INTERN with me and Top Secret Dance Off!

I am looking for an intern to help me run Top Secret Dance Off! It's an open-ended internship (starting ASAP, averaging 10-12 hours a week, and ideally continuing for 3-4 months). You can be anywhere in the world, in school or not in school, doing the internship for experience, or for school credit or just for something really interesting to do.

TSDO is a personal project and small (but growing) global player community of ~300 players from about 15 different countries currently. It's not affiliated with any game company; I'd like to develop the community and the content and the platform over the next 6 months and see what it turns into.

Here are a couple of trailers introducing you to TSDO:


Find more videos like this on Top Secret Dance Off



Find more videos like this on Top Secret Dance Off


You will be working on Top Secret Dance Off as the official community catalyst, or animateur. That means you'll be helping to:

• lead, guide and "animate" the player community
• update and manage the player database
  
• design new dance quests
• track the most interesting player content
• run discussions, chats, etc.
  
• help high-level players invent their own quests and missions
• welcome new players
• work with me to create and implement new alliance systems and dance-off challenges
• write community updates (blog, Twitter, newsletters)

There will be a lot of practical, everyday, routine management stuff alongside the more creative stuff -- in particular, I need someone to immediately take charge of the continual updates of the database as players advance through the ranks and such, and possibly help me implement hacks to Ning to get that part of the game automated the same way our leveling up system is automated.

I am about 6 weeks behind on player mission tracking, so to start, there will be a lot of just crunching and grinding to get everything updated and back on track. :) After that is all caught up, there will be much more room for the creative mission design, alliance quests, and other fun, new stuff.

It's an unpaid internship, as the project is completely unfunded -- but it's also super-flexible with pretty much unlimited potential creative opportunities once you get the hang of managing the day-to-day game management stuff. Also, I'd like eventually for TSDO to be entered into game festivals and such, and whoever joins me as my community catalyst and animateur will be officially credited on the project as part of the design & development team. Yay!

The kind of person I'm looking to collaborate with and hopefully help mentor will be someone who is generally optimistic, takes an idea and runs with it, super-reliable, and really enthusiastic about the idea that games can make people happy, give people real-life adventures, and just generally make us more satified with our everyday lives. And of course, you don't have to be any kind of a good dancer at all. :) You just have to think that dance quests are awesome.

TO APPLY:

1) Spend some time on the Top Secret Dance Off site making sure you love the project and would be excited to work on it!
2) Make sure you have at least completed DQ1 on Top Secret Dance Off, and include a link to your DQ1 video (and any others you've completed) in your email to me.

Then, send me an email with the following information:

Basic stuff:

• Where do you live?
• What do you do with most of your time right now (school? where, studying what? or work? what kind?)
• What is your schedule is like over the next 3-4 months? When would you be putting in your 10-12 hours? (ideally, it would be something like 3 hours a day 3-4 times a week)
• What are you hoping to learn and gain from this internship?
  
• Do you have a website/blog/Twitter account/anything I could look at online?

Fun stuff:

• What's exciting to you about the TSDO project?
• What are some of your favorite games these days? Why?
• What are you good at?
• What are you passionate about?
  
• Send me a few ideas for new Dance Quests or Dance-Offs.

No need for a formal resume or such... send it all to jane at the name of this blog .com!

Have you had the dream?

If you've had the dream, you will know it.

• Strings, tubes, wrinkles, branches, or flowing lines..
• Massive
• Small
• The dot

You probably had it multiple times, and it probably started when you were young. It may have been while you were asleep. It may have been while you had a fever. It may have sometimes been a waking dream, like a trance.

You've often wondered what the dream was. and if anyone else had it.

*

We are looking for others who have had the dream.

Tell us about your dream.

• What did you see, or what was happening, in the dream? It might defy words, but try.
• How did the dream make you feel?
• How old were you when you first remember having the dream? How many times would you guess that you had it? Did you stop having it at some point in your life?

*

The rules:

Send an email to: ihadthedream@gmail.com Describe your dream.

We probably won't write back for awhile. We need time to collect dreams and compare them.

We won't publish comments that describe the dream, because we want people to describe it in their own words. If they see yours, it might change or influence their memories.

We may share your dream (anonymously) with someone else and ask them if your dream sounds like theirs, or not. We may send you someone else's dream (without sharing their name) and ask you if it sounds like yours, or not.

After we build up a collection of dreams that we think are the same, we may post them (anonymously) on our blogs.

*

Have you had the dream?

Jane McGonigal & Ze Frank

Take the Outlier Challenge

This week from the Institute for the Future and the Signtific Lab: it's the third and final trial in our Free Space trilogy!

Free Space: How to invent the future by playing in the Signtific Lab

View more presentations from avantgame. (tags: 2009 iftf)

The experiment (PLAY NOW!)starts at 7 PM Pacific Time Monday March 9, and ends 2 PM Pacific Time Thursday March 11.

Join the lab or log in now!

The experiment is headquartered at Etech 09 -- but you're welcome to play with us at Etech from wherever in the world you happen to be!

For this final trial, we're issuing the Outlier Challenge. Here are the guidelines! (originally published on the Signtific Lab blog.)

*

Here at the Signtific Lab, we love outliers. That's why we want you to take the Outlier Challenge.

In future forecasting terms, outliers are the most surprising ideas. They are what scientists call "non-obvious", and they're the opposite of "wisdom of the crowds" consensus. They take the crowd by surprise. Outliers might not be the most likely ideas, but they would have a huge impact if they actually occurred. They're especially hard to see coming, but when they do come, they disrupt everything -- precisely because so few people anticipated them.

The main benefit of a platform like the Signtific Lab is that we can expose each other to many more outliers -- and avoid getting blindsided by the future.

To help you uncover new outliers, we've created the Outlier Challenge. Your mission: Avoid "Outlier Fail" and steer towards "Outlier Win."

OUTLIER FAIL
This is a list of apparently obvious ideas about the future of free space. We call them "outlier fail", because they have shown up literally 100 times or more in our forecast feed. You can feel free to create new micro-forecasts about these ideas, but you'd better say something extremely surprising if you want to avoid the outlier fail! Don't just tell us this stuff will happen. We've got that already. Can you say anything surprising or non-obvious about these topics? If not, AVOID! AVOID! AVOID!

• Junk in space
• Falling junk from space
• Porn in space
• Terrorists in space
• Stalking from space
• Reality TV from space

OUTLIER WIN
This is a list of the topic we think have the most potential for non-obvious ideas about the future of free space. So use these as springboards to surprise yourself and the other Lab members. The more you explore any of these topics, and the deeper you get down the chain of forecasts, the more potentially outlier you'll get! WANT! WANT! WANT!

* DIY space research
* Crowdsourced eco-monitoring
* Disaster spotting & response
* Hacking democracy
* Cubesat entrepreneurs
* Social capital in space
* News from space
* Serious games in space
* Climate change applications
* Food/agriculture innovation
* Chemical/materials research
* Bio/life sciences research
* Oceanographic research
* Tracking and protecting all living things (migration patterns, etc)
* MOST IMPORTANTLY: STUFF WE PROBABLY NEVER THOUGHT OF OURSELVES!

This is my Free Space future. Show me yours!

Our first massively multiplayer thought experiment is LIVE, and will end in ~ 36 hours!
If you have ideas about the future of Free Space or the Interstellar Internet, play with me...

Free Space is coming...

I've been working on a new future forecasting platform at IFTF. It's called the Signtific Lab, and it's designed as a kind of crowd-sourcing, micro-content, forecasting MMO.

Here's the trailer for the first experiment we're running. It's called Free Space, and it's based on scenario that is both mind-boggling and probable.



We've inviting scientists, engineers, researchers, designers, developers, hackers, and makers of all kinds to participate.

If you're attending Webstock (in Wellington, New Zealand), Etech (in San Jose, CA), or CeBit (in Hannover, Germany) this year, you're automatically invited!

If you're not attending any of these conferences and you'd like to participate, you can pre-register now at the Lab!