Co-creation in health

«A game must offer meaningful experiences to engage its players, particularly problem solving. For scholarship, that means asking and trying to answer meaningful questions. Here is where there is considerable debate in the Digital Humanities community as to how much these questions have to relate to the traditional questions of the Humanities? Personally, I do not feel prescriptive on this issue. An important part of the game experience is making choices and finding out what happens. I would like to leave this space as wide open as possible. Initially, we needn’t think of our playful experiments as providing any necessary insight into our “real world” scholarship, nor should we let that scholarship impose strict constraints on our play. That defeats the purpose of the game. We are not building Camelot—only a model.

Gamification can suggest a number of strategies for demonstrating the relationship between our play and our scholarly endeavours. Performing at different levels (“levelling up”) and receiving badges—perhaps representing confidence in the statistical validity of our results, and the like—would be typical methods. Just as (ideally) workers create real innovations and businesses provide real-world rewards for progress in the games, so scholars might progress along a similar continuum of activity. But I am sceptical of these strategies (at least, in this relatively undeveloped account) because they inevitably privilege the reward over the process and diminish interest in the intervening steps. I also suspect that many digital humanists would now go further and suggest that those steps are essentially performative and need not be seen in teleological terms (that is, as a means to some higher scholarly end). Incorporating “play” in scholarship eventually blurs the boundaries between analysis, interpretation, and creativity. That is appealing to some, deeply disturbing to others. As of now, I find myself on the fence, wishing to think more deeply about how to negotiate the status of objects I produce through “scholarly play”.»