Stick in there

Comment by cameron michael keys on March 26, 2010 at 2:14am

What I'm saying is basically that the point system is drives a cultural phenomena of PERCEIVED VALUE. It's not that the points ACTUALLY mean something. it's pretty clear from what you've been posting that they're not determining the final outcome of rewards and collaborative mentorships. However, the perceived value of points is a subtle actuality in the gaming environment. By posting content about the lack of value associated with points, you attempt to alter the perceived value of the point system. Well, in my opinion, despite what you say, the perceived value of points is vital to the interactivity of the design space. Points are motivating. Am I wrong?

Comment by Wintermute on March 26, 2010 at 3:12am

I guess my intention for the post was to expose the real meaning of the game.

Cameron, yes you are correct. The issue with reward systems is that once the reward has been taken away the behavior that it was promoting ends. For example if one wanted to encourage a child to read more books, give that child 10$ for every book that they read. Once you stop giving them the 10$/book however, they will stop reading. It is a far better plan to instead teach the child the merit of reading.

In the context of humanitarian work this means that it would be a better system to teach and educate people to help those in need. Well those systems are in place and they don't work. The only reason that I am here, playing this game is because it is just that, a game. So I say again, yes you are right.

The point system is vital. The reason that this reward system will work however, where as the 10$/book system doesn't is because Jane McGonnigal wants to create a world where there is always a point system in play, so the rewards never end. So once more, yes you are right, points are motivating...

...
...
but something about that idea. That I will remain on my ass until someone waves a cookie under my nose, makes me sick. I get it though, the ends justify the means...

Comment by Thomas Pinkerton on March 26, 2010 at 3:50am

"Fine Daniel LaLiberte, can you gave us links to such games? Because I wonder if they are Fun to play."

My personal example of this is Left 4 Dead. True, you can break off from your group to get more kills/points/whatever... but you'll likely be picked off by the AI if you do. The game was designed to force group cooperation. I'd argue that this one does as well, even with the points system, which encourages helping out others to get help in return.

Comment by Thomas Pinkerton on March 26, 2010 at 4:21am

No, the purpose is to survive, not kill the most zombies. The stats are largely just bragging rights -- there's no magical success rating given to you over your teammates if you do worse or better. And the best zombie-killers are a wash without teammates to watch their back for them. Ask people who play in the hardest modes or in survival mode -- you need people who will put the team over themselves.

You can play as the zombies, in an online team v team mode, but that's still team v. team. Within your team, if you strive to do better than your teammates, you will fail. If you strive to supplement your teammates for the greater good of the team, you will succeed. It's the old John Nash a la "A Beautiful Mind" saying, "The best outcome is when people do what's best for themselves and the group."

Give me three other teammates over any one zombie-killing god-player in L4D any day. I know they'll have my back when things get really rough.

Comment by Wintermute on March 26, 2010 at 5:05am

This discussion is getting really of subject but whatever.

Your playing the exact game you are looking for. The problems are things like hunger, the object is to solve it. We aren't going to get anywhere by competing against one another. We need to collaborate so that we can solve an issue that none of use alone could solve.

Comment by Alex Stovell on March 26, 2010 at 6:19am

Hey Wintermute :) Looks like we've been having some similar thoughts on this - I wrote a Keep Going - Don't Give Up! post yesterday which was partly about my own mixed feelings and also about some of those more negative posts you mentioned. Good to see you're sticking with it :)

Comment by Nick Heyming on March 26, 2010 at 6:22am

I'm gonna powervote you whether you like it or not!

I completely agree with your sentiments... don't know what more I could add that hasn't been said, other than lets all really start collaborating, not just playing lip service to it.

Comment by cameron michael keys on March 26, 2010 at 9:03am

In life don't you think the weird thing is someone trying NOT to provide a reward system? For example, what is reading? -- You sit alone somewhere, focus your consciousness on scanning a piece of paper, usually indoors, and process the script in order to perform symbolic operations of reading comprehension. In the context of public education, especially, this is not the greatest activity humans have developed. It emerges as a basis for education from the monasteries of Europe. There are several big human development issues that have to be down-played in order to focus children on learning to read full-time.
Obviously paying a child ten dollars to read a book is not a wise thing to do. Here's a subtle point: I think the best way to teach a child to read is to do this after they have learned to enjoy the substratum of experience in which all phenonmena arise, including the opportunity to read. I'm talking about some form of raw conscious awareness of embodiment. This is why I like education systems like the Waldorf curriculum. The first years of formative education are spent developing kinesthetic awareness, experiencing the body as a musical instrument, the hands as organs of artistic creation, et cetera. Children who have to be rewarded for reading at the age of six or seven, or ten or twelve, through the incentive of money are unfortunate victims of a wayward culture. I DO think children need 'cookies' under their noses, but I think when education is done properly (a tender concept, I know) the imagined rewards arise naturally and spontaneously, in the child's own mind, not from the external advice of an instructor -- from the fundamental structure of experience. Children reward THEMSELVES for what they do. They have their own "karma" systems, built in to their physiology, into their mindstreams. For example, learning to communicate through body language and spoken words I think are organic processes of a natural organism. When children play the game well, the behavioral response they get from their parents and peers, from the child's perspective, is the reward they desire. The perceived value of that interaction is beyond any ten dollars you could give to them. It has more flexibility. So when a child learns to read, if they instantly are able to use that knowledge to communicate in a new way with the environment -- if they can publish their own stories, for example, or write essays to children in other parts of the world -- this might increase their desire to continue reading. Also, if it sparks internal visions, I think this is another incentive. For example, when I read The Neverending Story by Michael Ende, I was 22 years old. I had never experienced such creative visualizations as are described in that book! Now, why didn't some teacher in 4th grade utilize the visualizations in that book to teach me about the joys of reading?! It boggles my mind that we want children to read more, but we don't free their minds to read in exciting ways! There's more than one way to read a book!!!

I also think collective play can be a natural shared state of culture-making. What we've got in our world today is collective play taken to cutthroat extremes of mechanized protocols. Just as in my reply to Panamericana's questionnaire, where I suggest that undeveloped local cultures opt out of participating in democracies and financial markets forced upon them from an unfairly rigid, north-atlantic perspective, I would also suggest to children in general that they opt out of our current overarching world structure. If children could band together democratically to critique our existing educational systems, they would blow our ears off with criticism. It's not in their best interest to play the game we're playing, in my current view.

Obviously, what I'm suggesting presupposes a way that things could be, that I cannot quite articulate.

I think Jane McGonigal is wishing for a world in which collective play can percolate through the rigid unfairness of our current world order -- a world order that is always attempting to call itself 'new' without being new at all. Collective play is a state you can witness when children are raised properly -- yes, properly. There are tendencies to domination and submissiveness in the play of children, but within this natural continuum of collective play these tendencies are seen to be the malleable stuff of relationships, not permanent, and not overly traumatic from a mature perspective of a child's life-cycle. Although I don't know exactly what it means to raise children properly, anyone can sense intuitively that raising children properly does not mean paying them money to read books. So when we find ourselves seriously considering such a proposal at a parent-teacher association meeting, this should be a red flag. Your alarm bells should be ringing in such a case. Parents and children, and adults that don't have children -- all these parties need to have a deep heart-to-heart talk about what children need. It's the same with our current Evoke gaming environment. Surely the administrators are asking themselves what the gamers need. And obviously the gamers are talking about what they need. Do we have a shared discourse that we can speak through in order to construct the game as it's being played? That's the famous problem with language games, from a philosophical perspective -- the famous case of Neurath's boat. Everyone needs to be very gentle and caring in this context, and also very smart. It will work better for all of us if we play nice.

I have respect for people trying to imagine more effective ways of teaching. My favorite so far is Ralph Abraham, co-founder of chaos mathematics, professor emeritus at UC Santa Cruz. Ralph built the curriculum for the Ross School in upstate New York in collaboration with his friend William Irwin Thompson. They came up with interesting ideas, such as: teach children geometry before algebra, because this allows them to work in 3D space with architectural principles that are closer to the natural groundwork and historical progression of human culture than abstract mathematical formulas. We tend to do it the opposite way in our culture, thinking children must learn algebra because our particular context is one of banking and reading. Ralph Abraham has some good ideas about teaching, he and William Irwin Thompson.

I think we should work as professional educators to produce an experimentalized context called the Schoolyard or the School that provides a baseline or natural state of play and exploration. The dichotomy between the playground and the classroom is I think fundamentally flawed. We need to bridge that gap if we want children to learn and read with continuous pleasure. There needs to be a baseline reality established as the School that mimics the mature experience of the substratum of space (Aristotle called it prime matter) in which all reality phenomena arise. This sounds so weird, I know, but try to hear me. Most adults don't actually have a visceral experience of their connection as organism to the substratum of space in which all reality phenomena are arising. Once you're out of the rhythm it is difficult to be re-introduced directly to the perception of this fundamentally natural state. I'm a victim of culture myself!

The natural organism has I think a sense of seriousness and of play, existing simultaneously in a continuum of consciousness. Laughter and survival exist on a single continuum in the mind of the organism. Understand that physically all children need are the 8 amino acids the body cannot readily require without intake of external food sources. Emotionally children need support systems that envelope the world of competition. They still need competition, they just need support systems that underlie and go beyond competition. That's what the substratum or groundwork-oriented approach to education should provide.

I think it is also this way with gaming, even with Urgent Evoke. We need competition, but we need an overarching support system that guides us through the gaming process. Not overbearing support systems, but gentle, subtle support systems. I think the comic book is a great thing for starters, because the comic book keeps us grounded in the temporal sweep of the game design -- beyond our current time constraints, in the realm of the realized goal.

et cetera, et cetera.
peace // cameron

Comment by Kevin DiVico on March 26, 2010 at 12:30pm

wintermute, good post and to all the others good comments. I could spend the day just replying ot Cameron's post on education theory, technology for education, spatial immersive leaning environments, and social engineering on a global scale.

I am not going to do that as I am back after almost after 7 days away and have 124 messages to attend to. What I will point out is this - competition or perceived value works, it gets people to play and in a game like this the goal of the designers is to open people eyes who would have never seen the information on social innovation or make the connections or have it become personal enough to give a dam.

as for games that work where there is no winner based on points look to single player puzzle or casual games.

In the end through remember, this is a game, a social ARG that the world bank commission and Jane McGonigal Directed based on her previous work such as superstruct and her many appearances at thought conventions and fellowship at the Institute of the feature. (sidenote- if you want to learn how to play the game of life in the world of social networking , watch Jane McGoinigals career it is a master work I mean that in a good way.)

Ok so its a game, its fun, there are real world prizes and opportunity to compete for, and you make friends. Out of this real world NPO's and Social entrepreneurship business may be started but even if none are, as long as one person who never knew or gave a dam about the problems coming down the pike see this and starts making a difference the game has served its purpose.

Comment by Gene Becker on March 26, 2010 at 5:41pm

Agent Wintermute, thanks for sparking such a thoughtful discussion, there's some really insightful stuff running in this thread. No +1's per your request, but I have featured this post.

You folks are right, EVOKE is a game, and it's more than a game. It's about having fun (hopefully you are!). It's about learning, and stretching, and creating social innovation in a large scale distributed community. It's about discovering new capabilities within yourself, and making new connections that you can take with you after the first season ends. Nobody has ever done this before, in quite this way. We are ALL learning -- so when 'Mute say "stick in there" we say that's a mighty dub, mon.

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