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"'My time is being squandered online because I'm not getting experience points,' Justin Hall declared, introducing the subject of his Masters project at the USC Annenberg Center. (link)
Justin has fun online, works online, studies and loves and plays online -- and on his phone and his Playstation. Why can't the whole thing be a game -- a social game and a knowledge game? While he goes about his day's surfing, blogging, chatting, tagging, gaming, posting, uploading, downloading, Justin wants to experience the same visible sense of goal-oriented progress he gets in World of Warcraft when he looks at his screens and sees exactly what level his activities have earned him. What if you could get points of various kinds for various activities, and compete with your friends? What if you and your friends and their friends could constitute a sufficiently large population to add collaborative filtering to the mix -- making recommendations for things to learn, see, hear play, do?
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We're already being surveilled by police and marketers. Why not surveille each other and make a game of it? ("I reserve the right to fit the entire Internet in there," Hall said, during the discussion following his presentation.)"
http://www.passivelymultiplayer.com/ is Justin's website. Pretty sparse, but it's a neat idea. He wrote up a paper, in which he outlines his plan.
He explains,
” Passively Multiplayer Online Games was first explored during a talk at South by Southwest, in Austin Texas, in March 2006 (Hall, SXSW, 2006). At that time, the idea revolved around mapping locations of people surfing so you could have a sense of co-adventuring through web space with other web surfers. By June 2006, "Passively Multiplayer" had taken shape as a computer system that followed you and gave you experience point levels for your chosen activities online (Hall, Aula, 2006).”
It's a cool concept, I think - this sort of social networking while you do other stuff, combined with some kind of gamist scorekeeping for what you're doing. And I’ve had a lot of fun imagining quests while at work today.
I wrote to Justin, and said that I thought a Boy/Girl-scout style ‘Merit Badge’ system seemed better suited to this virtual troop of etherscouts he was trying to establish, more than a class-and-level based fantasy system. However, there is a certain geeky something about the possibility of someday saying, “I just leveled up. I’m now a level 12 barbelithian.” |
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