A couple of years ago I was challenged to think about methods for understanding the long-term implications of climate-health interactions. I was asked by a colleague to sort out some methods that would help public health planners understand the complexity of climate-health relationships and transform them into priorities for action. Data from current health outcomes (e.g. malaria, dengue, malnutrition, heatstroke) can be rare, especially among health ministries that aren’t functioning as knowledge networks. It is also common that methods supporting forecasting are viewed as impractical, confusing, and too complicated given that institutional systems are struggling to provide basic services – much less anticipation.
Because data about the status and direction of health outcomes can be notably absent, we focused our attention on scenarios and the different methodologies. Scenarios are valuable for health and technology, in part, because they contain a certain narrative closure. Clear winners and losers can emerge along with outcomes that measure conflict and contributions to the process. On the flipside, that narrative certainty is a little too clean. Real world interactions are messy. However, the most importune implication is that scenarios make good design tools because they suggest future arrangements and demonstrate alternatives without interfering in current practice. Scenarios shift the context to an indefinite time in the future, an aliased set of actors, or a new place to make new propositions less personal. This unbinds specific feelings of identity from new organizational arrangements and may leave participants free to experiment further.
Scenarios can be complicated to produce. They require focused study and time, and that seems too often in short supply. Plus, you need hooks to get people engaged in finding and discovering the elements that ought to belong. Scenarios should be plausible and internally consistent, but they also should be relevant to a broad range of stakeholders. Some methods focus too narrowly on their own visions of the world, and can end up decidedly deterministic or expertly biased, as this critique of Royal Dutch Shell’s approach explains (opens pdf).
Because the organization we were working with is committed to a open stakeholder process, we wanted a methodology that would accept diverse contributions and still be tied to one of the hallmarks of science: replicability. So we kept some design criteria in mind while we explored:
Scalable
We wanted techniques that could allow us to look scenarios for specific contexts and regions, from hospital units to watersheds and beyond.
Participatory
Being able to use many perspectives was a definitive goal. Not only are there differing accounts of actors and outcomes, participation does a much better job of revealing where goals might be in conflict in the system. Participation is also critical for helping the results of the scenario process diffuse among different stockholder groups.
Translatable across domains
Public health and complex systems are increasing supported by people and things from a variety of disciplines. We wanted insights from ethnographers to be as critical to the development of scenarios as live data streams of mechanical stress, if that’s what the scenario needed. We also wanted the materials and insights generated by the process to be amenable to visual display, since many of the stakeholders may use different languages. Visual formats also exploit the ambiguities of statements to reveal tensions that exist among interpretations.
Robust to diverse interpretations
Some of that tension is created when you get people from different backgrounds discussing what they think matters for interventions in particular health outcomes. Different levels of expertise can expose the assumptions that people share. The different elements of scenarios and how they emerge to affect long-term change often form the basis for many of this assumption. Highlighting this ambiguity is critical later for negotiating strategies for action.
Accepting of qualitative and quantitative insight
Working across disciplines is critical. One result of this is that the standards for evidence and data are different. We also recognize that quantitative measurement provides a detailed description of the identity or behavior of system elements. In particular, we wanted to be able to translate qualitative insights into format usable for compute modeling, simulation, and visualization.
Fun and pleasurable
Despite many people’s paradoxical notion that fun things are bad for you, we see fun as enhanced participation. When you forget that what you are doing is work, that’s a good thing.
Readily usable and modular
Methods should move seamlessly between health outcomes and altogether different domains. The process for malaria can be the same as heatstroke. Understanding alternative energy futures may use the same process as malnutrition. This enables practice and iteration.
As it turned out, scenarios techniques for climate-health interactions are not new, but they don’t deal well with uncertainty because they are explicitly aimed at extending interactions based on what the presence of domain knowledge and capable expertise. How could you hope to understand possible priorities and act all while not knowing? This was where we hoped to make a contribution.
Using Clamps to Build a Knowledge Network
Bob Johansen’s book, Get There Early outlines tools for dealing with dilemmas. Dilemmas confound rationality-based problem solving because of the way they are structured (multiple stakeholders, goals, conflicts, and outcomes, diverse framings and interpretations) and because there is not a clear path to one or a few positive solutions. Johansen outlines how Structure, Rules, Resources, Thresholds, Feedback, Memory, and Identity can be used as levers to help organizations attenuate themselves to the multi-textured shapes that dilemmas pose.
I think this list is pretty right-on for at least three reasons. First, the metaphor of levers directly brings to mind the work of Donella Meadows, an environmental scientist concerned with sustainability. Her work on leverage points for intervening in systems (pdf) is a great introduction and ordering of policy-based strategies and their efficacy for changing behavior. Like Johansen, she articulates the role of rules and feedback in systems. Meadows goes on to explore ten other significant systems levers, ultimately tracing effectiveness to how we frame the “problem”.
Second, structure, feedback, memory, and identity point to second order, emergent characteristics. Second order characteristics arise form the interactions of actors (e.g. people doing interesting things, wild coyotes, institutions, viruses), resources (e.g. coffee, water, land, low-interest loans, blood sugar), and their activities. Kevin Kelly explores why we are seeing more impossible events taking place. He connects it to an emergence of second order behaviors made possible through the development of new actors, new infrastructure, and new rules. Carl Simon, a Professor of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan, has studied the characteristics of complexity in biological and economic system and often differentiates complex behavior from simpler behavior by looking for heterogeneity, non-randomness, feedback, heterarchy, and emergence. Eric Berlow’s still great TED talk demonstrates how taking the broad, messy, and networked of complexity can in fact allow us to isolate clear paths for action.
The third reason I think Bob Johansen’s tuning levers are great is that they overlap with basic elements in game design. This should come as no surprise for most people associated with IFTF.
When I was working on the climate-health scenario methods, we faced a challenge of providing some sort of suitable structure for participants to embed meaningful insight into the scenarios. Sometime over morning coffee in a Swiss cafe, we stumbled across Tracy Fullerton’s rubric for the formal elements of games. These formal elements complement narrative elements and give rise to the more emergent properties of complex systems. Goals, procedures, actors, rules, resources, boundaries, conflicts, and outcomes also have a great synergy; they are exactly the elements used by computer programmers to construct agent-based models of complex adaptive systems!
Creating Relevance for Participation
So now we had a structural backbone for the kind of content we felt we needed to gather during a scenario development process. We could ask participants to engage in brainstorming activities that accounted for the different elements of these climate-health systems, and we would provide them with support, examples, and heuristics for doing just that. We also wanted to find a way to make the process fluid. In the back of our minds we always wanted to bring elements of game mechanics into the project to help support decision fatigue.
I’m still not sure we’ve cracked it, mostly because we haven’t been able to implement the process yet. However, we have looked at different forms of turn-based play with clear, articulated goals for the players, not unlike the LEARN, ACT, IMAGINE rubric that worked so well for Urgent Evoke missions.
One of the challenges is that we are introducing concepts about systems dynamics at the same time as concepts about the elements of the systems. This sets up a lot of material to get through in a short amount of time.
We also want to introduce experiences of empathy for others into the play and practice of scenario building. In order to generate robust scenarios, the goals of different actors represented need to be recognized and incorporated as valid contributions. One of the common experiences of public health service delivery is that managers, practitioners, patients, and others all have different views of the system. These occluded perspectives mean that they have a difficult time in finding ways to enhance the social and ecological resilience of infrastructure. I think if we had our choice, we would use experiences of empathy to reinforce principles along the lines of those championed by Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom for designing long-enduring institutions.
Another significant outcome of clamps and elements for scenario development is that they clearly lend themselves to visual means of communication. Boundaries, resources, timings, and rules are common opportunities for change. Precise and ambiguous definitions can take on increased relevance, especially when dealt with creatively. One of the functions of mapping and visualization is to demonstrate this inherent ambiguity, pointing to areas for finding common ground. When we try to represent them visually, we are forced to make choices about the precise meaning of those boundaries, and this can be a significant source of cognitive dissonance for participants. But it’s exactly the form of dialogue that’s needed. It sets the stage for tactical strategies when conflicts emerge. Boundaries flow, and their meanings and borders can sometimes be adjusted to reach consensus or compromise.
Assembling Scenarios in Everyday Life
One of the questions designers (of scenarios, tools, artifacts, anything really) have to ask themselves is, “Where does this fit in everyday life?” One of the most useful rubrics I’ve come across for design is Products and Practices: Selected Concepts from Science and Technology Studies and from Social Theories of Consumption and Practice. (sorry, paywall). The authors make a case for a social and infrastructure-based approach to design. They identify acquisition (how we find it), scripting (how it shapes practice), appropriation (using it for something else), assembly (where we use it), normalization (sharing along with others), and finally practice (what activities it supports). What is great about this list is that it helps designers imagine the contexts of use.
In our scenario construction process we had to identify where this process existed along with a range of other activities that needed to be carried out by participants. This assembly meant that our process had to connect to other activities in a meaningful way.
The current processes and guidelines for conducting Vulnerability and Adaptation assessments in vulnerable regions hinge on their level of stakeholder involvement. Some processes are top-down, others bottom-up, and others a mix of expertise and engagement.
One way to assemble scenarios into these processes is to:
1) Define the scope and focus which usually means identifying the health outcome of interest.
2) Work out a baseline for which information may not exist. This is where defining system elements can be helpful for laying out current distributions and burdens, strategies for coping, early prioritization of “drivers”, and the interactions between elements that affect their dynamics.
3) From this point on, forecasts can be made about future trends and conditions. For example, what happens if boundaries change? How about if an actor appears or disappears?
4) Once forecasts are made, the task is to frame and narrate the interactions as scenarios. This is a great opportunity to develop the scenario through the eyes of others. Games, agent-based models, visualizations, and mapping can demonstrate change over time and the differences in scales affected while uncovering an array of interesting and unexpected interactions.
5) Isolation and sequencing asks participants to step back from what they produced, to look at the areas of concern, and to select the most relevant links between scenario elements. By focusing attention on these links, the next task is to order the steps they will need to affect change by listing priorities for action.
6) Package and disseminate the scenarios and the priorities for broad communication and feedback.
7) Use the feedback and resulting statements to assess how the scenario process and how it enabled participants to identify and act on the priorities they generated.
As you can see, it’s a richly-textured process, highly-amenable for visual communication, and ripe for engagement. I think one of the most important functions is the ability to expand the number of elements that matter to long-term change. One of the key decisions that participants have to make is to ask whether a resource, boundary, conflict, actor, rule, or procedure matters or makes a difference to the health outcome of interest. Here Gregory Bateson’s statement about information as, “a difference that makes a difference” looms large. More on that in the future.
Signals from Noise
One of the key endeavors of public health, infrastructure, and technology is the attempt to identify signals in noisy environments. Signals are utilized in biology to communicate across chemical gradients, metabolic networks, neuronal synapses, visual spectra, haptic musculature, individual displays of affection, and as invitation for cooperation across groups and societies. Technological systems stimulate behavior in new and exciting ways, but they can also script and normalize actions that may limit our abilities to find success.
The biggest challenges in generating signals for any medium is to make them relevant enough to transcend noise and competition from similar signals elsewhere. Synergistic timing with the individuals or groups receiving them is critical – as this will help them become meaningful in helping receivers revise their previous beliefs or come to new conclusions.
John Snow’s well-know map showing cholera cases in the London epidemic of 1854 clustering around the Broad Street well was an early success in distinguishing signals from noise using visualization and tight clamps that link actors (cholera, people, wells), boundaries (streets, houses), resources (water), and procedures (washing, drinking). These interactions clearly led to an understanding of a health outcome, and the relationships, once linked, could be used to forecast future scenarios.
Before the Storm is another game from the Parsons/Climate Centre collaboration that introduces forecasting to new audiences and uses the scenarios produced to help identify what the participants feel would be the most relevant and practical stapes to take during a flooding emergency.
Climate Health Impact – a simulation based game designed to give biology students a better understanding of the health impacts of climate change. It does do a great job of representing standard practices worldwide that contribute to the understanding and management of emerging vectors. What I like here is the attention to new actors and their relationships with policy measures, research processes, and geography. There’s a lot of detail about disease specifics as well, but narratively, it does reinforce a fairly top-down perspective.
What do scenarios look like when the are disseminated and opened up for engagement? I think they look closer to everyday life. To understand the impacts of alternative scenarios we have to look at out interpersonal relationships – at the things that are one or two degrees removed. How will climate-health interaction affect our pets, our sex lives, how we eat dinner, getting to and from work, and our expectations when we encounter each other on the street? I think the genre of climate-health scenarios and perhaps all scenarios is not one of horror, western drama, or even fantastical sci-fi; it has to be more subtle, more internally embedded in social values and individual goals. It’s melodrama about how we live and how we live it everyday. That’s the real scary, far-out stuff.
The Institute for the Future’s (IFTF) 2010 Map of the Decade is part of their annual Ten-Year Forecast which uses foresight and scenario planning to help organizations navigate change. Entitled “The Future is a High-Resolution Game”, the research materials demonstrate the re-emergence of games as a systematic process for positive change.
Map of the Future
IFTF uses a variety of strategies to help groups understand and interpret macro-level trends across several functional areas including carbon, water, power, cities, and identity. The long term goal is to use these sensemaking activities to meet diverse economic, technological, social, political, and ecological challenges. For organizations it is often the case that the interpretation and implementation can be difficult to connect. As foresight and sensemaking tactics become better honed to organizations of different sizes, structures, and cultures, so will the tools that help dedicated individuals in organizations recognize emerging landscapes AND translate those insights into priorities.
One key in making these translations is the ability to connect macro level processes to micro level behaviors – and everything in between. IFTF took a different tactic towards games as a tool for their 2010 map of the decade, and I think it helps move us in that direction of positive change.
IFTF has been at the forefront of what some call gamification – the systematic use of game mechanics for the development of positive psychology, practice, action, and cooperative dynamics. As IFTF’s Director of Game Development describes, games are put together with a goal, rules, a feedback system and voluntary participation. So it’s pretty easy to see how game mechanics can connect with operational challenges such as problem solving, productivity, and personal growth within organizations.
Critics argue that in most organizations and real-world situations things are pretty fuzzy, conflicted, and confusing. Agreeing on goals, rules, feedback systems, and participation can be difficult obstacles to begin with. But I think that is why games are tools that help us move in positive directions. We don’t often want to spend too much of our time arguing over goals; we’d rather just get on with it, play/work hard, and feel good about what we accomplish.
Th polling organization Gallup conducts surveys among employees every year across thousands of organizations worldwide asking hundreds of questions. THREE of those questions where employees responded positively turn out to be the largest human factors for organizations that are successful.
I have a commitment to quality.
I know what my job and/or role is, and
I trust my leadership.
Organizations are set up to accomplish a wide array of highly-complex tasks. No one person can keep track of everything. So in order to get things done, people have to simplify their overall cognitive load. They have to eliminate many conflicts and sources of confusion to deal with what they know and how it relates to new challenges. Game mechanics (goals, rules, feedback, participation) can be vectors for the above three factors, and more importantly they systematize them within organizational processes – something good human resource departments struggle to do everyday.
Think about it. I trust my leadership so I don’t always need to reevaluate the goals. Check. I know what my role is so the rules are clear. Check. I have a commitment to quality which means that I show up to participate and when I get feedback I self-correct to improve what I’m doing. Check.
I think the differences there have a lot to do with focus – of setting priorities and knowing what to spend one’s time on – especially when things go awry. We often get distracted, but even when we don’t human, social, and technological systems are always out of sync. Sometimes they connect and we may even experience periods of intense connectivity, creativity, and productivity. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi calls these bursts. So I suppose one of the benefits of the scenario platform IFTF uses is its ability to concentrate social interactions to achieve these bursts. We always need some latent time to process, connect, and search further. Maybe that’s why IFTF does the Map just once a year
One element of IFTF’s Map of the Decade is “The Happiness Kit”. It’s a platform for helping people ruminate on the kinds of transitions that could lead to more happiness in the world. There are a few standard tools of the foresight practice included like writing headlines from the future to identifying events that might shape or be shaped by the trends. There are also points where participants can identify new services, communities, and practices.
In science and technology sociologist Bruno Latour’s book Reassembling the Social, he looks specifically at groups, actions, objects, and facts as sources of uncertainty in the emergence of new technologies or innovation paradigms. These highly social elements tend to reveal themselves when controversies emerge. They help shape our future when, for example, a nuclear plant melts down and new groups, objects or facts insert themselves into society. Most recently at the Fukushima nuclear plant, it was formerly an established fact that the leaked radiation was 10% of Chernobyl disaster. Now as a society we are learning much more about nuclear radiation leakage models and their diversity when it is revealed that two different groups used two different models. The fact has been revised to 20%. We also know much more now about the safety mechanisms at nuclear facilities, especially the roles of strange monsters like emergency generators, vents, and containment vessels. Groups we never really paid attention to, methods of establishing facts, and objects with strange names all the sudden appear as important factors for how we think about the future. Kits like the IFTF Happiness Kit help us by working through some of them before they emerge from other events.
The kit also works to identify the actors involved in these transitions – as well as the distribution of those that are happy and those that are not. Understanding the distribution and abundance of elements in a system is important when we consider that rare things may become more prevalent and ubiquitous things sometimes disappear. William Gibson is famously quoted, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” As we consider technological diffusion, development, and knowledge-networking, one of the questions we have to ask is how the future can be more evenly distributed. I’m not sure I know the answer, but I think that getting more explicit about the social-technological-ecological networks that individuals live in can help. This graph of system elements in a rural farmer’s immediate grasp might be one step towards understanding, for example, the diffusion of organic farming methods and how they interlink with new sources of income and time for alternative activities.
Overall the thing I like the best about the map of the decade is its ability to use foresight methods while leaving open space for individual interpretations. Some scenario techniques can lead to overarching narratives which create sources of bias. In IFTF’s platform, it appears that participants are encouraged to apply the trends to their immediate organizations and processes (although I cannot be sure since I’m reading the product and not the use-context). My sense is that it’s more of a constructionist approach than the methods used by Royal Dutch Shell or the Global Business Network (for a critique see: Wright 2004; pdf) which define opposing axes and use those for story generation. The way IFTF does it is to throw out a variety of results, new ideas, patterns, and processes – allowing users to pick and choose where to apply them. It’s a more humble approach (if I may say so) that stems from the simple proposition that we can’t really predict what is going to happen and neither can we take everything into account. The point is attenuate our mental models towards things that we think will matter – so that when they become relevant – we notice them.
Still I think there are opportunities to bring greater resolution and hence greater relevance to the process. While the Map of the Future helps deal with actors and events, I think it gets less explicit in areas that matter a lot. More important than who or what is why. The goals that actors have lays out different sets of procedures for attaining those goals. So it’s important to demonstrate how goals and the ways that actors achieve those goals converge on other elements. For example, resources and boundaries are areas that can undergo rapid restructuring or remain relatively stable over time. Helping people make explicit predictions about the direction and magnitude of these changes is helpful for understand the complex dynamics of interacting systems.
Similarly, rules, conflicts, and the outcomes of conflicts are specific pivot points for change. What helps us navigate change well is being able to understand the implications on all side of those transformations. Whiles rules, conflicts, and outcomes are somewhat embedded in the IFTF process, how can we support thinking about how they would change and what changes they would bring in turn to the procedures or boundaries shared by different actors?
I think these additional elements can be added to these types of foresight exercises with little additional cost. And they yield a huge benefit of allowing the results and products of foresight exercises – namely the knowledge generated – to be transferred to the engineers that develop computational simulations. Actors, Goals, Procedures, Boundaries, Rules, Resources, Conflicts and Outcomes are all the basics of putting together agent-based simulation models that allow us to look at the interactions and assumptions of our exercises and turn it into sustained practice.
After all, wouldn’t it be really cool if the Future WAS a High Resolution Game?
Ludwig Wittgenstein was a Viennese philosopher intent on language, its meaning, and its interactions with the physical environment– or more precisely, the public space of use. His writings have influenced education, mathematics, art, and others for their critical approach to language, meaning, metaphor, and our representation of a shared environment. His work Philosophical Investigations (2nd Ed., Trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe) takes a decidedly non-linear approach, where his analysis of language straddles a landscape in which games are played, rules made, and mental images resonate with the spoken and written word.
Interspersed within Philosophical Investigations are a handful of passages that describe some general properties of games. In the book, they connect to other passages that explore language-games, rules, imagery and so on, but I’ve chosen these for their generality. In the work, the discussions proceed from an unwrapping of language and games into and understanding of the rules for play – i.e. grammar. Here we are only interested in the meaning of a game.
I’ve extracted these passages, to separate them (for the moment) from language. You’ll see lots of errors in the text because used OCR (optical character recognition). I was tempted to tidy it up, but given the general theme of the work, I think it’s fitting. Enjoy!
3. Augustine, we might say, does describe a system of communication;
only not everything that we call1anguage is this system. And one
has to say this in many cases where the question arises “Is this an
appropriate description or not?” The answer is: “Yes, it is appropriate,
but only for this narrowly circumscribed region, not for the whole of
what you were claiming to describe.”
It is as if someone were to say: “A game consists in moving objects
about on a surface according to certain rules …”-and we replied:
You seem to be thinking of board games, but there are others. You
can make your definition correct by expressly restricting it to those
games.
3I. When one shews someone the king in chess and says: “This is
the king”, this does not tell him the use of this piece-unless he already
knows the rules of the game up to this last point: the shape of the king.
You could imagine his having learnt the rules of the game without ever
having been shewn an actual piece. The shape of the chessman corresponds
here to the sound or shape of a word.
One can also imagine someone’s having learnt the game without
ever learning or formulating rules. He might have learnt quite simple
board-games first, by watching, and have progressed to more and
more complicated ones. He too might be given the explanation “This
is the king”,-if, for instance, he were being shewn chessmen ofa shape
he was not used to. This explanation again only tells him the use
of the piece because, as we might say, the place for it was already
prepared. Or even: we shall only say that it tells him the use, if
the place is already prepared. And in this case it is so, not because the
person to whom we give the explanation already knows rules, but
because in another sense he is already master of a game.
Consider this further case: I am explaining chess to someone; and I
begin by pointing to a chessman and saying: “This is the king; it
can move like this, …. and so on.”-In this case we shall say: the
words “This is the king” (or “This is called the ‘king’ “) are a definition
only if the learner already ‘knows what a piece in a game is’. That is,
if he has already played other games, or has watched other people
playing ‘and understood’-andsimilarthings. Further, only under these
conditions will he be able to ask relevantly in the course of learning the
game: “What do you call this?”-that is, this piece in a game.
We may say: only someone who already knows how to do something
with it can significantly ask a name.
And we can imagine the person who is asked replying: “Settle the
name yourself”-and now the one who asked would have to manage
everything for himself.
54· Let us recall the kinds of case where we say that a game is
played according to a definite rule.
Th~ rule may.be .an aid in teaching the game. The learner is told it
~d gtven pract1c~ in applying it..-Or.it is an instrument of the game
~tself.-Or .a :ule IS employed neither in the teaching nor in the game
ttself; .nor IS rt set down in a list of rules. One learns the game by
watching how others play. But we say that it is played according to
such-and-such rules because an observer can read these rules off from
the practice of the game-like. a.na~ral.law governing the play.-B~
t how does the observer distinguish in this case between players’
mistak~s and ~orrect p~ay?-There are .characteristic signs of it in the
pla~ers behaviour, Think of the behaviour characteristic of correcting
a slip o.f the tongue”. It would be possible to recognize that someone
was doing so even WIthout knowing his language.
66. Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games”.
I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and
so on. What is common to them all?-Don’t say: “There must be
something common, or they would not be called ‘games’ “-but
look andsee whether there is anything common to all.-For if you look
at them you will not see something that is common to all, but
similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To
repeat: don’t think, but look I-Look for example at board-games,
with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here
you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common
features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ballgames,
much that is common is retained, but much is lost.-Are they
all ‘amusing’? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there
always. winning and losing, or competition between players? Think
of patience. In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a
c~ild throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has
~sappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the
difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of
games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement,
but how many other characteristic features have disappeared 1 And
we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same
way; can see how similarities crop up and disappear.
And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network
of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall
similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.
68. “All right: the concept of number is defined for you as the
logical sum of these individual interrelated concepts: cardinal numbers,
rational numbers, real numbers, etc.; and in the same way the concept
of a game as the logical sum of a corresponding set of sub-concepts.”-
It need not be so. For I can give the concept ‘number’ rigid limits
in this way, that is, use the word “number” for a rigidly limited concept,
but I can also use it so that the extension of the concept is not
closed by.a frontier. And this is how we do use the word “game”.
For how IS the concept of a game bounded? What still counts as a
game and what no longer does? Can you give the boundary? No.
You can draw one; for none has so far been drawn. (But that never
troubled you before when you used the word “game”.)
.”B~t ~en the use of”the wor? is unregulated, the. ‘game’ we play
WIth It IS unregulated. –It IS not everywhere CIrcumscribed by
rules} but n? more are there any rules for how high one throws the
ball In tennis, or how hard; yet tennis is a game for all that and has
rules too.
69. How should we explain to someone what a game is? I imagine
that we should describe games to him, and we might add: “This and
similar things are called ‘games”’. And do we know any more about
it ourselves? Is it only other people whom we cannot tell exactly what
a game is?-But this is not ignorance. We do not know the boundaries
because none have been drawn. To repeat, we can draw a boundaryfor
a special purpose. Does it take that to make the concept usable?
Not at alll (Except for that special purpose.) No more than it took
the definition: I pace = 75 em, to make the measure of length ‘one
pace’ usable. And if you want to say “But still, before that it wasn’t
an exact measure”, then I reply: very well, it was an inexact one.Though
you still owe me a definition of exactness.
70. “But if the concept ‘game’ is uncircumscribed like that, you
don’t really know what you mean by a ‘game’.”–When I give the
description: “The ground was quite covered with plants”-do you
want to say I don’t know what I am talking about until I can give a
definition of a plant?
My meaning would be explained by, say, a drawing and the words
“The ground looked roughly like this”. Perhaps I even say “it looked
exact!J like this.” – Then were just this grass and these leaves there,
arranged just like this? No, that is not what it means. And I should
not accept any picture as exact in this sense.
Someone says to me: “Shew the children a game.” I teach them
gaming with dice, and the other says “I didn’t mean that sort of
game.” Must the exclusion of the game with dice have come before
his mind when he gave me the order?
75. What does it mean to know what a game is? What does it
mean, to know it and not be able to say it? Is this knowledge somehow
equivalent to an unformulated definition? So that if it were
formulated I should be able to recognize it as the expression of my
knowledge? Isn’t my knowledge, my concept of a game, completely
expressed in the explanations that I could give? That is, in my describing
examples of various kinds of game; shewing how all sorts of other
games can be constructed on the analogy of these; saying that I should
scarcely include this or this among games; and so on.
100. “But still, it isn’t a game, if there is some vagueness in the
~ules”.-But does this prevent its being a game?-”Perhaps you’ll call
it a game, but at any rate it certainly isn’t a perfect game.” This means:
it has impurities, and what I am interested in at present is the pure
article.-But I want to say: we misunderstand the role of the ideal
in our language. That is to say: we too should call it a game, only we
are dazzled by the ideal and therefore fail to see the actual use of the
word “game” clearly.
200. It is, of course, imaginable that two people belonging to a
tribe unacquainted with games should sit at a chess-board and go
through the moves of a game of chess; and even with all the appropriate
mental accompaniments. And if we were to see it we should say they
were playing chess. But now imagine a game of chess translated
according to certain rules into a series of actions which we do not
ordinarily associate with a game-say into yells and stamping of feet.
And now suppose those two people to yell and stamp instead of playing
the form of chess that we are used to; and this in such a way
that their procedure is translatable by suitable rules into a game of
chess. Should we still be inclined to say they were playing a game?
What right would one have to say so?
563. Let us say that the meaning of a piece is its role in the game.Now
let it be decided by lot which of the players gets white before
any game of chess begins. To this end one player holds a king in each
closed fist while the other chooses one of the two hands at random.
Will it be counted as part of the role of the king in chess that it is used
to draw lots in this way?
564. So I am inclined to distinguish between the essential and the
inessential in a game too. The game, one would like to say, has not
only rules but also a point.
567. But, after ali, the game is supposed to be defined by the rules I
So, if a rule of the game prescribes that the kings are to be used for
drawing lots before a game of chess, then that is an essential part of
the game. What objection might one make to this? That one does not
see the point of this prescription. Perhaps as one wouldn’t see the point
either of a rule by which each piece had to be turned round three times
before one moved it. If we found this rule in a board-game we should
be surprised and should speculate about the purpose of the rule.
(“Was this prescription meant to prevent one from moving without
due consideration?”)
568. If I understand the character of the game aright-I might
say-then this isn’t an essential part of it.
«Meaning is a physiognomy.))
On Tuesday evening I had the pleasure of meeting up with some fellow UM alums during an information session for the Ross Business School. I didn’t graduate with an MBA; I did my MFA in the School of Art & Design. Nonetheless, I was welcomed and had the opportunity to share my perspectives on what makes Michigan different from other universities and experiences. Actually, I think it is becoming increasingly relevant that students in art and design connect with business students and vice versa.
The highlight of the evening was a lecture by Venkat Ramaswamy, Hallman Fellow of Electronic Business and Professor of Marketing at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. During his visit to India he was launching his new book, “The Power of Co-Creation”, and he gave a very nice explanation of co-creation to the audience of prospective MBAs and Alums.
For me, the lecture was especially timely. I have been diving deep into the theory and practice of service design for the last eight months. My goal is to use knowledge of complex systems and dematerialized practices as options for thinking, teaching, and solving problems that can benefit from the engagement of multiple stakeholders. Some of these problems range from the provision of water resources, delivery of health services, discovery of patterns in public health, the maintenance and design of infrastructure, or even how learning is measured and fed back into teaching and course content.
Prof. Ramaswamy’s talk focused on examples that demonstrated co-creation as a paradigm for value creation. He provided a sample of instances where the design of platforms focuses on interactions between enterprise providers (supply chain, enterprise planning, customer relationship) on one hand – and stakeholders on the other. The key part of the value creation lies in the assembly of a platform through which the process of engagement and co-creation can take place. In this way, engagement happens first, enterprise second.
Seoul OASIS co-creation & planning includes the use of images to illustrate the suggestions.
Seoul OASIS co-creation & planning includes the use of images to illustrate the suggestions.
Venkat’s first example came from civic planning in Seoul, South Korea. OASIS is a platform for engagement with public services. It facilitates citizen engagement with the city council using a combination of online, video, and face-to-face platforms. To make it an effective platform, complaints are not allowed – only suggestions. The facilitators also ask/keep the suggestions limited to the goals that have already been determined. So the question civic participants have to ask themselves is, “How do we achieve our goals?”
Civic Participation in Seoul OASIS
Civic Participation in Seoul OASIS
The participation process begin with (1) suggestions which get tagged by the participants. The tags allow people to start structured (2) discussions of the ideas. About 12% then get taken for (3) off-line examinations. Eventually there are (4) Seoul OASIS meetings which are filmed live and where stakeholders and civic service providers get to interact. Finally, a handful of suggestions make it to (5) implementation where the project gets documented along with benchmarks and other accountability checks.
Delhi-Traffic-Police-get-social
Another great example for India is how the Delhi Traffic Police have been using Facebook as a platform for accountability and peer pressure on Delhi’s citizens to follow the rules. In some cases, the platform has even allowed citizens to establish some accountability on the part of the police as well.
Caja Navarra (Spain) is pioneering civic banking using engagement platforms to make an impact in the social sector. It shows customers how much it makes from their savings and provides them with the ability to choose from an array of eight or so recipients of their social contributions. The recipient organizations are further pushed to present how they use the money as a result of the participation. The benefits also feed back to the bank’s ability to attract new customers. By providing “gift cards” with preset amounts, new participants can log on and get involved with their donations. Meanwhile, the bank is then able to show potential customers how their money would be used by Caja Navarra as opposed to the customer’s current bank.
The Gameful Leaderboard
The Gameful Leaderboard
All of this reminded me of some other platforms that tie emerging enterprises with potential stakeholders. Kickstarter is a new platform for ideas that need capital to get their projects off the ground. Anyone can contribute, and it only depends on the project’s ability to pitch their idea – and maybe some well-placed social capital (here’s some tips on managing a kickstarter project). One hugely successful project pitch that was launched is Gameful (exceeding their funding goal by over 3000%). It’s an online Secret HQ for gamers and game developers who want to help change the world and make our real lives better. The project’s developers did a really nice thing in pitching the project. They set of levels of giving, that mimicked some game tropes like secret entry points and awards.
Co-creation and service design are largely about the engagement that happens in the development of product and service offerings. Later as we ate dinner, I asked Prof. Ramaswamy what it might mean to go beyond products and services. What would happen, for example, if co-creation impacted the evolution of the core business model and plan? Eric Beinhocker explores some of the conditions for how this might happen in his book, The Origin of Wealth. One of the central themes of the book revolves around how businesses themselves are a form of design. The design of businesses encompasses how to understand the market and connected institutions, product and service offerings, operations, marketing and sales, strategy, and the organization itself. If, as Beinhocker argues, business designs evolve over time through differentiation, selection, and amplification, then it stands to reason that co-creative platforms for engagement can distribute that work as well as just the product and service offerings. The only question is where will it happen?
Love this talk by the designer of evoke: the ten-week crash course in changing the world. Besides her breakdown of what gamers are good at, she nails a critical point: games can give you lots of characters who are willing to TRUST you and match challenges to your level–providing collaboration, feedback, and an engaging story–something we all need more of. She ends with a a better tactic around futurecasting: imagine the best scenario possible—then empower people to achieve it.
