Dear member of the FoC community,   We would like to invite you to participate in a programming challenge as part of a research project. For the last eight years, we’ve worked on the Webstrates (https://www.webstrates.net) software platform as a way to explore software that’s inherently malleable and collaborative. In our team, we’ve worked on various iterations of tools for developing software with Webstrates and now we have something that we think is pretty neat, but we’d love to get some input from you.    The programming challenge is to make a small multiplayer game where the players can change rules through programming using our Codestrates v2 development platform. The challenge will run for a little less than three weeks from June 10th to June 26th ending with an online demo session Friday the 26th at 15.30 CET. The programming challenge is open-ended, but expect to spend the equivalent of a couple of evenings to work on it. You can work on the challenge by yourself or in a group (all members should sign up). To participate, you are expected to have experience with Web development and JavaScript programming. We don’t expect that you have experience with game development but it’s fine if you do. We assume games to be publicly shared under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) unless otherwise is agreed with you.   You sign up for the challenge here: https://www.survey-xact.dk/LinkCollector?key=HCPGJP41UK9J    Sign up before June 8th at the latest.   If you sign up we will contact you with further instructions, access to our system, and to a Slack workspace where all participants can chat and ask for help. You can at any time opt-out of the challenge.    For us this challenge aims to: • assess the creative potential of the Webstrates & Codestrates tools. • evaluate the usability and understandability of Codestrates & Webstrates. • get input for the future development of the platform   For you, it’s an opportunity to contribute to science by playing with some software that hopefully inspires you and challenges you to think of software differently. We cannot compensate you for your time, but we can provide you with an exciting experience.   Our goal is to publish the results of the study at an academic conference or journal.   Feel free to share this invitation personally to people you might believe are interested, but we ask you kindly not to distribute it broadly, e.g., on social media or the like.   Best regards,   Clemens Nylandsted Klokmose, PhD, Associate Professor Bjarke Fog, PhD student Digital Design and Information Studies Aarhus University Denmark

Took a look at the platform and while it looks interesting, why multiplayer games specifically for this challenge?

Hi Scott, one of the emphases of Codestrates v2 is that it is easy to expose code in a user interface and edit it collaboratively. We also want to get at the potential weaknesses of the platform by creating a challenge that might come a bit at odds with the immediate affordances of the platform.