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Конференция SCIFOO в централата на Google включва реч на Джейн McGonical, игра дизайнер, който има идеи, които се отнасят до парче Clive Томпсън в последния ми пост. Тя е, тя трябва да се каже, още по-оптимистични от Констанс Steinkuehler,, академичен, които са извършили проучване в парче Томпсън. Обърнете внимание на това видео си беседа "спасяването на света чрез Game дизайн" в Нов конференция Йоркър "през май. Edge Фондация "съобщава, че в изказването си в SCIFOO; Тя посочва, че Wikipedia бе създадена в около 10 на силата на 8 лицето часа, което е еквивалентно на 5 дни от света на игрите Warcraft (или 1 сезон на American Idol гласуване). Тя казва, че геймърите са наличен ресурс за творческо използване на всяка задача, която може да бъде преформулиран като игра (която обхваща много на земята!). Астрономите са довели начина, по гражданин наука, тъй като в близкото проекта Galaxy Zoo и класическите SETI @ Home , но McGonical предвижда много повече. Тя също иска на учените решаване на големите проблеми на обществото, като игри от бъдещите световни сценарии в superstructgame.org . Тя е автор на това, което мисля, че е най-интересната част на писане, което някога съм прочели по една игра, "защо обичам Пчелите" . Става дума за Алтернативен реалност на играта, направено от 42 Entertainment, че е потопен на играча в задния история на видео играта "Halo 2". Единственият обява или "дупка заек" в играта е уеб адрес; www.ilovebees.com , че за кратко проблясваха на екрана в края на театрална ремарке за Halo 2; Разпределените разказ на I LOVE Пчелите играят в силно "деконструиран" форма. Той е разкрит в представата големи парчета в течение на четири месеца през стотици уеб страници, десетки публикации в блога, хиляди имейли, както и над 40000 живи МР3 трансмисии. Някои от тези съдържанието фрагменти могат да бъдат намерени от всеки, който изглеждаше достатъчно отблизо. Други натоварени само на уеб браузъри играчи, влизане в системата от IP адреси, свързани с определени географски региони. Все пак други са били изпратени като частни, персонализирани имейли или телефонни обаждания до един играч от стотици хиляди на всички играчи. Поради тази масивна разпространението на съдържание, отговорността се поема на всеки играч да излезе с някоя и всички открития, така че целия колектив могат да имат достъп и процес, тъй като завърши на данни, е възможно. Като един Обичам Пчелите играч отбеляза по време на игра: "Това е наистина красиво. В за да може всеки от нас да вървим напред, ние всички трябва да вървим напред. В едно есе от 2001 г. "киберпространството Диалектика", цифров теоретик Майкъл Хайм описва привържениците на колективната интелигентност като "мрежови идеалисти". Той пише: "Мрежата идеалист изгражда колективен кошерите. Идеалист вижда следващия век като огромна бръмча комунитаристки. "В Обичам Пчелите парцел, ние откриваме, буквално представяне на това, което Хайм идентифицира като пламенен на мрежови идеалисти, желание да видят" на световните мрежи, които покриват планетата форма глобален кошер "Когато обясни Лий първият проект за мен през април 2004 г. той призна, че метафората подразбиращи се от" www.ilovebees.com "е умишлено. "Това е абсолютно е трябвало да накара играчите да мислят за себе си като кошер ум." Играчите бързо се качвате на този жест към сътрудничество игри, демонстрирайки обща информираност на концепциите за кошер умове и колективния разум. Един ранен пост четем: "Мисля, че една от причините за" оператор "избра да нахлуе в сайт за пчелите, за да се свържете с нас .... Е необходимо един кошер интелект, или както бихме го наричат, колективен детектив ", предложи друг играч:" Мисля, че това няма да е цялата игра за пчелите ... но кошера ум или колективно сравнение ум може да се окаже умишлено. "Наистина, играчите показаха, осъзнаване на използването на дизайнерите на метафората, за да се оформи общност. Един играч е написал: "Създателите на настоящия ... определено се въведе някакъв мисъл в историята, и те определено ни смятат като нещо съвсем. Не би се изненадал, ако ние се очаква да бъде на пчелите ", както те обсъдиха как да се наричат, играчите прегърна пчела, вдъхновена метафора:" Бих ни се обадете кошера или HiveMind на ... в края на краищата, ние сме едно колектив. "Общността развълнувано прегърна метафора. Един играч пише просто: "Пич, това означава, че ние сме на пчелите!" След тази общност, и идентичност, е нараснал около тази идея, по-нататъшното самоорганизация е необходимо за постигане на целите в определени моменти в играта. Няма от 600,000 играчи, тя гледа на самоорганизация на една група от 4000, които се наричат пчеларите. McGonical нарича тази фаза "осмислянето" етап; На този етап означава, вземане, група играч започна да олицетворява идеала на Леви на колективната интелигентност, която подкрепя специализацията и признаването на различни гледни точки. Всяка група, създадена специален конец форум, както и уникален отчет за анализ на мисията. Целта на тази самостоятелно диференциация: група съмишленици анализатори заедно, позволявайки на множество конкурентни нишки на добре проучено тълкуване. Трите групи са наречени "буквално нишка", "роднина конци" и "цифрово конец". Всеки състои своя мисията ясно да се определят подхода си и да наемат повече играч, анализатори на своя страна. В първата група се твърди: Буквалният конец е за онези, които вярват, че ние просто трябваше да покаже на тези места, когато на аксоните 'Go Hot ". Тази теория е до голяма степен бил свален от някои играчи, тъй като някои от местата са били намерени да бъде частна собственост, в предната част на Sears Tower (мисля: група онлайн dweebs, събиране на W / техните GPS масово, когато свършва обратно броене ... Не мисля, че град Чикаго, няма такова), и дори един в гората. Въпреки това, аз не мисля, че тази теория може да бъде изхвърлен напълно, тъй като не е напълно опровергани. Друга група предложи по-концептуален подход: Относителният конец подкрепя фракцията, която вярва, че координатите са буквални места, но околните сгради / забележителности / улици / WiFi / и др. са ключът към решението. Тази нишка ще бъде добро място за обсъждане на констатациите в местата (и тези на уики), без да се притеснява математика. И третата група е много абстрактно, данни схрусква такт: Числовата конец обхваща всички онези, които вярват, координатите може да бъде решен математически. Или чрез: а) не се вземат предвид, че те са координатите и ги използват като поредица от числа, за да се намери скритото послание, Б), ако се предположи, че са координатите, но с помощта на места, за да намерите нови координати или скрито послание, C) намиране на графично представяне на координатите, което съобщава на съобщение или на ново място. Тя идентифицира най-важните аспекти на дизайна на играта, за да се постигне този вид на участие, като "значим неопределеност" и динамичен дизайн. Играта не е приключило, по време, е започнала около 40% от нея е оставена отворена, за да отговори на дейността на играчите. Играта дизайнер признава, че доста бързо, той се позовава на Wiki на играча, за да проверите използването на езика за програмиране, че е измислена за играта. В началото на това той не беше сигурен, че напълно имаше смисъл, но играчите я определя до такава степен, че го е направил. Тяхната дейност има смисъл. Възможностите на този тип игра като обучение, или инструмент за преработка, са огромни. Той също така изглежда да има повече смисъл на идеята за използване на видео игри да преподава като учебно помагало, видео игри, сами по себе си, изглежда ограничено. Но тъй като част от по-голям деконструиран и динамична визия, тя не изглежда като невероятно мощен идея. Особено ако концепцията е да научи хората, които се интересуват на първо място, а не в класната стая, но и в света. "Но някои хора са по-добре от други .... Или може би и други са просто по-рязко .... Какво се случва, ако се опитаме нашата най-трудното, и той просто не е достатъчно добър? "Включването на смислен неяснота Обичам Пчелите изрично се занимава с този проблем. Правдоподобността на толкова много различни тълкувания, упълномощено играчи на всички видове нива на квалификация, природни способности, наклонности и интереси, за постигане на успех. Този вид масово приобщаващо ангажимент е все по-голямо значение, тъй като ние мислим за бъдещето на обучение. Тя гарантира, че никой от играчите не се оставя вън от играта, нито едно лице,, обезкуражен или изключени от възможността да допринесе за участието на културата.
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Salon reports on a new USAF ad campaign in “War Is Not A Video Game”. The ad, above, looks exactly like it should be one of the fake ads in “Starship Troopers”, except without the irony, the intelligence, or the bugs. I’ve posted about “All Points Bulletin” before. If you take two of the most successful and powerful ideas in gaming- online MMO’s like “World of Warcraft” and urban crime console games like “Grand Theft Auto”- and combine them, you get APB. A crime-based MMO set in a modern city. This is a demo from this year’s E3 of the character or avatar creation tools for the game. I remember when I was doing “Alter Ego” I saw similarly powerful tools in “Heroes Journey”, but that game has never been released. This looks like the next generation… EA spokesperson Holly Rockwood confirmed today that a protest outside the E3 convention center on Tuesday, against the game “Dante’s Inferno”, was staged by a viral marketing company on it’s behalf. There were a couple of beautiful touches, it has to be said. The protest group even have a “We Are S.A.V.E. D” web site, featuring the familiar design sensibility of the unhinged. We are on a crusade to stop the blasphemous glorification of HELL and its minions as presented by Dante’s Inferno. The ever decaying youth and slovenly adults who engage with Dante’s Inferno are a victim of our society’s pointless need to flirt with Satan and his lustful campaign to corrupt human souls… We say NO. We say inferNO. People commenting on this story on various web sites have pointed out; The original Divine Comedy was a literary masterpiece, widely considered the central epic poem of Italian literature, and is seen as one of the greatest works of world literature. The poem’s imaginative and allegorical vision of the Christian afterlife is a culmination of the medieval world-view as it had developed in the Western Church. It helped establish the Tuscan dialect, in which it is written, as the Italian standard. It’s about a poor, depressed man going through a midlife crisis as he continues to mourn the death of his beloved Beatrice. As he wanders through a dark forest and contemplates his suicide, he sees a mountain of righteousness and attempts to climb it, only to be stopped by three great beasts of evil. Dante than meets Virgil, the Poet who died more than a thousand years ago, who guides Dante on a journey through hell, purgatory and heaven. Allegorically, the Inferno represents the Christian soul seeing sin for what it really is, and the three beasts represent three types of sin: the self-indulgent, the violent, and the malicious. These three types of sin also provide the three main divisions of Dante’s Hell: Upper Hell (the first 5 Circles) for the self-indulgent sins; Circles 6 and 7 for the violent sins; and Circles 8 and 9 for the malicious sins. The game involves Dante beating the crap out of demons with weapons such as a scythe, as he’s trying to escape hell and look for his beloved Beatrice (as to why he’s looking in Hell is anyone’s guess); The scythe gives Dante–who’s considerably beefier and more badass than the medieval Italian poet-philosopher upon which he is based–some incredible abilities. The weapon’s long reach will keep smaller enemies at bay, and thanks to a complex combo system that mixes light and heavy attacks and some handy midair jumping abilities, Dante becomes a one-man wrecking machine on his trip through the Nine Circles. During the press demo, we saw producers demonstrate successful midair combo juggles, essentially reducing nasty looking demons into playthings for Dante’s scythe. January 27th is the annual Holocaust memorial day, to mark the date this year, Stand Up to Hatred have made six viral machinima video’s, featuring a fictional video game that looks like “The Sims”. “The Hate Game” begins with No. 1, above, in Nazi Germany. No. 3, below, looks at the Stephen Lawrence murder in the UK. Meet Staff Sgt Matt Zedwick, the only living recipient of the Silver Star in the Oregon National Guard. The picture above shows him as he appears in “America’s Army”, the video game and recruiting tool; Launched on July 4th 2002, America’s Army is an innovative PC action game that provides young adults with an inside perspective and a virtual role in today’s high-tech Army. Through the America’s Army game, players can take a virtual “test drive” of Soldiering in the U.S. Army from basic training to the battlefield in the Global War on Terrorism. Zedwick won the Silver Star and Purple Heart when he pulled his squad leader and another buddy from their burning Humvee, when it was hit by an IED. Here’s a picture of him on active duty in Iraq; The America’s Army Real Heroes® program spotlights the “accomplishments of soldiers who have distinguished themselves in combat”. The America’s Army game places soldiering “front and center within popular culture and showcases the high-tech, team-oriented and values-driven nature of the Army,” says Col. Casey Wardynski, originator of the America’s Army game. Since its debut, the America’s Army program has registered more than 8.5 million users in over 60 countries, and expanded to include console and cell-phone games, the Real Heroes program and the Virtual Army Experience. The game has been downloaded more than 40 million times, and players have spent more than 200 million hours, or 3.5 billion rounds of play, experiencing life as soldiers. Jazwares worked closely with the army to produce a line of action figures celebrating the Real Heroes. Each action figure includes a Real Heroes trading card highlighting the soldier’s accomplishments and their “Warrior Ethos,” which says a soldier will always place the mission first, never accept defeat, never quit, and never leave a fallen comrade. The figures have “authentic uniforms, weapons and unit insignias”. The action figure line launched to coincide with the release of America’s Army: True Soldiers for Xbox 360. Here’s Matt Zedwick’s action figure; This Christmas, Matt Zedwick was chosen to appear in a Real Heroes edition of “Deal or No Deal”, the dumbest game show in the history of television. The America’s Army Real Heroes® web site reports; Staff Sergeant Matthew Zedwick, one of four U.S. Army Soldiers initially chosen for the America’s Army Real Heroes program, chose present number 6 to begin his quest for the one million dollar prize. For this special Christmas episode of Deal or No Deal, the briefcases usually holding the dollar amounts, were replaced with gift wrapped boxes. SSG Zedwick began the first round in which he had to select 6 presents to be eliminated from the field. His very first selection, present number 11, was opened to reveal the $1,000,000 value. While this was a bit of a let down, SSG Zedwick moved forward and, round-by-round, eliminated many of the boxes that contained the lower values. Along the way, some of the presents also held the names of Santa’s reindeer. The show’s host, Howie Mandel, explained that if Zedwick located all nine reindeer before he was given his final offer, he would win an additional $25,000. SSG Zedwick was eventually left with presents 18, 20 and 24, plus his initial selection, present number 6. These gifts represented values of $400, $10,000, $400,000 and $500,000. The mysterious Banker called Howie and made an offer of $202,000 for Zedwick’s present. After a few anxious moments, with half the audience screaming “No Deal” and the rest yelling “Deal”, SSG Zedwick slapped the red button on the podium and shouted, “DEAL”, winning $202,000 plus the additional $25,000 for finding all nine of Santa’s reindeer, for a whopping $227,000! We were saddened earlier today that YouTube took down some of our exclusive footage showing the IDF’s operational success in operation Cast Lead against Hamas extremists in the Gaza Strip. Fortunately, due to blogger and viewer support, YouTube has returned some of the footage they removed. I mean, I guess I’m disseminating propaganda. But hey, you can clearly see the rockets and the lorries and the little terrorists running around like ants, just before they disintegrate. Why would this be unsettling? It’s amazing how many there are, it’s like an entire level of “Call of Duty 4″. In fact Call of Duty 4 has a level that is exactly, eerily, like this. No one has yet left the comment “I could have done that”… Below is how “Death From Above” looks in Call of Duty (go to around 2.29). It’s interesting that some of the related videos, linked to this video game footage on YouTube, is of real gun camera footage from Iraq and Afghanistan; Mind Hacks has an interesting piece about the game “Mirror’s Edge” and a story in Wired that talks about the realism of the game’s simulation of free-running and the physical effects on the player; Only 15 minutes into the game, my mouth began overproducing saliva, and I had to pause the action for a few seconds to avoid carsickness. I would feel like a total lamer, but apparently even the Penny Arcade guys wrestled with nausea. The Wired writer thinks that the game fools the body’s sense of where it’s limbs are. Also known as “proprioception”. Mind Hacks adds; Research into illusions of proprioception — your sense of where you body is in space — has shown that our body map is surprisingly flexible. It is possible to mislocate your hand, for example, coming to believe that it is directly in front of you when in fact it’s out at the side, or behind you; Jaron Lanier has reported on an early virtual reality experience he had that made him feel like he had the body of a lobster, with 6 extra limbs. The important feature of all these illusions is that they rely on precisely timed visual feedback. Although visual input can reprogramme our body image, it only does so when there is a tight coupling between what we see and feel. The importance is not the level of detail in what we see, but in the fluidity of the interaction. If Mirror’s Edge makes you feel like you are really are doing Parkour then it is because it has the correct kind of visual feedback (your limbs, in a fully interactive world) with the correct timing. A final thought: if a computer game really is immersive for something as visceral as free-running, isn’t that kind of surprising, given how complex free running is physically, and how simple the commands used to control a computer game are? Perhaps what this is because when we automatise an action such as a run, a jump or a roll part of the process of making it automatic is losing the experience of the component parts. So, when a computer game feels like real, it is because real feels like nothing — we just ask our brains ‘jump’ and the motor system sorts out the details without our any deep experience of how the jump is performed. I often find that myself. As I’m leaping from rooftop to rooftop at night; that it feels like nothing. Same with when I’m gunning shoppers down in the supermarket… Ha ha. It’s an interesting thought; that a video game is simulating the experience of competence- the feeling that your body has learned something. Anyone who’s ever trained at something athletic or demanding of huge coordination- something physical- knows the pain and the perseverance required to get to the point where it feels effortless. But in so many ways the world of the video game is the world of sensation. Much more so than movies ever could be. This is the characteristic of simulation- it’s an active representation. The processes of feeling and experiencing are represented. The research going into first person shooters, for example, is amazing. Right down to levels of excitement experienced whilst using individual weapon types, in different games. Alva Noe has an interesting talk up on Edge about our relationship with pictures; One experience that I’ve been especially interested in is our understanding and experience of pictures. If I show you a picture from a newspaper—for example, a photo of Hillary Clinton—there is a sense in which, when you look at that picture, you see Hillary. There she is, in the picture. Of course, Hillary is not there, so there is an obvious sense in which you don’t see Hillary when you look at the picture. There is a sense in which you see her; and a sense in which you don’t. She shows up for you, in the picture, even though she is not there. She shows up as not there. Getting clear about this phenomenon is the central empirical and conceptual problem about depiction. One idea might be to say, well, seeing a picture of Hillary is just like seeing Hillary. Seeing a picture of Hillary produces in you, the perceiver, just the same effects that actually seeing Hillary would produce. The problem with that suggestion is that if that’s right then we lose our sense of the difference between seeing Hillary and seeing a picture of Hillary. The distinctive thing about seeing Hillary in a picture is that she is there but not there. She is there but visually absent. She is manifestly absent in her visual presence. It’s a kind of a paradoxical thing. There is something paradoxical about pictures. My view is that traditional philosophy and cognitive science has been asking the wrong question when it comes to pictures. They ask, how does the picture affect us and give rise to an experience in our heads? Instead, what they should ask is how do we achieve a kind of access to Hillary, to properties of Hillary, such as her visual appearance, by exploration of something which is not Hillary, namely, a picture? The critical thing is the relation between this model, this picture, and that which is absent, such that we can gain access to what is absent in the picture. Once again we are thrown back to this idea that the perceiving is an achievement of access by making use of skills, knowledge. I need to know what Hillary looks like in order to recognize Hillary in her picture. A striking feature of pictures is their immediacy. A picture of Hillary doesn’t seem to be a symbolic representation of Hillary. There seems to be the sense in which merely knowing how to recognize Hillary or how to recognize a human form, a figure, is enough to recognize a picture of Hillary. There is this idea that we don’t need any further knowledge or further skills in order to perceive something in the picture. That is a very interesting idea. But, in fact, there is a nice comparison we can make to help us see that pictures don’t really have this sort of immediacy. Think about something like the Macintosh operating system. No promotional endorsement intended, but the Mac OS is user friendly. If you understand a few basic metaphors, about the desktop, clicking, open files, closing files, a few basic metaphors allow you to unpack just about any program that you might be working with. So there is a sense in which the functionality of the graphical user interface is straightforward and immediate. But, of course, that is precisely because the engineers have built the program with our particular predilections and capacities in mind. They built it to be easy for us. It’s not as though it just happens to be easy. Technological evolution made it transparent for us. And pictures are just the same. You encounter pictures in a newspaper, say, and we find it easy to see Hillary Clinton in the picture. We don’t need any further training. But that is not because you don’t require training to see Hillary Clinton in a picture. It’s because that technology was devised to be easy for us. The technology was designed for people with the training we already had. OK, what does that mean? Pictorial technologies, both painting and photography, have been designed to be straightforward for people that already know how to recognize things by using their eyes. Certain background visual skills are all that is presupposed. But then seeing itself requires tremendous background knowledge. How do we achieve access to properties of Hillary? Such that we can gain access to that which is absent in the picture? Not that you’d want to. It’s interesting to think about in relation to, say, war in video games. Probably none or very few of the people who make those games have experience of real war. Neither do most of the people that play them. But the war in the game is really just an aesthetic, derived from other representations of war in movies or pictures. The images of war in a video game exist only to give us access to the sensation of shooting. The relationship to war is very tenuous. Even more so when you consider that the movies and pictures that the images in the video game is based on, have their own rules of abstraction. The background knowledge required to successfully access what you are intended to access, is not about the thing that’s represented. I watched “Dangerous Days” the other night, the documentary of the making of “Bladerunner”. It’s fascinating to see how much crap they edited out of it, to get the gold. Some of the dialogue is appalling- to the point where Harrison Ford is breaking off in mid sentence and saying “this is bizarre!” But after watching it I ended up thinking about one of the things that didn’t make it from the book- “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”- into the movie; Mercerism was the leisure activity/religion that involved people grabbing the handles of an “empathy box” and joining together in embodying the Sisyphean struggle of a man walking up a hill, whilst rocks are thrown at him. In the book characters who use the empathy box are physically hurt by the rocks. It has an echo in the “Passion of the Christ” movie, one of the highest grossing movies of all time, which derived it’s power from the “visceral” depiction of Christ’s suffering. The Pope’s apparent withdrawal of the comment “It is as it was” after seeing the movie, provoked Slavoj Zizek to write; And, perhaps, the prohibition to embrace a belief with a full passion explains why, today, “culture” is emerging as the central life-world category. Religion is permitted — not as a substantial way of life, but as a particular “culture” or, rather, life-style phenomenon: what legitimizes it is not its immanent truth-claim but the way it allows us to express out innermost feelings and attitudes. We no longer “really believe,” we just follow (some of the) religious rituals and mores as part of the respect for the “life-style” of the community to which we belong… Perhaps, then, “culture” is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without “taking them seriously.” Is this not also the reason why science is not part of this notion of culture — it is all too real? And is this also not why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as “barbarians,” as anti-cultural, as a threat to culture — they dare to take seriously their beliefs? Today, we ultimately perceive as a threat to culture those who immediately live their culture, those who lack a distance towards it. Looking for some sort of dialogue on religion in video games and MMO’s, I found this discussion about religion in mmo’s on Terra Nova. Comments include; It’s a bit interesting that there doesn’t seem to be much uproar over the latent near-Christian mythos in many MMOs, but that may be a reflection of the fact that the treatment is very shallow (for lack of a better word) or maybe more reflective of the fact that most gamers (in North America and Europe) are Christian (practicing or not) and so the presence of these themes is almost unnoticed? (The latter is legitimately a question — I have no idea). My experience in Dragonrealms, at least on the forums, has strongly suggested to me that people will make up religions to justify their characters, and will even make decisions based on this constructed view. But the overriding message is that game designers avoid real religion because they don’t want real conflict within a game. GTA is very clever in that it is about “the culture” and completely avoids religion or any religious plot lines or scenario’s. They’ll do Las Vegas but they won’t touch Sarajevo. However, the Christian game developer Digital Praise, who recently released a “Guitar Hero” spin-off “Guitar Praise”, have clearly been looking at the game. Interviewed on MTV, the CEO Tom Bean was asked “have you ever considered making a Christian version of GTA?”; There are a number of games that are out in the marketplace, and some of them have been derided for their content as being inappropriate for kids or inappropriate in general. And the thing that people don’t readily recognize is that some of these games are popular and are successful because they’re really fun; people have sometimes gotten distracted from the fun of a game by some of the content that’s in it. Quite. But the hard part came when they asked him, if he were to do it, how would he make it fun? I don’t have a real response for you there. That’s the trick of it. That would be one of the bigger challenges. How do you do that — make it fun and make it something that people want to play? That’s the million-dollar question. If we think we’ve got an answer to that, we will generate a product that will try to answer that question. The SCIFOO conference at Google headquarters featured a speech by Jane McGonical, a game designer, who has ideas that relate to Clive Thompson’s piece in my last post. She is, it has to be said, even more optimistic than Constance Steinkuehler, the academic who carried out the study in Thompson’s piece. Take a look at this video of her giving a talk; “Saving The World Through Game Design”, at the New Yorker Conference in May. Edge Foundation reports that in her speech at SCIFOO; She points out that Wikipedia was created in approximately 10 to the power of 8 person-hours, which is equivalent to 5 days of World of Warcraft gaming (or 1 season of American Idol voting). She says that gamers are a resource available for creative use at any task that can be reformulated as play (which covers a lot of ground!). Astronomers have led the way in citizen science, as in the recent Galaxy Zoo project and the classic SETI@home, but McGonical envisions much more. She also wants scientists to solve society’s big problems by gaming out future world-scenarios at superstructgame.org. She has written what I think is the most interesting piece of writing I’ve ever read on a single game, “Why I Love Bees”. It’s about an Alternate Reality Game made by 42 Entertainment, that immersed the player in a back story to the video game “Halo 2″. The only advert or “rabbit hole” into the game was a web address; www.ilovebees.com, that briefly flickered on screen at the end of a theatrical trailer for Halo 2; The distributed narrative of I Love Bees played out in highly “deconstructed” form. It was revealed in clue-sized pieces over the course of four months across hundreds of web pages, dozens of blog posts, thousands of emails, and over 40,000 live Mp3 transmissions. Some of these content fragments could be found by anyone who looked closely enough. Others loaded only on the Web browsers of players logging in from IP addresses linked to specific geographic regions. Still others were sent as private, personalized emails or phone calls to a single player out of the hundreds of thousands of total players. Because of this massive distribution of content, responsibility rested on each and every player to come forward with any and all discoveries, so that the entire collective could access and process as complete a data set as possible. As one I Love Bees player remarked during the game: “This is really beautiful. In order for any of us to move forward WE ALL have to move forward.” In a 2001 essay “The Cyberspace Dialectic”, digital theorist Michael Heim described proponents of collective intelligence as “network idealists”. He wrote: “The network idealist builds collective beehives. The idealist sees the next century as an enormous communitarian buzz.” In the I Love Bees plot, we find a literal representation of what Heim identifies as the network idealists’ ardent desire to see “the worldwide networks that cover the planet form a global beehive.” When Lee first explained the project to me in April 2004, he acknowledged that the metaphor implied by “www.ilovebees.com” was intentional. “It absolutely was meant to make players think about themselves as a hive mind.” The players quickly picked up on this gesture toward collaborative gaming, demonstrating a general awareness of the concepts of hive minds and collective intelligence. An early post read: “I think one of the reasons ‘The Operator’ chose to invade a site about bees was to contact us…. It needed a hive intellect, or as we’d call it, a collective detective.” Another player suggested: “I think that this won’t be an entire game about bees… but the hive mind or collective mind comparison may prove to be intentional.” Indeed, the players showed a conscious awareness of the designers’ use of metaphor to shape the community. One player wrote: “The creators of this… have definitely put some thought into the storyline, and they definitely consider us SOMETHING. I wouldn’t be surprised if we ARE supposed to be the bees.” As they discussed what to call themselves, the players embraced the bee-inspired metaphor: “I’d call us The Hive or HiveMind… after all, we are a collective.” The community excitedly embraced the metaphor. One player wrote simply: “Dude, that means that WE are the bees!” Once this community, and identity, had grown around this idea, further self-organization was required to achieve goals at specific times in the game. Out of 600,000 players, she looks at the self-organization of one group of 4,000 who called themselves the Beekeepers. McGonical calls this phase the “Making Meaning” stage; At this stage of meaning-making, the player group began to embody Levy’s ideal of collective intelligence, which supports specialization and a recognition of diverse perspectives. Each group established a dedicated forum thread and a unique analysis mission statement. The goal of this self-differentiation: to group like-minded analysts together, allowing multiple competing threads of well-researched interpretation to emerge. The three groups were named the “literal thread”, the “relative thread”, and the “numerical thread”. Each composed its own mission statement to clearly define its approach—and to recruit more player-analysts to its side. The first group argued: The literal thread is for those who believe that we are just supposed to show up at these locations when the Axons ‘Go Hot.’ This theory has pretty much been shot down by some players since some of the locations have been found to be on private property, in front of the Sears Tower (think: a group of online dweebs gathering w/ their GPS en masse when the countdown ends… don’t think the city of Chicago’s gonna like that), and even one in a forest. However, I don’t think this theory can be thrown out completely, as it hasn’t been completely disproven. Another group proposed a more conceptual approach: The relative thread supports the faction which believes that the coordinates are literal places, but the surrounding buildings/landmarks/streets/wifi/etc. are the key to the solution. This thread would be a good place to discuss our findings at the locations (and those at the wiki) without bothering the mathematicians. And the third group took a very abstract, data-crunching tact: The numerical thread encompasses all those who believe the coordinates can be solved mathematically. Either by: A) disregarding that they are coordinates and using them as a series of numbers to find a hidden message, B) assuming they are coordinates, but using the locations to find new coordinates or a hidden message, C) finding a graphical representation of the coordinates which communicates a message or points to a new location.” She identifies the most important aspects of the game design, to achieve this kind of involvement, as being “meaningful ambiguity” and dynamic design. The game wasn’t finished at the time it started- about 40% of it was left open to respond to the activities of the players. The game designer admits that pretty quickly he was referring to the player’s Wiki, to check his use of the programming language that he had invented for the game. At the start of it he wasn’t sure that it totally made sense, but the players defined it to such a degree that it did. Their activity made it make sense. The possibilities of this type of game as a learning, or processing tool are immense. It also seems to make more sense of the idea of using video games to teach- as a teaching aid, video games, on their own, seem limited. But as part of a bigger deconstructed and dynamic vision, it does seem like an amazingly powerful idea. Particularly if the concept is to teach people who are interested in the first place- not in the classroom, but out in the world. ‘But some people are better than others…. Or maybe others are just sharper…. What happens if we try our hardest, and it just isn’t good enough?” The inclusion of meaningful ambiguity in I Love Bees expressly addresses this concern. The plausibility of so many diverse interpretations empowered players of all kinds of skill levels, natural abilities, inclinations and interests to achieve success. This kind of massively inclusive engagement is increasingly vital as we think about the future of learning. It ensures that no player is left out of the game, no individual discouraged or excluded from the opportunity to contribute to participatory culture.