{"id":2238,"date":"2014-08-01T14:44:45","date_gmt":"2014-08-01T14:44:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/memetechnology.org\/?p=3166"},"modified":"2014-08-01T14:44:45","modified_gmt":"2014-08-01T14:44:45","slug":"changing-direction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/archaeology\/2014\/08\/01\/changing-direction\/","title":{"rendered":"Changing direction?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I’ve been doing a lot of thinking around my participation in the Portus MOOC a few weeks back. This post is an attempt to get my thoughts in order, so\u00a0I apologise in advance for any disjointedness.<\/p>\n

First of all, let me edit in some thoughts on locatative gaming, prompted by a Guardian article on social gaming<\/a> I read today while I should have been bashing this post into shape. Describing the new game from Bungie, Destiny (which is of course a console\u00a0game, not a location based one) she says<\/p>\n

On a practical level, though, \u201csocial\u201d is a business model. It means content engineered to be \u201cliked\u201d or shared. It means fundamentally we spend anxious time doing free labour for social infrastructures, providing our personal lives, disseminating links, making those platform-holders wealthy with our exhibitionism and interaction. When it comes to games, it\u2019s increasingly on the player to create the meaning in their experience.<\/p>\n

And passionate players provide unpaid labor to games development, too: games are being released in beta and updated in public, so that the end product will better meet their needs. Thus the eager front-line beta testers mitigate the expensive risk of developing a commercial tech product, just through the fuel of their social behavior.<\/p>\n

[...]<\/p>\n

It is social in that business sense: you must collaborate with and keep up with your friends, ensure that your statistics and equipment \u2013 your fitness for competition \u2013 are ever increasing. You participate excitedly in this capitalistic metaphor.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Having “played” Ingress<\/a> for a couple of weeks now, I’m beginning to feel the same frustrations as the author. I simple don’t have the time and dedication to labour on behalf of Google and for the benefit of my fellow players. I know what I ought to do to have an enjoyable experience is recruit freinds and family into the game so that we can play as a team, or build relationships with other players to do the same. But its too much bother. Its not for my generation, I’ve concluded.<\/p>\n

In the Guardian, Leigh Alexander concludes:<\/p>\n

I believe in the potential for games to create incredible collaborative environments for play. But let\u2019s think about what a \u201csocial\u201d play experience would look like if it served us, the users, and not the platform, whose only real desire is to have us use it, to have us serve and propagate it, to lend hours of our time to its cold lunar ecosystem.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What would a locatative game look like, that served\u00a0the users rather than the platform? We’ll have to wait and see.<\/p>\n

Right now though, I’ve been thinking about how the Portus MOOC might better serve its users. I’ve been looking at all the comments that were posted by students on the MOOC, and though I’ve not yet done any proper text analysis, my impression is that the Portus team\u00a0received great praise from participants, but there are\u00a0two apparent challenges for web-based learning:<\/p>\n