Fade to Play

On Sunday, Bart Simon gave a talk entitled “Boyhood Spaces: Play and Social Navigation through Video Games by Shanly Dixon and Bart Simon. It was one of my favourite talks and he is an excellent speaker as he incorporated space and place concepts. The abstract of his talk is available here.

Along with other scholars investigating children’s relationship with new media forms and technologies (Buckingham 2000, Flynn 2003, Ito 2004, Jenkins 1998, Mitchell and Reid-Walsh 2002, Mc Namee 2000, Sefton-Green 1998, Walkerdine 1998), we wish to create an analytical space for the investigation of the role of video games in the mediation and production of kinds of postmodern childhood. Drawing on our ethnographic study of a small group of boys playing console games over several months, this paper argues against a view of digital game space in terms of disjunctive other, parallel or virtual worlds (e.g. Foucault’s heterotopias). Instead, we wish to propose a model of children’s play that acknowledges the hybrid, fluid and continuous nature of game spaces with the other social, imaginative and physical spaces the players may occupy.

He spoke about whether other spaces exist during game play for boys. His student (Shanly) observed boys playing video games to better understand how they played the game. What they determined is that “playing the game” may not have anything to do with the game.

I’ve been busy at the DiGRA 2005 conference from last Thursday - Sunday and haven’t had much time to blog. It was such a good feeling being there. Everyone was very friendly and I felt a part of something that was dynamic. I am really looking forward for Digra 2007 which will probably be in Asia and on Sunday I joined DiGRA as a student member not because there are any really special benefits at this time but because I want to help shape digra to include urban and pervasive games. I have written notes on the talks I attended and will post summaries over the next few days

Today we had Robert Harle speak in our Ubicomp group meeting. It was very kind of him to do that as he was on holiday and he gave an excellent talk about the BAT system and his current research.

Deploying and Evaluating a Location-Aware System R. K. Harle and A. Hopper, University of Cambridge, UK

Location-aware systems are typically deployed on a small scale and evaluated technically, in terms of absolute errors. In this paper, the authors present their experience of deploying an indoor location system (the Bat system) over a larger area and running it for a period exceeding two years.

A number of technical considerations are highlighted: a need to consider aesthetics throughout deployment, the disadvantages of specialising sensors for location only, the need for autonomous maintenance of the computational world model, the dangers in coinciding physical and symbolic boundaries, the need to design for space usage rather than space and the need to incorporate feedback mechanisms and power management. An evaluation of long term user experiences is presented, derived from a survey, logged usage data, and empirical observations. Statistically, it is found that 35% wear their Bat daily, 35% characterise their Bat as useful, privacy concerns are rare for almost 90% of users, and users cite the introduction of more applications and the adoption of the system by other users as their chief incentives to be tracked.

This paper aims to highlight the need to evaluate large-scale deployments of such systems both technically and through user studies.

Relevance: One of the lessons he learnt from his research is to think in terms of maximising context gathering rather than location and to be aware of the distinction between context and location.

John Geraci has created an urban style of tagging in an application called foundcity. Unfortunately it is only available in New York City:

Foundcity is a social mapping tool for creating a personalized map of your life on-the-fly. Using your mobile phone, you “tag” or capture photos throughout the day, label them with any words you want, and send them to your map. At home, you access and customize your map, which you can share with friends, keep private, or publish openly.

Relevance: an example of play and tagging in your everyday life, see mobile play short paper from Ubicomp 2003 panel.

This AP article on Yahoo news about tagging in the urban environment through graffiti that draws you to a website or email address.

One of the most popular of the new projects, Grafedia, translates seemingly ordinary urban graffiti into works of art. A piece of grafedia (multimedia graffiti) is either written as an e-mail address ending in “(at)grafedia.net,” or in blue underlined text, mimicking the look of a hyperlink on a Web page.

This is another project out of NYU Telecommunications Program by John Geraci, a recent graduate. This is the same program which spawned dodgeball and !cellphedia. These guys are definitely onto something there.

Geraci likened grafedia to putting a message in a bottle. “You don’t know who will find it and uncork it, and it doesn’t really matter,” he said. “It’s an act of anonymous, artistic sharing, done with strangers in your city.”

Just another example of re-appropriating urban space to create a shared, meaningful place for providing people with cool knowledge in their everyday life.

Below are two contrasting articles on whether technology is helping or hurting the next generation. The first is an article found on technology review that discusses how preschool and kindergarten kids (about 23%) are being exposed to the internet.

“Young students don’t differentiate between the face-to-face world and the Internet world,” said Susan Patrick, who oversees technology for the department. “They were born into the age of the Internet. They see it as part of the continuum of the way life is today.”

This second article is from Macleans, a canadian news magazine that discusses problems some teens are having in managing their internet use.

At least some teens recognize the problem. Fifteen-year-old Colin Johnson of Toronto sits down at his computer at 4 most afternoons. He whizzes through his homework in half an hour, and then starts surfing, gaming and chatting with friends on MSN until 1 a.m., when he goes to bed. The tenth-grader is failing science, but otherwise getting by. “I procrastinate a lot more than before,” he says, acknowledging that “everybody’s marks suffer to some degree” if they spend as much time as he does online.

Students at Carnegie Mellon University are developing something called roadcasting in which songs stored on your car harddrive can be shared with others nearby. The project is available for download from this website for user feeback.

While a driver is listening to music from his or her choices, the songs will be broadcast and available for reception by any other car with a roadcast-equipped car stereo. So, if a driver gets bored with a personal playlist, the software’s collaborative filtering capabilities will automatically scan the airwaves looking for other roadcast stations that match the driver’s stated preferences, and return any matching available stations. Listeners can search by bands, genres, and song titles, and skip through other users’ radio stations to find music they want to hear.

The article is from technology review

I think this is a really cool idea. I would like to see a mountain bike version for us out here in Vancouver (call it off-roadcasting).

I remember the first time someone commented on my blog. It was a surreal feeling as I realised that I was not just writing for myself. I had become part of a blog collective and my words were now being read and thought about by others. This realisation had a significant effect on how I wrote. I now think more rather than just writing down whatever comes into my head.

It reminded me about when I lived in Germany and how I would distinguish between the “German” Phillip and the “English” Phillip. The difference was that in German I can’t say as much so I have to consciously run through my head whether what I am about to say makes sense based on the context and the situation. In English I don’t make the same conscious effort although I automatically assume I am speaking intelligently.

That said. I realised that I have also made a shift in how I use tags. I see it as a shift from “me-tags” to “we-tags”. When I first used del.icio.us, I only thought of how I could use its tagging feature, how I could store urls online rather than local to my particular computer. When I spoke with friends to tell them about how I found a cool place to place my a url in different folders based on something called tags. I then created tons of different tags that were useful to me but wouldn’t really help others. I was very individualistic but I believe that it was because I was a neophyte, I didn’t yet the power of tagging nor understand the collective benefit of it. My tagging had gotten out of hand.

Today while speaking to my supervisor and explaining why I liked del.icio.us I spoke about it as labels for urls rather than folders. I realised that I had changed how I thought about tagging. I just read an entry by PlasticBag.org that I found via You’re It. Tom Coates of PlasticBag states:

But there’s also a third potential cause for changes in a tag-cloud over time - that people might approach the very act of tagging differently - that their understanding of what they’re doing might develop. This is a change in the nature of tagging itself. And this is what I want to talk about really briefly.

Matt Webb and I did a fair amount of work around tagging with a project called Phonetags that I never get time to properly write up. As we were working on it, we came to realise that each of us had a radically different understanding of what a tag was. Matt’s concept was quite close to the way tagging is used in del.icio.us - with an individual the only person who could tag their stuff and with an understanding that the act of tagging was kind of an act of filing. My understanding was heavily influenced by Flickr’s approach - which I think is radically different - you can tag other people’s photos for a start, and you’re clearly challenged to tag up a photo with any words that make sense to you. It’s less of a filing model than an annotative one.

I am beginning to treat tags from an community perspective like how I use flickr. I am now looking at tagging as labels or keywords that I want to keep generally consistent with how others so that they can more easily find objects that I have tagged. Maybe this comes from experience as I look at the universality of tagging rather than individualism.

I found an excellent article called “How to be a winner: Advice for students starting into research work” which nicely complements tips my supervisor has given me on doing literature reviews.

Coping mechanisms employed by winners include:

* prioritizing (what do I need to know most)
* read (everything made available to you, and seek out more; but don’t put months of reading between you and getting started doing things.)
* multithreading (when blocked on one item or path, is there another I can productively pursue?)
* pursuing multiple, possible solution techniques (maybe some have easier/less blocks paths than others)
* wishful thinking (ok, let’s assume this subproblem is solved, does that allow me to go on and solve other problems?)
* pester people who might have some of the information you need (you might think they should know what you need to know, but often they don’t have a clear idea of what you do and don’t know; start by getting them to give you pointers to things you can use to help yourself. Show respect for their time and always follow up on the resources you’ve been given before asking for a personal explanation.)
* propose working models — maybe they are wrong or different from others, but they give you something to work with and something concrete to discuss and compare with others. You will refine your models continually, but it’s good to have something concrete in mind to work with.

The biggest tips I can use are to demonstrate progress no matter how small so that I can get feedback from my supervisor and to show workable results as I work my way to a solution.

I am preparing for my supervisory meeting tomorrow and these suggests are definitely useful

Just went to del.icio.us and I am very impressed as it will better manage my own tags.

The changes:
1. Predictive typing for tags. When I type in a word, it offers suggestion based on tags I already use (I spoke about wanting this feature in yesterday’s post after reading Alexandra’s entry on what is cool about del.icio.us).

2. Recommended tags feature. The system recommends tags that seem to be similar in content to my existing tags.

3. My tags. This shows my existing tags and highlights in red the tags that I have already used for that url. I can view my tag list by frequency or alphabetically. It also shows that I need to clean up my tags and I have misspelled tags (ethnomehodology ethnomethodology) and similar tags (publication publications publicdisplay publicdisplays) that could be merged.

4. Popular tags. This shows what tags are most frequently associated with this url by others. That is extremely important to helping provide consistency in tagging in the del.icio.us shared space.

Here I was thinking that del.icio.us would just be faster today with the new servers. Thanks to Joshua and the rest of his team for the pleasant surprise.