I assert that in the absence of regular interaction, communities will segregate physically and emotionally, and inevitably become unhealthy. I believe that interactions should more often than not be collaborative, though competitive and even provocative interactions can serve a greater purpose as well.
I would like to foster community growth within and across fractured communities through a geographically distributed system that encourages interaction on shared tasks, more specifically games, more specifically something like "Mario Party" style minigames.
Generally speaking, minigames are comprised of resources and controls. The task of the player is to manipulate the controls and resources using a strategy to obtain reward. So, the task of the minigame designer is to establish a set of controls that can manipulate resources and are equally accessible to all players, and to a determine a reward or set of rewards that are desirable to all.
The most primitive player in the minigame is the individual, one level up is the block or neighbourhood followed by the district or county etc. All higher level players are compromised of individuals.
Depending upon the minigame, resources may count towards one or another player levels, but because the individual is the only player with agency control ultimately rests with the individual.
I get the sense that most minigames can be made reusable across different communities, the exception being their controls-- but I have yet to think this through much, yet alone test it. At this time Fiber, Ethernet and 802.11 seem to be the most efficient method for establishing connections cross-community, but this is not inherently a technological problem and in many cases controls must not be highly technical. A list of minigame ideas shall be maintained below:
- Collaborative sentence building, where letters or words are resources.
- Collaborative drawing, where pixels in an image are resources.