Ideasonair
Ideasonair.net is fantastic. It's like an idea a day. It's fantastic to see project ideas shared and documented this way. I wish I found more of this, just little sprinkles from a project notebook, shared and documented electronically.
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March 25, 2007
March 24, 2007
We Make Money Not Art Interview
Great questions from Sascha Pohflepp that helped me figure out what the heck I do and why the heck I do it.
March 23, 2007
Exergaming and Instrumented Measures of Fitness
The Economist had a short article titled Let's Get Physical on "exergaming" — gaming that combines play with exercise. At the same time, Fabien wrote a thought-provoking blog post on the Nokia Sports Tracker and Tracing Personal Mobility. This stuff got me thinking about these weak-signals around exercise, play, gaming, fitness. I wrote a little comment on Fabien's blog about the different ways to turn sport into electronic gaming and play in some fashion, or the challenges around that. Much work is associated with GPS or pedometers and that sort of thing, or stats-based stuff.
I wonder how far beyond the more or less obvious solutions like GPS and pedometers we can go? And then what beyond the usual stats cards and graphs?
I think that the instrumented approach to measuring activity like this is quite compelling to many fitness enthusiasts. Knowing the numbers and tracking progress through spreadsheets and graphs has its appeal for those who want to measure very detailed incremental increases in their fitness. I think that there is the possibility for re-calibrating what gets to count as "fitness" so that it has a less instrumental meaning. So, rather than fitness measured as how far you can run in what amount of time, fitness could be shaped around less self-centered characteristics, such as how much CO2 your super hero avatar prevented from escaping into the atmosphere, or how many dinosaurs you saved by avoiding turning them into the fuel from their fossils. I only say this because, plainly, the GPS thing is wonky at best as you describe. In many cases it works perfectly fine — but in the off case that it does not work well, there's a real issue in terms of user adoption or satisfaction. If you measure physical activity more "ambiently" or with less instrumentalized rigor (sum-of-squares acceleration versus meters moved), you can tap into much less expensive techniques. Also, there's an exciting challenge there — can we redefine the culture of fitness, tie it into the booming electronic games business — all in the service of elevating ecoawareness? It'd be like crossing the streams in Ghost Busters!
Technorati Tags: exergaming, pervasive electronic games
Game Mechanics Musings — Offline Gaming? A Near Future for Electronic Play?
Trying to come up with some "log line" style idioms to describe the whole vector of near future research I'm doing around game gestures that elongate the scales of motion, time and contact (proximity, touch, etc.) that electronic games have completely shrunk down to nil. There's definitely a trend towards considering stretching these out a bit — the Wii, Warioware, Teku Teku Angel, Nike+, MobZombies. How far can you go? Can there be "offline gaming" where the screen disappears to the point of it not even being necessary? Where you sort of ambiently know that you're gaming in the sense that your actions and activities "offline" will register in the game world once you get back to your normal human computer later? Can you still be gaming while you're doing a run to the market, without being consciously and actively "in" the game while doing the grocery shop? But still, knowing in the back of your mind that, hey, cool! I'll get my shopping done and probably get a +2 power up!
What's the language and name for something like that?
* Hands-Free Gaming
* Offline Gaming
* Off-Screen Gaming
How far can you go with a game gesture? Can shopping at the Farmer's Market become an interface to an offline game, such that my action and activity while shopping powers-up my electronic game avatar while I'm away from it? Is our imagination open to the idea of gaming..even while not in front of a screen? Can you keep it in the back of your head that "stuff" in the online game world will be affected by your activities in the offline world? How will that change our perception of activities offline? How will it affect our attention to what's actually happening around us? What will it feel like to know you're gaming even though you're not twiddling keys on your mobile phone, nor looking at its little postage stamp screen? How about this — you're not even networked! Everything is stored up and then uploaded to the mothership later, when you're back home ready to be an online agent again. You get to participate in what's going on in 1st life, all the while knowing in the back of your head that your actions get to become something valuable in 2nd life!
The last couple of months has been an investigation of what this could be, through a mix of mostly technology craftwork with the Flavonoid project. Some notes, scribblings and sketches, too, but mostly construction of a theory object that I hope will help me answer these questions perhaps more expediently than head-scratching alone. We'll see how it goes. Flavonoid came to life the other day, so that's promising!
Technorati Tags: Near Future Laboratory, near-future, Offline Gaming, pervasive electronic games, play