Talk:PlayPower

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sources[edit]

Besides the 2009 wired and the 2010 pittsburgh-post-gazette sources, there are a few more computer-industry-press sources, and a reasonably-long-series of computer-science-academia sources. This non-prof is funded by CMU (among others), and used by their HCI researchers as an experimental vehicle.

Also in English but doesn't mention the company – czar 15:11, 23 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • [#5] ~275 words in Apr'09[3] by nikkeibp.co.jp,([4])
  • [maybe?] ~540 words in Oct'09[5] by PopTech (page del'd in 2005 for copyvio -- speaker-conf like TEDx, founders Bob Metcalfe and John Sculley, fellowship-award mentioned in many BLP pages, not sure it is fully 'independent'),([6][7][8][9])
  • noted as a CMU research-project[10] pre-Nov'09 by prof Matthew Kam (CMU is also where the NGO founder Lomas is a PhD student now[11]), see resulting 2011 academic paper below. Here is some of the PlayPower videogame work, done by one of the grad students.[12]
  • [#2] found by User:Czar, Old-style computers get new life in developing countries, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, February 10, 2010
  • [maybe?] ~400 words in Mar'10, written by Lomas (WP:ABOUTSELF) but published by PopTech per his fellowship there (independent?),[13], mentions Typing-Warrior app, && new hire.[14]
  • [maybe?] two presentations[15][16] at O'Reilly ETech Mar'09 conference, by Douglass/Lomas/Rehn (who are respectively PhD english prof at UCSB[17][jeremydouglass.com/cv/cv-jeremy_douglass.rtf] + PhD student at CMU[18] && design fellow at UCSD/CMU[19] + internet artist). Contents of these presentations don't seem to be available on the internet; not sure if the papers were published in any conf-proceedings or similar?
  • [aboutself] ~450 words in Jan'10,[20] written by co-founder & chief-investigator Lomas, published by HASTAC who is one of the funders of the non-prof-entity (along with CMU and MacArthur Foundation and others)
  • [probably#6] ~582 words in 'about the platform' section of 2011 academic paper by Kam & Lomas & two NYU co-authors, using 2009 PlayPower HW + 2010 typing-warrior-app.[21] funding by MacArthur Foundation, HASTAC, CMU / IES PIER[22]. Presented at the 9th Intl Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Conf, July 4th-8th, 2011, in Hong Kong. Published as part of "Connecting Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning to Policy and Practice: CSCL2011 Conference Proceedings", Volume 2, publisher International Society of the Learning Sciences (isls.org), editors Hans Spada / Gerry Stahl / Naomi Miyake / Nancy Law. Because this is co-written by one of the PlayPower co-founders, it would usually be WP:ABOUTSELF, but because it is academic work with three collaborators, funded by independent foundations, supported by the university where the co-author is a professor, and published by independent editors, it counts as WP:RS, and counts towards WP:N.
  • [unknown] Sep 2011 "artist talk",[23] hosted by No-Carrier.com in Chicago, may not count as wiki-notable venue.
  • [related] WP:NOTEWORTHY mention Apr'13,[24] in "Optimizing challenge in an educational game using large-scale design experiments". by Derek Lomas, Kishan Patel, Jodi L. Forlizzi, Kenneth R. Koedinger. DOI: 10.1145/2470654.2470668. Conference: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI 2013: Changing Perspectives, April/May 2013, Paris France. See also 2012 paper.[25]
  • [probably#7] in Aug'13, refereed academic paper, "The power of play: design lessons for increasing the lifespan of outdated computers."[26] by Derek Lomas, Anuj Kumar, Kishan Patel, Dixie Ching, Meera Lakshmanan, Matthew Kam. DOI: 10.1145/2470654.2481379. Conference: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, aka Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’13), Paris, France, April 27-May 2, 2013. (Allegedly, "20% acceptance rate.") See explanation of how this deserves wiki-independent-source-status under #6.
  • [interesting] WP:NOTEWORTHY mention in 2013 MIT Press book, as the recipient of all royalties therefrom, called "10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10" (yes actual title) ISBN 9780262305501, by Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter.[27][28] From page 'v' in the frontmatter: "All royalties from the sale of this book are being donated to PLAYPOWER, a nonprofit organization that supports affordable, effective, fun learning games. PLAYPOWER uses a radically affordable TV-computer based on the 6502 processor (the same chip that was used in the Commodore 64) as a platform for learning games in the developing world." Also noted by co-author && professor Ian Bogost.[29]
  • [borderlineIndependent#8] ~1200 words, in Jan'14[30] written by freelance journalist but published in CMU's "magazine of the school of computer science" making it quasi-WP:ABOUTSELF.
  • [prediction] Lomas will write his CMU PhD thesis, including a big section on all this PlayPower stuff, which is the primary thing he's been doing from 2009-to-2014.
  • [also] looks like Kumar was also supposed to get his PhD from CMU, last year, but his resume has not been updated, so I don't know where his thesis is, or if he graduated yet, or what exactly.[31]

Not to be confused with 1971/1972/1973 book by Richard Neville[32]. Also note that there is an ISBN 9785511429007 book-on-demand called PlayPower, which is 100% culled from wikipedia and thus non-WP:RS, authors Russell&Cohn, published by Transmedia Holdings of Key Biscayne FL. Depending on how we count the academia-papers (the are WP:RS per their refereed status but only specifically 'about' playpower and playpower games to a limited degree), and on whether we count the CMU EECS-dept article in 2014, there are several sources in the 2009/2010 era from BoingBoing, Wired, Engadget, and nikkeibp.co.jp. I cannot tell whether the PopTech stuff is wiki-notable slash wiki-reliable (cf TEDx). PlayPower seems to be the CMU answer to MIT's OLPC project, with a focus on software-creation rather than hardware-creation. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 14:49, 23 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Focusing on the numbered sources (as the other stuff doesn't count towards notability), #1 & 2 were fine. #3, 4 are minimal and barely in reference to the company. Short blurbs are not considered significant coverage. I'm not convinced that #5 isn't a repackaged press release, and #6 is not independent (Kam is affiliated with the project). However I did find http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/nov/04/playpower-80s-computing-21st-century so #1,2,7? should be enough to retract the prod. Feel free to take your sources and build out the article now! – czar 15:11, 23 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for de-prod-ification. Agree about #1 and #2. Mostly agree about #3 and #4, but the timing is significant there; before PlayPower, it was possible for USA and Chinese folks to purchase a FamiClone... if they bought a plane or train ticket to the grey markets of Mumbai / Hong Kong / similar. The reason the $10-clone-6502-cpu made press in BoingBoing aka "the zine for makers(tm)" , and international press in China and Japan, is because PlayPower is a serious effort to legitimize the FamiClone hardware and take it off the grey market. Even though PlayPower does not themselves actually *make* the hardware, they are helping get it imported (in the USA via makershed.com if memory serves at the moment) and vetted and legit. Mostly that's a function of their backing by CMU, including CMU profs and PhD students who are using the project as a research-vehicle. But the main reasons that I included #4 and #5 are to prove international-computer-press interest, which is always useful to demonstrating 'significant' aka internationally-broad-not-just-local-Pittsburgh-newspapers (where CMU is located).
    As for the short-blurbs-and-passing-mentions-never-count-towards-wiki-notability axiom, it is true that 'significant' coverage does require depth to exist... somewhere... but that doesn't mean that EVERY source must have depth, to 'count'. It is not true that, *unless* depth exists in each and every source, you can ignore what the sources say when determining WP:N. Short blurbs, as long as they are in WP:RS, and especially international press outside the country of origin, contribute towards proving WP:N (even listicles are explicitly permitted by WP:SIGCOV). Even passing mentions, as long as they are in WP:RS, can contribute to proving WP:N, if those passing mentions are widely distributed in time, or widely distributed geographically, or (especially) found in fields of inquiry outside the field of inquiry in which the main article-topic exists. WP:SIGCOV isn't a license to ignore what the sources say, it's just a rule of thumb (and a good one) that we should concentrate on the most-reliable sources with the most depth. That's less work, usually, and leads to less verbosity at AfD.  ;-)     But it is a misreading of the policy, to say that we can *disregard* short blurbs (in WP:RS of course), and *disregard* WP:NOTEWORTHY mentions (in WP:RS of course). If *all* we have is short blurbs, of a dozen or two dozen sentences, then proving WP:N is not going to be easy... but it may well be possible. In the case of PlayPower, we have several sources with depth; the blurbs are just used as icing on the cake, to show international coverage, and WP:PERSISTENT coverage after the initial burst of interest in early 2009. At the end of the day, 'significant coverage' is a qualitative wiki-policy, which specifically and on purpose never sets a firm number of sources required for demonstrating 'significant' coverage, and specifically and on purpose never sets a firm number of words-per-source / sentences-per-source to achieve 'detailed' / 'in-depth' coverage. Those are judgement calls, which vary depending on the situation; for some topics, the field of inquiry would demand book-length (or at least chapter-length) coverage of the topic, for it to have the requisite depth. For more specialized and niche fields, non-book-length coverage might be significant, it just depends on the topic of the article, and the field of inquiry. This context-dependence of the meaning of significant is, fundamentally, why the wiki-policy is so vague and non-quantitative.
    On #6 and #7, we just disagree; it definitely counts as WP:RS, and is no longer WP:ABOUTSELF. How much it counts toward WP:N is a bit more slipperly, hence my 'probably#6' and 'probably#7' assessment. Kam and Lomas are not just associated with the project, they are the principle investigators (Lomas for his PhD thesis and Kam as his PhD advisor/sponsor/whateverCmuCallsIt). What makes their journal-papers wiki-reliable, and in some sense 'independent' is that they were peer-reviewed academia-refereed journal papers, see WP:SCHOLARSHIP (bullet-point#2). The co-authors from NYU put their rep on the line, in academia; they wouldn't allow puffery into the paper. The editors of the conf-proceedings, same deal, they put their reps on the line as scientists, by accepting (after review-n-correction rounds usually) the paper for publication. To a lesser (but non-zero) degree, the backing by CMU, and by the other funding-groups like MacArthur-slash-HASTAC, of this specific research is also a contribution to making the vetted final paper count as pure WP:RS. Kam and Lomas are not janitors at CMU; they are professional researchers, who were vetted by the university before getting hired, and vetted by the grant-process before getting R&D monies from MacArthur/CmuIesPier/HASTAC/etc. So #6 && #7 are definitely WP:RS, full stop, although we should use common sense when pulling stuff from it (e.g. if the authors are *predicting* things in their 'future work' section wikipedia should probably be wary about using that stuff without WP:ATTRIBUTEPOV). And of course, it always makes sense to describe what comes from papers by the research-group *as* coming from that selfsame research group. But stuff in the academic paper #6 && #7, counts as 99.8% WP:RS, whereas stuff found at www.playPower.org is 100% WP:ABOUTSELF (because even though Lomas wrote most of both of them... the stuff in the papers was funded/backed/co-authored/indepEdited/proPublished whereas the stuff on the www-page was none of those things). Research groups are not immume to tooting their own horns, of course; just like corporations, they have to advertise and strut their stuff, if they wanna rake in the money (customers for corps and grant-giving-agencies for profs). So we have to be careful about which types of papers by the research group count as WP:RS, and to what extent they count toward WP:N. The main rule is, which university is it? If it's profs & PhD-students in the CMU EECS dept, that goes a long way all by itself. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 02:36, 25 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Let's not get caught up too much in details. When I say "disregard" I don't mean "it doesn't exist" but "it isn't important". All deletion discussions come down to whether there are enough sources to write something substantial. Tech & video game sources are notoriously close to their sources to the point of repackaging press releases as journalism. When, say, four (even vetted) such sources run the same story, it doesn't mean the subject is any more important than if one person ran the story. That's why they stack. A paper a professional writes about something to which they are close may be "reliable" by the peer review process and "noteworthy" by the expert self-published source distinction, but it most certainly is not a secondary source nor an independent source. Nothing the founders ever published under their names would be counted in the court of AfD notability. These are broad strokes. If it really takes drilling into three of these, a handful of these mentions, then it's basically a toss up over WP:ILIKEIT. In truth, there's not enough material in the articles we've been discussing to write something worthwhile. I'm happy to be surprised, though. – czar 02:56, 25 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

defunct?[edit]

Their website now says it has become a for-profit company. One of the co-founder lists it as a "project finished in 2012" http://danielrehn.com/projekt/playpower/ The source code for the games is no longer available (it was hosted in Ning, it seems): https://www.hastac.org/blogs/derek-lomas/2010/01/24/games-playpowers-workshop-india It would be nice if an editor modifies the page to mention this.

What happened[edit]

So, what happened in the end? Derek took the $180,000 grant and bought a house? There's certainly not much to show from the project, apparently a single game, not available in any physical cartridge form (ie useful to it's putative intended audience).

What's he done with the cash? He could've spent just a thousand, or a few hundred even, buying up the $10 Famiclones and shipping them to programming volunteers. Or setting up a small-scale facility to produce cartridges as cheaply as possible. Which would've been quite cheap, since you don't need the Nintendo proprietary 10NES chip to make software work on the bootleg Famiclone hardware.

I wanted to start work on this project myself, I had a couple of ideas and some programming ability. Not for the NES in assembler, but would've learned, or else used one of the small C compilers available.

If I were one of the poor Africans who was meant to have learned to type, and thus be able to earn $1 a day instead of $1 a month or whatever it was, I'd be a bit pissed off with Daniel and Derek.

If anyone decides to do this again, I'd be interested to hear.

94.197.121.144 (talk) 22:14, 16 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Worth sharing details on spending areas. The objective of the MacFound grant was to create an opensource devkit and community to facilitate new content creation for this platform. I feel pretty good about what we did there. Creating games and manufacturing them was not expected. Here's what we spent money on:

University overhead: 35% of the money. Hosted Workshops: In India, Brazil, NYC and Chicago (~$40k) Research Expenses: Travel + some paid local staff (published 3 papers, too) (~$5k) Equipment & shipping: production equipment (e.g., RetroUSB, EPROM burners), shipping stuff back and forth between USA and India (~$7k) Staff: we paid stipends to a bunch of folks (~$25k) Paid content development: while open source contributions were essential for the development platform, we paid for the actual development of the 3 games (~$20k), which we justified as being useful for the community Legal: we had to set up another organization to administer the grant (~$3k) Fun: we bought a bunch of old gaming platforms and games, like the Intellivision and Famicom BASIC. Some were then donated to computer history museums (e.g., Bill Buxton's). (~$3k) So, that's most of it. I still don't own a house :(

Other relevant events: having a baby and doing a PhD at the same time as managing this project was a challenge! That's part of the reason we started to develop online games, as it enabled us to run large online scientific experiments. The underlying goal of Playpower.org was to design software that could make a large-scale social impact on low-cost computers. It was pretty clear, even in 2009, that second-hand smart phones and computers were going to be a bigger long-term channel than famicoms. We've since contributed to XPrize edu and our web and mobile learning games have been played by over 3 million students. 145.94.153.160 (talk) 15:09, 24 January 2018 (UTC) Derek[reply]

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