Games
Games
Camino de Pokemon Go
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/25/2016 - 06:15It is the Feast of St. James. I am back from vacation. Through a minor mishap, I was even more disconnected over the past week than I intended to be. Give all the bad news of last week, perhaps that isn’t so bad, but now I have so much to catch up on.
Yesterday, before heading home, I went to The Chapel of St. James the Fisherman in Wellfleet. Today, I read a little more about the Camino de Sanitago. In A Medieval Pilgrimage in Modern Times, Rick Steves writes about the pilgrims,
They seem very centered, content with the experience, and tuned in to the important things in life...like taking time to talk with others.
It made me think of people playing Pokemon Go. There is so much more I want to write about St. James, about Pokemon Go, about #CLMooc. There is so much more time I want to take talking to others. There is so much more that I need to get done to dig out from this vacation. Yet I need time to get it all processed and written.
Another quote about the Camino comes to mind. Liza Gere wrote on Google Plus,
The camino provides. This is a theme I learned on my first journey on the Camino de Santiago. You find very quickly that your needs are covered and most times in miraculous and unexpected ways. So as I have been gearing up to leave there has been one…
Buen Camino
Vacation, #CLMOOC, #PokemonGo, #TinyHouses and more...
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 07/15/2016 - 17:06When I get busy, I typically leave windows open on my computer; webpages I want to bookmark or write about, documents I haven’t finished and will save later. Ongoing conversations in instant messenger programs, and so on. Eventually, it gets to the point where I just have to close out everything I’m working. Sometimes it is because things stop working. Sometimes it is simply because I need to tie things up. Today, it was a little bit of both.
I am starting vacation and I want to have as clean a slate as possible. There was a lot to close out, because it has been a particularly challenging week, mostly because of #CLMOOC starting and because of Pokemon Go.
I’ve saved all kinds of thoughts and links in various documents, and some of this needs to come together into a blog post. First #CLMOOC
The starting point for CLMOOC is this page. It isn’t too late to join in. One way of joining in is to simply jump in. CLMOOC is divided into Make Cycles. The first Make Cycle is around getting to know one another. Make Cycle #1: Make with Me: Who Are We?
An important part of CLMooc is the connections, reusing and mashing up content. Some of the posts that jumped out at me, not in any particular order, included Ronald Rudolf’s variation on Jennifer’s Poem, RON LEUNISSEN’s reuse of art-cards, Jeffrey Keefer mind map in Who Am I? A CLMOOC UnIntroduction (which inspired some of my writing this past week), Sarah Honeychurch’s Who am I this month? and Deanna Mascle’s<./a> Notable Notes: Exploring Identity with/in #CLMOOC. For those exploring mapping, Deanna’s post points to one of Jeffrey Keefer’s post, one of my posts, and several others. I also want to highlight Kevin Hodgson’s poem about vocal harmony in a world of so much disharmony in the world around us.
Deanna’s comments about my post hit on another big topic for me this week, Pokemon. She provided a link to two great articles, 14 reasons #PokemonGO has a future in education; or, Why #PokemonGO deserves the thoughtful, creative, attention of schools and teachers and Pokémon Go Has Created a New Kind of Flâneur
Another really important article, I thought, was Ezra Klein’s Pokémon Go isn’t a fad. It’s a beginning.
Meanwhile, at work, we’ve been talking a lot about Pokemon. In a blog post, Pokémon Go: In, Near, and Around the Health Center, in Mark Masselli’s LinkedIn post, Pokémon Go and Community Health, in a Facebook Album, Pokemon GO at CHC, and in various news articles: PokeMon at CHC New Britain and
Pokemon Go gaming craze has players getting outside to find Pikachu.
So now, I’m heading off to vacation. I’ll see what is available for Pokemon on Cape Cod. I’ll stop at the 2nd BIG Tiny House Festival in Concord, MA on the way, and hopefully, I will get time to read, relax, and maybe even get more writing done.
#PokemonGo and #clmooc in the context of Underhill’s Mysticism
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 07/12/2016 - 19:40As I drive, I’m listening to a Librivox recording of Evelyn Underhill’ Mysticism. Her comments about the phenomenal world and the transcendental world, that which is around us that we don’t normally see, makes me think of the various Pokemon characters that everyone is busy capturing in Pokemon Go. I think of it in terms of the networks and super-networks we are part of and how they shapes who we are. How does the network of roads, of food distribution networks, of electronic communications, of our social connections all connect with one another and shape the way we live and learn?
All of this is part of a spectrum of the phenomenal, the electronic, the social, and the transcendent. There is also the aspect of hallucinations, whether drug induced, or induced by other means. How do we know the validity of our perceptions, both of those things we receive and those that we don’t notice?
The section of Underhill’s Mysticism that I’m listening to right now is about introspection and the practice of contemplation; how you put yourself into a space where you can observe the transcendent. It seems to relate very well to levelling up in Pokemon Go or related augmented reality games. It seems as if the same applies to connected learning; practicing of being connected, of think about how our connections shape us and those around us.
So, I am spending time levelling up in my augmented reality games. I am spending time in contemplation. I am exploring my connections online and the learning opportunities they relate to.
For my CLMooc friends, how does this relate to your learning?
Kidney stones, #Birthday, #Ingress #PokemonGO #CLMooc
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 07/10/2016 - 20:27The pains returned Friday night. It had been a few months and I was hoping that maybe the kidney stone had passed, undetected. Nope. It was a painful sleepless night, leading up to my birthday.
So, as I sat in my chair, shifting my weight, trying to find ways to get comfortable, I started thanking friends who have wished me a happy birthday on Facebook. Last time I checked, it was 378. It is interesting to think about who shared greetings. Conservatives and liberals, priests and atheists, people whose houses I went to over fifty years ago and people that I’ve only met online through shared interests, white, black, Hispanic, gay, straight, trans, cis.
After this past week, where there has been so much violence, it is good to feel connected to all of mankind.
Some friends share a link to Choir, Choir, Choir, a large group of people gathering together to sing inspiring popular music, sort like massive karaoke on steroids, people connected to one another, like at Falcon Ridge, or, I imagine, at Miranda’s Hearth gatherings. I’ve been listening to a bunch of their recordings on YouTube.
Meanwhile, my youngest daughter has started playing Pokemon Go. For those who’ve missed it, Pokemon Go is an augmented reality game played on your smartphone, where you go to specific locations in real life and interact with objects in the game there. It is based on Ingress, which I’ve been playing for years. As such, the locations I go to for Ingress are the same locations that Fiona goes to for Pokemon Go. It is interesting to see the strong popular interest in Pokemon Go, when compared to the niche geek interest in Ingress.
All of this leads nicely into Connected Learning MOOC. It starts today, Sunday July 10th and goes til August 6th. I will try to participate as much as I can, although during this period I will be on Cape Cod for a week, and later at a folk music festival for several days.
The first Make Cycle asks, “Who are we?” During this coming week, I look forward to finding out who else is participating on CLMooc. Who will I be excited to connect with? What thoughts, projects, and ideas will we want to pursue?
I’m excited about the poetry part of CLMooc. For those interested, you can read some of my poems in the Poetry section of my blog. I’m also interested in mysticism. I’m currently listening to Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism during my commute, and reading some of St. Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle. All of this will probably feed into my poetry. It is fed by my religious journey in which I am exploring the possibility of becoming an ordained Episcopal priest. I’m very interested in online learning around religious and spiritual matters.
I heard about CLMOOC from RHIZO15. I’m very interested in a connectivist model of learning, the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and a bunch of other writers I lump together in the same larger group, from Lacan to Foucault. I work in social media in health care, and I’m working on an online health care professionals learning environment.
So that was my birthday, with kidney stones, and lots of interesting connections as part of my introduction to #CLMOOC 2016. I look forward to connecting.
#Ingress #MissionDay Update
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 06/18/2016 - 18:28It has been a while since I participated in an Ingress event. I’ve just been too busy with other things. I have been doing minimal daily ingress, mostly just enough to keep some of my streaks alive.
Today, I was supposed to go to a poetry picnic, but it got cancelled at the last minute, so I went to “Mission Day” in New Haven. People who play Ingress gathered on the Ingress Green at 11 am to start their mission day. They came in from Maine and New York City. Many wore their team colors, blue or green, carried flags, and had t-shirts, buttons, or other symbols of their participation.
In Ingress, you go from portal to portal, capturing the portal if the other team has it, hacking to portal to get more gear from it, and creating links, which joined together create fields. There are also missions where you interact with a group of different portals. Then there are groups of missions that some people participate in.
In Ingress, you get various badges for your participation. Some of the badges are for participating in large Ingress events. Others are for accomplishing various tasks, and you get different levels of badges depending on how many times you’ve completed the task. Having played for a long time, it is harder and harder to get new badges. Partly, these days, I am looking at hypothetical badges for multiples of the highest level. For example, the highest level recharger badge is for recharging 25 million XM. I am currently at 266 million. I celebrated getting to 10 times the top recharger badge and figure the next celebration will be at 12 times the top recharger badge.
Likewise the top Guardian badge is for holding a portal for 150 consecutive days. My record is 365 consecutive days, and my current oldest portal I’ve held for 141 days. For consecutive days hacking, the top badge is for 360 consecutive days. I’m currently at 471.
For Glyph hack points, the top badge is 50,000 points. I’m up to 90,000 points and approaching two times the top badge. For total hacks, I’m about 12,000 hack short of the second highest badge, having added 213 hacks today.
One badge that I haven’t done much with is the one for participating in missions. I completed 13 missions today, getting me the silver badge, but still leaving me many missions to go. For the distance walked badge, I’m current at 2,731 kilometers, having walked 13 kilometers today. That is a little bit beyond the 2,500 kilometers for the top walking badge, but a long way from the next multiple of that.
Another badge I am approaching and will hopefully get sometime this year is for the total number of portals captured. I’m currently at 14,610, which is 390 away from the second highest badge. Mission day was a good day for capturing portals. I capture 103 portals today. 48 of these portals were ones that I had not captured in the past, pushing me over 2,000 unique portals, but I have to hit 5,000 to get the next badge. Likewise, I visited 66 portals I hadn’t visited in the past, although I’m still a long way from the next badge for total portals visited.
I did deploy 549 resonators, pushing my total over 121,000 resonators deployed, but I still have a long way to go.
All in all, it was a good day, made all the better by running into various Ingress friends throughout the day.
