The wider picture..

OK, so this is really tangential to this blog but I figured that anyone looking at this can see the connection (it's towards the end :-). This is my commentary from yesterday's panel session with Alec Murphy here at OSU Geography, as part of the Geography Awareness week. Dr. Murphy presented the NRC report on "Understanding the Changing Planet: Strategic Directions for the Geographical Sciences" and I was asked to comment on some portions of it, so here goes...

"I want to acknowledge the entire group of students in my Cartography seminar this and previous years, and particularly James Baginski, Jay Knox, and Xining Yang, for providing lots of inspiration and material for this commentary. And excuse me for being very positivist, but this is truly an exceptional time to be a cartographer and geographer, so I can't help it!

As evidenced by this report, where each chapter contain information graphics, and many maps, visualization is key to communicate and understand our world. But the report also challenge us to think of better ways to observe, analyze, and visualize a changing world. This vision is not new. About ten years ago, then vice-president Al Gore outlined his vision of a Digital Earth and TWENTY years ago, Yale professor David Gelernter wrote a book called “Mirror Worlds” where he wrote:

'...someday soon: You will look into a computer screen and see reality. Some part of your world – the town you live in, the company you work for, your school system, the city hospital – will hang there in a sharp color image, abstract but recognizable, moving subtly in a thousand  places. This Mirror World you are looking at is fed by a steady rush of new data pouring in through cables. It is infiltrated by your own software creatures, doing your business.', and he went on to say...'Mirror worlds will transform the meaning of 'computer'.” (Gelernter 1991, 1)

 It is clear by now that many of the elements of what these two visions articulated have now become reality.

The idea that our real world is reflected in a 'mirror' representation is taking shape in front of us, and because of us.

Research on games goes mainstream?

I was intrigued to see the NYTimes Science section this morning with '...prognostications for science in 2011 from 10 leading figures...'one of which is Jane McGonigal, featured below and visiting our campus TODAY! so cool. She mentions a really nice GeoGame platform called GROUNDCREW - http://groundcrew.us/



I guess the take-home is...well... maybe that gaming is now so ubiquitous/powerful that it can't be ignored by anymore who is interested in environment - society - technology relations. We (the plugged-in part of the world) are all the cartographers of a mirror world (see Gelernter 1991). We shape it through our daily activities, consciously or not. Games will be part of that cartography as we progressively mix reality with imaginary worlds, so the games will record and also help us understand our soon to be past, present and, in my opinion, also educated guesses about our future.

A musical postcard from the past with a birds-eye view

This is cool! My past gets a postcard from my future as a map of the present zooms by. You can try it yourself...
http://thewildernessdowntown.com/
It is a playful mix of personalized items, a decent soundtrack, and actually inspires some reflection on how I got here. In a way a GeoGame but very different than how I have conceived of it. Thanks to Markus Hernandez in my GEOG480 class who brought this to my attention.

Serious games make for serious fun

Well, I just thought that headline was snappy and had some relevance to what I am currently thinking about. There is no doubt that the interest from funding agencies have started to take off with even a few recent calls from NSF. As I was pouring through one of these I remembered one of the critical remarks I've heard about trying to learn about human social behavior through what people do in a game; 'how can we tell that what they do in this virtual environment is what they would do in reality?'. It struck me that this is really a total misunderstanding of what type of reality we could address with games. "Real life" decision making is increasingly supported by, and conducted through, virtual spaces. Just think about GIS and the realm of spatial decision support system. A GeoGame is essentially a continuation of that same environment, extended into possible futures. Looking at GeoGame behavior can really help us better understand those dynamics by providing a somewhat controlled experimental environment. This is pretty awesome and certainly a promising platform for doing computational social science .

Oh, and it is soo cool hat Jane McGonigal (see post below) is coming to OSU! get your tickets 

IBM City One a disappointment

At long last IBM's venture into using games to promote smarter cities have launched.




Unfortunately, playing this game feels like a long commercial for the various IBM services that a city manager might be interested in. It implements a fairly straight forward pre-determined sequence of actions and results that are not very engaging. I hoped for more but by all means check it out and make your own opinion.

GeoGame Green Revolution

To continue from ... the TELR grant allowed us to develop a more sophisticated prototype game primarily for classroom use. After the initial trials we decided to use two open source platforms; Project Darkstar by Sun Microsystems and World Wind by NASA. A computer science graduate student worked on the project part time during winter and spring quarter and full time over summer quarter when most of the work was completed.

Now, this might not look like much but we think it is a significant step towards creating a development platform for massive multi-player online geographic games (oh dear, that will be MMOGG). The thing that we are most proud of here is that we have separated the interface from the assets and rules so that it becomes more modular and easier to change the parameters of the game. So, an external onotlogy file (in OWL) contains all the information about what a game contains, how many players it can take, which geographic data to load, and which rules to use. Essentially that ontology defines what exist in the game. Another separate Jess (that's the Java Expert System Shell) CLP file has all the rules for the game. So we can modify e.g how yield is calculated without having to modify the program code. Finally, the game is situated based on a KML file (that' your typical Google Earth geodata format) that contains the farmland areas where the game is going to be played. This makes it possible to move the game from being played in Punjab, India to Marion, Ohio if you want. Obviously we did not have the time to code a game configuration interface or manual, so these kind of tweaks are a bit undocumented and hidden, but they work!

The power of games

In this hilarious and provocative TED presentation JMcG  says it all. We need more people to spend more time playing meaningful games. We already have a generation of world-savers at our disposal and they possess...

The Four Superpowers of Gamers, i.e.:

An urgent optimism - believing that an epic win is always possible
A tight social fabric - actively building networks of trust
A blissful productivity - happy to be working hard
A sense of epic meaning - ready to take on planetary scale missions

So enjoy her talk and join the ranks of serious gamers to save the world.



Jane's book "Reality is broken..." is most likely a good read and eventually made some press in my native Sweden.