thoughts and initial critiques.

Since I started my Fulbright application, I’ve needed shorthand to explain what I planned to do in the UK and why I needed to do it in the UK. The simple answer always came out as I want to build wikis for local communities to record oral traditions. Because wikis are hot media, this explanation almost always focused the discussion around either wikis or citizen journalism. I admit that I take the bait because it’s easy; however, I wanted to take the time to get away from my comfort zone and explain 5 reasons why I don’t really work with wikis.

In fact, if I had to do my Fulbright application over again, I’d title it: Why This Project Isn’t Really About Wikis

Do you have a solution or are you simply throwing technology at a problem?

Yesterday my supervisor suggested that humanities has developed an oversimplified approach to technology.  He believes many in politics see people + technology = solution. As if crowd-sourcing alone could wash away all the many power issues of the body public, government, and the public sphere in one fell swoop, if we but could find the right bit of technology to do it. Of course, plenty of other people believe in the equally simplistic people + technology = problem.

Both are critiques I see as valid and vital for those who experiment in technological solutions. It’s quite important that we possess an understanding of how to solve a problem and address it by the best means and to the best ends we can. Digital technology may be the solution, but so might organizations, normative goals, and a common commitment–or, much to the chagrin of many American’s, government involvement.

Oral traditions are about local relationships

The wiki is a tool that means I don’t have to go to thousands of houses and record individual stories, but the wiki isn’t the project. The project is an experiment in capturing community stories on a scale not previously possible, and to test the quality of tradition captured. While I’m using a wiki to create a place for people to express traditions and relationships, it’s the expression of those relationships that matter, not the space I’m using. Plus, there’s the matter of testing.

Frankly, I have no clue as to how much collaboration will occur on stories, how much wider meaning the stories will hold, or how many participants will finally join the project. Part of research is embracing the inevitability of failures to help explain why something works.

Sometimes I feel like I should study anthropology more than communication

Tomorrow I will spend seven hours on a train to and from Bristol. Once there I’ll participate in by far the most rewarding aspect of my research: the community training sessions. The Knowle West community wiki thus far operates primarily once every two weeks. While I track the occasional entry between my bi-weekly visits, thus far over 90% of entries have occurred during my training sessions. This isn’t a success for social media, but the fact that stories are being recorded does mean it’s a success for the project, at least for now.

Physical presence means something to locals, and it isn’t surprising that getting involved matters when you’re asking people to record their personal stories and ideas. Whether this pays dividends in the continued success of the project after I’m gone remains to be seen.

I don’t see eye-to-eye with Wikipedia

I should do a whole other post on this, but not at the moment. I use MediaWiki for my wiki software and I have immense respect for the Wikimedia Foundation and the broad capabilities of Wikipedia. That said, Wikipedia has a loud disconnect between its grand goals and its design. Notability regulations make the website a fantastic source of broad knowledge, but less reliable fount of localized history and tradition. It is also a highly factual space, with little sense of place or community for the objects of its subject matter. It may be the best encyclopedia to date, but its remains an encyclopedia, not a true Aleph–or a space where all textual and literary meaning meld into a single space. It lacks narrative (save for the talkback sections which are often more intriguing than the articles), and that is a severe limitation when it comes to oral traditions and many forms of knowledge preservation and meaning-making.

I also have issue with Wikipedia’s divided stance on collaboration. I believe that preservation of certain details means closing control of a knowledge base not to individuals but certain groups with shared relationships: such as the shared relationship of those living in the same community or even a community of diasporic individuals whose tradition forms a lasting relationship beyond the immediately local. Where Wikipedia has locked editing to celebrity articles to prevent defacing, I’m far more concerned about whether this entry truly represents the history and tradition of Boyd, TX. If you go to the talkback section you’ll see the entry has a low-priority for WikiProject Texas. Knowle West suffers a similar fate on Wikipedia.

I do this because I love writing, history, and community

Community isn’t a social media buzz word for me. I suspect a group of people can care about an aspect of their community strongly enough that if they work hard at telling that story, no one can do it better. This project is about giving the community a chance to define those relationships and provide a space that affords them the ease of collaboration and storage over time to tell their story. Maybe a wiki can give those affordances. Maybe something else can do it better. I’ll keep experimenting until I find a means to allow people to produce the narratives they want to produce, and produce them from the relationships they care about.

(Because of my recent move to the UK, much of my contact with friends back in the States is thanks to Facebook.)

But then there’s everyone else on your friends list.

Have you heard of Dunbar’s number? Anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggests that there is a number of friends that the average human being can have, wherein the individual knows every single one of them reasonably well and, here’s the clincher, knows how every friend relates to every other friend. Robin Dunbar suggests that this number is approximately 150, which means I’ve exceeded the number by 173. Some people I know have exceeded that number by over 1000.

You can read all of Kenneth’s thoughts at his blog. I’m curious, as Facebook moves away from the network philosophy that originally themed the site, if Dunbar’s number may truly triumph over six degrees of separation as theory.

Then I stopped and asked myself that all important question, “Michael, what are you about to miss?” It’s a question I’ve indulged more and more over the last few years, and a vital question to anyone studying abroad. So, I stopped and asked the camera man what was going on. My reward came in the discovery that Prime Minister Gordon Brown was having lunch and should be out any minute.

Well, any minuted turned into an hour and a half later, but it also turned into some decent pictures (on my iPhone since this of course happened without my trusty Olympus). The crowd grew from three to a little over 60, and Brown shook hands right in front of me. I’m not too committed to stating political opinions regarding my host country in this post, but seeing any world leader interacting with citizens so close up makes me glad that I’ve started asking what I might miss–and then deciding not to miss it.

Feel free to look over the whole set of pictures.

Back on March 28th, I ran an awful half-marathon at 2.5 hours. The run happened in Liverpool, and despite the poor showing, I took some fun pictures. I didn’t run for charity and it was the worst time I’ve had. I’m now convinced that the only way to race is to run with a purpose. No more selfish runs that only mean something to me. I need to care about something more than time, and these kids need someone who cares: they need lots of people who care, actually.

No better way to find purpose and help the community than running for Dreams Come True.  Here’s a bit about Dreams:

Dreams Come True is a national charity serving the whole of the UK with the mission of bringing joy to children who are terminally or seriously ill by making their treasured dreams come true. Since the charity was incorporated in 1988 we have fulfilled the dreams of more than 4,500 children with severe and life threatening illnesses such as cancer, cystic fibrosis, cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy.

So on May 17th, I’m doing a ten-mile run for the kids. I want to raise £450.00 by then, and hope you can help.

I was inspired by a class I took at Texas State taught by Dr. Judy Oskam. Her seminar on visual literacy introduced me to the PhotoVoice social action project. I considered attempting one in Austin when I worked with parolees and survivors of domestic violence; however, problems with anonymity and protection concerns always kept the project from becoming a reality.

The PhotoVoice project uses the process of teaching photography to allow groups to gain marketable skills, be able to speak publicly about their lives, and to work towards social change. It’s particularly useful for marginalized, vulberable groups because they seldom have a chance to speak for themselves, all too frequently relying upon the words of others to relay their views and situations.

At its heart participatory photography works for this project because:

• Participatory photography speaks to kids: Asking kids to take pictures of their life is surprisingly easy. They want to tell you about the good and the bad, the bits they want preserve and the bits they’d like to see changed

• Participatory photography focuses upon the community: Requesting local input was extremely easy. The University, City Museum, and local Barnardo’s chapter all came onboard quickly and easily. each group not only wanted to help the kids, but also saw how much this could speak to the entire Leeds community.

• Participatory photography means teaching: Showing people how to take photographs is very much like teaching creative writing. It empowers them to speak and opens up a world they might not have known before. However, it simply shows them the door to that world, it is up to the participant to explore.

• Participatory photography tells a story: Granting a vision to someone’s life means tellinghis or her story. At its core, each project presents a series of personal stories, stories perhaps only to ever be told this one time.

This project is expected to run September 6th throough the 13th at the Leeds City Museum.

You can get a glimpse of this directness in a recent post he did about the British isle of Sark.  Kenneth has a no holds barred enquiry into whether democratic reform in the quite recently feudal island is change we can believe in—or just a new form of control in reformist guise. Leave it to Kenneth to ask questions few would.

Here’s a taste:

The problems began when the Barclays began to insist on democratic reforms on Sark. You see, Sark had been a feudal government for 450 years, and was the last feudal territory in Western Europe. Feudalism is a hard thing to defend, but the feudalism of Sark was as benign as they come. True, divorce was illegal, but other feudal laws included the idea that only the Seigneur, the feudal leader of Sark, could keep an unspayed dog or any doves. Life on the island has long been a pleasant one.

Carrie tells the story more intimately than I could, but here’s a snippet:

A bomb went off in Newry last night. The story made it to the European edition of The Wall Street Journal, and is naturally the headline story of the BBC. No one was hurt, and most everyone seems to be yawning as they talk about it. In fact, I think the person who told me did yawn.