conferences – Page 2

Blank banners — see me speak at TWAB 2008

In 1966 Provo took to the streets of Amsterdam with blank protest banners.¹ The use of rousing slogans had been outlawed by the city’s mayor. The ‘protesters’ were arrested. Provo achieved their goal of making the authorities look silly by playing at protesting.

They took existing rules and decided to play within them, to see how far they could push the limits of those rules. They were not allowed to use actual slogans, so they decided to use unwritten banners. They made use of the ambiguous nature of play: They were protesting, but at the same time not protesting. There were no forbidden slogans on their banners, but at the same time, the slogans were ever so present through their absence.

The police were not willing to take on Provo’s ludic attitude. They refused to step into their magic circle and play at opposing them. In stead they broke the rules, arrested them for real, and by doing so, lost—at least in the public’s eye.

This example—and hopefully a few others—I will discuss at The Web and Beyond 2008: Mobility. In 20 minutes or so, I hope to inspire designers to think about what the near future’s blank banners could be. My session is titled ‘Mobile components for playful cultural resistance’ (an unwieldy title in desperate need of improvement) and will probably be in Dutch.

The conference is organised by Chi Nederland and will take place May 22 in the beautiful Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam. Keynote speakers include Ben Cerveny, Jyri Engeström and Adam Greenfield. It looks like this will be a very special conference indeed.

Image source: Gramschap.

Provo was a Dutch counterculture movement in the mid-1960s that focused on provoking violent responses from authorities using non-violent bait. Read more about them at Wikipedia. [↩]

A Game Developers Conference 2008 postmortem

The 2008 Game Developers Conference was a bit of a confusing experience for me. To begin with, I felt out of place. Anytime I introduced myself to someone—“I’m an interaction designer, I work freelance”—I would usually get a blank stare. (Not many independents making a living in the games industry it seems.) At a lot of the talks, I was struck by the huge gap between the practice of UX designers native to the web, and designers working in the games industry. I’m generalizing here, but I’ll give some examples:

Game designers still don’t strive to understand their audience and the experience they’d like to have.
Game designers still don’t understand the significance of the web. They very rarely embrace the web way of doing things.
Game designers quite often aren’t able to think on different levels of abstraction about their medium, art form or whatever you want to call it.

If that doesn’t get me flamed, I don’t know what will.

GDC 2008 was huge. By far the largest conference I have ever been to. I heard someone mention the number of 16.000 but I could be completely off. The program committee obviously went for quantity over quality—I attended some really great talks, but also some really bad ones. In addition it was hell to figure out where to go. In hindsight I missed out on some great sessions. Apparently everything was recorded, but they need to be paid for—CMP apparently think they’re doing the games industry a service like this. I think not.

GDC Mobile in particular was a weird, depressing affair. The mobile game industry seems to have defined itself in such a way that there is no way for it to actually succeed. The majority are still trying to deliver a console-like experience on a small screen, completely missing the potential of the medium. Sigh.

Some themes I spotted:

Techniques for enhancing creativity: Annakaisa Kultima, a (game)researcher at the university of Tampere in Finland presented game-like techniques for idea generation. I’d particularly love to play around with her NVA cards. Sam Coates and Graeme Ankers of SCEE showed how they’ve improved innovation and concept creation using a whole range of techniques including lateral thinking.
The web way: There were some happy exceptions to the general ignorance of the power of the web. Justin Hall demoed PMOG—an exciting concept using the web as a gaming platform. Hopefully this will start a whole wave of “datagames”. Raph Koster blew me away with his very techy antemortem of Metaplace—a complete reinvention of MMOGs built from the ground up both with and as web technologies.
Story, drama, narrative, blah: “The audience are not your mom. They don’t care about your stupid story,” said Ken Levine, writer and designer of the critically acclaimed BioShock. I’m still not sure BioShock is actually as revolutionary as people make it out to be. But Levine’s approach to story in games—having multiple levels of detail that can be consumed as the player sees fit and telling the story through the environment—makes sense to me. I enjoyed Peter Molyneux’s demo of Fable 2 mostly because of his criticism of American prudishness. “If this were Germany I’d be naked on stage right this moment.” Molyneux attempts to create drama through simulation. Offering freedom of choice, but choice with consequences. I wonder if this is a road leading nowhere…
Mobile: Some people attempt to play to mobile’s strengths, with great success. DC of Pikkle in Japan showed a lot of crazy-ass Flash Lite games that are delivered over mobile web. These mobile social games completely circumvent the carriers and consequently disrupt the whole mobile market over there. Shades of Playyoo here—although Pikkle has the benefit of 90% Flash Lite player penetration, whereas in Europe we’re apparently on 20%. Equally true to mobile’s nature but offering a completely different experience is location based gaming. Jeremy Irish talked about the origins of Geocaching and showed wonderful work he is doing at Groundspeak. Location based games are full of emergent complexity. I enjoyed hearing that Irish tries to have players be in the world in stead of the screen when playing.
Miscellaneous: Sulka Haro‘s talk about Habbo was surprisingly thoughtful. Lots of good stuff on identity play and how Habbo’s lack of explicit support for it is not holding players back—on the contrary, less features seems to create more space for play. Takao Sawano of Nintendo delighted me with an in depth look at the evolution of the Wii Fit controller. Secret of the big N’s success is clearly the close collaboration between its hard- and software divisions. Rod Humble unveiled The Sims Carnival, EA’s contribution to the continuing democratization of creative tools (again reminiscent of Playyoo). Humble proved to be a very knowledgeable not to mention funny speaker. Seeing Ralph Baer and Allan Alcorn play PONG on the Brown Box was awesome.

There was more—I’d love to go over all the wonderful indie games I saw at the IGF and elsewhere for instance—but these were by far the most enjoyable sessions for me. If you’re looking for in-depth reports you could do worse than to start at Gamasutra. For me the real challenge begins now—digesting this and making it applicable for interaction designers on the web. I have a huge backlog of smaller posts lying around that I want to get out there first though (and this one has grown far too large already). So I’ll end here.

Designing a mobile social gaming experience for Gen-C

Update 21-03-2008: I’ve added some images of slides to allow for some more context when reading the text.

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).

Continue reading Designing a mobile social gaming experience for Gen-C

Speaking, lots and lots of speaking

First, the bad news: I won’t be able to make it to Interaction 08. Which sucks, because it looks like it’s going to be a wonderful conference with a smart crowd attending. I would have loved to meet up with friends there. And of course I was looking forward to sharing my ideas on playful products.

There’s plenty of other events in the pipeline for me though, both big and small. Here’s a rundown:

Next week on Tuesday 16 January I’ll be flying to Oslo on invitation of Are Halland at Netlife Research. I’ll do a short presentation at the UXnet meetup, focused on the application of game design to UX for the web.

Shortly after that, I’ll be participating in BarCampCopenhagen. I’ll probably do a session about my thoughts in mobile social gaming. Other than that I’m looking forward to just hanging out with the Danish geek crowd.

In February it’s time to cross the Atlantic to San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference. I’m speaking at GDC Mobile about designing casual gaming experiences for Generation C. I’m going to make good use of my complimentary all access pass. You’ll most likely find me playing weird stuff at the Independent Games Festival.

One final engagement taking place in June that I can already announce is From Business To Buttons, organised by my friends at InUse. Here I’ll get a chance to talk about the stuff that I had planned for Interaction 08: play, storytelling and complex systems. Looking forward to it.

If you’re reading this, and happen to be attending any of these events. Do drop by and say hi. I’d love to meet and chat!

My GDC Mobile 2008 proposal: accepted!

It doesn’t say so on the site yet, but I am on the program for next year’s GDC Mobile.¹ Yesterday I got the email that my talk — titled Designing a Casual Social Gaming Experience for Generation C — has been accepted. To be honest I was quite surprised. I work in the blurry overlap of the interaction design and game design fields, have no actual game titles under my belt and proposed a weird subject to boot. Who in their right mind would invite me to speak? Of course I am also really excited about this. GDC is the professional event for the games industry so I’m honored to be part of it.²

My talk will be closely related to the things I’ve been working on for Playyoo. I’ll discuss how short-session mobile games and a web based meta-game can interconnect to create a social game experience that allows different levels of player engagement. I’ll look at the ways you can align your game design with the expectations of Generation C: customization & personalization, recombination and connectedness. I might post the extended abstract sometime in the future, for now I’m just wondering: Who else is going to GDC? What would you like to see me discuss?

Update: The conference site has been updated, here’s the description of my session.

Don’t be scared by the big Orc in the header of their site. [↩]
Now I just need to figure out whether traveling to the US twice in one month is a feasible undertaking. [↩]

Finding playful patterns at dConstruct 2007

I didn’t announce it on this blog, but if you’re following me on Twitter or Jaiku, took a look at the Upcoming event page or share trips with me on Dopplr you’re probably aware that I attended dConstruct 2007 in Brighton.

By way of a short conference report I’d like to list some of the references to games and play that jumped out at me during the day. It might be that I’m slowly but surely going a little crazy or that have really discovered the secret order of the universe, but either way I was pleasantly surprised that most talks suggested that successful experience design benefits from an understanding of the dynamics of play. Here goes:

Game design is a second order design problem, meaning you cannot directly design the experience of play but only the ‘stuff’ that facilitates it. Jared Spool pointed out that successful experience design is invisible, it’s only when it’s done wrong that we notice it. This makes good experience design hard to sell, and I would say the same goes for great game design.
The practice of game design is very much a multidisciplinary one, with a lot of specialties on board. Similarly, there is no way you’ll be able to do good experience design when you use a relay-race-like proces. You need to have people from a lot of different backgrounds solving problems collaboratively (or a few people who can do a lot of different stuff really well.) Jared Spool briefly pointed this out, Leisa Reichelt gave a lot of good suggestions on how to facilitate this with washing-machine methodologies and Tom Coates finished his talk encouraging cross-disciplinary collaboration too.
Because good experience design (like game design) is a second order design problem, and it can only be done multidisciplinary, you can only do it in an iterative and incremental way. Good games get play-tested to death to ensure they’re fun, good experiences (on the web or wherever) need the same treatment. Leisa Reichelt had some interesting ideas on how to actually pull this off: Introducing UX to Agile, by having design and development teams both working in the same rhythm, but handling different stuff in their own iterations, with a lot of hand-over and communication back and forth. Well worth trying out I think.
More thoughts on the invisible nature of experience was provided by Peter Merholz, who used a quote from Tim O’Reilly: “Designing from the outside in”. Start with the UI and then figure out the data and logic. I wouldn’t equate user experience with user interface (because – again – the experience cannot be directly designed) but I think it’s a good quote nonetheless. I liked Merholz’s emphasis on the importance of an experience vision most of all.
I was great to hear Denise Wilton and George Oates talk about B3ta and Flickr. A lot of people are probably aware of the gamey origins of Flickr but it was enlightening to finally see some of it on the big screen. It came as no surprise to hear that Ludicorp‘s process in making Flickr was very much washing-machine style (although they did 0 user testing for a long time!)
Matt Webb was perhaps the speaker who most explicitly drew parallels between game design and experience design. (He mentioned Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun, for instance.) He also pointed out that customisation is vital to any experience, that a product should be able to recombine with others in its ecosystem, as well as allow for personalisation. Both customisation and personalisation encourage play. Tom Coates later mentioned something very similar – that your product (which as he was eager to point out is more than just your website) should be re-combinable and extendable with and by others.
One of the major themes in interaction and game design for me is behaviour, the way products encourage behaviour in their users and the kinds of behaviours they have embedded in themselves. Matt Webb also mentioned that people love to tell stories about the experiences they’ve had. This is very true of gaming, which is all about verbs, actions, doing stuff. Game design is not storytelling, the storytelling happens after the game.
I had completely forgotten about Disco, the CD burning app with simulated smoke effects that serve no purpose besides play. So thanks to Matt Webb I now have an example to complement the Wii Help Cat! (Come to think of it, the discussions surrounding Stamen Design‘s Twitter Blocks might be another good one.)

In conclusion, I think it’s great that Clearleft used this year’s edition to introduce the web development community to the wonderful world of experience design. I was also very happy to see a few people on stage I had not seen present before, but knew had a lot of good stuff to say. The pre- and after-party were both a lot of fun (thanks to Media Temple, Yahoo! Developer Network and the BBC for sponsoring those with free drink and food.) And if you’re curious, I understand there will be podcasts of all the sessions online soon, so keep an eye on the site.

Slides and video of my Reboot 9.0 talk

So I’ve been busy uploading stuff. The slides to my Reboot 9.0 talk are up at SlideShare. I uploaded a video recorded by Iskander with his N70 to Vimeo. Finally, since SlideShare still doesn’t import the notes that go with the slides in PowerPoint, I’ve also put up a big PDF (almost 50 MB). Please refer to the notes in the PDF for all the Flickr photo credits too.

Slides

Video

Mobile Social Play @ Reboot 9.0 from Kaeru on Vimeo

Notes

There’s a bit too much um-ing and ah-ing for my tastes. I need to do more practice, practice, practice before these things!
This will be the last time I use Darth Vader as the opening slide, I promise.
It’s too bad I didn’t have more time to go into the examples that go with the last part. Next time: less stage setting, more meat.
Still, I had fun. :-) Thanks again to Thomas for having me, and all the cool people at Reboot for going easy on me.

Reboot 9.0 day 2

(Waiting for my train home to arrive, I finally have the opportunity to post this.)

So with Reboot 9.0 and the after-party done, I think I’ll briefly write up my impressions of the second day.

Stowe Boyd – Good talk as always, offering a new definition of ‘flow’. I guess his attempt to have people open themselves up to the beneficial sides of being intermittently connected was a success.

Marko Ahtisaari – Interesting character with a good story to tell. His free mobile operator for teenagers scheme made a lot of people curious. (Free stuff always does that, it seems.)

Lee Bryant – Very fitting to the theme of human?, a touching story of how former inhabitants of a Bosnian town used social software to reconnect and rebuild the town.

Julian Bleecker – Cool stuff on new ways to interact with computing technology beyond the utilitarian and efficient, into the realm of play.

Dave Winer – An interesting character having a nice conversation with Thomas. I enjoyed his offbeat remarks and dry wit.

Guy Dickinson – Another round of micropresentations, this time with me participating. I stumbled several times. Next time I’ll prepare a custom talk for this. The other presenters were awesome.

Rasmus Fleischer and Magnus Eriksson – Two cool young anarchists with interesting ideas about file sharing and the future of music. Too bad large parts of their presentation were read from a sheet.

Leisa Reichelt – A carefully put together overview of ambient intimacy, what it is and what it’s for. Next step: coming up with design guidelines for these types of ‘tools’.

Matt Webb – Delivered on the expectations raised by his performances previous years. Interesting to see him move into experience design territory and hear his take on it. Very much applicable to my daily work in designing web services.

Dinner and the after-party were great (although it seemed that the reservations scheme had gone awry, they had no place for us at our chosen restaurant). I guess drinking and talking into the night at Vega with a lot of confused locals around was a fitting way to end another great Reboot.

Reboot 9.0 day 1

So here’s a short wrap up of the first day. I must say I’m not disappointed so far. The overall level of the talks is quite high again. Here’s what I attended:

Opening keynote – Nice and conceptual/theoretical. Not sure I agree with all the claims made but it was a good way to kick off the day on a gee whizz way.

Jeremy Keith – Good talk, nice slides, didn’t really deliver on the promise of his proposal though. I would’ve really liked to see him go into the whole idea of life streams further. The hack day challenge sounded cool though.

Stephanie Booth – Very topical for me, being a bilingual blogger and designer often confronted with localisation/multilingual issues.

My own talk – Went reasonably well. I guess half of the room enjoyed and the other half wondered what the f*** I was talking about. Oh well, I had fun.

Ross Mayfield – Could have been much better if it hadn’t been for technical screw-ups and perhaps some tighter pacing by Ross. Still the work he’s doing with social software is great.

Matt Jones – Very pretty presentation, nice topic and Dopplr looks cool. I’m not a frequent flyer but I can see the value in it. Still not quite sure it will improve the consequences of air-travel though.

Nicolas Nova – Came across as the high concept, theoretical twin to my talk. Lots of cool pervasive game examples. Nicolas always boggles my mind.

Jyri Engeström – Cool to see how he’s developed his talks throughout the past Reboots. I guess he delivered on his promise and stayed on the right side of the ‘I’m pushing my product’ line.

The evening program – No micro-presentations (which to be honest was fine by me, being quite exhausted). Good food, nice conversations and plenty of weird generative art, live cinema etc. All good.

On to day 2!

Reboot notes

It’s been quiet here lately. Even the del.icio.us links have dried up. The reason: I have been frantically preparing my talk for Reboot. It’s nearing completion, and I’m pretty satisfied. Looking forward to delivering it to the cool people in Copenhagen.

Some notes:

My slot has been announced. It’s on thursday the 31st, starting 12:20 in ‘the box’ (interesting name for a room, hopefully it’s not too descriptive).
Nicole Simon has interviewed me as part of her podcast series for Reboot. It should be up any time now. Hear me babble incoherently about why I think games & play are such interesting areas for designers. Update: the interview is now online!
Guy Dickinson has been so kind to invite me for his micro-presentation session. I’ll be in the one during the evening ‘happening’, so you can all drink and talk while looking at the pretty pictures in my slides.

It’s going to be an amazing two days. See you all there!