links for 2010-04-23

“…we’re going to encounter a bunch of crap­py sor­ta-games foist­ed on us. Those rudi­men­ta­ry game schemes are going to be rolled out by every­one with a rewards card, CRM sys­tem, loy­al­ty scheme or some­thing that can be plot­ted on a graph. And they’re going to be no fun.” I agree with Rus­sell that the game­poca­lypse runs the risk of being incred­i­bly bor­ing if peo­ple keep focus­ing on stick­ing a reward sys­tem on a mun­dane activ­i­ties. At the core of any good game is an inter­est­ing activ­i­ty, so we should be think­ing about those, the many kinds of expe­ri­ences peo­ple have and how those can be turned into games. Rewards are noth­ing more than feed­back, and feed­back can take on many forms, so let’s see if we can come up with things oth­er than a score or a badge, shall we?

“If you’re run­ning a city, though, there’s stuff here you prob­a­bly ought to be pay­ing atten­tion to. The mes­sage is that in the long run you’re clear­ly bet­ter off under­writ­ing a vibrant ecosys­tem of [cowork­ing spaces] than shelling out one tax break after anoth­er in the hopes of entic­ing (or retain­ing) cor­po­rate head­quar­ters.” How­ev­er much I am a fan of cowork­ing, it does not work well for many cre­ative activ­i­ties which require a prop­er stu­dio space where one can phys­i­cal­ly engage with materials.