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.
