Tag: games

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.

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.”

Design challenges for short-session gaming

Screenshot of a particularly funny Elite Beat Agents sequence

I’ve just fin­ished read­ing an excel­lent series of post by two video game jour­nal­ists on the appar­ent revival of short-ses­sion games. (What’s not to love about an arti­cle that fin­ishes by assert­ing that Desk­top Tow­er Defense beats BioShock at its own mechan­ic?) It’ll be in tomor­row’s link post but here’s the link any­way. Being involved with a casu­al gam­ing project myself late­ly, I’ve spent a some time think­ing about what the design chal­lenges for this sub-genre are. In oth­er words: what make short-ses­sion games hard to pull off? I think it breaks down to these things:

  1. You need to get the play­er in flow as soon as pos­si­ble. This means you can’t both­er him with lengthy intros (or even menus). It also means the game’s mechan­ics should be as self-explana­to­ry as pos­si­ble. I’m remind­ed of the first time I start­ed up Elite Beat Agents the oth­er day and was giv­en a super-short tuto­r­i­al on how to play the game, then was dumped into the action right away (this is good).
  2. No sto­ries please. Short-ses­sion gam­ing forces you to design for play, not for nar­ra­tive (as it should be, in my opin­ion). It’s about giv­ing the play­er an engag­ing activ­i­ty and inter­est­ing choic­es, noth­ing more.
  3. Tra­di­tion­al dis­tri­b­u­tion mod­els make no sense for small games. Luck­i­ly, we now have net­work con­nec­tiv­i­ty on vir­tu­al­ly all gam­ing devices (not to men­tion PCs and mobile phones). The wait is for an open plat­form for game devel­op­ers to exper­i­ment on while at the same time being able to make a buck. But even now, net­worked mar­ket­places on con­soles have encour­aged experimentation.
  4. The visu­al lay­er does not have to be retro. Although most short-ses­sion game expe­ri­ences remind us of the good old games from the begin­ning days of elec­tron­ic gam­ing, there’s no rea­son why these games should look retro. 
  5. Throw some of that pro­cess­ing at the rules, not the visu­als. Short-ses­sion, small and sim­ple don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean crude. Don’t go all-out on my 4th point’s visu­als with­out for­get­ting about all the cool com­plex behav­iours you can cre­ate with today’s processors.

There’s much more to think and talk about, but I think these are the high­lights. Par­tic­u­lar­ly get­ting peo­ple into flow ASAP and cou­pling this with inter­est­ing dis­tri­b­u­tion mech­a­nisms is I think worth some more discussion.

Mirroring mental models — games modelling players

Will Wright demoing Spore at TED 2007

Today I sent in the slides of my Euro IA Sum­mit pre­sen­ta­tion for the pro­ceed­ings. The rough out­line of my talk is done, the most impor­tant thing now is to find the prop­er exam­ples to illus­trate all the fuzzy the­o­ret­i­cal think­ing. That means (at least for me) doing a lot of Flickr pho­to search­es. This time I’ll also be exper­i­ment­ing with using some short video-clips. Games are bet­ter seen in motion after all (and best expe­ri­enced through play of course). Chron­i­cling my think­ing on the sub­ject of play­ful IAs on this blog has been very help­ful in organ­is­ing my thoughts by the way, I’ll def­i­nite­ly try it again the next time I need to do a talk.

On mental models

One idea I man­aged to squeeze into the pre­sen­ta­tion in addi­tion to the stuff I’ve been blog­ging about so far is about men­tal mod­els. I think it was Ben Cer­ve­ny who men­tioned in his Reboot 7.0 talk (MP3) that some of the plea­sure of play­ing games is derived from the grad­ual men­tal mod­el build­ing a play­er goes through. The play­er uses the visu­al lay­er of a game to learn about the under­ly­ing struc­tures. When a play­er mas­ters a game, the visu­al lay­er more or less fades away and becomes a sym­bol­ic land­scape through which he manip­u­lates a far rich­er mod­el of the game in his mind.

From a UX per­spec­tive because usu­al­ly when design­ing web sites and apps we try to adhere to exist­ing men­tal mod­els as much as pos­si­ble to pre­vent con­fu­sion and frus­tra­tion. This is a very valid approach of course. How­ev­er, regard­less of how well done the UX design, there will always be some men­tal mod­el­ling on the user’s part. Best make this as engag­ing as pos­si­ble I guess. This, again, is where games come in.

Will Wright acknowl­edges the fact that play­ers build mod­els of a game but he pro­pos­es to take it one step fur­ther. In an old(ish) talk at Accel­er­at­ing Change 2004 he pro­posed the idea that a game can con­struct a mod­el of the play­er as well. Par­al­lels with online rec­om­men­da­tion engines are appar­ent here. As Wright points out, in games (as in web envi­ron­ments) every­thing can be mea­sured. This way, the expe­ri­ence can be tai­lored to a player/user. He’s apply­ing this prin­ci­ple in the upcom­ing Spore, where game con­tent (cre­at­ed by oth­er play­ers) is dynam­i­cal­ly includ­ed based on inferred play­er preferences.

It can be argued that cer­tain web pro­fes­sion­als are way ahead of the games indus­try in this field. Per­haps there are some inter­est­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for col­lab­o­ra­tion or career moves here?

Learning about emergence from games

A game of Go

I’m still try­ing to get a grip on why I think games are such a good ref­er­ence point for IAs and IxDs. I’ll try to take anoth­er stab at it in this post. Pre­vi­ous­ly I wrote about how games might be a good way to ‘sell’ algo­rith­mic archi­tec­tures to your client. Even if you’re not active­ly push­ing your clients to adopt ideas such as on-the-fly cre­ation of site nav­i­ga­tion, soon­er or lat­er I’m con­vinced you’ll find your­self con­front­ed with a project where you’re not asked to devel­op a defin­i­tive infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture. Instead you’ll be charged with the task to come up with mech­a­nisms to gen­er­ate these pro­ce­du­ral­ly. When this is this case, you’re tru­ly fac­ing a sec­ond-order design prob­lem. How can games help here? 

One of the defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics of games are their com­plex­i­ty. A few years ago Ben Cer­ve­ny gave a bril­liant talk on play (MP3) at Reboot 7.0 and men­tioned this specif­i­cal­ly — that much of the plea­sure derived from game-play is the result of the play­er com­ing to terms with com­plex pat­terns. This com­plex­i­ty is some­thing dif­fer­ent from pure ran­dom­ness and most cer­tain­ly dif­fer­ent from a ‘mere’ state machine. In oth­er words, games show emergence.

There are many exam­ples of emer­gent sys­tems. The Game of Life springs to mind. This sys­tem isn’t real­ly a game but shows a remark­able rich­ness in pat­terns, despite (or maybe because of) the fact that it is based on a set of decep­tive­ly sim­ple rules (which appar­ent­ly took its cre­ator, John Con­way, over 2 years to per­fect!) The thing is though, The Game of Life is not interactive. 

A won­der­ful exam­ple of a com­plex emer­gent sys­tem that is inter­ac­tive is the real game Go. It has a set of very sim­ple rules, but play­ing it well takes a huge amount of prac­tice. The joy of play­ing Go for me (an absolute begin­ner) is large­ly due to dis­cov­er­ing the many dif­fer­ent per­mu­ta­tions play can go through. 

So get­ting back to my ear­li­er remark: If you’re con­vinced you’ll need to get a bet­ter han­dle on solv­ing the sec­ond-order design prob­lems pre­sent­ed by the design of com­plex emer­gent sys­tems, games are an excel­lent place to start learn­ing. They are emer­gent first and inter­ac­tive sec­ond, the per­fect twin to the web envi­ron­ments we’ll be shap­ing in the future.

UX and the aesthetics of interactivity

Tetris cookies

I’ve been try­ing to reg­u­lar­ly post some thoughts on the top­ic of play­ful IA here. Pre­vi­ous­ly I blogged about how games could be a use­ful frame for think­ing about com­plex algo­rith­mic archi­tec­tures. Last week I post­ed some thoughts on the appli­ca­tion of game mechan­ics in web apps. There, Rahul was kind enough to point me to the fas­ci­nat­ing blog of ‘Danc’ Daniel Cook, titled Lost Gar­den, where there is one post in par­tic­u­lar that res­onates with my own pre-occu­pa­tions lately.

In ‘Short thoughts on games and inter­ac­tion design’ (which hon­est­ly isn’t that short) Danc Cook looks at some of the ways game design tech­niques can be applied to the inter­ac­tion design of web apps. In sum­ma­ry, accord­ing to Danc Cook game design tech­niques allow you to:

  1. Cre­ate an engag­ing expe­ri­ence that goes beyond sim­ply com­plet­ing a task efficiently.
  2. Sup­port free and deep explo­ration and intro­duce and teach new inter­ac­tions that vio­late conventions.

Some things you should­n’t bor­row from games with­out giv­ing it a lot of thought are:

  1. Spa­tial metaphors
  2. Visu­al themes

These are some of the things most peo­ple think of first as char­ac­ter­is­tic of games but real­ly, they are only sur­face, super­fi­cial, not deter­mi­nant of the actu­al inter­ac­tiv­i­ty of the system.

I think one of the great­est argu­ments for a deep­er under­stand­ing of games by inter­ac­tion design­ers, infor­ma­tion archi­tects and oth­er user expe­ri­ence spe­cial­ists is that they are the medi­um that is all about the aes­thet­ics of inter­ac­tiv­i­ty. It is true that they have no util­i­tar­i­an char­ac­ter, they aim to cre­ate a plea­sur­able expe­ri­ence through sys­tems of risks and rewards, restraints and free­doms, nest­ed feed­back loops and on and on. As a UX prac­ti­tion­er, it can nev­er hurt to have a deep appre­ci­a­tion of the aes­thet­ics of the medi­um you work in dai­ly (beyond sim­ply sup­port­ing user goals, or sell­ing prod­uct, or whatever).

Game mechanics in web apps

A while ago there was a dis­cus­sion on the IAI mem­bers list about game mechan­ics on web sites. Andrew Hin­ton point­ed to the Google Image Label­er and LinkedIn’s ‘pro­file com­plete­ness’ sta­tus bar and asked: “Can any­one else think of a use of a game mechan­ic like this to jump-start this kind of activ­i­ty?” (Where “this kind of activ­i­ty” is basi­cal­ly defined as some­thing peo­ple would­n’t nor­mal­ly do for its own sake, like say tag­ging images.)

I was think­ing about this for a while the past week and seem to have end­ed up at the following:

Profile completeness status bar on LinkedIn

On LinkedIn, hav­ing a (more or less com­plete) pro­file pre­sum­ably serves some extrin­sic goal. I mean, by doing so you maybe hope you’ll land a new job more eas­i­ly. By slap­ping a sta­tus bar onto the pro­file that gives feed­back on its com­plete­ness, the assump­tion is that this will stim­u­late you to fill it out. In oth­er words, LinkedIn seems unsure about the pres­ence of extrin­sic moti­va­tions and is intro­duc­ing an intrin­sic one: get­ting a 100% ‘com­plete’ pro­file and as such mak­ing a game (in a very loose sense of the term) out of its pro­fes­sion­al net­work ser­vice. A good idea? I’m not sure… 

Screenshot of Google Image Labeler

On Google Image Label­er, the start­ing point for its design was to come up with a way to have peo­ple add meta-data to images. Google actu­al­ly ‘bought’ the game (orig­i­nal­ly called The ESP Game) from CAPTCHA inven­tor Luis von Ahn, who before that did reCAPTCHA and after went on to cre­ate Peek­a­boom and Phetch. Any­way, in the case of the Image Label­er (con­trary to LinkedIn) there was no real extrin­sic goal to begin with so a game had to be cre­at­ed. Sim­ply hav­ing fun is the only rea­son peo­ple have when labelling images. 

Note that Flickr for instance has found oth­er ways to get peo­ple to tag images. What hap­pened there is (I think) a very nice way of align­ing extrin­sic goals with intrin­sic (fun, game-like) ones.

‘Pure’ games by their very nature have only intrin­sic goals, they are arti­fi­cial and non-util­i­tar­i­an. When you con­sid­er intro­duc­ing game-like mechan­ics into your web site or appli­ca­tion (which pre­sum­ably serves some exter­nal pur­pose, like shar­ing pho­tos) think care­ful­ly about the extrin­sic moti­va­tions your users will have and come up with game-like intrin­sic ones that rein­force these.

Update: Alper fin­ished the LinkedIn pro­file com­plete­ness game and was dis­ap­point­ed to find there is no pot of gold at the end of the rain­bow, mir­ror­ing the expe­ri­ence many play­ers of real games have when fin­ish­ing a game.

Possibility spaces and algorithmic architectures

A screenshot of Sim City.

One of the con­cepts I plan on explor­ing in my talk at the Euro IA Sum­mit in Barcelona is ‘pos­si­bil­i­ty spaces’. It’s a term used by Will Wright to describe his view of what a game can be — a space that offers mul­ti­ple routes and out­comes to its explor­er. That idea maps nice­ly with one def­i­n­i­tion of play that Zim­mer­man and Salen offer in Rules of Play: ‘free move­ment with­in a rigid struc­ture’. Some exam­ples of pos­si­bil­i­ty spaces cre­at­ed by Wright are the well-known games Sim City and The Sims.

I think the idea of pos­si­bil­i­ty spaces can help IAs to get a firmer grip on ways to real­ize infor­ma­tion spaces that are mul­ti-dimen­sion­al and (to use a term put for­ward by Jesse James Gar­rett) algo­rith­mic. Algo­rith­mic archi­tec­tures accord­ing to Gar­rett are cre­at­ed ‘on the fly’ based on a set of rules (algo­rithms) that get their input (ide­al­ly) from user behav­iour. The exam­ple he uses to explain this con­cept is Ama­zon.

I’ve found myself in sev­er­al projects recent­ly that would have ben­e­fit­ed from an algo­rith­mic approach. The hard thing is to explain its charms to clients and to get a uni­fied vision of what it means across to the design team. I believe games might be a use­ful anal­o­gy. What do you think?

See me talk on mobile social play at Reboot 9.0

I got awe­some news the oth­er day: my pro­pos­al for a talk at Reboot 9.0 has been accept­ed. I’m very hon­oured (and a lit­tle ner­vous) to be pre­sent­ing at a con­fer­ence with so many smart atten­dees. Now to get my act togeth­er and cre­ate a kick-ass presentation. 

If you have any­thing relat­ed to this (pret­ty broad) top­ic that you’d want me to address, please do leave a note in the comments.

One thing’s for sure: I’ll try to build upon what has gone before at pre­vi­ous Reboots, such as Ben Cer­veny’s mind-blow­ing overview (MP3) of how play is essen­tial­ly becom­ing a new lan­guage for us to com­mu­ni­cate with and TL Tay­lor’s great talk on the dynam­ics of vir­tu­al worlds.

What I will be address­ing is still slight­ly unclear to me, but the direc­tion I’m head­ed is: 

  1. Games can be social play, which means they can be used to forge and exper­i­ment with social rela­tions in a ‘safe’ way. This hap­pens whether you design for it or not, but can be nurtured.
  2. When games go mobile, the bor­ders of the space and time in which a game is played are blurred. In this way, games bleed over into cul­ture in a grad­ual way.

Enough to chew on for one talk, I guess. Again, any ques­tions, com­ments and sug­ges­tions are more than wel­come. See you all at Reboot 9.0.