THE COOKBOOK: Recipes for Distributed Living

This began as an exploration of the gamification of small group processes (with a particular focus on on-line migration); it led to a consideration of the primitives of computer-mediated communication and play. This is not particularly surprising since "gamification" is usually rendered in French by the term "ludification" but there is a competing term "ludicisation" applicable in learning contexts:

Le terme ludicisation paraît alors plus approprié. En effet, le suffixe «icisation » ne renvoie pas à l’idée l'on puisse « faire » un jeu comme le laisse penser le suffixe «fication » (facere) de ludification mais plutôt à l’idée qu’il est possible de transformer une situation en jeu. Ainsi, c’est l’intention qui fait le jeu et ce n’est pas « dans la matérialité des objets, dans la factualité des gestes, que l’on a des chances de détecter la présence de l'élément ludique » [Henriot, Le jeu, Presses Universitaires de France, 1969]. Cette approche conduit à définir le jeu par le sens que le joueur donne à la situation plutôt que par les actes qu'il est amené à effectuer

Source: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludification << accessed May 23, 2020.

Who is this for?

This is for the traveller, the universal explorer (cf. Don Koberg and Jim Bagnall The Universal Traveler: A Soft-Systems Guide to creativity, problem-solving and the process of reaching goals).

It is for anyone interested in the ABC of distributed living and learning (which is the primary mode of living).

This is for people who view "structure", "content" and "format" as more than mere nouns. They are verbs and adverbs

This for myself and my students (and I am of course also my own student). We bring to the the day to day tasks of living the awareness of switching between orientation (reading) and action (writing) to all our interpersonal and media encounters. This is to remind me and others to pause, reflect and then take the appropriate action whether it may be allowing the rot of time to take an experience or artefact away, whether it may be running down a rabbit hole along the time lines of the eternal semiosis of the world(s) we inhabit and create.

Favourite Tool = One's Own Hand -- Good for grasping self and other hands

This is for people whose favourite tool is their hand (and body). And use this awareness to navigate stress. To

Stop
Parse / Refine
Reach Out / Research
Inform / Package
Follow Through

All this activity amounts to opening and closing loops. For more nodes on the theme of hands, see https://berneval.hcommons.org/?s=hand and great narrative arcs (like in the novels of Samuel R. Delany.)

I emphasize the hand because it counts. It is with the hand that we remember the five classical senses and the sixth sense, proprioception.

Sensory Modalities

In the Occidental tradition, the five senses are arranged as a hierarchy which is not universally valid. (See the research of Asifa Majid, Professor of Language, Communication, and Cultural Cognition at the University of York, Department of Psychology).

Here we like to think of riding the senses as a form of navigation. One can wallk the syntagm in the great tradition of Christian Metz.

There is a worthwile line of inquiry to see how the various syntagms for the senses are influenced by social constructions of the concpet of proximity.

I like to think of any possible syntagm as laid out as a gradus .A gradient and also a gradus, a manual of rhetoric. See origin from the Apple Dictionary Version 2.3.0 (copyright 2005-2029): mid 18th century: Latin, from Gradus ad Parnassum ‘Step(s) to Parnassus’, the title of such manual << Note the plural possiblities of steps -- one can meander on the gradus (a fourth declension noun in Latin with the same form in the plural and singular nominative) which in English invites us to roam over the graduses. [Many a productive long (rabbit hole) while can be spent pouring over dictionaries and grammars.]

Game

Make your own gradus (tumble the order and walk the resulting list).

Research

Become acquainted with the history of the gradation of the senses. A good place to begin is in noting that "gradus" and "gradation" are different words; gradus = a manual of classical prosody formerly used in schools to help in writing Greek and Latin verse. A gradation (not to be confused with graduation implies hiearchy. Hierarchies like all human and natural constructions are subject to "graceful degradation" as opposed to abrupt failures due to information overload.

In an ecological view of the sensory apparatus, the senses compete with each other for attention. Too prolonged a spell with a single sense leads to the return of the repressed. Sensory deprivation can lead to information overload. Not all information overload is bad.

Pedagogical situations are sensory. They are also interpersonal. Because they are sensory this makes even learning by oneself interpersonal. Egocentric speech is like a dialogue between the senses. In Vygotsky's and Luria's experiments, children placed in problem-solving situations that were slightly too difficult for them displayed egocentric speech. One could consider these as self-induced metadiscursive moments. The self in crisis will disassociate and one's questionning becomes the object of a question.

Not only is the human self as a metabeing both fracturable and affiliable in itself, it is also prone to narrativity. That is, the human self will project its self-making onto the world in order to generate stories from sequences and to break stories into recombinant sequences. Its operations on signs are material practices with consequences for world-making.
Source: http://lachance.artsci.utoronto.ca/S6.HTM 5.32 & 5.33 << Accessed April 24, 2020

This means that there is a universal translator between the senses and that is the generation of stories including micro narratives. The games outlined in The Cookbook are meant to initiate and refresh explorations of the storytelling faculties and their environments.

5 Basic Games

Scavenger Hunt

In some scavenger hunts, the object or objects are left in situ. A record is created and brought back to the deposit spot. And there again the temporal dimension can be brought to bear on the game: the depository may be open only at certain times and dates [and to certain persons]. It all begins to ressemble a game of Dungeons and Dragons.

Graffiti Walk

A Graffiti Walk is a species of Scavenger Hunt. Especially with a recording device in hand.

Inspired by city walks looking at the tags and great graffiti artwork. You take people on a tour of what is written, posted or shared on a message board, chat, etc.

In various collaborative environments and on the open web there are a lot of places to check records.

The exercise is one of observation only – you don’t contribute, you just observe (and take notes). Like practicing being a lurker in an audience.

In short it is like generating a play list or (rabbit hole) listicle to share after you have learnt to navigate a play list.

The generation of guidance content leads to Tag - a term of art from the domain of graffiti making but here used in its but before we tackle the game of tag, an exercus on brainstorming ...

List Mania - Brainstorming

Before one comes to brainstorming (the making of lists as a group) one needs to become aware of their own list making behaviours. What is a list for?

A list is for remembering and it is for exploring. Often list making or picturing results in "not looking for things but looking for a thing and finding other things along the way." (Source: Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 347) A list is a path. And sometimes that path branches or loops back.

My point is very simple, the search for the multiple need not be an exercise in serendipitous browsing. It can be orchestrated.

To extrapolate: the electronic medium facilitates reading in terms of clusters, lists, and tables (a type of reading that was always available to the clever manipulator of index cards).

Laying out cards one arrives at some basic shapes: grids, lists (stacks) and clusters (Cf. Grids, Lists, Clusters). There is a tendancy to consider the main model of a list as a stack. (And indeed if I were to rewrite the "list of lists" I would substitute "stack" for "list" in the listing of grid, list, cluster. But that might defeat my main pedagogical purpose -- to recognize the many forms and names that lists take. The point to consider is the fungibility of lists: a grid can turn into a cluster that may be gathered in a stack. Reading is a form of manipulation.)

Time for a bit of a self-reflexive moment: what do you do with lists? Or, in your practice, what kinds of pictures do you draw?

One's own comfort in generating and manipulating lists is a good indcator of how comfortable one might be with brrainstorming. Notice how in the very definition of brainstorming there is the appeal to a list ...

To get out as many ideas as possilbe in a limited amount of time. It frees the imagination to come up with new ideas about goals, projects, whatever.

Source: Resource Manual for a Living Revolution

Note that the shape those ideas take (be it words, pictures, or numbers) is not prescrived by the method.

Playing in the same sandbox at the same time is possible with certain files in certain operating systems -- this provides the ground for a synchronous exercise just like in-person brainstorming. (Though one would argue that there are timely pauses in any brainstorming exercise -- nothing is truly syncrhonous.)

Asynchronous brainstorming is possible. It's a form of baton passing. Detour into the game of cadavre exquis. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence. (Source: Exquisite corpse) Composition by sequence links the game of brainstorming (list making) to that of tag.

Another view of lists and brainstorms... 1,2,3... a,b,c... there is in the mind of the reader a side by side arrangement ... lists already ordering or already shuffling...

grids, clusters, lists ... pointers.

Tag

Tag is more than @mention.

Tag is classically a game begins with someone as "it" and the aim is to transfer this status. It is akin to a form of baton passing. And many a teacher has designed an exercise where the student answering the current question gets to pick the respondent to the next question.

From the signed to the addressable

But tagging is not just a game between persons. We know that from the art of graffiti that a tag is a signature.

Just as in the game of tag between persons, the graffiti tag is a game of pointing (and capture). It is in effect a game of point and stick. It is a game of label attaching.

Pointing is the primitive action that underpins games of tag and games of point and stick. Consider this definition: point As in "point a mouse," means to position the mouse pointer at a specified place or location within a window or other part of a window system display (Learning the Unix Operating System Jerry Peek, Grace Todino and John Strang). This notion of the pointer can be generalized to the act of making a selection, of drawing attention.

Following the pointing or selecting is an action of labeling. It is worth rethinking the simple copy and paste procedure as one of selection and labelling paired with duplication. The tag and the tagged can travel together. Or with a robust system of reference the pointing can occur over a distance.

If a tag can be viewed as type of signature, it not only marks what is addressable (open to being "it") but is itself addressable (open to being itself "it" in some other game). It is an opportunity for a shift in attention.

Notice how there are felicity conditions in the classic game of tag. The player needs to touch the other player and declare that they are now "it". A speech act is involved. This amounts to a pointing to a person and attaching a label. This form also transfers well to the realm of objects: pointing and then sticking a label. In this world of objects, the two steps can be distriburted over two or more players. A pointer can call out for labels. One can then rethink brainstorming as a collective form of tagging.

Of course, the astute obsever will recognize the stretch in the meaning of "tagging" stems from markup langauges, specialized instances of reading (pointing) and writing (labelling).

Let us return to the @mention varity of tag.

Turn Taking

Turn taking is an important social lubricant. Who's on first? See the humorous exchange between Bud Abbott and Lou Costello:

Circle Widening

And into those sometimes anxious silences we leap. We jump for a moment from "tag" to "link". A tag is like a link. It connects. What it connects are points in time... Adrian Miles on the excess (and sometimes anxiety triggering excess) of the link:

Links always have a remainder, a residue of contextualising force that extends against and into the moment before their promise, and at the point of their enaction into an open future that can only ever be a bet against an unknowable outcome. Which is to say that after the link has arrived it then recontextualises what was, and before the link has arrived we are always subject to the risk of the radically open.

[...]

The general condition of the link is that by virtue of its force relevance is perceived within the nodes joined. This relevance does not need to reside within the nodes themselves, but in the fact of their retrospective connectedness.

What is suggestive here is that it is time that binds. Linking is a chronogame.

A game without a winner. Where the player is at a loss.

A game without a clock? A pointer without point ... Mark Berstein identifies among the patterns of hypertext the missing link. "At times, a hypertext may suggest the presence of a link that does not, in fact, exist [...] Allusion, iteration, and ellipsis can all suggest a Missing Link. Structural irregularity, introduced in a context where regular structure has been established, presents an especially powerful Missing Link, for a place to which we cannot navigate may seem, by its inaccessibility, uniquely attractive."

The trajectory traced here from gamification to silences, is not so surprising for before every move in a game is a pause.

[pause]

If silence is an excess, then play with silence is not only about what is lost but also what has not been found. There is always more to show and tell. Ceaseless hunt.

The Cookbook: Recipes for Distributed Living

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction