Should skills be able to belong to more than one skill group?

[shereefb]

From @jeffreywescott

I love the idea of "Stat Groups", but my concerns are that (a) I'm not sure those particular Stat Groups are the right ones, and (more importantly) (b) this really forces us into a 2-level hierarchy, when I really believe that each Skill Stat could fit into more than one Stat Group.

For example, if @shereefb is right that "Application Frameworks" and "Databases" are both Stat Groups, and "Front-end Web" and "Back-end Web" are both Stat Groups, then I could see React.js belonging to both "Front-end Web" and "Application Frameworks" and MongoDB belonging to both "Back-end Web" and "Databases".

To that end, I'd like to have Stat Tags (like labels in gmail, rather than groups / "folders" as they are now). I think if we do it that way, it will give us a lot more flexibility and will be easier to come to agreement.

[tannerwelsh]

Success looks like:

• Yes/no (w/ thoughts)
• If yes, create a new issue to re-organize skills

[tannerwelsh]

Make sure to look at all 4 quadrants.

[shereefb]

The idea for me around stat groups was to organize stats and to give the UI designers a “collapsible” layer where they can expose more meaningful numbers to players. For example: As a player I could see CSS level 2, html level 1, jQuery level 3….. or “Front End Level 6".

Having stats belong to more than one group (essentially they function as tags) doesn't break this. In fact, might make it more meaningful.

From my view, the only issues here, does it reduce or increase complexity for the player, and for the terrain designer. Gut sense: it's a good thing, but I haven' spent any time looking at all the stat groups being generated!

[jeffreywescott]

Blocked on #99, #92, and #105.

@tannerwelsh -- I'm pausing work on this for this sprint.

[jeffreywescott]

From @awolfinthewind: "Hey @channel I've been working on clarifying the definition of Player Stats. I'm getting to a point where I think I've got most questions answered and a flow-chart for deciding how to classify stats. This would be helpful to Game Developers as we try to integrate our quadrant work and create challenges that affect Player Stats.

But I have one open question:

Are Stat Groups tags that can apply to multiple types of stats? (Example: A stat group has skill stats and quality stats associated with it. ie Systems Research could be a stat group that includes the skill of "industry mapping" and the quality of "thoroughness.")

Or are stat groups classification buckets that fall under the stat type?

Example: Quadrant -> Stat Type -> Stat Group -> Stat

OR should it be:

Quadrant -> Stat Group -> Stat Type -> Stat

There's evidence for both in the current rule book and once we get that sorted I can commit the doc on how to sort our stats :-)"

[jeffreywescott]

From @tannerwelsh: "In looking at Stat Groups, I’m having a harder time seeing the benefit of applying them across all three kinds of stats (Health, Skill, Quality)

And also the 5-level taxonomy is seeming a bit overbuilt. Example: Quadrant -> Skill Stat Group -> Skill -> Skill Level -> Ability

I’d be curious to see what we’d produce if we opted for a combination tag and category structure.

Here’s a dump of how the relationships between the many stat objects could look:

Stat Objects:

• skill (measured in skill points)
• ability (measured by state: "unchecked", "checked", etc.)
• health stat (measured in 1-5 Likert scale)
• quality stat (measured in %)

Relationships:

• abilities contribute to one or more skill levels in one or more skills (1->many)
• skill levels have a set of abilities (1->many)
• skill levels belong to one skill (many->1)
• skills have a set of abilities through their skill sets (1:many)
• skills are grouped into one or more skill groups (1:many)
• skill groups contain many skills (1:many)
• health stats belong to one or more health groups (1:many)
• health groups contain many health stats (1:many)
• quality stats belong to one or more quality groups (1:many)
• quality groups contain many quality stats (1:many)

What would happen if our work now was to create as many of the atomic stat objects as possible, each of us adding our own “groupings”, and then merge all of our stat objects and see where our groupings overlap?

In other words, if we had a giant bucket of these 4 things:

• Quality Stat (e.g. "Self-assessment", "Object-Oriented Design")
• Health Stat (e.g. "I contribute to group projects.", "I hold strong opinions lightly.")
• Skill Stat (e.g. "Interviewing", "Algorithms")
• Ability (e.g. "Move files and directories using a command shell")

And then we each went through and “tagged” them with different groupings (e.g. “Collaboration Skill Group”, “Pragmatism Health Group”, “Systemic Skill Group”), I wonder what structure would emerge?

Disclaimer: I read Clay Shirky’s essay “Ontology is Overrated” last night, so I’m a little primed towards tagging systems

For the curious: http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html?goback=.gde_1838701_member_179729766 "

[tannerwelsh]

Thanks for the update re: blocking @jeffreywescott, and for capturing conversations here. :)

[jeffreywescott]

Depends on #132

[tannerwelsh]

No longer relevant