Rules

1. ONCE REGISTERED AT MOVEMBER.COM EACH MO BRO MUSTBEGIN THE 1ST OF MOVEMBER WITH A CLEAN SHAVEN FACE.
2. FOR THE ENTIRE MONTH OF MOVEMBER EACH MO BRO MUST GROW AND GROOM A MOUSTACHE.
3. THERE IS TO BE NO JOINING OF THE MO TO YOUR SIDE BURNS.(THAT’S CONSIDERED A BEARD)
4. THERE IS TO BE NO JOINING OF THE HANDLEBARS TO YOUR CHIN.(THAT’S CONSIDERED A GOATEE)
5. EACH MO BRO MUST CONDUCT HIMSELF LIKE A TRUE COUNTRY GENTLEMAN.

There is no event for Germany yet. Instead I recommend you head over to the Irish website.

Exploitationware
I also found an interesting essay, called ‘Persuasive Games: Exploitationware’ that Bogost recently published at gamasutra.com. In the article Bogost writes critically about rhetoric of gamification and suggests a new name for gamification altogether: Exploitationware. It’s an interesting read. I singled out two quotes:

“…because games are systems, they offer a fundamentally different way of characterizing ideas. They can inspire a different kind of deliberation than we find in other forms of media, one that considers the uncertainty of complex systems instead of embracing simple answers. It’s this potential that has inspired me to advocate for the uses of games in areas like learning, politics, journalism, and business.”

and

“Doing real, meaningful things with games is hard and risky, but it offers considerable reward, reward that responds to the underlying shift away from the logic of industrialization that gamification takes for granted.”

Head over to gamasutra.com the read the full article.

Suits thinks games are the highest intrinsic good and he’s found a light-hearted way of getting to that conclusion – by using arguments and considering counter-examples.

The central character of the book is, in fact, a grasshopper! It’s inspired by a fable about a grasshopper and an ant. The ant works all summer and survives the winter, whereas the grasshopper spends his time dancing and singing, so he has nothing to eat and starves to death. The grasshopper is choosing to die rather than giving up his belief that the thing which has intrinsic value in life is play.

The book puts forward a whole theory about the nature of game playing. Suits argues that playing a game is “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”. Basically there are three features to all games, and for something to be a game it has to meet all these features. Games must have the “pre-lusory goal”, constitutive rules and the “lusory attitude”.

Suits believes that game-playing is the highest good, because in a utopian world where all our other needs are met, he believes human beings would just play games. They’d set themselves obstacles and willingly try to achieve these pre-lusory goals. They wouldn’t need to worry about anything else. If heaven were real, that’s how we would survive in eternity.

 
Read the full interview with Nigel Warburton at thebrowser.com

When we do these computer models, those aren’t the real models; the real models are in the gamer’s head. The computer game is just a compiler for that mental model in the player.

We have this ability as humans to build these fairly elaborate models in our imaginations, and the process of play is the process of pushing against reality, building a model, refining a model by looking at the results of looking at interacting with things.

(via —Magical Nihilism)

 
Also take look at this interview with Will Wright on Spore, SimCity, and the Sims:

Kars Alfrink is principal designer at applied pervasive games studio Hubbub. In this recent talk at dConstruct, Kars Alfrink explores ways we might use games to alleviate some of the problems willful social self-separation can lead to. Kars looks at how people sometimes deliberately choose to live apart, even though they share the same living spaces. He discusses the ways in which new digital tools and the overlapping media landscape have made society more volatile. But rather than to call for a decrease in their use, Kars argues we need more, but different uses of these new tools. More playful uses.

The games Kars envisions can be used as meeting places, as ways to bring in new perspectives from the people we play with. Games can also function as testbeds for new ideas, to see what sticks, and perhaps bring the best ideas out into the world. To do this though, not all forms of games will work equally well, and Kars goes into some of the preconditions games for social change need to adhere to, in order to be successful.

Ultimately, Kars proposes we might be able to create games where we can share the manifold sets of rules we choose to live by, so that we gain deeper insights into the people we share our neighbourhoods with. And by doing so, we might transform society, and make it more resilient.

Here are his slides:

(via dconstruct.org)