Article briefly describes three-games framework and gives an overview of problems could be solved using this framework. It is only a problem-setter article, not a silver-bullet solution, and it contains neither receipts nor solutions, but ideas how such a solution could be brewed.
Participating in various online environments, we put together a framework that guides our development efforts. The framework describes environments where multiple users create, save and connect objects. The following are questions and problems we propose to tackle at the workshop, with examples from games we play and develop.
Three games
There are three classes of games in multi-user online environments:
- Artifact games: creating an object by an artifact form
- Protocol games: creating connections between artifacts by a protocol form
- Net games: creating meaningful systems or nets out of protocols by a net form
Forms can be given or emergent. We call environments supporting net games brownies, a word play on relatively free and partially random “Brownian motion” of participants and entities in such environments. For example, blog entries or comments are artifacts; flash mobs make a protocol; and a group developing flash mob protocols may create a net, with particular styles, boundaries and rituals. The three games are defined subjectively through participants’ roles and actions. One person’s net game can be “reified” as another person’s artifact game.
To liberate a form
Depending on the form that defines them, artifact, protocol and even net games can be very rigid and closed. For example, a simple online test (“What kind of an elf are you?”) is a choice among a few preset pictures with short descriptions. Sticker artifact-games combine elements of various types into a picture (heromachine.com). Since combinatorial complexity growth exponentially as the number of element types increases, the artifacts created in these games are perceived as more unique and personal, which is highly desirable to most users.
We want to free the artifact form even further, allowing creation of new representations. Moreover, our focus is on games going beyond the environment’s initial forms, or liberating forms. All large online environments are sometimes used in emergent, non-intended ways. For example, in WoW there are business meetings (“Is the World of Wacraft the new golf?"), sociological studies, university courses, and epidemiology modeling. How can we help users liberate game forms in the environments we design?
Entry issue: free and rigid forms
Using existing forms, especially popular and familiar forms, or forms based on universally understood metaphors (to kill a monster; to make a friend) allows for easy entry of new people into artifact, protocol and net games. Simple tests are popular among blog novices as an accessible form for creating blog entry artifacts. Rigid forms supporting easy entry, and free forms supporting user development, should be considered in their dialectic relationship. To liberate a form means to support creativity and learning beyond the initial entry level, yet free forms make entry more difficult. Do free forms make people who try to enter the environment feel more “noobish”? If our goal is to liberate forms, how do we support those who do not feel comfortable in the novice position?
Rewards, progress and motivation
On the same principle we support user-created representations in artifact games, we focus on user-generated rewards in protocol and net games. Creating rewards may mean more learning, and be more fun, than doing what it takes to receive rewards. We distinguish rewards from tracking learning progress, which also may be highly motivating. Other motivators we consider are representations of human connections, that is, protocol games themselves, and exploration of the environment (a kind of learning that can be tracked). What mechanisms can motivate users to play the environment’s games? There is an issue of reward, learning, and human connection transfer between environments. How can we make accomplishments and progress within a particular environment more universally recognizable and thus more globally rewarding?
Gaming as a worldview
Game is a type of creativity and an intentional way of participating in an environment. “Intentional” here does not refer to the intentionality of learning within artifact, protocol or net games. In every environment, there is an issue of metaphor death and the difficulty of playing the games thereafter, at the stage of knowledge formalization. It is our hypothesis and our hope that freeing forms can support playing and further learning even with formalized post-metaphor understanding. There are several more functions we place on liberating forms. For example, working with free forms should help prevent “runaway imagery” and being stuck in the metaphor stage. Also, free forms can take an activity from a purely instrumental (means to an end) plane onto the intentional, creative environment participation that we define as game.
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©2006 by Brownie Movement.
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