Wisdom of Play

Although the Wisdom of Play projects fell short of the original vision, we did manage to produce some interesting experiences for Bloomington. A number of these projects wouldn’t have been possible without some financial backing, even in small amounts.

I’d like to extend a personal thanks to the following donors who pledged money to our projects:

• Chris Borland
• Gabriel Recchia
• Mike Trotzke
• Maarten Bout
• Gail Hale
• Craig Harvey
• Allison Cooke
• Bob Molnar

The money raised directly paid for materials to build the Serious Games Arcade facades and the Our Infinite Canvas materials, as well as reimbursing a significant chunk of the expenses incurred by our Human Puzzle coordinators. We had a number of other people step up in our initial Kickstarter campaign, too, who would have contributed money if that effort had been successful.

A special thanks to Mike Trotzke and Sproutbox for hosting our Playing With Wisdom unconference last week. Mike also bought pizza for the participants that day.

We had two volunteers help with our events. Michelle Smith was instrumental in moving the Our Infinite Canvas project around Bloomington, snapping pictures of new panels for Ben Serrette to include in the online version of the project (http://ourinfinitecanvas.com). Betsy Head assisted with the Ignite Bloomington event at the end of Taming the Butterfly and registration—including handing out Human Puzzle shirts—at the unconference. Their help was greatly appreciated.

Our coordinators were the ones responsible for getting the projects off the ground: Ben Serrette (Our Infinite Canvas), Larry Buchanan and Erin Wright (Human Puzzle), Christian Briggs (Taming the Butterfly), and Will Emigh (Serious Games Arcade). I also want to thank Bloominglabs for giving the Toy Boxes project a go. I wish we had the resources to have made that a success during the first half of May.

Sally Meyer did a wonderful job lining up the locations for both the Our Infinite Canvas project and the training sessions for Taming the Butterfly. Having that off of my plate was a huge help.

Thanks to the artists who participated in Human Puzzle: Kurtis Beavers, Barba Bonchek, Larry Buchanan, Zach Rozycki, Raf Cronin and Jack Brubaker. We wish we could have properly funded stipends for your work.

Similarly, thank you to our four game developers: Pete Grogg of WisdomTools’ Health Games (Campus Craft), Sonny Kirkley of WisdomTools, Inc. (AstroEngineer: Moon Rover™), Nathan Mishler of Studio Cypher (San*Go Seasons), and Gabriel Recchia of the Indiana University Cognitive Computing Laboratory and Transformative Gaming & Simulation (Wordbots). The quality of your work got lost in the execution and coordination of the Serious Games Arcade, but I hope the experience at least got you a few users.

Other thank-yous go out to CFC Properties for allowing us to shoot daily videos in a swanky downtown office overlooking the courthouse. They also hosted the Serious Games Arcade and Our Infinite Canvas for the final weekend, at Fountain Square Mall.

The Wisdom of Play projects concluded on Sunday, May 15, with a successful unconference and delivery of the Human Puzzle shirts. There were a number of challenges about this suite of community engagement projects, and each effort had mixed success.

Taming the Butterfly

The alternate reality game run by SociaLens was designed to improve digital skills and strengthen connections within the Bloomington community. Attracting over 70 registrations, the game ran from May 5th through 12th and culminated in an Ignite Bloomington event where players shared their plans for shaping the future of Bloomington. While there was attrition—thanks in no small part to the IU graduation activities during the game—TTB ended up with three active groups and enough feedback to iterate the project. The organizers considered this project a successful pilot for larger versions of the game to be run in other communities and corporations.

Toy Boxes

The Bloominglabs hackers and builders group made great strides toward completing four of the targeted six geocaching puzzle boxes, to be placed in the Bloomington area in early May. Due to a late start in organizing this project, however, the time frame became too short to complete and place these objects out in the world. The project was cancelled after the Kickstarter campaign failed. However, the group continues to work on the boxes in the hope of making use of them in the future.

Mission:X

One of the speakers at TEDx Bloomington was Charlie Todd, the founder of Improv Everywhere. We have long talked about bringing an IE-style mission to Bloomington, but it has never materialized. Lack of time was the biggest reason we continue to wait, as the Mission:X project was cancelled before ever naming a coordinator.

Our Infinite Canvas

Ben Serrette‘s local art and storytelling project made a tour of Bloomington for the first two weeks of May, inviting people to add panels to an organically-grown comic. The low-tech display still had too many constraints of physical space to properly honor Scott McCloud’s notion of an infinite canvas, but several dozen panels were created and are being scanned into a site Ben made to explore them online (http://www.ourinfinitecanvas.com/). Some artistic license had to be invoked to connect the panels together, in some cases, but overall this was a great iteration on Ben’s capstone project from a year ago. We have high hopes that the online version will continue to develop, adding social dynamics and letting people upload new panels to the story lines collected this month.

Serious Games Arcade

The weekend of TEDx Bloomington included an exhibition of four local game developers of playful games with serious benefits. The three-day show was fraught with difficulties, including technical and material needs that didn’t fully support the project. The construction of the facades was delayed by financial and time constraints, and the final structures were not in place until mid-afternoon on Friday. The killer blow, though, was the absence of an announcement from the TEDx Bloomington stage, which kept the exhibit invisible to hundreds of attendees just a block away. We are grateful to Fountain Square Mall for hosting these exhibits and providing internet access.

The Serious Games Arcade lacked traffic

Human Puzzle

Local artists were recruited to create scenes that spread across multiple t-shirts. Worn individually, the hand-crafted designs are interesting, but when recombined, the set of shirts recreates the full scene—like a human jigsaw puzzle. Our initial plan was for 7 or 8 such puzzles, each with 10 shirts. We only managed four complete puzzles, as well as a number of individual shirts, but that was sufficient to distribute shirts to the crowd at “Playing With Wisdom.” It was neat to see the shirts moving around Bloomington after the unconference, as well. This is definitely a project worth doing again. The cost of the shirts was a significant part of our budget, however, and had to be covered in advance by the coordinators. Generous donations allowed for some of that to be paid back, but we had hoped to support both the material costs and artist stipends.

Playing With Wisdom

Following the full day of short talks on May 14, we targeted a group of 70 people to participate in an afternoon unconference on May 15 to process what we heard that day, as well as discussing the experiences from Taming the Butterfly. Because our initial plans tied this event to the TEDx Bloomington experience in Buskirk-Chumley, recruiting became an issue. Instead of selecting participants from a pool of a couple hundred, we had to scrounge. In the end, we ended up with half of our goal, but more than enough to have multiple small-group discussions about topics like education reform, permaculture, and access to government data. Sproutbox was a gracious host for this event and an ideal location for an unconference of this size. The goal of an unconference is to turn insights into actionable task items that can live on beyond that afternoon, so the biggest measure of success will be our ability to re-engage these topics in the coming months.

We have a number of people and organizations to thank for helping Wisdom of Play to exist. That will come in a special blog post tomorrow.

Since this is the first Kickstarter campaign I’ve managed, I didn’t realize that a video was all but required. I fought through a bunch of pre-existing hurdles to find the time to pull something together to explain what we’re doing with Wisdom of Play. Video editing always seems to take 10x as long as you think, so it wasn’t until about 3a that I finally was able to upload the 5-minute file to Kickstarter.

It was an interesting and helpful exercise to have to describe our projects in a formal way. Since the timetable was tight, I leveraged YouTube heavily to find clips that could illustrate what I wanted to say. That is a rabbit hole from which I safely returned. If we do this next year, we’ll have an entire DVD filled with material to update this first effort and reflect the actual projects we are asking you to fund.

Take a look at the video on Kickstarter. What do you think?