--- breaks: false --- MCSA project: Participatory culture applied to science (title pending) === NEW VERSION: https://pad.degrowth.net/s/eDn-iWeAs current challenge: find a good reference and phrasing why we need the bottom-up. Basically that bottom-up is critical to move those levers, and more effectively targeted than established power. some refs from AquaSavvy - Agger, Annika and Eva Sørensen (2018). “Managing collaborative innovation in public bureaucracies.” In: Planning Theory 17.1, pp. 53–73. doi:10.1177/1473095216672500. It is well recognised within research in innovation in public governance that traditional strategies and tools to overcome unruly policy challenges have proven insufficient (e.g. Agger and Sørensen, 2018) - Andersen, Per Dannemand, Meiken Hansen, and Cynthia Selin (2021). “Stakeholder inclusion in scenario planning—A review of European projects.” In: Technological Forecasting and Social Change 169, p. 120802. doi:0.1016/j.techfore.2021.120802. - Arnstein, Sherry R (1969). “A ladder of citizen participation.” In: Journal of the American Institute of planners 35.4, pp. 216–224. doi: 10.1080/01944366908977225. - Avelino, Flor (2021) “Theories of power and social change. Power contestations and their implications for research on social change and innovation” Journal of Political Power , 14.3 Informa UK Limited 425-448. - Brennan, Mark A. et al. (Dec. 2022). “Creating Caring Communities to Overcome Times of Crisis.” In: Community Development for Times of Crisis. Routledge, pp. 1–16. isbn: 978-1-00-321265-2. doi: 10.4324/9781003212652-1. Transformative social innovation which is defined as changing social relations involving new ways of doing, thinking and organising (Avelino et al., 2023) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2210422423000680#section-cited-by need community for adaptive capacity. --- Title needs a target name; can include socio-ecological systems, or Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services or Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Science? It's also more about applied science or even engineering, rather than fundamental research. Participation in transition. TODO: check the expert panels, what fits, and tailor title accordingly. From funding page, the list is: - Chemistry CHE - Economic sciences ECO - Information science and Engineering ENG - **Environmental and Geosciences ENV** - Life Sciences LIF - Mathematics MAT - Physics PHY - **Social Sciences and Humanities SOC** ## Introduction ### Climate action needs bottom-up action The need for more and better contributions - climate change, needing citizen input, participation changing knowledge in unpredictable times - STS critique. Introduce the leverage points. Environmental science has become an obstacle for transformative change for people and nature {Turnhout_2024}. Sustainability science operates on a dangerous illusion of neutrality. Many see neutrality as indispensable for the production of truth, but it is not just unattainable, it is actually harmful {Turnhout_2024}. Transformative change - ‘fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values’ - towards sustainable pathways requires more than a simple scaling-up of sustainability initiatives—it entails changing the fabric of legal, political, economic and other social systems {Chan_2020}. To address the complex social–ecological problems we currently face, our focus must expand beyond the direct drivers of change, which resist intervention because they underpin our current economies and governance institutions, and shift to include indirect drivers, including formal and informal institutions, focused on norms, values, rules and governance systems, demographic and sociocultural factors, and economic and technological factors {Chan_2020}.Given that the fate of nature and humanity depends on transformative change of the human enterprise {IPBES2019a}, indirect drivers clearly play a central role. In this project, I intend to focus on the role of contributor communities, and participative culture, as a driver of bottom-up transformative change, impacting the five intertwined levers of {Chan_2020}. ### Instead, greater division Unfortunately, grassroots action is vulnerable to manipulation and misinformation. (Add something about virtue signaling being alienating? - can likely find OG refs in Naomi Klein's book) Instead of getting more collaboration and contribution, we are seeing more polarisation, more echo chambers, more division, more conflict. Current approaches of participation do not seem to be working coherently. (henry jenkins had a quote about this in the 2019 book, the disillusionment of what participatory culture could give) ## Problem statement ### Background: Contributor community frameworks form their own echo chambers Existing work has focused on what existing contributors can gain from the experience, analysing what is already there, and encouraging more of the same to join. It could be argued that this creates an echo chamber of its own, albeit of noble intentions. Participation in for-good contributor communities seem to be dominated by certain personality types, and are often frought with tension. It is hard for others to join, and often not desirable; it's not fun. Work on how to influence these dynamics, in order to get more people to engage, and stay engaged is lacking. Unpack this: Review existing work on analysing contributing communities. Are there contributor motivator frameworks / types? ### Citizen "engagement" has become problematic. Article on different citizen science types {Kasperowski_2018}, that can be developed into a certain type of framework. Consider limitations. Understanding that consumption patterns are a fundamental driver of material extraction, production and flows, but they are in turn driven by worldviews and notions of good quality of life {Chan_2020}. A top down engagement aiming to educate citizens to change consumption patterns have thus far proven marginally succesful at best (REF). Games, on the other hand, have become increasingly complex with individualised storylines and objectives. Considering and nudging individual ideas of good quality of life, and exploring the trade-offs inherent in that, in an unstructured, playful way, may yield greater positive change {Kahan_2017}. ## A different approach ### Curiosity and play Look to work on how this can be different - Eyal, Stampnitzsky, Naomi Klein, Anand Giridharadas, Gilligan. Curiosity, facilitate building new knowledge alliances, ethic of care. Playfulness. ### Limitations of "gamification" Introduce the concept of gamification and how it was used to improve engagement in scientific concepts, overview of serious games. Consider the limitations of gamification. Simplistic motivations - Octalysis Overview {Fernandez_2021} Many gamification studies seem to rely on a captured audience, like applying games in formal education {Sabornido_2022}, or catering to an existing audience, for example targeting people already concerned about climate change. Games often prioritize awareness over tangible behavioral changes or policy impacts (REF?). Gamification can oversimplify complex issues, potentially undermining nuanced discussions around sustainability. A very recent pre-print requests robust evaluations of the impacts of serious games for climate change mitigation {Hognon2025}. ### Game culture design What does game design mean broader than gamification - story, curation, user-friendly interface, the tutorial thing that guides ### Why game design? How did we get here? The convergence of particitory culture in media, games, and politics - Henry Jenkins quotes. Acknowledge the importance of the digital. Emergent games, personalised opbjectives, meeting people where they are. ### Gamer motivation profile Then how did I get to player motivation types? Introduce the concept with the OG - Bartle player types, that include the killers - people who break stuff for fun. Compare this with the "for good" in serious games. This is boring, while the potential for failure, and inefficiency, is core to what a game is - consider playing golf when you can just pick the ball up and put it in the hole. The concept of player types was introduced by Richard Bartle, who ... role playing games called MUDs - multi-user dungeons. These games where a combination of ... (Yee). Bartle consideres four player types, based on the player's preference in engaging with people, acting upon (killer) or interacting with (socialiser), or preference in engaging with the game environment, or world, acting upon (achiever) or interacting with (explorer) (REF). These types are limited in contexts less concerned with war or conquest, and some attempts have been made to extend these (8 types - REF) Also Frans Mayra: {Kallio2010} cited by: {McKechnie_2024} -useful! #### Different frameworks Bartle's player types persist in game design, but this approach to player design results in games development missing entire market segments of potential players. The evolution of games need a fresh look at what motivates players. At the same time, there is an evolution in the commercialisation of games, and a trend towards casual games, which is potentially harmful in the sense of community that the original MUDs nurtured. It struck me that the same opportunities and challenges that games are faced with, can be applied to our interaction with the world, particularly the challenges to community and the incessant force of consumerism that threatens quality engagement. {Yee2014} Introduce Nick Yee's [gamer motivation types](https://quanticfoundry.com/gamer-types/) - the 9 archetypes.  ## Contributor communities as player communities Why is it important to include all player types in a game - e.g. the Bard is in it just for the social engagement. Bards are the people people and the connectors that maintain the strength and diversity of networks - quote whoever said the strength of networks thing. ## Potential risks Risk of echo chambers and conflict. Healthy communities, curiosity, an ethic of care - more player types needed to create and maintain this balance. In game design, as in a healthy functional community, all player types have a role to play, they are all important, and should be included and catered for by design. All player types should be able to achieve "flow" - REF. --- move this to another section, it's not a risk, it's what we're doing in the project. Because science-based contributions rely on data and verification, it is likely that the player types would need to be extended or adapted - e.g. add Librarian types. In this sense it is helpful to include work on fandoms, and the convergence of media consumption, participatory culture, and collective intelligence. This convergence represents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content {Jenkins_2008}. TODO, extend this to emergent games, (something something metaverse?) Also how the data is managed underpins all this. While this is beyond the scope of this project to investigate, this project notes something something data infrastructures are considered from a player management perspective. Extend to immersive games - broader than location-based. Then extend this media-game-politic convergence to science. Extending {Jenkins_2008} assertion: Knowledge communities form around mutual intellectual interests; their members work together to forge new knowledge often in realms where no traditional expertise exists; the pursuit of and assessment of knowledge is at once communal and adversarial. Mapping how these knowledge communities work can help us better understand the social nature of contemporary engagement with climate science ~~media consumption~~ Lever points?. - maybe good paragraph to link to the last link back section. ---- Our traditional assumptions about expertise are breaking down or at least being transformed by the more open-ended processes of communication in cyberspace. The traditional expert paradigm requires a bounded body of knowledge. The types of questions that thrive in a collective intelligence, however, are open ended and profoundly interdisciplinary, and rely on the combined knowledge of a more diverse community {Jenkins_2008, Walsh_1999}. Climate action falls in this category. The expert paradigm creates an “exterior” and “interior”; there are some people who know things and others who don’t. (Add the STS bit about Lesley Green, command and control, no longer appropriate when the models that are the underpinning of that expertise no longer works). The current focus on participatory planning still struggle with power disparities {Chan_2020}. A collective intelligence, on the other hand, assumes that each person has something to contribute, even if they will only be called upon on an ad hoc basis {Jenkins_2008, Walsh_1999}. (Experts becomes another person with something to contribute, but they are not priviledged overall) Traditional expertise have (implied) rules about how information is accessed and processed, which were established through traditional disciplines.These are no longer useful (flesh this out by the OSF talk - https://osf.io/ku239 - and convert to ref) By contrast, the strength and weakness of a collective intelligence is that it is disorderly, undisciplined, and unruly. Just as knowledge gets called upon on an ad hoc basis, there are no fixed procedures for what you do with knowledge. This project aims to improve the structure while acknowledging the need for creative flow - similar to what OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia have achieved. Traditional expertise is credentialized; often having to do with formal education. While participants in a collective intelligence still have the need to prove they know what they know, this is not based on a hierarchical system. Asserting one's expertise as special, threatens the more open-ended and democratic principles upon which a collective intelligence operates. ---- ### Utility beyond project Extending player types to account for the physical world further extends the potential application of games to include wider market segments, and use of games, and game design, in professional contexts. ## A framework for contributor motivators based on diverse player types If we then look at what motivates different types of players, and we consider contributors in the same way, what can we learn about the overlaps? What motivates each of them, and what dimensions are relevant to each? What gaps can we identify? We can hypothesize that healthy communities need all the player types to function properly. I hypothesize that this is not currently the case in contributor communities. We can then apply the different types of players to contributors and extend the engagement beyond the "for good" (patronising) principle. ## link back to the leverage points thing. Linking with leverage points on shifting/breaking society structures that limit climate action: re-imagining the agency of accountable grassroots action. On the limits of frameworks: It is tactical to reduce the understanding of community in order to analyse and direct community-based action, while understanding that this is a limited take on the complexity. This project is still a tactical reduction, but aims to take a different lens to the framework in order to gain new insights. Interventions in pursuit of just a few goals risk having negative effects on others and missing opportunities to realize synergies and manage trade-offs {Chan_2020}. Game design, and particularly emergent game design, have the potential to allow interventions across communities and focus areas in unforeseen ways, while developing meta-skills required for effective collaboration (Mitsea ref?) Consider different contributor communities as different "game communities" - e.g. OpenStreetMap is a game, OSM users are the fandom, Debian is a game, Ubuntu, Wikipedia, is a game. DIYBio, Reddit. Also, TEDx is a game - the speakers and team are the players, and the attendees and wider community is the fandom. parkrun is a game, the organisers and volunteers are the players and the runners are the fandom. etc. Links to open source "in crisis" - commercialization, taxation, and social validation (burnout). Can a poorly functional community lead to individual burnout? Can better player design mitigate this? I would say Nick Yee's book proves this already. Or at least documents the other way, increased burnout :( To summarise, the objective of this project is then to: 1. Conceptually compare the game player type framework with existing contributor frameworks. 2. Apply these frameworks to contributor communities, map the intersections, find where they overlap, what's missing - create a contributor motivation profile 3. Identify the barriers to extend contributor engagement to a broader set of "player types" and suggest recommendations for how this can be mediated. ----- More: Henry Jenkins notes: https://indiebio.co.za/notes-from-henry-jenkins-book-convergence-culture/ Jonas - what is OK to stretch in the model, what is "illegal"? - one is the game being frustrating and inefficient, but what is a game? is the tunnel digging game really a game? There needs to be a challenge, but it's open to interpretation what the challenge, or the game, is. different game player types cultivating empathy. current ways of increasing engagement seems to be overly idealistic or downright dictatorial - "everyone should". There are a lot of initiatives that are loud but are not solving anything.identity politics, virtue signaling