A game of seeing

The game I'm envisioning for gamifying Higher Ed has four levels in it. This game differs from most ARG's (Alternate Reality Games) that dwell entirely in the physical world. Conventional ARG's only gamify levels of attainment and cultivated attributes, not levels of spaces and places. Thus most ARG's focus on missions to discover, narratives to piece together and puzzles to solve collaboratively.

There is a place you go to change how you're seeing your situation. It does not change what physical evidence you are seeing objectively. In this place, you change how you see the objective evidence subjectively. You alter your selective perceptions and construed attributions. You reframe what you're seeing with a different outlook, perspective or lens.

This is the place where any game of seeing gets played. This place has been called your inner world or your mind. It's a place for all your daydreaming, fantasizing and imagining. It's also a place for replaying and reconsidering what happened in light of new insights, perspectives and possibilities. It's a place to run through a scenario or mentally practice what you will soon say or do. Sometimes this is a place to experience being haunted by horrific memories, dreadful forecasts or paranoid interpretations of interactions with others.

When we go to this place, we can see opportunities to explore that previously appeared as dangerous threats too be avoided. We can see ways out of our comfort zone of habitual seeing out onto skinny branches of unfamiliar perspectives. We can adopt an optimistic outlook that welcomes challenges, new experiences and games to play well. In this place, we can change how we keep score, what we monitor continually and what facets we regard as "mission critical". It's as if we have a dashboard in this inner place we can update in a level of play and upgrade as we change levels.