Creating a playful experience to encourage participation in the meta narrative of conference discussions

Editor's Notes

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• #3: In the last decade we have witnessed; the rise of social networks focussing on the grouping of friends to whom we broadcast short blasts of information. \n\nServices like “friending”, “tagging”, “following” and “hashtags” have all impacted the way we make quick and convenient communications with one another.\n
• #4: BRIDGING - often referred to as weak ties, loose connections between individuals. They may provide information or new perspectives but offer no emotional support.\n\nBONDING - tightly knit emotional groups, like families and close friends.\n
• #5: People consume their social media for many different reasons and\ndifferent social networking services, provide for these differing\nmotivations. \n\nFor some it is about engaging in the conversation in real-time; raising questions (hopefully encouraging further questions) and debating their perspective on a particular topic, also the desire for some is the appeal of sharing what you are viewing/reading or hearing\n\nSocial networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, encourage their users to broadcast their activities by updating, tagging, (re) tweeting and now checking-in to venues.\n
• #6: Twitter social network - micro blogging service\n\nFacebook, Google+ and Linkedin focus on the relationships between people. \n\nIn this respect it is perhaps unsurprising Twitter has been adopted by conferences and events.\n
• #7: Because of its 140-character limit on information updates, known as tweets, Twitter is sometimes described as the “SMS of the Internet and in fact this limit was imposed from its original origins using standard SMS messaging.\n
• #8: Twitter is changing the way in which we discuss and communicate by allowing information to be relayed rapidly in near real-time when events happen. One way Twitter is doing this is through Hashtags.\n\nTweets are independent \ntweets that have been either re-tweeted or include a hashtag are collated into a thread. \n\nThe inclusion of hashtags can be particularly useful when contributing to a specific topic or event. \n\nIt is specifically the hashtag that is of importance to the Buzzbird Bingo project.\n
• #9: Why do people engage with social media?\n\n- real time conversation\n- raise a question\n- the appeal of sharing what you are reading/viewing\n- informal debate\n
• #10: Sit in rows\nlarge displays \ndoesnt encourage participation\nfocus around one person (the presenter)\n\ndecrease in audience participation in formal conference settings, which is in direct opposition to the general aims of most conferences.\n\nlinear stream on a public display, which isn’t particularly engaging as users can easily follow this in the same way through one of the many, was users can access Twitter on their personal devices.\n
• #11: It is no longer considered uncommon to see an array of audience members faces lit up by some form of device, whether its by nursing a laptop / tablet or interacting with a mobile device, all whilst listening to a talk or presentation. \n\nThis is down to the increase of popular social networking tools, like Facebook and Twitter, being widely accessible by varying availabilities of connectivity methods and the range of ubiquitous mobile devices.\n
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• #13: The back channel refers to the online conversations that take place usually in real-time, discussing what is currently happening but outside the primary presentation. \n\nPeople can use these services to express their opinions freely and in an informal manner. Furthermore, this allows those who cannot physically attend to also engage in the discussion. \n\nThe back channel in the communication found at events is often understood as the meta-narrative (the story behind the story), the event being the main story and the audience discussions being the story associated with the event. It is this meta-narrative where the two channels of simultaneous communication lie.\n
• #14: Research into twitter alongside presentations and the ways to explore playful experiences, which\nare presented on public spaces, have previously been studied.\n\nIn contrast, BackChatter a social word game where players earn scores by picking unique words amongst fellow competitors.\n\nLocal No.12 the creators of BackChatter, describe the game as a game of rounds (lobby, discussion and scoring). Player participation is achieved by sending a Direct Messages (DM) to BackChatter’s Twitter account (@bcgame), containing a limited number of words. Players earn maximum points by picking uncommon words and scores are calculated against the weighting of their words against its popularity.\n\nOur research attempts to address some of the participation issues previously discussed for of BackChatter with\nsimultaneous participation and consumption model that is key to the study and will be developed through the following design.\n
• #15: To enable us to perform the study on Creating a Playful Experience to Encourage Participation in Conference Discussions,\n\nA system was developed to capture tweets from Twitter, using its Streaming API. The Streaming API was\nadopted in preference to its counterpart the Search API, due to its increased ability to handle the throughput of large real-time data streams. \n\nThe system streams all tweets that contain a certain hashtag or hashtags, in its raw form. The tweet data is then\nparsed, split and sorted into different tables.\n
• #16: Before the idea behind BuzzBird was conceived, we explored the of use of mobile phones for second screens for TV. \n\nWe streamed hashtags for TV shows in order to determine if mobile phones are being used to tweet about TV shows. \n\nThe idea behind capturing hashtags gave us the idea to utilise this social platforms method of querying for tweets into a game. \n\nThe paper presents the design of a system aimed at facilitating delegates to integrate with the themes emerging or narrative and actively join in discussions through a purposefully playful experience for such events.\n\n
• #17: It was important that BuzzBird Bingo conforms to the fit the structures of conferences. \n\nAs the name of the game suggests Bingo provided the initial inspiration through which BuzzBird Bingo was conceived. Unlike Bingo where players are provided a pre-defined card, BuzzBird allows players to\ncome up with their own selection of buzzwords as their card entry.The only limit imposed by the game, is from Twitter’s tweets infrastructure. \n\nThe presentation of BuzzBird Bingo player information takes its inspiration from a traditional fun fair activity, The Arabian Derby also known as The Kentucky Derby. In the funfair game players roll a ball along their table, aiming for a set of coloured zones (each zone scored accordingly) in turn the players score moves a physical character (typically a horse or camel) along a track, the amount the character moves is in accordance to the score they received from rolling the balls into the zones. The player whose character reaches the winning post first is named the winner. \n
• #18: BuzzBird (#buzzbird). \n\nPlayers wanting to join the game will include the events hashtag and #buzzbird, along with their chosen entries (words, only limited by Twitters tweet infrastructure of 140-characters).\n\nAs the games mechanics can be altered depending on the event. If it was important to have a period where players could join the game, then a lock could be placed on the entry system.\n\nThe game works by taking each word from the players Tweet and comparing against the list of common words. If a players’ Tweet, contains words that are contained in the list, it is not considered towards that players’ final score. This approach could be reversed, where each player’s Tweet must contain words that appear in a pre-defined list. This set list can be nicely termed ‘buzz words’, where each player are only awarded points against buzz words\nrelating to the event. However, this approach may not be feasible for certain events, where creativity is the focus for their participants.\n
• #19: This paper presents a concept of building upon the platform of an existing social network (Twitter), to create a playful experience to engage conference participants in the back channel discussions.\n\nThe meta-narrative game model introduced by BuzzBird Bingo provides a vehicle to encourage discussions around chosen topics or themes.\n\nThe key characteristics of the research were to define a game with minimal rules, to encourage discussions amongst participants during conferences in a playful manner. Alongside the actual gaming and competitive elements of such key characteristics outlined, the interface also promotes and encourages discussions by including the discussions relating to the game (#Buzzbird) and the event.\n
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