links for 2010-03-23

“My main inter­est here is to extract the design tech­niques as very sim­ple design pat­terns or ‘gam­bits’* that can be applied in oth­er design sit­u­a­tions out­side games them­selves, where design­ers would like to influ­ence user behav­iour. So these are (at least at present) pre­sent­ed sim­ply as provo­ca­tions: a “What if…?” ques­tion plus an exam­ple.” This is a nice check list of sorts, with some good exam­ples. The gam­bits are of very dif­fer­ent lev­els of abstrac­tion though, “rewards” and “lev­els” sit uneasi­ly next to “play­ful­ness” and “sto­ry­telling”. The gam­bit descrip­tions also do not address the expe­ri­en­tial dimen­sion, so you’d have a hard time deter­min­ing which ones to use if you’re con­cerned with cre­at­ing a suit­able or even coher­ent user expe­ri­ence from these.