Overview
Infinite Games for Infinite Teams was published by and in response to the DARPA Polyplexus Citizen Incubator: “Inventing a Remote Culture to Deal with Pandemics”, and was done so with the intent of discussing the questions outlined below. How are global online narratives constructed and received in 2020? Why are the processes of narrative design and culture production so important for security and governance? What is possible now or soon that was not possible before? What approaches could catalyze assessment, design, and deployment of online narratives in real-time? Why is it so important to have meme-detection systems that are culturally-aware, interlingual, intermodal, and human-in-the-loop? What does it look like to take a Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) approach to the neuromemetics of narrative co-construction and agenda-setting? How could a CAS approach be used to support specifically-defined cultural/institutional/national/global interests? How do we find, formalize, and quantify goals or outcomes within a CAS framework? How can we diagnose, perturb, and create narratives through gameplay? What might a “design science for memes” look like? How is this present work continuous with and contrasting with previous work in innovation, generative games, and LARPing? How can music, sound, art, and other techniques amplify narrative impact ?
Overview source: Curated paper metadata.
Methods and contributions
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Findings and contributions
- Introduces the term Instantaneous Remote Teams (IRT) for rapidly formed online-native teams, described as essential for institutional function and resilience.
- Defines 'Infinite Teams' by analogy to Infinite Games as teams with open-ended, evolving composition, and uses 'Gray Zone' for the ambiguous space where they play.
- Proposes that Polyplexus could serve as a platform hosting Infinite Games such as culture creation, narrative evolution and R&D.
- Argues that AI alone struggles to detect links between memetic material and context, motivating curated knowledge networks with humans in the loop.
Methods
- Complex Adaptive Systems framing of remote teams and narrative ecosystems — Uses the CAS framework to explore how games played by remote teams could be harnessed through platform design choices.
- World of Warcraft PvE/PvP play as a case study of rapid team formation — Draws on WoW raid and player-vs-player teams to illustrate rapidly assembled teams and cultural transmission.
- Design sketch: formal-informal interface for collaborative world-building — Idea I proposes formal memetics where technical users set world parameters while prose and art contributors co-evolve the narrative.
- Design sketch: Red/Blue/Green 'Cadavre Exquis' role-playing game — Idea II proposes a case-management-like knowledge-mapping game with sword, shield and integrating roles plus role-specific guiding questions.
Summary sources: Paper metadata and evidence · Extracted source text.
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- InfiniteGamesInfiniteTeams_DAF_RJC_7_8_2020.pdf PDF · 0.36 MiB · extracted-text source
Citation
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Catalog details and resources
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