To Play Is the Thing: How Game Design Principles Can Make Online Deliberation Compelling

How to make the next big thing.

An Online Environment for Democratic Deliberation: Motivations, Principles, and Design

This paper elucidates the experience and thinking behind our new web-based environment for asynchronous group deliberation: Deme (pronounced "deem"). Deme grew out of participation in and observations of group decision making and community democracy, and is being developed within a university-community partnership to enhance civic participation and to bridge digital divides. Civic decisions in ...

How to play the Syntax Game

This paper introduces the Syntax Game, a language game for exploring the origins of syntactic structure, specifically phrase structure. We define the game and propose a particular strategy for playing it. We show that this strategy leads to the emergence of a phrase structure grammar through the collective invention, adoption, and alignment of culturally established conventions.

Pragmatic Forces in Conceptual Integration: How Blend Recruitment is Used to Make Metaphors More Compelling

Metaphor and analogy are cognitive tools which, in serving specific communicative goals and descriptive needs, are subject to a host of pragmatic pressures. Knowing that these pressures will shape the interpretation of a given metaphor, an effective communicator will exploit them to structure the conceptual content of the metaphor in such a way as to maximise its perceived aptness and argumenta...

How to Make Money from those about to Play a Game

It is known that a player in a noncooperative game can benefit by publicly restricting their possible moves before play begins. We show that, more generally, a player may benefit by publicly committing to pay an external party an amount that is contingent on the game’s outcome. We explore what happens when external parties – who we call “game miners” – discover this fact and seek to profit from...