Gaming

America's Army (also known as AA or Army Game Project) is a series of video games and other media developed by the United States Army and released as a global public relations initiative to help with recruitment. America's Army was conceived by Colonel Casey Wardynski and is managed by the U.S. Army's Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis at the United States Military Academy.

Wardynski envisioned "using computer game technology to provide the public a virtual Soldier experience that was engaging, informative and entertaining."The PC version 1.0, subtitled Recon, was first released on July 4, 2002. Since then, there have been over 26 versions released, the most recent being America's Army 3. All versions have been developed on the Unreal Engine and use PunkBuster to try to prevent cheating. The game is financed by the U.S. government and distributed by free download.

America's Army has "grown in ways its originators couldn't have imagined". Dozens of government training and simulation applications using the America's Army platform have been developed to train and educate U.S. Army Soldiers. America's Army has also been used to deliver virtual Soldiering experiences to participants at events, such as air shows, amusement parks, and sporting events around the country. The America's Army series has also been expanded to include versions for Xbox and Xbox 360, arcade, and mobile applications published through licensing arrangements.

The game was developed by Col. Wardynski who recognized that a video game might be helpful to the U.S. Army in the strategic communication efforts by providing more information to prospective Soldiers and to help reduce the number of recruits who wash out during the nine weeks of basic training. The effort proved successful as more than 9 million copies have been downloaded. One teenager was quoted saying the game "provides great information. This would probably spark an interest. I don't know how I would have found out so much some other way."



The critical and hazardous nature
of the work for which soldiers are trained requires a “virtually real” environment where mistakes
are not catastrophic. The highly coordinated and cooperative nature of their work requires
a learning environment that builds teams and prepares personnel for highly specific and highly
coordinated missions. The U.S. Army is so convinced of the power and effect of serious games
that it uses its massively multiplayer online game as a recruitment tool.



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Research Poster

Poster should contain:
1. Title
2. Introduction presenting your research question or central proposition
3. A short description of its significance, context and relevance
4. Overview of methodologies used in the design research investigation
5. Description of key design activities, original investigations,
experiments, technical achievements and reflections
6. Overview of the intended design solution
7. References
> Link address to PDF version on Stream
> Poster should be understandable in 10min.
> Only A1 format
> Portrait



Just two posters to get me thinking about composition and aesthetics

For my teams poster we are going to explain the participatory culture with a heavy emphasis on the entertainment industry e.g Music, Games and Movies. We decided to get active participation with the design aesthetic by getting facebook users to submit to us an image that they think best describes the entertainment industry. These images will be collected and transformed into a collage. This information was sent to facebook users online via a group invite, here is the description they received:

Major Project Assignment Thingy

Category:Entertainment & Arts - Online Media

Description:
Hey guys, for my design research paper i have been looking onto the participatory culture and user driven content online. One part of my assignment requires me to create a poster explaining this user interactivity and i would like to create a collage with your collaborative input.

I basically need an image(s) of your favorite aspect of the entertainment industry e.g movies, bands, music, technology, gaming etc. From there ill take your image and hopefully turn it into an amazing piece of informative design. So jump on google or your favorite image search engine, grab an image that you think represents your definition of entertainment and chuck the link onto this page.

Thanks for your time, you guys are the shizz!!!



So far there has been a positive response with many people joining the group but fewer to actively participate by posting a link or image. This maybe because they do not have an incentive to participate, in saying that some facebook users found the group by chance and found it interesting so they joined and began adding images themselves.

Object

The class was asked to bring in there favorite/most desirable object to class, iv decide to take a photo of mine rather than bringing it all the way in. My object is my guitar which is a black G-310 Epiphone SG guitar that i purchased when i was 17 years old from a music shop in Rotorua, a fairly cheap guitar but sounds good on clean.

Human Computation

Folksonomy to ESP Games (games with a purpose)

The ESP game is an idea in computer science for addressing the problem of creating difficult metadata,
the idea behind the game is to use computational power of humans to preform a task that computers can not do
(image recognition) by packing the task into a game.










http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143&q=google+tech+talks#

Social Tags

Folksonomy

A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging. Folksonomy is a portmanteau of folk and taxonomy.
Folksonomies became popular on the Web around 2004 as part of social software applications such as social bookmarking and photograph annotation.

Social Bookmarking is a method for internet users to share, organize, search and manage bookmarks online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves are not shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.

Tagging, which is one of the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 services, allows users to collectively classify and find information. Some websites include tag clouds as a way to visualize tags in a folksonomy.
Attempts have been made to characterize folksonomy in social tagging system as emergent externalization of knowledge structures contributed by multiple users. Models of collaborative tagging have been developed to characterize how knowledge structures could arise and be useful to other users, even when there is a lack of top-down mediation (which is believed to be an important feature because they do not need laborious explicit representations as in semantic web). In particular, cognitive models of collaborative tagging can highlight how differences in internal knowledge structures of multiple users can lead to different emergent properties in the folksonomy of a social tagging system.

- Advantages

All of the classifications of internet resources are done by human beings, who understand the content of the resouce as opposes to software, which use algorithmic attempts to determine the meaning of the resource. Also people can find pages that have not yet been found or indexed by a web spider.

Exploiting Social Tags

For Music Information Retrieval
- Expanding the tag/ labeling coverage
- using tags for discovery
- improving the quality of tags



http://www.slideshare.net/plamere/social-tags-and-music-information-retrieval-part-i-presentation

"Music is created by humans for other humans, and humans
can bring a tremendous amount of contextual knowledge to
bear on anything they do; in fact, they can’t avoid it, and
they’re rarely conscious of it.
But computers can never bring much contextual knowledge to
bear, often none at all, and never without being specifically
programmed to do so. Therefore doing almost anything with
music by computers is very difficult; many problems are
essentially intractable "(Byrd, 2008).

Byrd, D. (2008). Organization and search of musical
information. Syllabus for a course at http://informatics.
indiana.edu/donbyrd/Teach/I545Site-Spring08/Syllabus
I545.html

Lecture Notes

Design Context

"Design is a goal-oriented process to solve problems, meet needs, improve situations, or create something new or useful..."
(Friedman 2005)

-Create awareness of a problem, issue or an opinion

- For users needs, problem solving, Developing own vision, independent thinking and to explore own signature


The focus of design research is qualitative

-Critical thinking
-Meanings, feelings and dreams
-Contextual research/design


Research Summary + Abstract

What/Why = Contextual Research = Background Argument

How = Studio Research + Design Studio

* What is the Communication issue and Context?

* Why is it important?

* Who is your audience?

* How will you accomplish this and what is your design direction

* What visual strategies will you use?
e.g Semiotics, Rhetoric , Aesthetic, Techniques and Phenomenology


Design as an agent in a system of meaning making communications
that are all ( Investigated, Discussed, Synthesized and Articulated) = Research Summary

Abstract

Initially advertising began purely as an informative communication for the public in which products were differentiated by their specific features. Over time companies started to use more influential methods of persuasion to sell their products, such as celebrity endorsements and stretching the truth to not only sell goods, but to inform the consumer of how this product could benefit their lifestyle.

In later years, advertising developed into more than a product focused communication tool and began to exploit the psychological thoughts of consumers by creating an experience that they can become a part of. Thus altering the consumer’s perceived nature of the product and through association, how they are viewed by others.

Currently consumers are responding to these tactics with the emergence of the movement known as the participatory culture. Many brands and corporations have responded back by embracing consumer input to come across as more trustworthy.

The participatory culture is the active communication, co-operation and circulation of ideas between the masses, this allowing the public to act not only as consumers but also as producers and contributors. This culture has emerged from the recent advances of technologies mainly personal computers and the Internet, the absorption of this technology has created opportunities for the average consumer to create, archive, appropriate and publish media content usually through the Internet.

This leads us to our research question, with participatory culture emerging into mainstream media, how can the users input; interact, influence and contribute towards the design process?

This will be investigated by finding examples of ways that the participatory culture is impacting on different areas of design. We will explore how participatory culture can be used, adapted and applied to various platforms.