Update: it took me a while, but the slides that accompanied this talk are now up at SlideShare.

A little context: The NOP run frequent events for designers in the region. These designers mostly work in more traditional domains such as graphic, fashion and industrial design. NOP asked Jeroen van Mastrigt — a friend and occasional colleague of mine — to talk about games at one of their events. Jeroen in turn asked me to play Robin to his Batman, I would follow up his epic romp through game design theory with a brief look at pervasive games. This of course was an offer I could not refuse. The event was held at a lovely location (the huge art-house cinema LUX) and was attended by a healthy-sized crowd. Kudos to the NOP for organizing it and many thanks to them (and Jeroen) for inviting me.

So, what I tried to do in the talk was to first give a sense of what pervasive games are, what characterizes them. I drew from the Hide & Seek website for the list of characteristics and used The Soho Project as a running example throughout this part. I also tied the characteristics to some theory I found interesting:

• Mixing digital technology with real world play — I emphasized that ultimately, technology is but a means to an end. At Interaction ‘09 Robert Fabricant said the medium of interaction design is human behavior. I think the same holds true for the design of pervasive games.
• Social interaction — Raph Koster once said single player games are a historical aberration. It is clear much of the fun in pervasive games is social. In a way I think they bridge the gap between the “old” board games and contemporary video games.
• Using the city as a playground — Here I could not resist bringing in Jane Jacob’s notions of the city as an entity that is organised from the bottom up and Kevin Lynch’s work on the mental maps we create of cities as we move through them. Cities play a vital role in facilitating the play of pervasive games. At best they are the main protagonist of them.
• Transforming public spaces into theatrical stagesets — This is related to the previous one, but here I made a sidestep into the embodied nature of player interactions in pervasive games and how embodiment facilitates reading at a distance of such actions. In a sense, the social fun of embodied play is due to its performative quality.

After this, I tried to show why designers outside the domain of games should care about pervasive games. This I did by talking about ways they can be used for purposes other than ‘mere’ entertainment. These were:

• Enlarging perceived reality; you can create games that play with the way we customarily perceive reality. This was inspired by the talk Kevin Slavin of Area/Code delivered at MIND08. Examples I used were Crossroads and The Comfort of Strangers.
• Changing human behavior for the better; think of the Toyota Prius dashboard’s effect on people’s driving behavior. Examples of games that use feedback loops to steer us towards desirable goals are CryptoZoo and FourSquare.
• Crowdsourcing solutions; games can simulate possible futures and challenge players to respond to their problems. Here I used Jane McGonigal’s ideas around collective intelligence gaming. The example game I talked about was World Without Oil.
• Conveying arguments procedurally; Ian Bogost‘s concept of procedural rhetoric isn’t specific to pervasive games, but I think the way they get mixed up with everyday life make them particularly effective channels for communicating ideas. I used The Go Game, Cruel 2B Kind and Join the Line¹ as examples.

By talking about these things I hoped to provide a link to the audience’s own design practice. They may not deal with games, but they surely deal with communicating ideas and changing people’s behavior. Come to think of it though, I was doing a very old media style presentation in attempt to achieve the same… Oh well.

1. Join the Line is a game students conceptualized during a workshop I ran.

Summary

The idea of the talk was to look at a few qualities of embodied interaction, and relate them to games and play, in the hopes of illuminating some design opportunities. Without dwelling on what embodiment really means, suffice to say that there is a school of thought that states that our thinking originates in our bodily experience of the world around us, and our relationships with the people in it. I used the example of an improvised information display I once encountered in the paediatric ward of a local hospital to highlight two qualities of embodied interaction: (1) meaning is socially constructed and (2) cognition is facilitated by tangibility.¹

With regards to the first aspect — the social construction of meaning — I find it interesting that in games, you find a distinction between the official rules to a game, and the rules that are arrived at through mutual consent by the players, the latter being how the game is actually played. Using the example of an improvised manège in Habbo, I pointed out that under-specified design tends to encourage the emergence of such interesting uses. What it comes down to, as a designer, is to understand that once people get together to do stuff, and it involves the thing you’ve designed, they will layer new meanings on top of what you came up with, which is largely out of your control.

For the second aspect — cognition being facilitated by tangibility — I talked about how people use the world around them to offload mental computation. For instance, when people get better at playing Tetris, they start backtracking more than when they just started playing. They are essentially using the game’s space to think with. As an aside, I pointed out that in my experience, sketching plays a similar role when designing. As with the social construction of meaning, for epistemic action to be possible, the system in use needs to be adaptable.

To wrap up, I suggested that, when it comes to the design of embodied interactive stuff, we are struggling with the same issues as game designers. We’re both positioning ourselves (in the words of Eric Zimmerman) as meta-creators of meaning; as designers of spaces in which people discover new things about themselves, the world around them and the people in it.

Sources

I had several people come up to me afterwards, asking for sources, so I’ll list them here.

• the significance of the social construction of meaning for interaction design is explained in detail by Paul Dourish in his book Where the Action Is
• the research by Jean Piaget I quoted is from his book The Moral Judgement of the Child (which I first encountered in Rules of Play, see below)
• the concept of ideal versus real rules is from the wonderful book Rules of Play by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (who in turn have taken it from Kenneth Goldstein’s article Strategies in Counting Out)
• for a wonderful description of how children socially mediate the rules to a game, have a look at the article Beyond the Rules of the Game by Linda Hughes (collected in the Game Design Reader)
• the Will Wright quote is from an interview in Tracy Fullerton’s book Game Design Workshop, second edition
• for a discussion of pragmatic versus epistemic action and how it relates to interaction design, refer to the article How Bodies Matter (PDF) by Scott Klemmer, Björn Hartmann and Leila Takayama (which is rightfully recommended by Dan Saffer in his book, Designing Gestural Interfaces)
• the Tetris research (which I first found in the previously mentioned article) is described in Epistemic Action Increases With Skill (PDF), an article by Paul Maglio and David Kirsh
• the “play is free movement…” quote is from Rules of Play
• the picture of the guy skateboarding is a still from the awesome documentary film Dogtown and Z-Boys
• for a lot of great thinking on “loose fit” design, be sure to check out the book How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand
• the “meta-creators of meaning” quote is from Eric Zimmerman’s foreword to the aforementioned Game Design Workshop, 2nd ed.

Thanks

And that’s it. Interaction 09 was a great event, I’m happy to have been a part of it. Most of the talks seem to be online now. So why not check them out? My favourites by far were John Thackara and Robert Fabricant. Thanks to the people of the IxDA for all the effort they put into increasing interaction design’s visibility to the world.

1. For a detailed discussion of the information display, have a look at this blog post.

I had ten minutes to get my point across. To be honest, I think I failed rather dismally. Some of the ideas I included were still quite fresh and unfinished, and I am afraid this did not work out well. I also relied too heavily on referencing other’s work, presuming people would be familiar with them. A miscalculation on my part.

In any case, thanks to Felix Bopp and Carla Hoekendijk for inviting me. I had a good time and enjoyed the other presenter’s talks. The discussion afterwards too was a lot of things, but dull certainly isn’t among them.

What follows is a write-up of what I more or less said during the presentation, plus references to the sources I used, which will hopefully make things clearer than they were during the evening itself.²

(This is where I did the usual introduction of who I am and what I do. I won’t bore you with it here. In case you are wondering, the title of this talk is slightly tongue-in cheek. I had to come up with it for the abstract before writing the actual talk. Had I been able to choose a title afterwards, it would’ve been something like “Growth” or “A New Biology of Urban Play”…)

This gentleman is Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. He is said to be the first to formulate a coherent theory of evolution. His ideas centred around inheritance of acquired traits. So for instance, a blacksmiths who works hard his whole life will probably get really strong arms. In the Lamarckist view, his offspring will inherit these strong arms from him. Darwinism rules supreme in evolutionary biology, so it is no surprise that this theory is out of favour nowadays. What I find interesting is the fact that outside of the natural domain, Lamarckism is still applicable, most notably in culture. Cultural organisms can pass on traits they acquired in their lifetime to their offspring. Furthermore, there is a codependency between culture and humans. The two have co-evolved. You could say culture is a trick humans use to get around the limits of Darwinism (slow, trial-and-error based incremental improvements) in order to achieve Lamarckism.³

You can think of cities as cultural meta-organisms. They’re a great example of natural-cultural co-evolution. We use cities as huge information storage and retrieval machines. What you see here is a map of the city of Hamburg circa 1800. In his book Emergence, Steven Berlin Johnson compares the shape of this map to that of the human brain, to illustrate this idea of the city being alive, in a sense. Cities are self-organizing cities that emerge from the bottom up. They grow, patterns are created from low-level interactions, things like neighbourhoods.⁴

Games are this other thing nature has come up with to speed up evolution. I’m not going to go into why I think we play (you could do worse than have a look at The Ambiguity of Play by Brian Sutton-Smith to get a sense of all the different viewpoints on the matter). Let’s just say I think one thing games are good at is conveying viewpoints of the world in a procedural way (a.k.a. ‘procedural rhetoric’ as described in Ian Bogost’s book Persuasive Games). They provide people with a way to explore a system from the inside out. They give rise to ‘systemic literacy’.⁵ The image is from Animal Crossing: Wild World, a game that, as Bogost argues, tries to point out certain issues that exist with consumerism and private home ownership.

Moving on, I’d like to discuss two trends that I see happening right now. I’ll build on those to formulate my future vision.

So trend number one: the real-time city. In cities around the globe, we are continuously pumping up the amount of sensors, actuators and processors. The behaviour of people is being sensed, processed and fed back to them in an ever tightening feedback loop. This will inevitably change the behaviour of humans as well as the city. So cities are headed to a phase transition, where they’ll move (if not in whole then at least in neighbourhood-sized chunks) to a new level of evolvability. Adam Greenfield calls it network weather. Dan Hill talks about how these new soft infrastructures can help us change the user experience of the city without needing to change the hard stuff. The problem is, though, that the majority of this stuff is next-to invisible, and therefore hard to “read”.⁶ The image, by the way, is from Stamen Design’s awesome project Cabspotting, which (amongst other things) consists of real-time tracking and visualization of the trajectories of taxis in the Bay Area.

Trend number two. In the past decade or so, there’s a renewed interest in playing in public spaces. Urban games are being used to re-imagine and repurpose the city in new ways (such as the parkour player pictured here). Consciously or subconsciously, urban games designers are flirting with the notions of the Situationist International, most notably the idea of inner space shaping our experience of outer space (psycho-geography) and the use of playful acts to subvert those spaces. Parkour and free running can’t really be called games, but things like SFZero, The Soho Project and Cruel 2 B Kind all fit these ideas in some way.

So I see an opportunity here: To alleviate some of the illegibility of the real-time city’s new soft infrastructures, we can deploy games that tap into them. Thus we employ the capacity of games to provide insight into complex systems. With urban games, this ‘grokking’ can happen in situ.

Through playing these games, people will be better able to “read” the real-time city, and to move towards a more decentralized mindset. The image is from a project by Dan Hill, where the shape of public Wi-Fi in the State Library of Queensland was visualized and overlaid on the building’s floor-plan.

Ultimately though, I would love to enable people to not only “read” but also “write” possible processes for the real-time city. I see many advantages here. Fore one this could lead to situated procedural arguments: people could be enabled to propose alternative ways of interacting with urban space. But even without this, just by making stuff, another way of learning is activated, known as ‘analysis by synthesis’. This was the aim of Mitchel Resnick when he made StarLogo (of which you see a screenshot here). And it works. StarLogo enables children to make sense of complex systems. A real-time urban game design toolkit could to the same, with the added benefit of the games being juxtaposed with the cities they are about.

This juxtaposition might result in dynamics similar to what we find in nature. Processes from these new games might be spontaneously transferred over to the city, and vice versa. The image is of roots with outgrowths on them which are caused by a bacteria called Agrobacterium. This bacteria is well known for its ability to transfer DNA between itself and plants. An example of nature circumventing natural selection.⁷ A new symbiosis between urban games and the real-time city might lead to similar acceleration of their evolutions.

(I finished a little over time and had time for one question. Adriaan Wormgoor of FourceLabs asked whether I thought games would sooner or later become self-evolving themselves. My answer was “absolutely”. to get to ever higher levels of complexity we’ll be forced to start growing or rearing our games more than assembling them from parts. Games want to be free, you could say, so they are inevitably heading towards ever higher levels of evolvability.)

1. Iskander Smit has posted a report of the evening over at his blog.
2. If you’re interested, the slide deck as a whole is also available on SlideShare.
3. I first came across Lamarck, and the idea of nature and culture co-evolving in Kevin Kelly’s book Out of Control. The blacksmith example is his too.
4. All this flies in the face of large-scale top-down planning and zoning, as Jane Jacobs makes painfully clear in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
5. Eric Zimmerman talked at length about the need for systemic literacy at Playful 2008.
6. For more on this have a look at another blog post by Adam Greenfield titled Reading, writing, texts, literacy, cities.
7. As Kevin Kelly writes in Out of Control, evolution with symbiosis included is less like a tree and more like a thicket.

A while ago I was interviewed by Sam Warnaars. He’s researching people’s conference experiences; he asked me what my most favourite and least favourite conference of the past year was. I wish he’d asked me after my trip to Playful ’08, because it has been by far the best conference experience to date. Why? Because it was like Toby, Richard and the rest of the event’s producers had taken a peek inside my brain and came up with a program encompassing (almost) all my fascinations — games, interaction design, play, sociality, the web, products, physical interfaces, etc. Almost every speaker brought something interesting to the table. The audience was composed of people from many different backgrounds, and all seemed to, well, like each other. The venue was lovely and atmospheric (albeit a bit chilly). They had good tea. Drinks afterwards were tasty and fun, the tapas later on even more so. And the whiskey after that, well let’s just say I was glad to have a late flight the next day. Many thanks to my friends at Pixel-Lab for inviting me, and to Mr. Davies for the referral.

Below is a transcript plus slides of my contribution to the day. The slides are also on SlideShare. I have been told all talks have been recorded and will be published to the event’s Vimeo group.

Perhaps 1874 words is a bit too much for you? In that case, let me give you an executive summary of sorts:

1. The role of design in rich forms of play, such as skateboarding, is facilitatory. Designers provide tools for people to play with.
2. It is hard to predict what people will do exactly with your tools. This is OK. In fact it is best to leave room for unexpected uses.
3. Underspecified, playful tools can be used for learning. People can use them to explore complex concepts on their own terms.

As always, I am interested in receiving constructive criticism, as well as good examples of the things I’ve discussed.

Hello everyone. My name is Kars Alfrink. I am from the Netherlands, from the lovely town of Utrecht, to be exact. Utrecht is so keen on becoming the nation’s capital for game design, that they let Microsoft light up the Dom tower green for the Xbox 360 launch… Anyway, I work freelance, as an interaction designer. I guess the reason I was invited to come here is because I occupy myself mainly with designing for playful experiences. What that means exactly, I am still trying to figure out myself!

Interaction design is a discipline that occupies itself with shaping the dialogue between people and the stuff they use. Sometimes that stuff is a way to communicate with other people. Sometimes not.

When I was studying interaction design, I could not stay away from games. This irritated most of my teachers greatly. I’d always enjoyed playing them of course. But then I also got fascinated by their design, in particular of their interactivity. I found their interactions so much richer than most other things.

However, I was not that interested in games as entertainment, or at least, I wasn’t interested in designing them for this end. And I’m still not very interested in that area. Which is why I say I design for playful experiences. I want to design things that use play to facilitate things such as learning, collaboration and creativity.

So in my work I straddle the line between interaction design and game design. You could draw both fields like this, both being equals.

Although often I draw the picture like this: game design being a specialized sub discipline of interaction design. And I would be on game design’s edge, approaching it from an interaction design perspective.

What I like about play is how it forces me, as a designer, to take a certain stance. In many ways I think designing playful things is very humbling. Designers tend to be control freaks, and interaction designers, myself included, are no exception. This urge to control the experience of use has often annoyed me. I guess this is why I’ve drifted towards the design for play.

Designing for play is like a holding a bird: squeeze too hard, and it dies. Of course, if you hold it too loosely, it will fly away…

So it’s this stance that I’d like to talk about today. Using a few examples, I hope I can paint at least a partial picture of what I think it is about.

Let’s start with skateboarding. Who has seen the documentary film Dogtown and Z-Boys?

I think it’s brilliant. It tells the story of the 1970s Zephyr skateboarding team, who were a big influence on the ultimate shape the “sport” would get. One of my favourite sections of the film is ‘The Birth of Vertical’ — where we see how a chain of seemingly coincidental events lead to a dramatic change in the dominant style of skateboarding. In short, a draught causes lots of private pools to be empty. The Z-Boys decide to try and skate in those pools. Because of the particular shape of the pools — bowl shaped and irregular — they try reaching the edges, and eventually they start jumping out of the pools and back in. “Vertical” is born.

This all sounds very logical to us now, since when we think of skateboarding, we immediately think of verts and half pipes, and aerial acrobatics. But back then, to these kids’ knowledge, what they were doing had never been attempted before.

So I think this is a prime example of what we in game design call the exploration of a possibility space. The Z-Boys were trying to figure out what the limits were of the combination of their equipment, their bodies, and their environment. Why were they doing this? For the sheer enjoyment of it. They weren’t doing it because it had some outside purpose. In fact, in my opinion, they were doing it exactly for the sake of its uselessness. Play is an end in itself. Later on in the film you see how, for some of the Z-Boys, skateboarding looses its charm when competition and money get involved.

(For those of you who are familiar with Roger Caillois’ classification of games — I think skateboarding started out firmly in ilinx territory, which is all about physical thrills, and only later moved towards agôn, which is about competition.)¹

Another aspect of this story that I find so fascinating is how the vertical style of skateboarding apparently emerged, without any top-down orchestration. Skateboarding was not “designed”, in the usual sense of the term.

But certain parts of the ecosystem in which “vertical” was “born” were designed, or at least man-made. At that time, skateboards were already commercial products sold in stores — toys, you could say — although they weren’t meant to be used as the Z-Boys did. The pools were designed as well, obviously, although again, not for vertical-style skateboarding. But some of the choices made by the pool makers were, I feel, of much influence on the emergence of vertical skateboarding: round edges, irregular shapes.

What would we call these things? Are they media? I do not think so. The best term I can come up with is “tools”. They were tools used by the Z-Boys to play.

So design was not completely absent in the emergence of vertical skateboarding, but it wasn’t as instrumental as we would like to think it is. However, no-one can deny that skateboarding has become a noteworthy form of play — an industry in its own right. I have not been part of skateboarding as a designer in any way, but it is clear to me that, if I had been, an over-controlling stance would have been inappropriate. Counter-productive even.

I think it is interesting to try and design tools, that can be used for known and unknown forms of play.

Earlier this year, in January’s Edge I read an interview with Yoshinori Ono, who is the producer of Street Fighter IV. Somewhere in it, he describes his game as a “tool for having fun”. I thought that was brilliant.

Ianus Keller, a friend of mine, has designed a tool for designers called Cabinet, which allows you to collect inspirational material and organize it. It acknowledges the serendipitous nature of design. Much of design is actually very playful (if done properly). But I digress.

Ianus says about tools:

“Good tools extend your capabilities. Great tools go beyond that and allow you to create things that neither you nor anyone else has ever thought of.”

I’d say that’s a pretty accurate description of what the skateboards and pools were to the Z-Boys.

So that’s part of my preferred designer’s stance: don’t see yourself as a maker of media, but as a creator of tools. The use of which you can never fully predict. There’s two ways to handle this uncertainty: one — try to eliminate any chance of people messing with it, or two — embrace this uncertainty, and leave open opportunities for new play forms.

Let’s examine this issue using playgrounds as an example.

I would love to design a playground, a proper real-life one, some time. Unfortunately I have no architectural training whatsoever. I do enjoy reading about architecture though, one of my favourite books being A Pattern Language. (Strangely enough, it seems architects aren’t too fond of its author, Christopher Alexander.) The book aims to help regular people design a house, or improve their neighbourhood. The book is structured in so-called patterns — building blocks, you could call them.

One of those building blocks is called ‘Adventure Playground’. When I first skimmed through the book it naturally drew my attention. I wondered what Alexander had to say about designing for play.

The problem statement of Adventure Playground reads:

“A castle, made of carton, rocks and old branches, by a group of children for themselves, is worth a thousand perfectly detailed, exactly finished castles, made for them in a factory.”

And the proposed solution:

“Set up a playground for the children in each neighborhood. Not a highly finished playground, with asfalt and swings, but a place with raw materials of all kinds—nets, boxes, barrels, trees, ropes, simple tools, frames, grass, and water—where children can create and re-create playgrounds of their own.”

A good playground, in other words, does not presume the kinds of play that will happen there. A good playground is a tool that offers enough freedom to children for them to invent new play forms. (This, incidentally, is a very bad playground.)

Habbo Hotel is a good playground. At this year’s GDC I attended a talk by Sulka Haro. In it, he showed many examples of emergent play. Here’s one of them: can you guess what these kids are enacting?

It’s a manège! What I find so wonderful about this is that there’s no explicit support for playing a horse, or building a stable, and yet, the players come up with this idea and find a way to play at it. They negotiate the meaning of the the bits and pieces available to them: to be a horse, you need to adjust your avatar so that it has a brown skin colour, pig tails, and brown clothes.

(This, by the way, is what Paul Dourish, an HCI theorist who wrote a book titled Where the Action Is, means when he says that in social computing, meaning is coupled by users, not designers.)

Sulake consciously chose to keep the number of objects and actions in Habbo Hotel limited, or at least generic, so that players were encouraged to create their own forms of play. It’s what in interaction design is known as underspecification.

So when designing tools for play, underspecify!

We’re running out of time so I’ll wrap up by giving you one example of how playful tools can be applied outside of the realm of entertainment.

StarLogo is a computational tool designed by Mitch Resnick — we can also thank him (at least partly) for Lego Mindstorms. Resnick wanted to improve people’s understanding of complex adaptive systems. StarLogo is a simple programming environment in which you program agents who, through their interactions, give rise to larger scale patterns. The tool was used in education. He describes many examples of children building simulations of aspects of reality, and discovering new things about them.

In his book Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams, he writes:

“Probably the best way to develop better intuitions about decentralized systems is to construct and “play with” such systems.”

He even uses the P word!

At the end of the book, Resnick writes:

“What’s needed are microworld construction kits, so that you can create your own microworlds, focusing on the domain you find most interesting.”

That was in 1994. I think his challenge is still worthy of acceptance, and I think Resnick’s attitude towards play is a wonderful example of the stance I mentioned in the beginning of this talk: he’s created a tool, one that affords people a large enough degree of freedom, so that they can explore concepts and arrive at new insights, without the designer needing to prescribe them.

And all of this through lovely, delicious play.

1. The article can be found in the excellent The Game Design Reader edited by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman.

Update: It occurred to me that it might be a good idea to briefly summarize what this is about. This is a presentation in two parts. In the first, I theorize about the emergence of games that have as their goal the conveying of an argument. These games would use the real-time city as their platform. It is these games that I call urban procedural rhetorics. In the second part I give a few examples of what such games might look like, using a series of sketches.

The slides, posted to SlideShare, as usual:

The video, hosted on the Reboot website:

1. I did post a transcript in English before, in case you prefer reading to listening.

In brief, in the presentation I argue two things: one — that the more sophisticated applications of interactive data visualization resemble games and toys in many ways, and two — that game design can contribute to the solutions to several design issues I have detected in the field of data visualization.

Below are the notes for the talk, slightly edited, and with references included. The full deck of slides, which includes credits for all the images used, is up on SlideShare.

Hello everyone, my name is Kars Alfrink. I am a Dutch interaction designer and I work freelance. At the moment I work in Copenhagen, but pretty soon I will be back here in Utrecht, my lovely hometown.

In my work I focus on three areas: mobility, social interactions, and play. Here is an example of my work: These are storyboards that explore possible applications of multitouch technology in a gated community. Using these technologies I tried to compensate for the negative effects a gated community has on the build-up of social capital. I also tried to balance ‘being-in-the-screen’ with ‘being-in-the-world’ — multitouch technologies tend to be very attention-absorbing, but in built environments this is often not desirable.¹

I am not going to talk about multitouch though. Today’s topic is data visualization and what opportunities there are for game designers in that field. My talk is roughly divided in three parts. First, I will briefly describe what I think data visualization is. Next, I will look at some applications beyond the very obvious. Third and last, I will discuss some design issues involved with data visualization. For each of these issues, I will show how game design can contribute.

Right, let’s get started.

1. What It Is

Data visualization is admittedly a broad term, that can be used for many things. There are also closely related terms, such as information visualization, and information design. Data visualization seems to be the most common term though, often shortened to dataviz. One important qualification is that I am focused on visualizations that involve at least some level of interactivity.

Making Visible the Invisible

In his book The Ghost Map, Steven Berlin Johnson writes about a cholera outbreak in Victorian London. One of the book’s central protagonists, Dr. John Snow, creates a map of the cholera cases to help show that the source of the outbreak is a water pump. Here’s part of that map. I’ve marked the location of the pump with a red circle. For each case, Snow drew a black dash at the location of its residence. You can see clearly that the cases diminish the further you move away from the pump. You have to remember that in those days, people still believed that diseases such as cholera and the Black Death were spread through the air — the so-called miasma theory. The germ theory had not yet been definitively established.

This is an excellent example of showing things that cannot be seen. This is one of the defining qualities of data visualization for me.

Many Shapes and Sizes

Showing the invisible can be done in many ways, and information design goes back a long way — in the caves of Lascaux there is a map of the heavens dating back to 16,500 BC. Over the years, many ways to visualize data have been developed. You’ve got maps, charts, and graphs of all shapes and sizes. The point is, each data-set requires a specific display. Also, although there have been many established patterns, it is of course completely legitimate to experiment with new visualizations.

A Medium, Not a Technique

This is something the people at San Francisco-based design and technology studio Stamen often say. Data visualization is not just a technique — a way of doing things. It is also a medium — a way of conveying messages. From their site comes this quote:²

“It’s not quite honesty–you can lie with charts and graphs as easily as with words or pictures. It’s not quite accidental discovery–this is pretty technical stuff, and deliberate choices are made at every step along the way.”

For instance, Stamen have created something called Oakland Crimespotting. On this site you can explore a map of crimes committed in Oakland. When outsiders see this, they tend to react with shock, saying they would never want to live in Oakland. This was never the intention of the Stamen people though, and if you look closely at the patterns in the data, you discover that conventional wisdom about such things as which neighborhood is the most dangerous is often wrong.

This is an example of an argument made using data visualization. In the gaming world, I think this is mirrored by concept of procedural rhetoric as described by Ian Bogost: Using game models to convince people of your point of view. Both show that technology is not neutral, that neither games nor data visualization are just techniques, but media.

2. Non-Obvious Applications

Hopefully that has clarified what I mean when I say “data visualization”. To make things more concrete I’d like to look at two broad areas of application, beyond the well-known information graphics as we encounter them in print media. The first is the idea of making complex things more understandable. The second is this idea of improving people’s lives through data visualizations.

Understanding Complexity

I think we can all agree the world is becoming more complex. But in this case I am talking about a specific kind of complexity known as organized complexity. This is when in a system — be it biological, technological, economic or something else — a relatively small number of parts interact in a nontrivial way. Such systems display behavior that is not carried by the parts, so the organized character of the system emerges, without top-down control.

Many of the systems we find ourselves surrounded with these days are like this. The problem is that old-style models from things like statistics aren’t useful when dealing with them. What we can do is show the data that results from such systems. We can then literally see the emergent patterns. Going one step further, by making these visualizations interactive, we can allow people to play with complexity — exploring the space of possibilities (a term that should be familiar to game designers).

For example, this is a piece by Ben Fry, one of the initiators of the open source project Processing. It is a visualization of traffic in Los Angeles. It is meant to be manipulated with a gestural interface known as G-Speak (which was developed from initial concepts for the film Minority Report). The many degrees of freedom people have with a visualization like this allows them to get a deep understanding of the complex system that is urban traffic.

Clearly, game-like interactions are very appropriate for these kinds of visualizations.

Happiness Hacking

A hack is a clever solution to a problem, often in the form of a shortcut. I first came across the idea of happiness hacking on Jane McGonigal’s blog. She’s working towards the “goal of using new scientific research on well-being to develop technological systems that actually improve quality of life”.³ There’s a lot more to her crusade, I encourage you to check out her ETech presentation on the topic.

This idea of happiness hacking is extendible to other areas too. For instance, there is a whole subculture of lifehackers who are mostly focused on boosting their productivity using clever tricks. When I was writing this presentation, I used a hack called ten-plus-two-times-five, which was invented by life hacking guru Merlin Mann. The idea is that you set a timer for ten minutes, during which you only focus on work. Then, as a reward, you get two minutes to play, and then it’s back to work again. Repeat this five times for an hour of being productive for 50 minutes. Not bad. It works for me!

What this has to do with data visualization is perhaps best exemplified by the Apgar score. This is a way of measuring the condition of a baby after birth. When this scoring was introduced after its invention in 1952, the mortality of newborns dramatically decreased. This was because there were now numbers that could be collected and compared. Doctors could now measure what effect different procedures had on the health of babies. Measuring things changes them.

So now imagine you could quantify things that relate to quality of life — to happiness — and visualize those.

This can be done on the individual level. RescueTime is a web application that keeps track of what you do on your computer. You can tell it what types of activities you find productive or not, and it’ll visualize how you’re doing over time. This is what Matt Jones calls personal informatics, and there are more and more examples popping up. An older one being BodyMedia’s SenseWear Weight Management System. Each of these is an example of happiness hacking using data visualization. Like in games, it allows people to manage their resources.

By combining individual data-sets, we will be able to get a sense of collective patterns. We are all participants in complex systems ourselves, after all, and we aren’t particularly good at perceiving the high-order consequences of our actions. Matt Jones has this to say about it:⁴

“The overlays of these patterns with those of others are a new kind of feedback we haven’t had at any scale before. And we do flock well. So perhaps that’s how we will learn and change our behaviours… in a “supercontext” if you will…”

Supercontext is a term taken from the comic book series The Invisibles. There, it is a state-of-being humanity is evolving towards, where all is ambiguous and non-binary.

There aren’t many true collectively intelligent data visualizations out there yet.⁵ I am confident we will see them arise though. When they do, they will require game design. Compared to interaction designers, game designers are much more comfortable with complexity and indirect control, which is exactly what these systems will require. Wouldn’t you like to be involved with bringing joy to the world?

3. Design Issues

In this last section, I’d like to look at some design issues with data visualization. There is an ongoing debate about the role of aesthetics — is it important displays look pretty, or not? Also, interactive data visualizations tend to employ unorthodox interaction styles. Should utility trump explorability? Finally, is it enough to describe past data or should we also predict the future? I’ll show that for each of these questions, game design can contribute to the answer.

The Role of Aesthetics

In the fall of last year, Stamen launched Twitter Blocks. For those of you who are not on Twitter: It is a so-called microblogging service, where you leave short messages about what you are doing for your friends and followers. You can do this using web, IM, SMS or other channels. This is what my Twitter stream looks like:

Blocks was created by Stamen for Twitter. It is a 3D visualization of your friends’ status messages. From each friend’s message another stream is drawn. So you get to see your friends’ friends too. I guess it sounds complicated if you don’t use the service. The point is that this way you get to have a sense of what’s happening on Twitter beyond your own stream. Anyway, here’s what it looks like:

When this launched, it was met with quite a bit of criticism. A lot of it basically boiled down to: “This looks pretty, but it’s useless.” The prevalent idea amongst people still seems to be that aesthetics is subordinate to utility. I thought we had gotten over this, designers in fields such as product design and architecture have satisfactorily proven that if something is pretty, it is perceived to work better.

Andrew Vande Moere writes in a paper about this very topic (PDF):

“[…] information visualization should be enriched with the principles of creative design and art, to develop valuable data representations that address the emotional experience and engagement of users, instead of solely focusing on task effectiveness metrics […]”

The point being, aesthetics are ‘useful’ in their own right. They can make the same functional experience be perceived as wholly different. I believe you as game designers understand this very deeply. The role of fiction, dressing etc. in games is prominent. No-one would argue that a game with the same mechanics but drastically different aesthetics is the same game. It is not. Properly executed aesthetics are vital to the experience.

Utility Versus Frivolity

Let’s examine the criticisms received by Twitter Blocks a bit more. A lot of people complained about its uselessness. One of the designers of Blocks is Tom Carden. He writes in a response to the criticism on his blog:

“[…] why not also accept that some things might just be for entertainment and ask “am I having fun” once in a while instead of looking for a problem to be solved or an important statement to be read? Some things just are.”

The irony is that Twitter itself isn’t exactly a hardcore utilitarian experience. To a large extent it can be seen as a toy, and a lot of what people do with it is very frivolous.

In game design there have been big advances in the understanding of why people play. There is for instance a model called PENS — the player experience of need satisfaction — which shows that one flavor of fun results from a feeling of autonomy — the feeling of freedom to explore something on your own terms. I think Twitter Blocks’ fun is like this.

An Expressive Language

Blocks’ interface is unorthodox, it is exploratory. Other examples I’ve shown before have this same quality — interactions that might need some getting used to, but once you do are quite powerful. I tend to think of this as learning an expressive language, and games are particularly good at it.

Take Portal, for instance, where you are gradually taught the many uses of one single mechanic. The wonderful thing about Portal is that it expands your thinking in an almost subliminal way. Some people have gone as far as calling it a subversive game.

“[…] games are [not] a way to convey and directly put content in players’ brain but rather that the cognitive processes mobilized when playing games can create relevant routines that may possibly be transfered to other activities […]”

This is Nicolas Nova writing about a presentation by Ben Cerveny at Picnic 07. Ben is an advisor to Stamen. He talks a lot about the transformative potential of games.

My point here is that exploratory interactions not only contribute to a fun experience but also facilitate a kind of deep understanding. People gradually master an expressive language that allows them to think about complex things in a new way.

From Description to Prediction

Let’s move on to a slightly different topic. A while ago my friend Alexandra, who’s a designer and also CEO of physical computing studio Tinker.it, blogged about her disappointment with the current wave of data visualizations. She’s annoyed that most displays don’t go further than showing you the data.

For instance, this is my carbon output from flights over the past year or so. It is calculated by Dopplr — a social tool for optimizing travel. (I apologize for the horrendous output and promise to improve over the coming year.) The issue here is that from this display I can only say: “Wow, that’s a lot.” There are two ways to improve this: One — extrapolate the data into the future, giving me a sense of what my actions might result in on the long term. And two — offer me ways to mitigate the effects of my actions. Let’s start by focussing on the first.

Alexandra writes:⁶

“I would like to see us move towards a world full of little everyday objects that give me a glimpse into the future if I keep doing things the way I do, total yearly bills based on my current usage, predictions about how much I’ll have to spend on food and how much weight I’ll gain if I keep at the current pace.”

In stead of only describing the status quo, Alexandra would like data visualizations to also predict the future. I like this idea, because it is a non-prescriptive way of motivating people to change their behavior.

What would we need to do this? We would need to start using models in addition to data. Models of the phenomena we are showing data of, so that we can generate possible future outcomes. Therein though lies a danger — what if the predictions turn out to be wrong?

The Ludic Fallacy

In his book The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes what he calls the ludic fallacy — “the misuse of games to model real-life situations”. In other words it is mistaking the map for the territory. The problems with predicting the future using models are many: It is impossible to know everything (to have all the data), it is very hard to account for amplified effects of small changes (a.k.a. the butterfly effect), and any model we employ can only be based on prior experience.

As Yogi Berra reportedly said:

“It is tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

It is important to take the ludic fallacy into account when designing predictive data visualizations. It should be made clear to people that they are looking at a simplification of reality. For instance, perhaps it is wise to show ranges in stead of end points. In this way you communicate a certain level of uncertainty.

A Hybrid Approach

There is promise in this hybrid approach though. Data visualization traditionally draws displays of data about things that have happened. From the visualization one can start seeing patterns. Games have traditionally employed models to generate fictional realities. Any pattern that might arise is encoded in the model. By combining these two, we arrive at data visualizations that describe what has happened, and predict what could happen.

Finally, because we have a model, we can now also make the possible effects of mitigating actions perceivable. Imagine having a display of my past and future carbon, where I can play with different ways of offsetting it — flying less, planting trees, etc. The visualization would show me in real-time how much each method would affect my output, and perhaps relate it to financials too, so that I can figure out what the most cost-effective way of offsetting is.

I think this is an obvious type of ‘new’ data visualization that can benefit from game designers’ involvement.

I hope I have shown today that data visualization is a field that offers interesting opportunities. It can clearly benefit from the experience of game designers. If you do decide to get involved with data visualizations, I am looking forward to seeing your creations!

Thank you.

1. For more background on this project please see this older blog post. More examples of my recent work can be found in my portfolio.
2. Taken from the page Data Visualization.
3. Quote taken from the blog post Work, Work, Work – How I Spent My 2007, or, a Year in Review
4. This quote is taken from a long but excellent interview with Matt Jones on Ryan Freitas’s blog which discusses personal informatics amongst many other things.
5. One example I stumbled across just before delivering this talk is Citysense.
6. This quote is taken from her blog post Prescriptive or predictive information visualisation?.

The conference From Business to Buttons 2008 aimed to bring together the worlds of business and interaction design. I was there to share my thoughts on the applicability of game design concepts to interaction design. You’ll find my slides and a summary of my argument below.

I really enjoyed attending this conference. I met a bunch of new and interesting people and got to hang out with some ‘old’ friends. Many thanks to InUse for inviting me.

The topic is pretty broad so I decided to narrow things down to a class of product that is other-than-everyday — meaning both wide and deep in scope. Using Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things as a starting point, I wanted to show that these products require a high level of explorability that is remarkably similar to play. After briefly examining the phenomenon of play itself I moved on to show applications of this understanding to two types of product: customizable & personalizable ones, and adaptive ones.

For the former, I discussed how game design frameworks such as MDA can help with sculpting the parameter space, using ‘experience’ as the starting point. I also looked at how games support players in sharing stories and speculated about ways this can be translated to both digital and physical products.

For the latter — adaptive products — I focussed on the ways in which they induce flow and how they can recommend stuff to people. With adaptation, designers need to formulate rules. This can be done using techniques from game design, such as Daniel Cook’s skill chains. Successful rules-based design can only happen in an iterative environment using lots of sketching.

The presentation was framed by a slightly philosophical look at how certain games subliminally activate cognitive processes and could thus be used to allow for new insights. I used Breakout and Portal as examples of this. I am convinced there is an emerging field of playful products that interaction designers should get involved with.

Sources referenced in this presentation:¹

• Pilgrim in the Microworld (PDF) by David Sudnow
• The Core of Fun by Raph Koster
• The Art of Interactive Design by Chris Crawford
• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
• Designing for Interaction by Dan Saffer
• Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga
• Man, Play and Games by Roger Caillois
• A Theory of Play and Fantasy by Gregory Bateson
• The Ambiguity of Play by Brian Sutton-Smith
• Rules of Play by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman
• Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
• The Life of Products by Schulze & Webb
• MDA (PDF) by Robin Hunicke and Robert Zubek
• The Conversation Gets Interesting by Stephen P. Anderson
• The Chemistry of Game Design by Daniel Cook
• Waterfall Bad, Washing Machine Good by Leisa Reichelt
• Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton
• How Can A Game Be Subversive? by Borut Pfeifer

As usual, many thanks to all the Flickr photographers who’ve shared their images under a CC license. I’ve linked to the originals from the slides. Any image not linked to is probably mine.

1. Most of these are offline books or papers, those that aren’t have been hyperlinked to their source.

Update: I have uploaded a video of the presentation to Vimeo. Many thanks to Almar van der Krogt for recording this.

In 1966 a number of members of Provo took to the streets of Amsterdam carrying blank banners. Provo was a nonviolent anarchist movement. They primarily occupied themselves with provoking the authorities in a “ludic” manner. Nothing was written on their banners because the mayor of Amsterdam had banned the slogans “freedom of speech”, “democracy” and “right to demonstrate”. Regardless, the members were arrested by police, showing that the authorities did not respect their right to demonstrate.¹

Good afternoon everyone, my name is Kars Alfrink, I’m a freelance interaction designer. Today I’d like to talk about play in public space. I believe that with the arrival of ubiquitous computing in the city new forms of play will be made possible. The technologies we shape will be used for play wether we want to or not. As William Gibson writes in Burning Chrome:

“…the street finds its own uses for things”

For example: Skateboarding as we now know it — with its emphasis on aerial acrobatics — started in empty pools like this one. That was done without permission, of course…

Only later half-pipes, ramps, verts (which by the way is derived from ‘vertical’) and skateparks arrived — areas where skateboarding is tolerated. Skateboarding would not be what it is today without those first few empty pools.²

Flash mobs are spontaneous mass gathering often coordinated through mobile phones. People congregate to play zombie or have a pillow-fight. The fun of flash mobs lies primarily in the reactions of unwitting bystanders, the friction that arises from this confrontation. Without mobile phones there would be no flash mobs.³

I see play as something more than ‘just’ entertainment, something that is not only for kids. Play to me is a phenomenon that permeates culture and is omnipresent. Brian Sutton-Smith — who catalogued the various theories on play in his book The Ambiguity of Play — once said:

“The opposite of play is not work. It’s depression.”

In other words, without play the desire to live rapidly disappears. Play lies at the foundation of creativity, personal development, innovation, and so on. It is a generative process. A useful definition of play is the one put forward by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman in Rules of Play:

“Play is free movement within a more rigid structure.”

On the one hand, play exists thanks to the limitations imposed by the structure within which it takes place, on the other hand it works against the same structure, trying to change it. Play is the exploration of a ‘possibility space’, the search for boundaries and testing of possibilities. The friction that arises from all this is a source of pleasure.

Free running is about getting from point A to point B in the city, in straight a line, and overcoming all the obstacles you meet in as interesting a manner as possible. Free runners strive to achieve harmony between themselves and the built environment.

In the case of free running the structure in which play takes place is solely determined by the city and the bodies of the players themselves. But objects carried or encountered by people have a role in urban play too. Take for instance the mobile phones of the flash mobs mentioned earlier.

LED throwies is an invention of Graffiti Research Lab. They consist of a LED, a coin battery and a small magnet. You throw them at a metal surface to have them stick there. They are a form of nondestructive graffiti. The recipe for a LED throwies is ‘open source’ — anyone can make them.

Sharing a recipe for play is a powerful concept. Street artist Poster Child published instructions for the creation of blocks from the game Super Mario Bros. to his website. There he also collects photos sent to him by people who created their own blocks and put them in the streets. The project is a commentary on the ever increasing amount of advertising in public space.

Play changes once computation gets involved. Compare board games to digital games — software offers game designers the possibility to include significantly more calculations in their games.

This is what famous game designer Chris Crawford calls ‘process intensity’. According to him a game is better when the ‘crunch per bit ratio’ is higher. He sees ‘data intensity’ — simply transporting data back and forth — as inferior to process intensity — performing calculations on the same data:⁴

“Processing data is the very essence of what a computer does. […] Using the computer in a data-intensive mode wastes its greatest strength.”

Games (be they analog or digital) can always be typified as systems, as dynamic models. Players explore those models. Discovering the model that is the basis for a game is a source of pleasure. Some games have a very simple model: Tic-Tac-Toe is a model of territorial conflict, albeit a simple one. This is why you get bored of this game so quickly: the possibility space is very small. Sim City consists of a complex network of models from architecture and urban planning.

Games can convey arguments, just like other media. The important distinction between the way a television show or film can present an argument and the way a game does the same lies in the aforementioned process intensity. Games, particularly digital ones, can offer a dynamic model of an argument that is explored by the player. This is what Ian Bogost calls ‘procedural rhetoric’:⁵

“Procedural rhetoric […] arguments are made not through the construction of words or images, but through the authorship of rules of behavior, the construction of dynamic models.”

September 12 is a newsgame that comments on the events around 9/11. As player you fire rockets at terrorists moving in the streets of a Middle Eastern village. The innocent casualties that result from each shot lead to more civilians joining the terrorist ranks. This is a simple example of a procedural rhetoric.

I expect that play in public space will become more process intensive with the arrival of computation embedded in the built environment. I think future urban play will compare to its current shape as Halo 3 compares to Monopoly. The procedural rhetoric of games will take place in the built environment too. People will present arguments in the form of dynamic models that use the city as their platform.

At this point, you might be wondering how. I have a few ideas, but first, one more anecdote:

A year after Provo’s blank banner stunt, in the United Kingdom, Christopher Southall wondered how the authorities would react to an invasion of flying saucers. So, together with a few friends, he built seven UFOs. Each saucer made a unique beeping sound that was turned on or off using a mercury switch. They dropped the UFOs at equal distances on a straight line cutting through the southwest of England. Alien life could not be left out so they filled the saucers with a boiled mixture of flour and water.

The reactions of the authorities were — besides very amusing to read about years later — uncoordinated and in some cases even irresponsible. Some UFOs were moved, or worse — blown up, without knowing for sure what they were exactly.⁶

The British UFO hoaxers and Provo have a lot in common — both used play in public space to provoke a reaction. Provo made the absurdity of their situation apparent. Southall and his gang used play to ask “What if?” and made a possible future tangible.

Because I do not want to limit this presentation to talk alone there now follows a small design exercise. These are sketches for possible urban procedural rhetorics. I’m not sure if these are all good ideas, but that’s something we can talk about afterwards. With pleasure actually. I do hope these sketches illustrate the principles I have talked about so far.

Let’s suppose I’m worried about the ever increasing amount of surveillance cameras present in the city. I am not convinced they provide more safety, I have read crime simply moves to other areas. In that case, is all this control really necessary? And is all the data that is gathered in good hands with the authorities? I am annoyed by the fact that most people do not share this concern. How can I make people more aware of these cameras and make them question their usefulness too?

Turns out I’m not the only one with this concern. On the website Spot the Cam you can see where in the centre of Amsterdam cameras have been placed. I now know for instance that people who parked their car in the Bijenkorf this morning have probably been filmed.⁷ Check it out.

That’s a start I guess, but there must be more that can be done. Using a GPS-enabled camera-phone I can take photos of all the cameras I run into…

…I can upload them…

…and in this manner (with a little help of others) I can make a map of all the cameras in the Netherlands.

On the same phone I can run something similar to Nokia Sports Tracker, to record all my movements…

…this way, when I get home I can see where I was filmed.

Heaps of data are fun and all, but useless if I cannot act on them. It should be a small step to alert me to the presence of cameras while walking down the street…

…similar to how TomTom alerts you to the presence of speed cameras while driving. I can then choose to take a different route…

…or to don my disguise.

So far so good, but it’s not very playful yet. All the data I collect can be made more understandable using visualizations. A map view of this data would be nice too.

I could share the data with friends. A score can be linked to the amount of times I was filmed and so we turn it into a contest: Who can stay out of sight of the cameras and whose life is most like that of Truman Burbank?

But if I wanted to make it into a real game, I’d need to introduce some kind of conflict. A bit of fiction often helps in those cases.

Alternate reality games use the ‘real’ world as a platform for their fictional reality. In Zona Incerta (a Brazilian ARG) for example, Arkhos Biotech (the game’s baddie) ask people to help them buy the Amazon rainforest through a YouTube video-clip. There was quite a bit of confusion amongst Brazilian politicians about the reality of the clip. Zona Incerta aimed only to entertain, but it could have been used just as well to raise awareness about the Amazon.

In my game cameras could be the tools of a totalitarian regime, and it would be up to the players to overthrow it. I would send them on all kinds of missions, where they would need to stay out of the sight of the cameras. (The camera alert service mentioned earlier would not be admitted to the game.)

Players of this game would experience first hand what it would be like to live in a 1984-like world. But they — and I — would also discover how easy it really is to stay out of sight of cameras.

The data we collectively generate as players could be shared anonymously in the shape of a nice visualization. It would provide insight into the usefulness (or uselessness) of camera surveillance. This way, non-players can be spectators and learn something too.

If I want to make the unsuspecting public in the streets more aware of cameras I can take a different approach, using Graffiti Research Lab’s LED throwies as an example. Components for physical computing are becoming increasingly cheap and accessible. Also, marketers have already made clever use of Bluetooth in ‘proximity marketing’.

I could design a throwie that can be attached to cameras…

…the throwie would detect mobile phones of passersby en send them a message.

The messages could contain text, images, sounds, it would be up to the makers of the throwies themselves. But hopefully they’ll keep it creative. This way, each camera would get a voice and a little bit of personality.

The instructions for the throwie (including a shopping list of parts) would be published online.

And finally, if the cameras transition into Bruce Sterling’s Spimes (objects that start and end life as data, that can be tracked in space and time), then we won’t have to bother with all that geocoding with camera-phones and messing about with throwies. We would be able to directly play games with the cameras. Provided we get some kind of access to the data that flows through them…⁸

I believe technology is not neutral. I also believe that the specific technologies that we’re discussing today have the potential for far-reaching control. Although I have great faith in the hackers and makers of this world, I do not think things need to be made harder for them than they already are. You can all (partly) influence the future shape of mobile technologies. I have one simple request: Please make sure there remains space to play.

Or, as Bill Buxton would say:⁹

“These things are far too important to take seriously.”

Thank you!

For image credits please refer to the slides over at SlideShare. I am very grateful to all the people sharing their images on Flickr under CC licenses. If and image is not credited it is created by myself. These include all the sketches that make up the majority of the second half of the presentation.

1. The website of Gramschap contains a chronology of the Provo movement in Dutch.
2. For a vivid account of the emergence of the vertical style of skateboarding see the documentary film Dogtown and Z-Boys.
3. Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs is a wonderful book that described new social interactions made possible by mobile communication technologies.
4. Crawford wrote one of the first books on game design, this quote is taken from a 1987 essay from his hand.
5. Bogost has written a book on the concept of procedural rhetoric called Persuasive Games. The quote is taken from an essay available online entitled The Rhetoric of Video Games.
6. For a full account of the big British UFO hoax of 1967 refer to the article by John Keeling in Fortean Times #228. John was kind enough to permit me to use images from the article during the presentation, but I can’t share them online.
7. The Bijenkorf is a Dutch department store chain.
8. For a full description of Spimes I can recommend Sterling’s book Shaping Things.
9. This quote is taken from Buxton’s excellent book Sketching User Experiences and originally refers to his approach to design.

This is a rough transcript of my lecture at GDC Mobile 2008. In short: I first briefly introduce the concept of experience design and systems and then show how this influences my views of mobile casual games. From there I discuss the relation of casual games with the trend Generation C. Wrapping up, I give an overview of some social design frameworks for the web that are equally applicable to mobile social gaming. As a bonus I give some thoughts on mobile game systems mobile metagames. The talk is illustrated throughout with a case study of Playyoo—a mobile games community I helped design.

• I’ve included a slightly adjusted version of the original slides—several screenshot sequences of Playyoo have been taken out for file size reasons.
• If you absolutely must have audio, I’m told you will be able to purchase (!) a recording from GDC Radio sometime soon.
• I’d like to thank everyone who came up to me afterwards for conversation. I appreciate the feedback I got from you.
• Several aspects of Playyoo that I use as examples (such as the game stream) were already in place before I was contracted. Credits for many design aspects of Playyoo go to David Mantripp, Playyoo’s chief architect.
• And finally, the views expressed here are in many ways an amalgamation of work by others. Where possible I’ve given credit in the talk and otherwise linked to related resources.

That’s all the notes and disclaimers out of the way, read on for the juice (but be warned, this is pretty long).

Introductions

Hi everyone, my name is Kars Alfrink. I live in Copenhagen, Denmark at the moment, but my hometown is Utrecht in the Netherlands—a place so desperate to become the hub for Dutch game development that they lit up the cathedral green for the Xbox 360 launch. I work as a freelance interaction designer, which might cause you to wonder what I’m doing here. My company is called Leapfrog, which might confuse you even more because it’s different from the US company LeapFrog. Which reminds me: I need a new company name. Anyone have any suggestions?

In my work I attempt to straddle the line between game design and interaction design. For example I’ve visualised how multi-touch interfaces can be integrated into a gated community. The interactions people have with these interfaces needed to be useful but also playful—so that’s where game design comes in.

Another project I’ve spent a lot of my time on lately is called Playyoo. In an article on TechCrunch it was described as “a YouTube for mobile games”. Or if you’re familiar with Kongregate, it’s similar to that as well—although there are some important differences. They hired me to consult on the games-related parts of the system. The work I did for them is the basis for today’s talk. Although I’ll use a lot of examples from Playyoo, I’ve tried to keep the content as universally applicable as possible. Also—just to prevent any misunderstandings—Playyoo is not my employer. This talk is very much about my own views and interests.

Today I’ll be talking about “designing a mobile social gaming experience for Generation C”. I know it’s not the most eloquent of titles on the programme, but I had to come up with something. Also, it sounds a bit like buzzword bingo doesn’t it? Mobile, social, experience, Generation C… “Oh dear”, you might be thinking, “who does this guy think he is?” I’ll talk about each of these ‘concepts’ in more depth. I’ll give you some of my views on them and show you how they were addressed in Playyoo. At the end of this talk you’ll have hopefully learned a bit more about them in a way that’s applicable to your own work. If you do end up using any of this, please let me know about your experiences. This is all very much work in progress for me, I love getting feedback.

But before I get started, let me give you a brief introduction to Playyoo. I despise sales pitches in talks so I was a bit reluctant to do this at first. However, it makes the rest of my story much easier to digest so please bear with me.

Playyoo consists of a web site, where you register an account and then configure something we call your game stream. The game stream functions as a recommendation engine of games. You access this stream on your mobile phone. So this is the second component of Playyoo: the mobile web site, which allows you to launch and play games. You can send high scores and other stuff from the mobile to the web site. All games on Playyoo are user-submitted. They can be developed from scratch or made with a web app we imaginatively call the game creator.

By the way, all games on Playyoo are Flash Lite games. This is because there is a large worldwide community of Flash game developers, and it would have been hard to pull off some of the parts of the system in something like Java—such as the game creator.

Experience

Playyoo can be seen as a system. It has several discrete parts that work together in order to provide the player with a coherent experience. I use the term “experience” in the talk’s title because that’s the way I tend to approach design. (Not just me by the way, there’s a whole emerging field of user experience that includes interaction design.) The essence of this approach is that you think outside-in, it’s human-centred if you will. It also means you don’t start with a laundry list of features that need to be accommodated just because the design team agrees they would be cool. In stead, you start with what motivates your target audience, what they want to do, but also very much how they want to feel while using your product, service or whatever.

The approach is very similar to the MDA model described by Marc LeBlanc. So with experience design, you start from the aesthetics and work “backwards” in order to arrive at the mechanics.

So systems. An example of a system that aims to deliver a good experience would be Apple’s iPod and iTunes. The smart thing Apple did was realise that there’s some stuff you would rather do behind your PC in stead of on your mobile device. So you use iTunes to organise your music library, and your iPod to listen to it. In addition they introduced the iTunes Store so it became really easy to buy music too. Together these form one system, one experience.

Playyoo has these different parts I mentioned earlier and they work together as system too. The web site for managing your games (and doing some other stuff), the mobile site for playing games and the game creator web app for creating games.

You can take this notion of experience design even further and think of your product as something with a personality, something that has agency. This is what I think people like Jesse James Garrett and Matt Webb mean when they use the phrase “products are people too”. When you do this, you start to realise there’s even more to think about apart from the period someone’s actually using your product. The experience expands to include the first time someone reads about it, or sees it in a shop on a shelf, or plays with it when visiting a friend. Any encounter a person has with your product or service can be thought of as an “experience hook“.

Mobile

This experience based approach influences the way I think about mobile. I don’t really think of it as a device, but as a context. Perhaps a noun—”mobility”—would make more sense. The major design challenge for me is not to make any arbitrary feature work on mobile devices. It’s about coming up with stuff that makes sense within the context of mobility. Sure, conforming to physical form factor plays a role in mobile design, but what people actually want to do while out and about is the real unexplored area.

So Playyoo aims to solve some important issues people have with mobile gaming. These are things like discovering games you actually like, and getting them on your phone. Pricing is another big issue—the perceived price of games for mobile is often too high.

Playyoo is also firmly targeted at a mainstream audience. It aims to introduce or reintroduce a group of people to gaming who have felt left out until recently. I’m not going to define the term casual game, but I will take a cue from Ian Bogost and point out they allow themselves to be played in short sessions, have simple, easy to master controls and (surprise) cost very little.

A note about the short play sessions though—although a single session might be short, you can see a lot of repeated play with casual games. This is the “easy to learn hard to master” class of games. The ultimate example of this dynamic would be Go (if you exclude Go’s long play sessions from the equation.) Conversely, some casual games are really meant to be played once only. A good example would be the Zidane Head Butt game. This class of games are very much about creative personal expression, about commenting on current events for instance (like newsgames).

Generation C

Where are all these ultra-short, casual mobile games going to come from? That’s where Generation C comes into play. I don’t usually base my decisions on what trend watchers say is going to be the next big thing, but a while back I ran into a description of Generation C at Trendwatching.com (most probably through Schulze & Webb’s blog). Generation C is a growing group of people that can be defined by their behaviour in stead of age—they are extremely comfortable with being creative.

These people enjoy using products and services that make them feel like they’re kicking ass. They want to be approached more as producers than consumers. They want to be able to share whatever they make with their friends and expect the stuff they use to be smart about this. Generation C need their services to be connected in a way that makes putting in and taking out creations easy.

Examples of services that are geared towards this generation include Etsy, which is this online community that connects so-called crafters to people looking to buy hand-made stuff.

Generation C would feel very comfortable with something like Sketch Furniture—sketch out a chair in space and have the resulting shape fabbed for you.

You could argue that a large part of this attitude has been brought about by games. They have opened up to players in ways that allow them to express themselves too. Think of The Sims, or Doom and Quake. Think of machinima and the modding scene…

On top of that, there’s a whole generation of people—myself included—who have been brought up with games in such a way that they feel comfortable expressing themselves through them. We have become increasingly game-literate—although the general public can better ‘read’ than ‘write’ them. For people to become truly game-literate, they will need to be enabled with creative tools that let them create games as easily as play them.

So to bring this back to mobile social gaming: It’s obvious not everyone wants or needs to be a creator, but it makes a lot of sense for a casual gaming platform to enable creative people to get their creations in front of an audience. After all, they are at least partly motivated by celebrity.

Creation can in this way be made part of the metagame (Word document), providing for multiple levels of player engagement. With the rise of the social web, there have been many pyramid diagrams whipped up illustrating these engagement levels. Will Wright once produced one showing the Sims ecosystem, Raph Koster made one mapping the levels to easy and hard fun and in web circles Bradley Horowitz‘s 1% creators, 10% synthesisers, 100% consumers pyramid based on behaviour observed in Yahoo! Groups is pretty well-known. Here’s my extremely simple version of the pyramid, made specific to Playyoo.

Playyoo has different ways to enable creators. Savvy developers who are comfortable with working in Flash can download an extension that helps them set up their workspace so that it’s guaranteed compatible with the platform. Less techie people that still want to create can use the game creator. And at the bottom of the pyramid, we have all the people who are happily playing all the games coming into the system. The game creator in a way tries to bridge the world of game play and game development.

Let me give you a brief overview of the game creator. It allows you to customise predefined game archetypes. Currently there are six in the application, with more on the way. The idea is to make this act of customisation a fun way to spend a few minutes. It’s a fill-in-the blanks kind of activity. Once you’ve picked an archetype, you can change the graphics on the different game elements, and change some of the rules and parameters. You’re also able to enter custom messages that are shown when the game begins and ends. Finally we’ll ask you to describe the game for other players. Once you’re done, you can publish it and it will be sent to the web site. From that moment, people can play it on their phones.

So that’s the creation part. I’m sure by this point you’re wondering how this is working out. Well, pretty good I’m happy to say. There’s a nice mix of custom games and game creator games in the system at the moment. The custom games tend to be made by enthusiastic amateurs that see Playyoo as a way to reach an audience and hone their skills. They’re pretty active in promoting their games on the site.

The game creator games are very much about people just having fun being creative. Sometimes they use the game creator to comment on something that’s going on. Sometimes the games make no sense to me at all because they’re using family pictures for instance. But that’s OK, we really wanted the game creator to be about creative expression on a personal level and that’s what seems to be happening. That’s great.

And we’ve basically provided for people to be engaged with the system on different levels. Game creation has been made a playful act and as such functions as part of the Playyoo metagame.

Paradox of choice

With all these games coming into the system the supply side of things is taken care of pretty well. We have plenty of games in the system and they cover a broad range of genres. The challenge of course becomes getting the right game to the right person. It’s also about the paradox of choice: The more options people get, the less happy they’ll be about the choice they end up making, always thinking they should’ve gone with something else.

We all know that in today’s world attention is so scarce, people will be reluctant to spend a significant amount of time on any chunk of content. And I think that’s actually a pretty good explanation for the rise of the casual game. There’s a large group of people who don’t want to attention-binge on a game but still want to play.

So: People want few choices (or none at all) and whatever they choose needs to be consumable in bite-sized chunks.

In stead of offering choices, you can surprise people. Take for example the Anyway & Whatever soft drinks which you can get in Singapore. It comes in two main varieties: carbonated and non-carbonated. But what flavour you get you’ll only know when you open the can.

With attention being scarce, one way people are handling it is paying less and less attention to any single piece of content. This is happening not just with media, but on other fronts too, such as food. Minnies in Chicago serves bite-sized burgers, so you can eat a larger variety of them! This is the other way of solving the paradox of choice—by allowing people to consume in snack-sized portions and be more economic with their attention.

(I first encountered the examples of Anything & Whatever and Minnies in Trendwatching.com’s 8 important consumer trends for 2008.)

In Playyoo the principles of surprise and snacking are applied through the game stream.

On the site you customise the game stream. This is a kind of explicit tweaking of your preferences. In the future Playyoo might be able to augment this with guesswork based on implicit behaviour. Once you launch the mobile site you’ll get a time ordered sequence of games that you have not played yet. If you play a game once, it’s moved from the game stream to your recently played list. You can also favourite games which makes them show up in a separate stream. In the future, there might be even more streams added to the system.

Social

Part of the selection process depends on what your friends are playing and creating. Let’s talk a little bit more about the notion of sociality in the system. Like I said the people Playyoo was designed for aren’t only comfortable with creativity, they want to share their creations with others.

We did not want to include social features just because all the other web 2.0 sites were doing it. We wanted the social dimension to make sense in the greater context of mobile play.

For players, this means it should be about “playing alone together”. Although a mobile play session is often solitary, the metagame turns it into a social experience. You can start competing with your friends over high-scores for instance.

For creators, the social dimension is closely tied to celebrity. It’s about seeing what happens to your game, who plays it, do they like it, how can it be improved and so on.

However, we don’t just hang out online and talk to people about nothing (although sometimes you would think so). In stead we form relationships with others around so-called social objects.

A good example of this concept would be Flickr, where the photos serve as social objects. An “excuse” if you will for people to interact. With del.icio.us, the social object is a URL. With Upcoming, it’s an event. With YouTube it’s a videoclip. With Dopplr, it’s a trip, and so on…

Playyoo’s social objects are games. It’s interesting to look at the types of conversations that happen around them. Sometimes the conversation is about the quality of the game itself. This is often the case with custom games. With game creator games, the conversation is usually about the story behind the game. If it’s a comment on current events, the conversation might be about what is said about that event in the game.

You see this on Flickr too. You have people uploading artfully done photos, and the conversations tend to be about the craftsmanship of the photo (in addition the subject too of course). I take a lot of photos with my cameraphone and upload them directly to Flickr. My mobile is old, the photos are hardly ever any good, but we have conversations about the stories behind the photos.

So in a sense, the game creator is to Playyoo what the cameraphone is to Flickr…

I mentioned people form relationships around social objects and they have conversations about them. Relationships and conversation are two of the building blocks of any social service. Here’s my version of a diagram originally produced by Gene Smith who in turn based it on work by Matt Webb. It shows the most important building blocks of any social service. I’ll briefly describe each building block:

• Identity is how you are represented in the system. With games this is usually a game character, in Playyoo there are profile pages.
• Presence is about letting other now where you are and what you’re doing.
• Relationships are about how you can be linked to others in the system’s social network. Playyoo has a very basic ‘friends’ framework with no granularity. As I said, people also relate to each other implicitly around objects. If we both like the same game a lot, we have some kind of relationship through that game.
• Reputation is about making your past actions visible to others. Think of eBay ratings for instance.
• Groups is how you can mark out yourself and others as part of a greater whole.
• We talked about conversations already.
• Finally, sharing is about what can be exchanged in the system. Playyoo allows you to share your games with others.

The idea is not that each service should support all of these in equal measure. In fact, you can look at different services and kind of map it to the building blocks, exposing its character.

So let’s do that for Playyoo. It focusses on conversations (around and through games), reputation (how good a player you are, how good the games you create are) and sharing.

The future…

Playyoo is still just in public beta and is continuously being improved. I’m only slightly involved with the roadmap for the future so I can’t comment on specifics. I’ll share two things related to Playyoo that I’m generally interested in though: these are mobile game systems and mobile metagames.

The game creator takes a template approach to game customisation, similar to what MySpace does with profile pages. What if we come up with a tool that’s more like a deck of cards? These are game systems: components that can be used to create many different games. The trick will be to come up with components that make sense within a mobile context. I can think of location, movement, time of day and gesture, what else can you think of?

A metagame is about the activities players engage in around actual play sessions. Kongregate has done some wonderful work in this direction, but it’s pretty structured and narrow. What if we come up with Flickr-like playful interactions that take as their inputs mobile play sessions? There is a start of such a mobile metagame in Playyoo—it takes high scores from mobile play sessions as an input with which you can play on the website. I’d like to expand this in a way that makes sense for the mobile.

And that’s all we have time for. Thanks for your attention! Any questions?

The talk went OK. I had 20 minutes, which is pretty short. I finished on time, but I had to leave out a lot of examples. The original talk on which this was based is a 2 hour lecture I deliver at UX companies. (I did this last year for instance at InUse.)

The lack of examples was the biggest point of criticism I got afterwards. I’ll try to make up for that a bit in a later post, listing some examples of web sites and apps that I would call in some way playful. Stay tuned.

For now, here are the slides (no notes I’m afraid, so it’ll be hard to make any sense of them if you weren’t there). Thanks to Are Halland for inviting me. And greetings to all my friends in Oslo. You’ve got a beautiful UX thing going on there.

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