Hell

xkcd.com

Taking Your Emotional Vitamins: Recommended Daily Allowance of Play

Daily Emotional Balance is an (infrequently commented upon) online discussion forum. Its pedigree strikes me as a bit thin. Nevertheless, it presents some intriguing ideas:

In nutrition, we have an RDA — a Recommended Daily Allowance for essential vitamins and minerals…

Is there also an RDA for emotions? Is it optimally healthy for everyone to experience a certain amount of love each day? of creativity? of competition, in the sporting sense? Of artistic fulfillment? Of connection with friends? Perhaps even hatred?

There may be research which suggests that for ideal health a person’s glands should emit so much adrenaline, so much cortisol, and so much oxytocin on a daily basis. This could translate into a requirement that one would be well served to have several kinds of experiences every day which require these hormones. They might include the feel-good emotions that everyone craves; but they might also include less popular ones like aggression, fear, and anxiety.

Play can elicit any number of emotions. “Positive” feelings are most obvious — from the comfort of bonding with friends or family in free play to the excitement of winning a game. The rest of the emotional spectrum may be a bit more difficult to recognize, but it’s all there. For instance, play researchers note that it’s in competitive play that children often first learn the motivations of deception and experience fear and anxiety due to harassment received during play. Of course, losing a game can yield sadness and disappointment. In adults, even flirting and sex can be viewed as forms of play — intertwined with lust and eroticism.

If play can bring about and is connected to so many emotions, then perhaps it’s an essential part of good health. In fact, it seems that focusing on designing play technologies to explore and elicit the gamut of human emotion could open a door to both better health and entirely new play interactions.

UPDATE (June 1, 2010): Related post on Optimal Daily Experience.

(via Hug the Monkey)

The Geekness: Humanities Gaming Institute

The University of South Carolina’s Center for Digital Humanities is creating and hosting a summer Humanities Gaming Institute with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities’s Office of Digital Humanities (do their business cards have fold out panels?).

The purpose of this 3 week long institute (and the follow-on year of discussions and collaboration) is to explore the interplay of serious games and advanced technology towards furthering both electronic gaming and the study of the humanities.

With the generous help of luminary experts and emerging innovators in game studies and development, our team seeks participants to:

Investigate the cognitive components of games that inform and enable successful gameplay, including immersive structure, rule governance, interactivity, and simulation.

Provide hands-on research into existing serious games from a variety of fields, including history, literature, linguistics, philosophy, and economics.

Produce, under the guidance of experienced game developers, games that can scale to meet participants’ research and teaching needs in the humanities.

(via The Future Now Blog)

Scientific American: “Thinking Outside of the Toy Box: 4 Children’s Gizmos That Inspired Scientific Breakthroughs”

Thinking Outside of the Toy Box: 4 Children’s Gizmos That Inspired Scientific Breakthroughs:

Advances in science and technology can launch from unassuming springboards. In 1609 Galileo tweaked a toylike spyglass, pointed it at the moon and Jupiter (not the neighbors), and astronomy took a quantum leap. About 150 years later, Benjamin Franklin reportedly used a kite to experiment with one of the earliest-known electrical capacitors. Continuing that tradition, these researchers prove toys inspire more than child’s play.

“The laboratory is basically a glorified playroom,” says Jeremy Levy, physics professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “When we do experiments, it is a highly advanced form of play…we’re exploring new things.”

The researchers were inspired by and used toys for developing new technologies:

1. Etch A Sketch: nanoscale transistor
2. Legos: researching particle separators for “lab on a chip” microfluidic devices
3. Shrinky Dink: production of microfluidic devices
4. Balloons: nanoscale cancer drug delivery

Play researchers talk about an interconnection of play and cognitive flexibility (almost always as related to the neurological development of children). A couple thoughts here:

1. Consider the possibility that the act of playing with these four toys may have imprinted itself upon these researchers as children. Perhaps the act of playing with these toys had something to do with these very creative technical solutions — both the mechanics of the solutions and the creativity itself.
2. Play has a place in adult’s lives, and I believe there’s a real place for play in the workplace — for getting the creative juices going, and, oh, I don’t know, just being human. So, seriously, people, start goofing around and get back to work.

How to fix your boring progress bars

Launch: Highrise for iPhone

One of the downsides to the initial download is that it can take some time depending on your connection and the number of contacts you have. Waiting for anything sucks, but what sucks more is being bored while waiting.

So we decided to give you something to do while the initial download is in progress. You can play tic-tac-toe while you wait. Just tap the button and the screen flips to a tic-tac-toe board. The download progress bar remains at the bottom so you see where you are while you tap away your time trying to beat the computer.

You betcha.

From the blog postings I’ve seen thus far, I’ll wager that this app gets more attention by virtue of this one screen than it does for all its pedigree as a 37signals product. What does that say about introducing playful human computer interfaces to technology?

(Is it insulting to end with a rhetorical question like that?)