The strongest message, for me, was the people carrying posters that said “We are the 99%—and so are you.” That was, I realized, the point. I think that, more than anything else, this is a transpartisan movement, trying to unite people who have, for at least a decade and probably longer, been split over relatively false issues, while their common economic interest is undermined.

That’s the point of this. It’s not about existing political divisions. It is, really and truly, saying “these are the super rich. We are the ‘everyone else’. These are the battle lines.”

Right now, I’ve had a great up and a bit of a down, and the whole thing has me feeling down. First, the up: Gen Con was wonderful. Met many folks I had internet-known, met many new folks, sold half our stock (51 games out of 98 that we brought; apparently 20 of a new RPG is doing well, so we’re happy) and got a lot of good feedback.

And the down is that my favorite restaurant in Boulder—one of my favorite ever, anywhere—is closed for good. Himalayas always felt like home, like a place where I could get those reserves that I feel I lack here.

Maybe I’ll just end up in Toronto. Or Dublin.

In Nora England and B’alam Mateo-Toledo’s endangered languages class, we were discussing the issue of getting community members—most particularly kids, the lynchpin of language revitalization—to care about their endangered language. And most particularly, to care about learning that language.

I thought, immediately, of the (misguided) idea of gamification, that is, adding game-like elements to non-game activities. This is the right impulse but the wrong approach. Better than gamification is what I call “finding the fun”. If there is any hope for getting people to do a non-essential activity, you’ve got to find the ways in which it is fun. Taking things that are fun in other contexts and bolting them on is wrong.

So how do you find the fun in language learning? The fun of language is communication. The fun of language learning is mastery of the language to the end of communication. I think that the first thing is to tell people it’s a game. Huizinga, I think, talked about how games supplant the usual social contract of a group, for the duration of play. So by saying “here’s a game,” and actually making a game, you can get people to do things that they might otherwise be reluctant to do. Now, make the game’s victory condition require communication. Make the game’s rules require communication in the target language. Kids will probably want to learn the skills to play the game, which happen to be the language in question.

Preliminary thoughts.

That’s really awesome.

• cucumber sandwiches
• bread, cheese and pâté
• hobnobs and McVitie’s digestives
• Pimm’s
• mustardy potato salad
• treacle tarts
• nutella

There was nothing not good about this.

At the end of meeting, lots of kids came in, all the kids from the First Day School whatnot. And I just had to smile; I love seeing old people and young people all intermixed.

On top of that, the social expectations of the site are such that talking with people you don’t know is encouraged, which just makes it great at community building, rather than Facebook’s community-recording.

I got a great compliment from a student the other day—she said that I was the only TA she had this semester who seemed to know the material. I then had a conversation with another student about the ways in which what they’re learning in intro Ling isn’t, per se, true, but is, I hope, a set of useful simplifications.

This is probably just end-of-semester workload blues. Lemme write 20 decent pages more and talk with you again. I reckon I’ll be fine in a few weeks.

And amongst this, I am thinking about the use of public space, by which I only mean “spaces not hidden in someone’s home”. We four here have taken to working at coffee shops, and occasionally a local pub or two, when we want to get things done. It gets us away from the distractions of home, but more than that, it shifts our context enough to jump-start some work.

One thought leads to another, and soon I am thinking about  Cassidy’s, on Westmoreland Street in the middle of Dublin. Some friends took me there once, to find the basement bar full of gamers—some people playing card games, some playing role-playing games, some playing board games, some just talking. This idea has stayed with me since I saw it; rare is the place in this country where that would work, was my first reaction. But maybe not; maybe I just have to talk to a few gamers, and talk to a few pubs. Part of what makes it work, of course, is the size and layout of an actual Irish pub; there’s a whole basement bar that allows people to set themselves aside a bit, and not be disturbed or disturbing.

So, from there, I come to something that Vincent Baker posted about today: Owl and Raven, a community space that’s just opened in Northampton, MA. The idea is to have a space where people can come to work on projects, hang out, and learn from each other and talk with each other. This seems a really compelling idea, and I look forward to following these people to see how it works.

Finally, all of this leads me to remember an idea I had a while ago, that I occasionally revisit: gamerspaces. The idea is to make something like hackerspaces, but for gamers and games. A bit over a year ago, I was frequenting the IRC channel of Hacklab.to, and had the notion to get a group of gamers of all stripes to pitch in some membership fees to get a space and furnish it with what you need for games and gamers: tables, couches, nooks and crannies, and 24-hour access and security. One problem with this idea so far has been that companies will sometimes donate to hackerspaces, but I have a hard time envisioning getting funding for a gamerspace from anything but members’ fees.

All of these ideas are as-yet just vaguely related notions floating around, but I thought I’d put them out there, to remind myself and maybe give other people ideas.