Can Open Government Be Gamed? If information is power, the first step to gaining power is to get the right data. The Obama administration is a big proponent of opening up government data and making it digitally available. Today at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City, the government’s new chief information officer Vivek Kundra announced USAspending.gov, a new site which launched today that tracks government spending with charts and lists ranking the largest government contractors (Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, etc.) and assistance recipients (Department of Healthcare Services, New York State Dept. of Health, Texas Health & Human Services Commission, etc.). There is also the Data.gov project, which is attempting to digitize government data and make it available in its raw form for citizens and companies to sift through.
Digital tools are bringing participation back to democracy, or at least that is the idea. Except there is one big problem: indifference. Will the rest of us let them? John Hunter: Teaching with the World Peace Game. Reality Drop: Spread Science about Climate Change, Global Warming. World Peace Game Foundation. Harnessing Collective Intelligence with Games 2012. Jane McGonigal: The game that can give you 10 extra years of life.
SuperBetter. How games can organize millions of people to accomplish great things (book excerpt) By Adam L. Penenberg On October 4, 2013 Look around. Games are everywhere. Start with that carton of orange juice in your fridge, which might advertise it’s worth three points, redeemable for discounts and prizes. It’s a game. What about frequent-flier miles, which are games that reward loyalty? Mega Millions, Powerball, Take Five and other state lotteries? Peer at the game-like iconography of your iPhone and you might recognize it as reminiscent of old video games like “Pac-Man” and “Space Invaders.” The term “Baader-Meinhoff” describes that feeling you get when you hear or read a word you’ve never encountered before then subsequently notice it all around you.
This is what my new book, Play at Work: How Games Inspire Breakthrough Thinking, is about. Why couldn’t he get people to solve every problem, willingly, and for free? Von Ahn knew to accomplish all this would require vast numbers of people. Von Ahn has a novel approach to work. On its face, it might sound preposterous. But how?
Synthesis: How Games Could Save the World. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, Jane McGonigal, Penguin Press, 2011 Game Developers Conference,www.gdconf.com Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab,www.povertyactionlab.org Innovations for Poverty Action,www.poverty-action.org I have a confession: I am a games geek. I’ve lost untold hours of my life at various developmental stages wandering through forests in Dungeons & Dragons, conquering nations in Risk, and shooting imps in Doom. I am not alone. Like any workers whose industry has been disrupted, game designers want to know what to do.
Social games, Koster notes, are excellent at harnessing gift giving (core mechanic #20). Top 10 Social Gamification Examples and Cases that Save the World. Ingress. BigGames. The last few years have seen the blossoming of real world computer games that allow players to learn about important global issues. Here are a bunch of them. (If you know of others, please let us know so we can post them.) Real Lives is a unique, interactive life sim that enables you to live one of billions of lives in any country in the world. Through statistically accurate events, Real Lives brings to life different cultures, political systems, economic opportunities, personal decisions, health issues, family issues, schooling, jobs, religions, geography, war, peace, and more! FoodForce teaches about hunger and the global food situation by putting you in charge of an emergency food mission. NationStates is a nation simulation game. Darfur is Dying is a narrarive based simulation where the player, from the perspective of a displaaced Darfurian, negotiates forces that threaten the survival of his or her refugee camp.
C.F.O.I.R. Earth OS. Project 10X: A Game-Changing Approach to Growing 21st Century 'Leadership Everywhere' Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world | Video on TED.co. EarthGame—Welcome. EarthGame™ is a massively multiplayer online strategic design and planning real-world "game. " It is also a set of tools for recognizing, defining and solving global and local problems onboard Spaceship Earth. It combines the vast and growing wealth of global data available on the web with sophisticate data visualization techniques, embeds these within a powerful strategic planning and design methodology, and places all this into a gaming context.
The EarthGame is being developed by EarthGame Inc. a non-profit research and education organization. For more information and to learn how you can get involved, contact us here. EarthGame Tools The dashboard of a vehicle describes the present state of the condition of the vehicle— it’s speed, remaining fuel, engine temperature, etc. Creating the EarthGame. Proposal for a World Brain Institute and Development of a Global Game.
Robert David Steele Vivas December 26, 2012 [Editor's Note: The World Brain was proposed in collection of essays by H. G. Wells, wherein Wells describes his vision of the world brain: essentially a free, synthetic, universal, authoritative, and permanent "World Encyclopaedia" very much like today's Wikipedia. The Need Four developments converged in 2009 to suggest the end of the industrial era in which treaties and military force were the principal means of governing human affairs; There is an urgent need for a new means of hybrid self-governance that reflects the diversity of human interests and capabilities. The fragmentation of knowledge, and the gap between people with power and people with knowledge, is the root cause of our universal failure to deal responsibly with the ten high-level threats to humanity.
World Information Summits and Global Knowledge Summits have not addressed the core need: to connect all human minds with one another and with all information in all languages. 1. 2. Story-Based Games as Transformational Media. Story-Based Games as Transformational Media In John Stewart’s posting, “Flow Engineering using computer games,” he begins to “sketch some ways in which computer game frameworks can be used to promote the positive development of humanity, both as individuals and collectively.”
The general subject of transformative media is directly relevant to another conference venue, Social Approaches to Consciousness, and together they become a mandate for meaningful media. The term media covers a lot of ground, and it is by virtue of an infinite array of mediation that humans learn about their environment, themselves, their cultural values, and the meaning underlying the patterns of their lives. I think that the discovery of relative meaning (personal or collective) is the essence of the “Flow” experience in its many forms.
Why story-based games? Carl Jung understood that dreams have all the elements of good Greek drama and that this dramatic structure provides a framework for analysis. Games and the Common Core: Two Movements That Need Each Other. Recently I witnessed two expert panels discussing critical issues for our educational system -- on the same day. The first one was on implementing the Common Core for English-language learners; the second was on how games offer an exciting new frontier for student learning and engagement. In the morning, I listened in to an Alliance for Excellent Education panel including Stanford professor Kenji Hakuta and Carrie Heath Phillips, director of Common Core implementation at the Council of Chief State School Officers. That evening, I went to Stanford to hear a panel on Education’s Digital Future that included professors James Paul Gee of Arizona State and Constance Steinkuehler of the University of Wisconsin - Madison.
I was struck by two things: 1) How neither community of experts mentioned the other, and 2) how these two "movements" urgently need to work together. They need each other. Student Choice Dr. Video: Constance Steinkuehler describes her research. Inventing the Future And Dr. Hive-mind solves tasks using Google Glass ant game - tech - 05 August 2013. GOOGLE Glass could soon be used for more than just snapping pics of your lunchtime sandwich. A new game will connect Glass wearers to a virtual ant colony vying for prizes by solving real-world problems that vex traditional crowdsourcing efforts.
Crowdsourcing is most famous for collaborative projects like Wikipedia and "games with a purpose" like FoldIt, which turns the calculations involved in protein folding into an online game. All require users to log in to a specific website on their PC. Now Daniel Estrada of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and Jonathan Lawhead of Columbia University in New York are seeking to bring crowdsourcing to Google's wearable computer, Glass. The pair have designed a game called Swarm! That puts a Glass wearer in the role of an ant in a colony. Swarm! To gain further resources for their colony, players can carry out real-world tasks. Estrada and Lawhead hope that by turning tasks such as these into games, Swarm!
More From New Scientist. Wisdom, Games, and Mindfulness. Gamification to improve our world: Yu-kai Chou at TEDxLausanne. Catalysts for Change: Paths out of Poverty. Game for Change: Fate of the World. New Computer Game Simulates Challenges of Global Warming A British company has developed a new computer game that allows players to save the planet from the effects of global warming — at least in a simulated setting.
“Fate of the World,” produced by the gaming company Red Redemption, places players at the head of a global environmental organization — a “UN with teeth” — charged with saving the world over the next 200 years in the face of rising temperatures, diminishing resources, disappearing ecosystems, and growing population. Using actual climate models and data from scientists at the University of Oxford, players can confront these challenges globally through a variety of policies — including cap-and-trade, promotion of renewable energy, and geoengineering schemes.
“In many ways, it’s just a very complex puzzle,” Matt Giles Griffiths, one of the designers, told the New York Times. “The first few times you try it, you’ll get absolutely creamed.” Shoes for plantar fasciitis. Welcome to the Superstruct Game Archive. Manifesto: The 21st Century Will Be Defined By Games.
Previous centuries have been defined by novels and cinema. In a bold manifesto we’re proud to debut here on Kotaku, game designer Eric Zimmerman states that this century will be defined by games.ore Below is Zimmerman’s manifesto, which will also appear in the upcoming book The Gameful World from MIT press. We invite you to read it, to think about it and even to annotate it. Zimmerman’s manifesto is followed by an exploration of the ideas behind it, in an essay by author and professor Heather Chaplin. In the days to come, we’ll be expanding the discussion even further with perspectives from other gamers and game-thinkers. But let’s start with the big ideas. Let’s start with a manifesto by gamers, about games, for the world we live in… Manifesto for a Ludic Century by Eric Zimmerman Games are ancient.
Like making music, telling stories, and creating images, playing games is part of what it means to be human. Digital technology has given games a new relevance. We live in a world of systems. Win the Planet – games that change the world! Top 10 Social Gamification Examples and Cases that Save the World. Urgent Evoke - A crash course in changing the world. The Playpump: How a Simple Gamification Concept can Save the (third) World. Loyalty 3.0 | by Rajat Paharia, Founder of Bunchball & Father of Gamification. iGAM4ER. The Game of Collaboration. HipBone Games Welcome. It's been a while: click on the update button for details. Welcome to HipBone's site. The HipBone Games are so simple a child can play them: if you've ever thought, "and that reminds me", or "isn't that like such and such", you've already got the basic idea. We call them "HipBone Games" because of the old song, "the hip-bone connected to the thigh-bone", and because they are games of connection, of the links between ideas.
The HipBone Games site offers you a variety of simple boards, and playing our games is as easy -- and as subtle -- as mapping your ideas onto the board positions. It's pretty much like using one of those "clustering" devices you find in creativity seminars and problem-solving workshops -- one idea goes in a little balloon over here, and it's linked to another idea in a little balloon over there... Here's what you'll find in the rest of our site: Mind-to-mind games Invitation to play Purposes Computer games Hesse GBGs HipBone Games.
PSFK Gaming For Good Report. Games for Change | Games for Change is the leading global advocate for supporting and making games for social impact. Games for Change. New logo - 06/19/11 Games for Change (also known as G4C) is a movement and community of practice dedicated to using digital games for social change. An individual game may also be referred to as a "game for change" if it is produced by this community or shares its ideals. "Games for Change" is also the name for the non-profit organization which is building the field by providing support, visibility, and shared resources to individuals and organizations using digital games for social change.[1] Overview[edit] Games for Change is often considered a branch of serious games focused on social issues and social change. History[edit] The movement first emerged as Games for Change at a Serious Issues, Serious Games' conference held at New York Academy of Sciences on June 8, 2004.[2] The invitation-only event gathered 40+ foundations, academics and nonprofits for a day "to mobilize support for a medium with growing importance for nonprofits.
" The organization[edit] Current leadership[edit] Introducing a Game-Based Curriculum in Higher Ed. Continuing from last week’s post about “The Gamification of Education”, this week we bring you a guest post from Justin Marquis, who examines the why’s and how’s of incorporating game based learning elements into the higher education curriculum. The gamification movement is in full-effect with its fair share of proponents and opponents. Those in favor of the idea most often cite student motivation and the ability of games to simulate real world circumstances so that learners can safely explore these environments without endangering themselves or others. Those on the other side of the argument think gamification is just a fad and that there is no real transfer of what is learned in games to the real world.
There is enough research on both sides to support either point of view, but perhaps those most opposed to the incorporation of games into their curriculum just don’t know where to begin? Why Games in Higher Ed? About Kelly Walsh Print This Post. Educating Players: Are Games the Future of Education? CAMBRIDGE, Mass. —Smart phones, tablets and video game systems are often seen as distractions to school children in developed countries, which tend to adhere to a strict teacher-student educational model.
At Technology Review‘s Emerging Technologies (EmTech) conference here on October 25, a panel of technologists and educators posited that it’s time to embrace students’ use of such technologies and rethink learning in both developed and developing countries. “The issue isn’t education or schools—it’s learning,” panelist Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman emeritus of M.I.T.’s Media Lab and the chairman of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) foundation, said.
“The fork in the road is the difference between knowing and understanding. Not a new argument, but Negroponte’s approach to resolving it has been novel. Instead, within four minutes the village children had opened the boxes and learned how to turn on the tablets, he said. Credit: paz.ca/Flickr. The Gamification of Education and Cognitive, Social, and Emotional Learning Benefits. Games for Impact - by IdeaScale | Popular. Can a mobile game help find the cure for cancer? Amazon, Google and Facebook hope so. Games that Can Change the World. Logiciel de gestion de comportement - ClassDojo. Ludicité - Gamification et jeux dans l'espace public. Socialgames4good-big_0.png (Image PNG, 4019x2541 pixels) - Redimensionnée (31%) GTI-Perspectives-Game_On.pdf. Social Gaming for Social Change: Introduction and Opportunities | SocInfo. These kickass games let you do real-life science.