SenseCraft Update
Author: Jack Park Issue: 2022-09-21
SenseCraft Update
by Jack Park
We have had a lot of help from Richard Hammond in thinking about how our messaging should emerge. More recently, Jonathan Sand joined our CSC Agora “SenseCraft dev” channel, opening with questions about how SenseCraft might serve his needs to bring online his Civilization 2.0 game; those conversations morphed into a deep dive into what “conversational literacy” means.
Actually, that term gives terrible google, but when Jeff Conklin said it, the context said it all. It goes like this: When a bunch of people hold forth in a conversation, most often, the conversation entails poor grammar, ambiguity all around, people not listening to each other, wandering off topic, and so forth.
The IBIS conversation facilitation system was invented as a way of pulling useful information out of rambling, often warring conversations. Jeff Conklin took IBIS from the original paper to conference rooms. He taught courses in facilitation, which is where he said that people could not do IBIS online in free form owing to a lack of conversational literacy.
We see conversational literacy in practice in Jerry's meetings and Zooms, and in WorldCafes. But, how can you let people do IBIS conversations online given they lack -- in general (let's be clear: most of “Jerry's kids” would do well) sufficient conversational skills?
I saw some weak evidence of this in the ForesightEngine and MMOWGLI online IBIS-like quests. In general, the number of impolite game moves was very low, mostly because those who would sign up for an IFTF.org quest, or one run by the U.S. Navy, were already pretty literate - conversation wise.
Still, given that each player could make game moves alone, the signal to noise ratio in those quests was not what it could have been, even though there were many truly great game moves.
The present implementation of SenseCraft is that of a Quest-Guild-based RPG, modeled a bit after World of Warcraft, but having nothing to do with war. Guilds - not individuals - make game moves, which consist of conversation nodes added to a conversation tree - the Quest.
Game moves are created in private rooms which serve as a kind of apprenticeship opportunity for guild members. They can earn badges and “level up” to the ability to play the Guild Leader role and eventually spawn their own guilds.
What transpired from those conversations at CSC is that Jonathan joined the TopicQuests slack and started generating his own variants of our user's manuals.
I think the story is this: slowly, we are seeing progress, and indeed evolution of our thinking, vision, and platform.
Related:
- Jack Park (author)
- 2022 (year)
- Topics: Tools and Platforms, Hosting and Facilitation