First draft of presentation

Draft for the presentation

Presentation is about games and mediated communication. Seminar is about “serious games”. Name implies that there are serious games and games that are fun – learning or entertainment (escapism).

I did a search on why we use media.: entertainment, learning, routine, social needs and making sense of ones life. Motivation for playing games might be similar.

Very natural way to think is that we play to learn skills and get experiences in a safe environment. I think that very important skill to learn is communication (and mediated communication). Communication and community – our social environment is the echo of our self esteem. We evaluate our selves by the feedback we get from others. In this way social contacts give a meaning for our living. Playing games is a very important part of learning social rules, roles and communication.

Communication on the other hand is a very important way of learning. We can learn by following an example, but most of our learning is via mediated communication – books, images, video and computers. Learning new things is very natural for us. We have done it all man kind, but lately our livelihood, earning a descent living depends more on continuously updating our knowledge. “Learning our living” like McLuhan puts it.

I want to continue with an other mcluhanism new word “Glocal”. Even though we are communicating in a global world, we are not in contact with everyone. We share with a rather small “tribe” and communicate with about 1 – 2000 persons. We need to get to know these people and this is why communication skills are important and digital literacy, too.

I’ll go back to the dichotomy of serious/fun or virtual/real or useful/nonsense. I don’t think that it is defined by the game. It’s involved by all parts: players, game and learning objective (intentional or unintentional). It is very easy to compare this to social software and discussion about social objects – a reason for working together. (referring to Jyri Engelstom’s article.)

What is useful or what is a game, is much a question of definition. Wittgenstein argued that language is a game (from wikipedia). We do not have to play role games to learn about how people react. If we play games with someone, we can learn about others. If we play solo, can we learn about our selves?

(This is also a western/ non western philosophical question. In our western society we like to teach others and also think that plays on books should teach us important things. What about thinking that it’s not about teaching, but it’s about learning. We can learn from plays, we don’t need to teach others, but learn from others? Knowledge and understanding can not be thought, it has to be learnt. We can assist in the learning – and call that “teaching” :-)

Part two of the presentation is about communication as a “game”. One way of thinking of communication is that a) we have people that want to speak – present their view or publish. b) We have people that are looking for information or for some reason want to read, listen or view and c) there is a some kind of connection with these two. In these game we will try to fulfill both needs. I am looking answers from semantic web, ontology and tags.

(I have to stop now and go to Sauna...)

gaming socialcomputing socialnetworking ContinuousComputing socialsoftware