Harvesting Game is really a univ experiment.

Recently I joined a game led by Mitja Omlet, a researcher at Indiana Univ's Cognitive Sciences Dept. I had fun, made some L$, and felt good about helping science. The down side is that there were only 2 of us in the game and it really required more people to make the results valid.

Well, Mitja is running it again tonight, but there are SO MANY games (like Zyngo,barf) that the event announcement gets lost in the shuffle.

Maybe we need a new event cat for things that SLers can do to help valid experiments. Something where the message doesn't just get lost in the morass of commercial come-ons.

Anyway - here's the event - you find out why you're doing it at the end and it's REALLY interesting.
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he task is to 'harvest L$' by stepping on blue squares appearing on the floor in our experiment game room. Each run lasts between 5 and 10 minutes, and each blue square is worth 1 L$.

The Percepts and Concepts Laboratory in the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University (cognitrn.psych.indiana.edu) conducts experiments on collective behavior.

We are testing our new group experiment game in SL on Thursday September 10 2009, from 6:30PM to 7:30PM (Second Life Time), on Limestone Quarry island:
(slurl.com/secondlife/Limestone%20Quarry/195/96/32)

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Hope to see some of you there
Kyttn

Oooh, cogsci. I'd love to play, but my older computer and worse DSL makes any sort of timed movement a doomed affair! I might come just to watch, though.

Have the researcher announce this in all of the open-enrollment event announcement groups. Join ANNOUNCE IT! and send the slurl and info.

Look up the avatar VooDoo Projects. She has many groups in her profile you can use to announce this event.

thanks Lias - They need to get some coverage somehow.

Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that you didn't have enough people there last night!

I played Forager a couple of years ago (wow, has it been that long?) and it was a lot of fun. (Low-lag avatars are a good idea, though, so you can move faster!) They had a link to a webpage that told what it was about and what it was trying to prove, which I found pretty fascinating - though you should probably read it after trying the game.

When I saw it on the Events calendar I signed up to be notified, but when the notice came through I was worn out from a scripting class and decided it would be better to let the L$ go to newer players who might need it more. Now watch - I'll show up again tonight just in case more people are needed, and the place will be standing room only...

Hello,

following up on this thread, I'm not sure what's the best place to announce a group behavior experiment, but here it is. After the preliminary tests in previous weeks, we're finally starting with the real thing. To summarize:

The task is to 'harvest L$' by stepping on blue squares appearing on the floor in our experiment game room. Each run lasts between 5 and 10 minutes, and each blue square is worth 1 L$.
The Percepts and Concepts Laboratory in the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University (cognitrn.psych.indiana.edu) conducts experiments on collective behavior. We are running our new group experiment game in SL on Limestone Quarry island: (slurl.com/secondlife/Limestone%20Quarry/204/96/32/)

today's event:
https://secure-web0.secondlife.com/my/community/events/event.php?id=3293545

and Saturday's event:
https://secure-web4.secondlife.com/my/community/events/event.php?id=3293552

Suggestions & comments are welcome!
-Mitja

is the prize supposed to be more on the symbolic side? 1L$ is less than one whole US cent...

edit:how much do you expect people to earn on average?

Hi, thanks for the comment--

the amount of L$ participants gather at our games varies quite a bit.
For each player, it may be as low as L$10/game and as high as L$500/game, although those are a bit extreme. Each game is 5 to 10 minutes long, at about 4 game runs per hour (it takes a bit to get started, and we take breaks between runs).

How does this compare to other (similar?) SL games?

By the way, we are running more this week:

- this Thu Nov 12 2009, 11:30AM to 12:30PM and 12:30PM to 1:30PM
https://secure-web14.secondlife.com/my/community/events/event.php?id=3315421
https://secure-web14.secondlife.com/my/community/events/event.php?id=3315427

- this Sun Nov 15 2009, 9:30AM to 10:30PM and 10:30AM to 11:30AM
https://secure-web14.secondlife.com/my/community/events/event.php?id=3315505
https://secure-web14.secondlife.com/my/community/events/event.php?id=3315503

Any suggestion on how to popularize the game are welcome--
-Mitja

Why not post more spam entries on a regular basis in the Residents Answers forum until a mod tells you off and transfers the thread somewhere more appropriate?

Pep (Oh, that's right, you are doing that already.)