Tag: game design

I was interviewed for the Playyoo blog

I was interviewed by Playyoo the other day

Most of you will prob­a­bly know I’m involved1 with this new mobile game com­mu­ni­ty called Playy­oo. I haven’t blogged about it here explic­it­ly because most of my con­tri­bu­tions so far are still being devel­oped and will hope­ful­ly hit the inter­net around Decem­ber. I have an excuse to talk about it now though, because recent­ly I was inter­viewed by the peo­ple of Playy­oo for their blog. Read about my thoughts on the role of social­i­ty in (mobile) gam­ing and how that will work in Playy­oo’s meta-game, as well as what I think about casu­al games and the unique game design oppor­tu­ni­ties for mobile.

A quote from the inter­view:

What does the term ‘casu­al game’ mean to you?

‘Casu­al,’ to me, says some­thing about the lev­el of atten­tion and engage­ment that a play­er has (or is required to have) with the game. For me as a design­er, casu­al games pro­vide inter­est­ing chal­lenges. It might seem sim­ple to cre­ate these casu­al games, but they’re actu­al­ly quite tricky to pull off, or pull off well, that is. From a game design per­spec­tive, I think it’s more chal­leng­ing to pull off a high qual­i­ty causal game than yet anoth­er first-per­son shoot­er game. 

Read the rest of the inter­view over at the Playy­oo blog.2

  1. They’ve hired me to do game and inter­ac­tion design. I have been work­ing on mobile games, a game cre­ation tool, and a web-based meta-game. [↩]
  2. Thanks to Alper Çuǧun for the pho­to that’s in the post. [↩]

Pollinator — a casual game prototype made with Mobile Processing

I wrote a game about a bee and flowers today

Last sun­day I sat down and cod­ed a pro­to­type of a casu­al game in Mobile Pro­cess­ing. I got the idea for it the evening before: You’re a bee who needs to col­lect as much hon­ey as pos­si­ble in his hive while at the same time keep­ing a flower-bed bloom­ing by pol­li­nat­ing… Play it and let me know what your high score is in the comments!

Thinking and making

I’ve been look­ing for an excuse to get some expe­ri­ence with Pro­cess­ing (par­tic­u­lar­ly the vari­ant suit­able for devel­op­ing mobile stuff) for a while. I also felt I need­ed to get back into the mak­ing part of the field I’ve been think­ing about so much late­ly: Game Design. I agree with Saf­fer, Webb and oth­ers — mak­ing is an impor­tant part of the design prac­tice, it can­not be replaced by lots of think­ing. The things learnt from engag­ing with the actu­al stuff things are made of (which in the case of dig­i­tal games is code) aren’t gained in any oth­er way and very valuable.

Get the game

I’ve uploaded the first ver­sion of the game here. You can play it in the emu­la­tor in your brows­er or if your phone runs Java midlets, down­load the file and play it like you’re sup­posed to: While out and about. The source code is pro­vid­ed as well, if you feel like look­ing at it.1

Pollinator 0.1

How to play

You’re the yel­low oval. The orange tri­an­gle in the top left cor­ner is your hive. Green squares are grass, brown squares are seeds, red squares are flow­ers and pink squares are pol­li­nat­ed flow­ers. The field is updat­ed in columns from left to right (indi­cat­ed by the yel­low mark­er in the bot­tom). A seed will turn into a flower (in rare cas­es a pol­li­nat­ed flower). A flower will die, a pol­li­nat­ed flower will die and spread seeds to grass around it. Move your bee with the direc­tion­al keys, use the cen­tre key to grab nec­tar from a flower. You can cary a max­i­mum of 100 nec­tar. Drop your nec­tar off at the hive (again using the cen­tre key) to up your score. When you first grab nec­tar from a pol­li­nat­ed flower and sub­se­quent­ly from a nor­mal flower, the lat­ter is pol­li­nat­ed. Try to keep the flower-bed in bloom while at the same time rack­ing up a high-score!

You’ll get 10 nec­tar from a flower (in bloom or not). Pol­li­nat­ing a flower costs 5 nec­tar. If you try to take nec­tar more than once from the same flower, you’ll loose 10 nec­tar.2

Improvements

Stuff not in here that I might put into a next ver­sion (when­ev­er I get around to it):

  • Ani­ma­tion — I need to get my feet wet with some script­ed ani­ma­tion. Thing is I’ve always sucked at this. For now it’s all tile-based stuff.
  • Bet­ter feed­back — For instance show the points you earn near the bee and the hive. I think that’ll make the game a lot eas­i­er to under­stand and there­fore more fun.
  • Menus, pause, game over — It’s a pro­to­type, so you get dumped into the action right away. (The game starts on the first key you press.) And there’s no actu­al game over mes­sage, the field just turns green and you’re left to won­der what to do.
  • Bal­ance — I’m not sure if the game like it stands is bal­anced right, I will need to play it a lot to fig­ure that out. Also there’s prob­a­bly a dom­i­nant strat­e­gy that’ll let you rack up points easily.

The aim was to cre­ate a rel­a­tive­ly casu­al game expe­ri­ence that will almost allow you to zone out while play­ing. I think it is far too twitchy now, so per­haps I real­ly should sit down and do a sec­ond ver­sion some­time soon.

Mobile Processing

I enjoy work­ing with Mobile Pro­cess­ing. I like the way it allows you to pro­gram in a very naive way but if you like struc­ture things in a more sophis­ti­cat­ed fash­ion. It real­ly does allow you to sketch in code, which is exact­ly what I need. The empha­sis on just code also pre­vents me from fid­dling around with ani­ma­tions, graph­ics and so on (like I would in Flash for instance.) Per­haps the only thing that would be nice is an edi­tor that is a bit more full-fea­tured.3 Per­haps I should grab an exter­nal edi­tor next time?

Feedback

If you played the game and liked it (or thought it was too hard, bor­ing or what­ev­er) I’d love to get your feed­back in the com­ments. Any­one else out there pro­to­typ­ing games in Pro­cess­ing? Or using it to teach game design? I’d be very inter­est­ed to hear about it.

  1. Not that it’s par­tic­u­lar­ly good, I’m an ama­teur coder at best. [↩]
  2. I’m not sure this is the right kind of neg­a­tive rein­force­ment. [↩]
  3. The auto­mat­ic code for­mat­ting refused to work for me, requir­ing me to spend a bit too much effort on for­mat­ting by hand. [↩]

More than useful — outline of my Interaction 08 talk

Illustration from children's book

A while back I was hap­py to hear that my sub­mis­sion for Inter­ac­tion 08 is accept­ed. This will be the first con­fer­ence organ­ised by the IxDA. Obvi­ous­ly I’m proud to be part of that. I’ll prob­a­bly be build­ing my talk a post at a time on this blog, more or less like I did with the one for the Euro IA Sum­mit of this year. If you’re won­der­ing wether it’ll be worth fol­low­ing along, let me out­line the argu­ment I made in my submission:

There’s a gen­er­a­tion of ‘users’ expect­ing their dig­i­tal and phys­i­cal prod­ucts to be cus­tomiz­able, per­son­al­ize-able and re-com­bin­able. These users explore the poten­tial of these 3C prod­ucts through play. This is why I think it’s worth­while for inter­ac­tion design­er to get a bet­ter under­stand­ing of how to design for open-end­ed play. Obvi­ous­ly, it makes sense to do some shop­ping around in the the­o­ries of our col­leagues in game design. Why should design­ers both­er? Play­ful prod­ucts have deeply engaged users that can’t stop telling sto­ries about their expe­ri­ences with them. 

The focus of this talk is firm­ly on design­ing sto­ries that emerge through play and enabling the retelling of those play experiences.

Like I said, I’ll dive deep­er into these top­ics in the com­ing peri­od. If you have any views of your own on this — or use­ful resources that you think I should check out — do let me know.

Update: Today the full con­fer­ence pro­gram was announced and my name is actu­al­ly on there. The pro­gram looks real­ly cool, and I’m real­ly hap­py to see some talks relat­ed to mine in there as well. See you in Savan­nah!

Work with me in Copenhagen (or where-ever)

Panorama of Copenhagen harbour

Now that I’m over three months into my stay in Copen­hagen I thought it would be good to post a short update. Here are the facts, bul­let-wise (with apolo­gies to Mr. Tufte):

  • I have been in Copen­hagen, Den­mark since July 1st 2007
  • Until now I have most­ly been work­ing on Playy­oo, doing inter­ac­tion and game design
  • I also pre­sent­ed on Play­ful IAs at the Euro IA Sum­mit in Barcelona
  • No lat­er than July 1st 2008, I will return to Utrecht, the Netherlands
  • Yes, I intend to con­tin­ue free­lanc­ing when I get back (I offi­cial­ly left Info.nl on Octo­ber 1st 2007)
  • I am avail­able for free­lance inter­ac­tion design gigs that involve social media, mobile tech­nol­o­gy and/or gaming
  • You can also invite me to speak at your event or com­pa­ny, par­tic­u­lar­ly on the top­ic of apply­ing game design prin­ci­ples to the user expe­ri­ence of prod­ucts and services

Oh and of course, if you hap­pen to be in Copen­hagen, don’t hes­i­tate to drop me a line when you feel like going out for some drinks!

Snacking on casual games

Snacks

Fol­low­ing up on an ear­li­er post about short-ses­sion games here are some com­ments on a recent Gama­su­tra arti­cle by Ian Bogost (it’ll be in the link post for tomor­row). It’s titled ‘Casu­al As In Sex, Not Casu­al As In Fri­day’ and in it Bogost argues there is quite a bit of unex­plored space in the casu­al games domain. 

In the arti­cle, Bogost points out that casu­al games are usu­al­ly seen as easy to learn but hard to mas­ter, like Go. They are com­mon­ly cheap (or at least cheap­er than typ­i­cal con­sole and PC titles) and easy to get. Final­ly, con­trol of the game is often sim­ple and lim­it­ed to few inputs. (Bogost rec­om­mends only using the mouse on the PC, I won­der what he’d rec­om­mend on a mobile…one button?)

Bogost points out that a typ­i­cal casu­al game-play ses­sion might be short, but that the over­all mod­el of casu­al gam­ing (both the dis­tri­b­u­tion and the game mechan­ics) actu­al­ly encour­age repeat­ed play over a long peri­od of time where­by a play­er achieves an increas­ing­ly high­er lev­el of mas­tery of the game (which arguably is the antithe­sis of casualness.) 

What we rarely see are games that are explic­it­ly cre­at­ed to be played once and nev­er revis­it­ed. Bogost men­tions Sep­tem­ber 12th and Zidane Head-Butt as pro­to­types for these types of casu­al games.

This is all very inter­est­ing to me because in a cur­rent project I have been dis­cussing this notion of snack-sized games quite a lot. I am con­vinced there is a mar­ket for games that are con­sumed once and are then dis­card­ed, but there are some chal­lenges to over­come. Bogost men­tions these as well: They need to be ridicu­lous­ly sim­ple to access, as cheap as pos­si­ble (ide­al­ly free) and instant­ly learnable. 

One point Bogost does­n’t raise is: Who will feel com­pelled to cre­ate these games? Because game cre­ation always involves some effort, typ­i­cal game devel­op­ers might not see much prof­it in releas­ing their games into the wild for free. What’s in it for them? I think the key there is the democ­ra­ti­za­tion of game cre­ation. Giv­ing ordi­nary users fun tools to cre­ate these short-ses­sion, snack-sized, casu­al-as-in-sex games as a form of per­son­al expression.

Summary of my Playful IAs argument

I thought I’d post a short sum­ma­ry of the argu­ment I made in my Euro IA Sum­mit 2007 talk, for those who weren’t there and/or are too lazy to actu­al­ly go through the notes in the slides. The pre­sen­ta­tion is basi­cal­ly bro­ken up into three parts: 

  1. Future web envi­ron­ments are becom­ing so com­plex, they start to show emer­gent prop­er­ties. In this con­text a lot of tra­di­tion­al IA prac­tice does­n’t make sense any­more. Instead of direct­ly design­ing an infor­ma­tion space, you’re bet­ter off design­ing the rules that under­ly the gen­er­a­tive con­struc­tion of such spaces. In oth­er words, IA is becom­ing a sec­ond order design problem.
  2. IAs tend to argue for the val­ue of their designs based sole­ly on how well they sup­port users in achiev­ing their end goals. I pro­pose sup­port­ing expe­ri­ence goals is just as impor­tant. From there I try to make the case that any pow­er­ful expe­ri­ence is a play­ful one, where the user’s fun fol­lows from the feel­ing that he or she is learn­ing new stuff, is kick­ing ass, is in flow.
  3. Game design is not black mag­ic (any­more). In recent years a lot has become under­stood about how games work. They are built up out of game mechan­ics that each fol­low a pat­tern of action, sim­u­la­tion, feed­back and mod­el­ling. Design­ing play­ful IAs means tak­ing care that you encour­age dis­cov­ery, sup­port explo­ration and pro­vide feed­back on mastery.

Get the the slides, and a list of sources for the talk in this ear­li­er post.

Playful IAs — slides for my Euro IA Summit 2007 talk

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:

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.

Notables in the overlapping area of interaction and game design

With the Euro IA Sum­mit soon approach­ing and my pre­sen­ta­tion more or less done, I think it might be a good time to post a list of peo­ple I’ve found inspir­ing while work­ing on it. These are all per­sons who one way or the oth­er are work­ing in the over­lap­ping area of inter­ac­tion and game design (at least as far as I’m concerned.)

Katie Salen and Eric Zim­mer­man are the authors of the excel­lent book Rules of Play. This is arguably the foun­da­tion­al text on game design the­o­ry. It is so good even that much of it is read­i­ly applic­a­ble to the broad­er domain of inter­ac­tive media. 

Daniel Cook has writ­ten some thought-pro­vok­ing pieces on his blog regard­ing the appli­ca­tion of game design to inter­ac­tion design. I admire the way he com­bines an ana­lyt­i­cal mind with con­sid­er­able skill in visu­al arts, allow­ing him to com­mu­ni­cate his ideas in a very engag­ing way.

Raph Koster is the author of A The­o­ry of Fun for Game Design, a book I have yet to read. He’s the design­er of the ear­ly MMOG Ulti­ma Online and has since gone on to found his own com­pa­ny that is appar­ent­ly focussed on deliv­er­ing games every­where. He’s recent­ly pre­sent­ed some worth­while talks on the area where the games and inter­net indus­try meet.

There are more, but I’d just like to high­light these three because they’ve all pro­vid­ed their own frame­work for think­ing about games in such a way that it can be under­stood and used by rel­a­tive out­siders like me. Take a look at their work, and let me know what you think.

Finding playful patterns at dConstruct 2007

Fortune cookie with design wisdom and dConstruct 2007 bag

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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!)
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.

The toy-like nature of social media

A Barbie doll

I’ve been mean­ing to write about this for quite a while: I think a lot of social media are like toys. I think what we see with peo­ple (adults!) using them is a lot like the open-end­ed play we know from play­ground games in school. A lot of these games are about explor­ing (the pos­si­bil­i­ties of) social rela­tion­ships in a ‘safe’ con­text. Social media offer this same poten­tial. In play­ground games there is a nat­ur­al under­stand­ing that what hap­pens with­in the mag­ic cir­cle of the game is not real­ly real (but the notion is blurred.) A lot of dis­cus­sion about the vir­tu­al­i­ty of rela­tion­ships in social media does not acknowl­edge the exis­tence of such a thing: Either the rela­tion­ship you have with some­one is real (he’s a real friend, or even real fam­i­ly) or not, in which case the rela­tion­ship is often seen as val­ue-less. I’d argue that a lot of peo­ple use social media to explore the poten­tial of a rela­tion­ship in a more or less safe way, to lat­er either tran­si­tion it into real­ness or not (note that I do not mean it needs to be tak­en offline into meat-space to make it real!)

I think social media are so com­pelling to so many peo­ple for this rea­son. They allow them to play with the very stuff social rela­tions are made of. I think this fas­ci­na­tion is uni­ver­sal and vir­tu­al­ly time­less. At the same time I think the notion of using social play as the stuff of enter­tain­ment has seen a tremen­dous rise over the past decade. (I tend to illus­trate this point with the rise of real­i­ty TV.)

If you think of the design of social soft­ware as the design of a toy (in con­trast to think­ing of it as a game) you can design for open-end­ed play. Mean­ing there is no need for a quan­tifi­able end-state where one per­son (or a num­ber of peo­ple) are said to be the win­ner. You can how­ev­er cre­ate mul­ti­ple feed­back mech­a­nisms that com­mu­ni­cate poten­tial goals to be pur­sued to the play­er. Amy Jo Kim has a worth­while pre­sen­ta­tion on the kind of game mechan­ics to use in such a case (and also in the more game-like case.)

Final­ly, two things to think about and design for: 

  1. Play in social media hap­pens accord­ing to rules encod­ed in the soft­ware, but also very much fol­low­ing exter­nal rules that play­ers agree upon amongst themselves.
  2. You will have peo­ple gam­ing te game. Mean­ing, there will be play­ers who are inter­est­ed in cre­at­ing new exter­nal rules for social inter­ac­tions. Think of the alter­na­tive rules play­ers enforce in games of street soc­cer, for instance.

Update: Just thought this small quote of Michal Migurs­ki defend­ing the recent Twit­ter Blocks nice­ly com­ple­ments my argument: 

“There are plen­ty of but-use­less things in the world that serve as emo­tion­al bond­ing points, amuse­ments, attrac­tions, and macguffins. Prac­ti­cal­ly all of social media falls under this cat­e­go­ry for me, a form of medi­at­ed play that requires a sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief in ratio­nal pur­pose to succeed.”