Category: Talks

After a con­sid­er­able amount of fid­dling with SlideShare I’ve final­ly man­aged to upload a ver­sion of the slides that go with my Play­ful IAs pre­sen­ta­tion. This more or less as I pre­sent­ed it at the Euro IA Sum­mit 2007 and includes an approx­i­mate tran­script of my talk. I hope to get an audio/video record­ing of most of it in the near future as well. When I do I’ll update this page.

Update: I’ve post­ed a short sum­ma­ry of the cen­tral argu­ment of my talk.

Down­load a ver­sion includ­ing an approx­i­mate tran­script (14,5 MB).

I had some great reac­tions to this talk and I want to thank all the peo­ple who engaged with me in dis­cus­sions after­wards. It’s giv­en me a good pic­ture of what areas I should devel­op fur­ther in future sub­se­quent talks. I’m also pleas­ant­ly sur­prised to see that con­trary to what some peo­ple think, the IA com­mu­ni­ty (the Euro­pean one at least) is very much open to new ideas. That’s real­ly nice to expe­ri­ence firsthand.

A lot of peo­ple asked for a list of books and oth­er good sources on the top­ics I cov­ered. Here’s an incom­plete list of stuff I’ve used at some stage to inform my thinking:

• Rules of Play by Katie Salen and Eric Zim­mer­man — Pos­si­bly the best book on game design out there. Big and meaty — not at all what you would expect from a games-relat­ed book perhaps.
• A The­o­ry of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster — A book I have yet to read, but the cen­tral argu­ment is described very clear­ly in the ini­tial pre­sen­ta­tion (PDF).
• There isn’t much out there on the top­ic of Gar­ret­t’s algo­rith­mic archi­tec­tures. I took some notes the sec­ond time I saw JJG speak, at Reboot 9.0. Per­haps they are helpful.
• For an impres­sion of Will Wright’s think­ing on pos­si­bil­i­ty space, this old­ish pre­sen­ta­tion at Accel­er­at­ing Change 2004 is prob­a­bly the best source. Recent­ly he’s done a lot of pub­lic appear­ances relat­ed to Spore. Of those I prob­a­bly enjoy his high-speed TED per­for­mance the most.
• Lot’s of stuff on mak­ing your user feel like he’s kick­ing ass can be found in the archives of Kathy Sier­ra’s blog, Cre­at­ing Pas­sion­ate Users.
• I have yet to read Mihaly Csik­szent­mi­ha­ly­i’s Flow. Salen and Zim­mer­man dis­cuss it in Rules of Play. There is a short but sweet inter­view with Csik­szent­mi­ha­lyi in WIRED. The orig­i­nal flOw game can be found over at Flow in Games.
• Daniel Cook’s mod­el of how game mechan­ics work is best described in his Gama­su­tra arti­cle The Chem­istry Of Game Design. His blog Lost Gar­den (where I first encoun­tered the Wii Help Cat) is high­ly recommended.
• Richard Bartle’s arti­cle Hearts, Clubs, Dia­monds, Spades: Play­ers Who Suit MUDs is a great exam­i­na­tion of how var­i­ous play­er groups influ­ence the expe­ri­ence of a MUD. Read­i­ly applic­a­ble to the design of MMOGs and social soft­ware (as Tom Coates and Matt Webb have argued in the past.)

If that does­n’t keep you busy for a while, you could always have a dig through my del.icio.us links. There’s plen­ty of good stuff there. Of course of if you ever find any­thing you think would be of inter­est to me, do let me know. Just tag it for:kaeru.