VU mini-symposium Measuring Causal Relations

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Priscilla

There were several speakers that all had new and elegant solutions to the problem of trying to establish causality in their field. The one that most appealed to me was the story of professor Olivers. Possibly because as a Cognitive Psychologist he was closest to my field of expertise and possibly because he entitled his presentation “The case of….” which instantly made me put on my mental Deerstalker and investigate.

Prof. Olivers suffers from the ‘black box’ problem – as does anyone involved in the field of psychology. How do we measure what goes on in someones head? Even you dont know exactly what you know, why you think you know that and so on.
What we can know is what stimulus creates what response (and under which circumstances). Sufficient causality is hard to establish in this way but necessary causility is possible; what Must be present as a stimulus to obtain a certain outcome. In profesor Olivers’ research this involves fMRIs to see what zones are being activated when a person conjures up mental imagery. The research becomes more interesting when you add Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) zapping certain areas of the brain into temporary paralysis and then asking participants to evoke the same mental imagery. First map out the zones through fMRI, shut them down with TMS and if the task becomes impossible to perform, one can establish necessary causality between that zone and that mental imagery.

Form the panel-discussion I will take home a shared annoyance at the significance of significance and a Quest to promote the underappreciated correlations metrices. It has started me on the path of Bayesian statistics

An afternoon well spent.

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Gamifeye: Are you present?

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Priscilla

Ideally speaking, you should be able to experience entertainment and education within a game-frame – experiencing ‘fun’ and any ‘intentional content’ at the same time, instead of switching between blocks of one or the other.

This takes a creative approach of the intended content combined with a deep understanding of numerous game mechanics. On a more abstract level we (media psychologists) can predict that to facilitate blending, presence is a very important concept. Through a feeling of presence experienced during gameplay, we process the things going on in the game environment, i.e. your intended content (Biocca & Harms, 2002). Presence splits in a self- , spatial- and a social dimension. First I will discuss them as a psychological concept and then apply them to the often used gamification example: Foursquare.

Presence as a whole “can be understood as a psychological state in which the person’s subjective experience is created by some form of media technology with little awareness of the manner in which technology shapes this perception” (Tamborini, 2006, p. 226).

  • Self presence – the idea of “being”- is the presentation of oneself in the virtual world.
  • Spatial presence – the idea of “being in”- is mainly determined by two qualities: involvement and immersion. Involvement relies on mental vigilance and depends on the meaningfulness of an environment, while immersion depends on the environments ability to isolate people from other surrounding stimuli such as temperature or audio (Tamborini, 2006).
  • Social presence – the idea of “being with” – is the sense of being in a social environment. It involves recognising other actors in the game environment as social entities. Of course, the likelihood of inducing a strong sense of social presence is greatest when the other actors are (controlled by) actual humans.

In Foursquare the presence of self is facilitated by you logging in as yourself (possibly through one of your networking sites) and giving yourself a name/face in this shared online environment. Spatial presence is a very important marker in Foursquare as it is the basic game mechanic; the digital translation of where you physically are. This takes the involvement, meaning and attention you experience in the environment you are physically in and piggybacks that into the Foursquare environment. Social presence is high because all the other actors in the environment are representations of actual humans. Humans like yourself.

 

Biocca, F., & Harms, C. (2002) Networked minds social presence inventory; measures of co-presence, social presence, subjective symmetry, and intersubjective symmetry.

Tamborini, R., & Skalski, P. (2006). The role of presence in the experience of electronic games. In P. Vorderer & J. Bryant (Eds.), Playing Video Games; motives, responses and consequences (pp. 225-240). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Blog written for Gamifeye – a UK platform – published online 11.03.2013

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Alternate Reality Gaming – Examples

Posted on January 21, 2013 by Priscilla

The Beast is said to be the game that successfully introduced ARG’s to a larger public (Baertlein, 2008). This futuristic murder-mystery intrigued one million players for twelve weeks in 2001. It was created as a promotion for the movie A.I.

Another massive ARG was I Love Bees (aka Haunted Apiary) which was designed to support the launch of the video game Halo2 in 2004 (McGonical, 2007). This ARG revolved around an audio-drama broadcasted by public phones, immersing the player base into the world of Halo2. “The distributed fiction of I Love Bees was designed as a kind of investigative playground, in which players could collect, assemble and interpret thousands of different story pieces related to the Halo universe. By reconstructing and making sense of the fragmented fiction, the fans would collaboratively author a narrative bridge between the first Halo video game and its sequel” (McGonigal, 2007).

It had almost 10.000 people participating in real world challenges, and over 3 million players overall. The core website received 80 million hits, of which over 250.000 on the first day it went online. In the four months that the ARG ran, over 40.000 public phones spread over 50 states and 8 countries were answered (Dena, 2008). The players had to learn a fictional program language called Flea++ in order to complete the online challenges (McGonigal, 2004). The game created enormous media coverage with items in the New York Times, CNN, Wired and the London Times to name but a few. It also received the Innovation Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards 2005 (Dena, 2008).

An example of a smaller ARG is Chain Factor (Montola, Stenros & Waern, 2009). This puzzle based ARG started in the Numb3rs episode Primacy (aired first November 9th, 2007) in which players needed to find and crack several codes to stop the world’s economy from being destroyed. The Primacy episode featured short commercials to lure players to www.chainfactor.com and start playing with a fairly simple puzzle-game. Further game play included several clues and codes embedded in the Primacy episode and clues in physical locations (picture). Other codes that unlocked ‘cheats’ could be found on billboards throughout the country. On December 12, 2007 the game was successfully ended by entering all ‘ShutdownKeys’ simultaneously on twelve s computers in twelve different (physical) locations (Dena, 2008).

An ARG can be more than just fun. The first large ‘serious’ ARG was the World Without Oil that ran in 2007. The game revolved around the personal experiences of the players in a fictional, but realistic, global oil crisis. More than 1.500 player reports describing how they interacted with this ‘crisis’ were posted online. These reports include blogs, video files, audio files, images and voice mails. Almost 2.000 players registered at the core website www.worldwithoutoil.org, mostly from the United States. The game was played between the April 30th and June 1st 2007. When the game concluded the website had received more than 60.000 unique visitors. The game received several awards and a lesson plan for high school teachers to use the content created by the game (Dena, 2008).

This blog is a shaken but not stirred piece of my thesis “How ARG changes reality” which you can find here

Introducing Alternate Reality Games – blog 1 of 3
Alternate Reality Gaming – Ingredients – blog 2 of 3
Alternate Reality Gaming – Examples – blog 3 of 3

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Alternate Reality Gaming – Ingredients

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Priscilla

Any ARG has several key ingredients such as

  • a puppet master
  • a rabbit hole
  • a curtain
  • TING rhetoric

A puppet master is the person controlling the game, giving out clues and keeping an eye on plot development. The starting point of an ARG is known as a trail head or a rabbit hole, the latter being a reference to Alice in Wonderland “In another moment down went Alice [into the rabbit hole] never once considering how in the world she was going to get out of it”. Usually the rabbit hole is a website. The curtain marks the separation between the players and the puppet masters, it refers to the curtain of a magician; if you look behind it you will learn how the trick works and ruin the magic of the experience.
An ARG treats itself as if it were real; all physical elements used by the puppet master exist and are functional. There is no overtly present rule set or designated arena for play. All evidence of the game being a game is buried and whatever is incorporated in the game has to be non-fictional but actual. This pattern of the game denying it is a game is known as the This Is Not a Game or TING rhetoric (McGonical, 2003; Montola, 2005).

Elan Lee, lead game designer of the ‘first’ ARG The Beast comments; “Players were never meant to believe the This Is Not a Game rhetoric… it was obviously a game. There was nothing we could do about that. What we could do was make it a game with an identity crisis. If I know it’s a game and you know it’s a game, but IT doesn’t know it’s a game, then we’ve got a conflict.”

Players hold on to this rhetoric and actually protect it by ignoring possible cracks when reality seeps through at places where the curtain is slightly lifted (Stenros, Montola, Waern, & Jonsson, 2007). Players want to go along with the game believing itself, but the awareness of the game-as-game remains.

ARGs are part of the pervasive gaming genre which is “a genre of gaming systematically blurring and breaking the traditional boundaries of a game”. Expansion of a game beyond its boundaries in spatial, temporal and social dimensions in itself is not new but “pervasive gaming is differentiated with the use of these expansions in new efficient ways to produce new kinds of game play experiences” (Montola, 2005).

McGonical (2003) defines different types of play further by making a distinction between pervasive play and immersive play. Pervasive play consist of mixed reality games that use mobile, omnipresent and embedded digital technologies to create virtual playing fields in everyday spaces. Immersive play is a form of pervasive play that adds the TING rhetoric to the mix. Immersive gaming was designed to “integrate itself fully into the off-line lives of its’ players”. The game achieves this by using everyday digital devices. So no special toys, consoles or joysticks but the phones, PDA’s and internet connections that the players already had were now part of the game.

The ARG The Beast intrigued their one million player base by contacting them at home or at work, sending emails from their own accounts, sending them packages in the mail and spreading over 4000 digital files over various websites (Dena, 2008). For the players The Beast was everywhere and anything could be a potential clue.

This blog is a shaken but not stirred piece of my thesis “How ARG changes reality” which you can find here

Introducing Alternate Reality Games – blog 1 of 3 –
Alternate Reality Gaming – Ingredients – blog 2 of 3
Alternate Reality Gaming – Examples – blog 3 of 3 –

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Introducing Alternate Reality Gaming

Posted on December 12, 2012 by Priscilla

In 2008 I first came across Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG) in an episode of the popular TV-show Numb3rs and I was intrigued. It was a form of gaming that apparently did not stop when it encountered physical reality but made reality part of the game.

This latest form of game play is not just multimedia. Websites, cell phones, public phones, motion pictures, radio, magazines, newspapers and museums have all been used in an ARG (e.g. Hunter, 2008). An ARG is also multi reality; the virtual and the physical reality are combined in a game that has lost some of the boundaries we use to distinguish game play from reality (Baertlein, 2008). Other games are limited in time, space and numbers of players, but an ARG is more ambiguous regarding these aspects “…a game that has one or more salient features that expand the contractual magical circle of play socially, spatially or temporally (Montola, 2005, p. 3)”.

The six key qualities that describe an ARG are

  • cross-media,
  • pervasive,
  • persistent,
  • collaborative,
  • constructive and
  • expressive

(McGonigal, 2004).

Cross-media refers to the several media platforms that are used simultaneously in the game play. All possible media have been used in an ARG but internet is usually the central binding medium.
The pervasive quality is found in the fact that an ARG uses the real world as part of the narrative it wants to tell. Part of the game play takes place in the physical reality and several game clues are embedded in everyday environments.
Persistence means that the game play is continuous, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. For the individual player this means that game play continues without the player being present.
Collaboration is required because ARG’s  “would be absolutely impossible to solve alone” (McGonigal, 2005). An ARG incorporates massive scale challenges and location-specific information, from multiple locations.
The constructive quality refers to the absence of a player platform, which needs to be created by and for the players. The organisation of communities and social engineering are needed, but not pre- made, to maintain game play.
A final determining quality is its expressiveness; an ARG “requires and inspires user self-expression” (McGonigal, 2004). User created content, fan art and fan fiction are an integrated part of the game play.

Another striking feature of Alternate Reality Gaming is that players do not use a representation to interact with the game. A player does not create an avatar, does not build a virtual space for a virtual presence but utilises actual presence directly in the game play. The players’ lives are the platform.

Multiple media and gaming elements are involved and the players have impact on the storyline, making the narrative an interactive one. The story develops real-time and player’s often work together, coordinating real-life and online activities. Real life knowledge, that not everyone might have, is required to solve clues and puzzles.

This blog is a shaken but not stirred piece of my thesis “How ARG changes reality” which you can find here

Introducing Alternate Reality Games – blog 1 of 3 –
Alternate Reality Gaming – Ingredients – blog 2 of 3
Alternate Reality Gaming – Examples – blog 3 of 3 –

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Roting for change

Posted on November 12, 2012 by Priscilla

The foundation of our educational system is the repetition of factual knowledge. Classrooms are filled with the chanting of multiplication. Useful and necessary one might think, but is it? What we need to know is not that “three times four equals 12” but that one grouping ‘times’ another grouping results in a new grouping via the mechanism of multiplication. What we need to understand is what ‘times’ means. I was never very good at rote learning, the chants of multiplication or topography were songs to me. The lyrics no more relevant than Mary having a little lamb. Teaching the principle instead of the several outcomes must be a better way to do it.

“This is rote learning, the bane of modern existence[… ] simple remembering without reliance on an understanding of why or on an internal structure.”
The design of everyday things (Norman, 1988/2002).

Like the Ford-factory the basis of our schooling system is that of the conveyer belt. A one size fits all approach in which rote learning represents the nuts and bolts that allow us to mount, with simple instructions, the bodywork of factual knowledge onto the framework of any child. Out comes a generally tested product that can be “any colour as long as it’s black”. Society doesn’t need more of the same; it hasn’t for some time. Society doesn’t need dependable cars than can drive on paved roads, it needs a vehicle that can traipse any geology it encounters. Could be a car, could be a plane, might be a dolphin and chances are high that the best fit is going to be something that I cannot think of because basically I am a Ford-mobile too.

We do a lot more rote learning than just the chanting of numbers. We learn facts; we teach one-dimensional knowledge and test by stating the outcome. We learn the names of countries, places and people; declarative statements. If you were keen on biology you can probably tell me the six types of feather on a magpie but have you ever been asked to describe the birds’ experience of flight?

I am terrible at naming places and countries because as soon as I learned how to interpret a map and found out that every atlas has an index I no longer saw the point in stuffing my head with these nonsensical lists of names when there was a perfectly good list out there. Nowadays, Google is the index of everything. Filling impressionable heads with whatever listings of fact is a terrible waste of space. What would be useful is teaching them to actively seek knowledge. How and where to find the facts, how to judge information, possible interpretations of ‘the facts’ and how to apply them.

Which lands us in the middle of How? How do we teach these things (and how do we test them)? If we want to instil the process instead of providing declarative statements; what do we do? Perhaps we should question the thinking process and then trust the outcome. The educational paradigm must be redefined as a continuous interaction between teacher and pupil instead of the sender-receiver model it is now based on. At the moment, this is not what we teach our teachers.

Have peek at what changes possibly -hopefully- lie ahead with 21st century skills
or join the discussion here (Dutch)

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