Blurring Game Boundaries

Justin Hall on Passively Multiplayer Online Games where rewards and levels are gained for surfing websites that were valued. The passive part is rewards for just surfing, but there’s active stuff, too, where you can spend points that you passively accumulate on tools and mines, etc. “Internet is a battle between order and chaos. There’s people who want to help you find information and people who only want to distract you.” Also covered other cool web/game techs like Askville, Attent, and itty Bitty RPG. These are totally cool. I wonder if I can use them in the tech class I teach for the Teacher Education Program as a way to encourage participation in Web 2.0 stuff…

Bill Tomlinson on the EcoRaft Project, a museum exhibit that demonstrates the complexity of ecological restoration, emphasizing species interdependency, sources of biodiversity, conservation, and cooperation. Three tablet PCs acted as rafts to carry species over from one island/station to another. Totally neat exhibit. I hope OMSI or Pacific Science Center gets it some day. 🙂

Deborah Fields on distributed expertise across settings with a group of tweens who use Whyville and also interact outside of game in an after school club. The intersection between on-screen and off-screen life is really interesting. I should use their analyses as a model for my own research since they’re doing chat log analysis and video analysis, etc. 😛

Erica Halverson summarized/responded to this panel and it was great how she highlighted how easy it is to gain access through multiple entry points into games for certain kinds of games. The kind of stuff that is really the opposite of the huge barriers to high-end raiding, for example. Are more casual or passive games a way to level the playing field more?