we started out the morn­ing by play­ing “reverse scav­enger hunt” (we are soooo play­ing this at GLLS2008!)

Amy Jo Kim — Putting the Fun in Functional

http://shufflebrain.com/

game design prin­ci­ples have been find­ing their way onto web­sites more and more
“social media” for her
1. player-created con­tent (she likes to talk about the peo­ple who use your soft­ware as “play­ers,” not cus­tomers) +
2. social fea­tures (pro­files, rep­u­ta­tion, groups, etc.) +
3. tools for sharing

“game” = a struc­tured expe­ri­ence with rules and goals that’s fun (which includes things like “The Sims”)
stretches what can be con­sid­ered a “game“
games tap into our pri­mal response pat­terns
game pay­offs are like slot machines — ran­dom, unpre­dictable, not always con­trolled by your behav­ior
games engage us in “flow” (that space between apa­thy and bore­dom, anx­i­ety and bore­dom)
the tricky part is that the game has to adjust as you play it

game mechan­ics for social media
1. col­lect­ing — you’re going to show off your stuff (stuff in WoW, friends in Face­book, etc.); so when you’re design­ing, look at what can be col­lected to drive player behav­ior; down­side is who has the most friends
2. points — point sys­tems give you leader­boards, give you some­thing sticky over time; great way to intro­duce new fea­tures, new areas to explore; social points are given by other points (dif­fer­ent from sys­tem points); eg, flickr inter­est­ing­ness, ebay rep­u­ta­tion, etc.
3. feed­back — accel­er­ates mas­tery; eg, Gui­tar Hero; this is prob­a­bly the low­est hang­ing fruit of all these; it’s one of the eas­i­est ways to make some­thing com­pelling and fun and to help peo­ple mas­ter the curve
4. exchanges — back and forth inter­ac­tions between two peo­ple; implicit (not built into the sys­tem, but comes out in other ways, eg The Wall in Face­book or the social pres­sure to pro­vide feed­back on exchanges in ebay) vs. explicit exchanges (cod­i­fied in the sys­tem, eg adding a friend in Face­book); so leave room for implicit exchanges
5. cus­tomiza­tion — of the inter­face, your char­ac­ter, your iden­tity, your expe­ri­ence; makes the per­son more invested and just makes it more fun; Gaia Online lets you cus­tomize your avatar before you even start playing

power to the play­ers (trends)
1. the rise of con­tent shar­ing net­works — Flickr, YouTube, etc. that cre­ate the net­work but the play­ers exchange the con­tent
2. acces­si­ble tech — much sim­pler UIs, open APIs, cross-platform ser­vices; see­ing these things in games, too
3. syn­di­ca­tion — not just hav­ing your content-sharing net­work, but also to be able to take bits of it and place it on other sites (feeds, wid­gets, embed code); inte­grat­ing with the rest of the web and acces­si­ble there

some of this change is because of the change in the audi­ence (new demo­graph­ics for gam­ing, both up and down); broad­en­ing of the audi­ence has trans­formed game design into some­thing that reaches beyond the hard­core
hap­pen­ing on the web, too

game mechan­ics + social media = the future of net­worked entertainment?

gave some tips that can be found on her website

points don’t have to be explicit — views on a pic­ture, how many times it was emailed, etc.
points are not always the right thing to use

Merci Ham­mon — PMOG
launched in March before hav­ing to take the game down for improve­ments due to new fund­ing
Fire­fox exten­sion
game envi­ron­ments, the envi­ron­ment lev­els you up
in pas­sively mul­ti­player, you don’t get to choose your class; you get assigned a role
in PMOG, two of them rep­re­sent order and two rep­re­sent chaos
you can pur­chase things that are bizarre
light­posts are used to cre­ate “quests” (they “illu­mi­nate” your con­text or some­thing about the site)
“por­tals” trans­ported you from one site to another seam­lessly, but became a prob­lem because of where you might end up
Merci’s favorite object was a mine — could leave one on a site and then the next PMOG player hit­ting a site would encounter it; an anony­mous weapon that spreads havoc for the other play­ers
had to develop “armor” at the end because pop­u­lar sites would obvi­ously get mined quickly

they were shut out by del.icio.us, open direc­tory didn’t work, so they cre­ated their own tags
you get points for eras­ing other peo­ples’ tags and for adding your own
so users are deter­min­ing the scope of the universe

hop­ing to test the new ver­sion in early 2008

http://www.pmog.com/

they don’t mon­i­tor game­play to see if play­ers are gam­ing the sys­tem
pas­sive because of class char­ac­ter­i­za­tions and point collection

Play­ful Pro­gram­ming, Com­pet­i­tive Code — Ned Gully (The Math­Works, Inc.)
“the big brain has many legs“
“com­pet­i­tive wikipedia” — imag­ine if the sys­tem could award points if your edit was an improve­ment and your pic­ture then appeared on the page?
would wikipedia be bet­ter for hav­ing a sys­tem like this?
his con­tests run like this:
– entries are auto­mat­i­cally scored, ranked, and dis­played imme­di­ately
– code, author, and score are vis­i­ble at all times
– any­one can mod­ify any­one else’s code and resub­mit it as their own

means you have to put your code into the pub­lic domain to get rewarded
are they encour­ag­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion or theft?
will this make you so angry that you won’t play any­more?
hav­ing been tweaked, some peo­ple delight in tweak­ing right back
“tweak­ing is the nickel slots of their con­test” — teaches peo­ple to open up (their wal­lets, in the case of the slots)

par­tic­i­pa­tion
showed a graph of improv­ing game play scores which resulted in a final entry that was code no one could have writ­ten on their own

phase tran­si­tions (Jenny: can actu­ally illus­trate reflec­tion?)
lots of inter­est­ing graphs and an ani­ma­tion of the tweaks
inno­va­tion uptake — can see it hap­pen in convultion-based algo­rithm
social sig­nal­ing — it’s just code, but thou­sands of entires have to be named; became fun exchange of com­mu­ni­ca­tion
code genomics
per­sonal glory or col­lab­o­ra­tion? the code is the one inter­ested in col­lab­o­ra­tion
the coder wants to block code prop­a­ga­tion while the code wants to prop­a­gate — use this to shape the con­test design
for the coder, make par­tic­i­pa­tion easy, reward van­ity, many cheap prizes, and dark­ness period
for the code, encour­age copy­ing, high­light changes, pun­ish com­plex­ity, anti-obfuscation tools

think of the code as genomic in a bio­log­i­cal sense
lib­er­at­ing to think of the code as an entity with its own agenda
well-written code is manip­u­lat­ing you to make more code like it
“a chicken is only an egg’s way of mak­ing another egg” –> “a hacker is only a code’s way of mak­ing more code”

fit­ness func­tion is how fast did it run, but per­for­mance, too; blend­ing them at a cost func­tion
how would you eval­u­ate future recyclability

A Cre­ative Com­mu­nity for Young Pro­gram­mers and Game Design­ers: Boku — Matt Maclau­rin
he tried to fig­ure out what com­put­ers are for
– cre­at­ing new worlds
– invent­ing new lan­guages
– udner­stand­ing cog­ni­tion
– evok­ing won­der
more

soft­ware as an expres­sive medium
code as a medium
– the only truly mod­ern medium

sim­u­la­tion is the fun­da­men­tal basis of cog­ni­tion
it’s a good descrip­tion of how we think; we don’t think like a text engine
play­ing mag­i­cal stuff makes you want to make mag­i­cal stuff
then they get exposed to code — ugh

some his­tory about pro­gram­ming envi­ron­ments (logo, etc.)

Boku’s approach
– start with a work­ing sim­u­la­tion
– real-world objects and verbs
– throw out every­thing (loops, vari­ables, most con­trol struc­tures)
– no typ­ing (uses an XBox con­troller instead)
– make the exer­pi­ence fluid and immediate

could debate whether or not this is really programming

start off in a blank world where noth­ing is going on until you participate

demoed Boku — very cool, don’t ever see the code

adding actions adds the nar­ra­tive; just hav­ing one bot eat an apple while the other one tries to kick made it into a con­test with­out even adding any con­test code
lets you eas­ily cre­ate bar­ri­ers and bound­aries (like mountains)

early test­ing:
– 11 is a great age for this
– some as young as 7 can pro­gram
– com­mu­nity is crit­i­cal (inspi­ra­tion, learn­ing)
– kids really dig shoot­ing
– world editing

ques­tions?
– is pro­gram­ming a core lit­er­acy?
– is com­pu­ta­tion a core lit­er­acy, and is pro­gram­ming the only man­i­fes­ta­tion of it?
– do we need con­flict?
– is it okay for kids to act out vio­lent fan­tasies?
– what “verbs” should boku have?
– what is the inter­sec­tion between sto­ry­telling and game design?
– how to define authorship?

Alter­nate Real­i­ties — Susan Bonds
“42 Enter­tain­ment cre­ates trans-media nar­ra­tives for highly par­tic­i­pa­tory expe­ri­ences through a vari­ety of both online and offline mechanisms”

dis­trib­uted nar­ra­tive
i love bees
one of the biggest rewards for this type of enter­tain­ment is just play­ing it
world as plat­form
– every­thing can be used to tell a piece of the story, which takes the pres­sure off any one piece to carry the whole tale

lev­els of audi­ence (inverse tri­an­gle)
– casual, level 1 (more and more peo­ple enter­ing here); mod­est level of inter­ac­tion, mostly online par­tic­i­pa­tion, broad­est audi­ence reach
– active, level 2 (sig­nif­i­cant level of inter­ac­tion, online and some offline)
– enthu­si­ast, level 3 (very high level of inter­ac­tion, par­tic­i­pa­tion across media into the real world, “tip of the wedge” super-engaged audi­ence that can cre­ate enter­tain­ment for the other two levels)

has found that the com­mu­nity will form on its own
– the power of one can fuel the power of the many
– “hive mind” — peo­ple will col­lab­o­rate based on shared goals and interests

can take tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als and doing some­thing dif­fer­ent with it
“hide in plain sight”

used “Year Zero” exam­ple from Nine Inch Nails (http://iamtryingtobelieve.com/)
even giv­ing out but­tons at lis­ten­ing par­ties became clues

how can you make peo­ple think? how can it used for social expe­ri­ence?
an impor­tant part of the ARG was mpow­er­ing play­ers to make the themes of the­mu­sic their own. this was facil­i­tated through two sites — Art is Resis­tance and Open Source Resis­tance, the lat­ter of which accepts user gen­er­ated art and has even pub­lished in mag­a­zines and online.

www.ninwiki.com
opensourceresistance.com
www.artisresistance.com

when a story starts com­ing at you through the chan­nels of your “real” life you start to see your life through the lens of that story
at the end, you saw a file of the play­ers with “case num­bers” as accomplices

all of their com­mu­ni­ties are organic and set up by the com­mu­ni­ties themselves

audi­ence ques­tion: can you use these sys­tems to engen­der positive/normative behav­ior?
“it doesn’t mat­ter what you believe, as long as you speak up“
peo­ple are look­ing for a roadmap to activism

No tags for this post.