A taxonomy for activities: Dimensions in which to consider activities

The following document tries to help answer the questions: in which dimensions can activities be considered in? And, how does X activity (existing or being planned) fall in all possible dimensions that it could be considered in? 

An activity can be anything a being does. It can be eating, watching something, playing a game, interacting with something. Dimension is a qualitative measure of how well an activity fits a certain classification. There's not an objective values for each. No direction/polarity in these dimensions is inherently better than another (e.g. one shouldn't necessarily think that one should always provide as much feedback as possible, as opposed to not providing much feedback) but each direction is better suited for certain objectives, so it could be useful to consider many directions.

The benefits of considering these are that a person can more easily consider the benefits of improving a certain activity on certain dimensions (or make it supply a different need), especially ones they might not have been considering before, or a person might design an activity taking the relevant dimensions into account, or a person might compare 2 different activities in some dimensions to decide which one to do in which amount, or a person might learn to analyze things in the parts that compose them, or a person might better be able to decide which activity will help them achieve a certain objective, or a system could be designed to help suggest activities, or activities can be categorized in a more precise way (e.g. more precise video games genres), or it can help businesses more clearly analyze the experience they are giving to their customers. Considering these might help someone do an activity better because they would understand it more deeply.

Objective:

Supply of a need:

How well does it supply a need?

Physiological 

Safety

Love and belonging

Esteem

Self-actualization/Transcendence

Balancing of a chakra:

How well does it help you know which chakra to balance? (or in "western" terms: how well does it help you know which emotion you should be feeling in order to be more efficient in your life?)

How well does it help balance a chakra?

(List all chakras here)

Definition of objectives

How well defined are the objectives? 

Intuitiveness:

How intuitive is it to determine elements related to the activity?

Objective

Mechanics ("if I do this, that happens")

E.g. it might be very intuitive to know that eating supplies a physiological need but less intuitive to know how to achieve an objective in a game. It also depends on how perceptive the participant is.

interactivity:

How much do the participant's acts affect the next step of the activity?

E.g. Playing a game is more interactive than watching a movie.

With the activity (how much a being interacts with the activity)

With others (how much a being interacts with other beings during the activity)

Effect/Mechanics ("if I do this, that happens")

Feedback

How effectively does the activity communicate elements of it?

E.g. eating gives good feedback that hunger is being depleted, especially if done slow. A game might not tell you that an action has a certain effect if it does not show that effect.

Time quantum

What is the length of a step in the activity relative to another measure of time? A step is an action in an activity. An activity is a series of steps that could happen one after the other and/or in parallel, just like walking {author's note: that's quite lose of a definition}. "Another measure of time" could be the time commonly experienced by the being.

Dependency (how much does the length of a step depend on a certain variable) E.g. Turns are the steps in a card game and the length of turns depend on how long the player takes to play. Playing notes are the steps in a rhythm game and the time between one step and the other does not depend on the user

Length (length of the step relative to other measures of time) E.g. a frame in an action game is of very small length compared to common time as experienced by beings. Chewing while eating should take a longer time.

Parallelism

How much can steps be done in parallel to each other?

E.g. playing the flute you can only play a single note at a time, but playing the guitar you can play more than one string at a time.

Spatial needs

How much space does an activity require?

E.g. normal chess might be confined to 2 participants but giant chess may more easily allow more participants to join.

Joinability of steps

How easy is it to group/ungroup steps to analyze them separately or jointly?

E.g. a football team might discuss strategies (combinations of steps) broadly. A batting swing can be analyzed very minutely to ensure all parts of the body are in the right place.

Discovery

How much can users discover about the activity?

Repeatability

How much are steps repeated?

Response

How much does the activity elicit a response from the participant?

Sense: Which sense does the response come from

Intensity: How intense is the response

Pleasantness

Intentionality: How intentionally did the participant have that response

Perspective: How does the place (real or metaphorical) from which the participant experiences the activity affect the response it has on the participant? E.g. experiencing war from the sight, ears, and touch of a soldier is different (evokes a different response) from that of a general that is away from the heat of battle.

Challenge

How much do the participant's abilities match the requirements imposed by the activity?

Explicitness (how explicitly is the challenge conveyed)

Perceptiveness (how is the challenge perceived)

Competitivity

How pitted against each other are participants? How much can they work together towards a common goal?

Abstraction

When simulating another activity, how abstractly is it being simulated? How well does the activity translate to others?

Adherence to a reality

How much does the activity adhere to a given reality?

Selection: Which reality is it adhering to?

Intensity: How intense is the adherence?

Combinability: Does the activity draw from one or many realities?

Theme/Topic: Which part of that reality is this activity 

Connectedness of steps

How interconnected are steps in the activity?

E.g. taunting might be less interconnected to the overall goal of the activity. In contrast, most major events that happen in a movie generally are very connected to others.

Personalization/Expression

Avatar

How much is the participant controlling a representation of himself? E.g. fully if it is controlling itself (with the varying degrees of success it might have) or partially if it is controlling a representation of itself like in a traditional video game or tabletop game. First person VR might be an in-between.

Planning

How much previous planning does each step require?

Speed of reaction

For a given objective in the activity, how fast is the participant required to make a given action?

Control

W5 (Who, what, where, when, why) and how can actions be controlled?

depth: can the participant control every minute position of the parts of itself or are actions clumped together?

Selection: what does the participant control? E.g. does the participant control a hero, an enemy, a door?

Learning curve

Randomicity

How random are elements of the activity?

Importance of a dimension

How important is each of these dimensions to the participant

or To the objectives

Exercises:

1) take any activity and analyze it in terms of these dimensions. Try to assign the value that the activity has for each dimension in your subjective opinion.

2) take another completely different activity and repeat exercise 1. Perceive the differences in dimensions

3) choose any activity (done in previous exercises or not), analyze it again if you haven't and then modify each dimension in both directions. see if other objectives (different than the original) can be supplied by that change. mix changes from different dimensions if desired.

4) chooses an activity, choose a few objectives different than those the activity usually has, and try to figure which dimensions need to be changed in which direction to achieve those objectives