Helping users retell experiences

A frame from a Second Life machinima

I talked about the dif­fer­ence between emer­gent and embed­ded nar­ra­tive in games a while ago. I also intro­duced my Inter­ac­tion 08 talk in a pre­vi­ous post. I’d like to now fol­low up with some thoughts on the sto­ry­telling that hap­pens out­side of a user’s direct inter­ac­tion with a prod­uct or ser­vice — the sto­ry­telling she engages in when recount­ing the expe­ri­ence of use to oth­er people.

Obvi­ous­ly, sup­port­ing the retelling of expe­ri­ences is impor­tant. After all if you’re offer­ing a cool prod­uct or ser­vice, you want oth­ers to know about it. A pas­sion­ate user is prob­a­bly your best advo­cate. It only makes sense for you to cre­ate easy ways for her to share her expe­ri­ences with oth­ers. It can also deep­en a user’s own expe­ri­ence — mak­ing the prod­uct or ser­vice part of a sto­ry where­in she is kick­ing ass can cre­ate a pos­i­tive feed­back loop.

Games have picked up on this, of course. They’ve employed numer­ous ways for users to retell their play-ses­sions. In Rules of Play, Salen and Zim­mer­man list a num­ber of them:

  1. The replay — found in rac­ing games for instance — lit­er­al­ly replays the actions of the play­er after she com­pletes a track, stage or lev­el. Some­times this is done in ways that would­n’t be prac­ti­cal in the game itself1 in all cas­es it is done in a way that fits the feel of the game, the expe­ri­ence the game aims for.
  2. Oth­er games take this one step fur­ther and allow play­ers to con­trol the view of the replay them­selves. They’ll also allow users to redis­trib­ute the record­ing of their actions. Doom did this, it was called the recam.
  3. A log­i­cal pro­gres­sion is found in the machin­i­ma phe­nom­e­non, where the play of a game takes a back-seat to the retelling of play, effec­tive­ly mak­ing the game a tool for per­son­al cre­ative expres­sion. A famous exam­ple are the many soap opera episodes pro­duced by play­ers of The Sims.
  4. Final­ly, with the advent of more embod­ied inter­ac­tions in gam­ing there’s an upsurge of online videos of game-play. Hav­ing an embod­ied inter­face makes it much eas­i­er for bystanders to ‘read’ what’s going on, effec­tive­ly open­ing the way for play to become like per­for­mance2.

How does this trans­late to the design of user expe­ri­ences in dig­i­tal and phys­i­cal prod­ucts? I think there are a few things that are impor­tant in the retelling of experiences:

  • The pro­tag­o­nist is the user, not your prod­uct. Your prod­uct or ser­vice is the enabler for the user to look cool in a story.
  • The way in which you enable retelling should be well-inte­grat­ed with the expe­ri­ence you’re aim­ing for. The recam made sense for Doom because it allowed play­ers to boast about their achievements.
  • You don’t have to cre­ate all the sto­ry­telling tools your­self. You should try to play nice with the stuff that’s already out there, such as pod-cast­ing ser­vices, video-blog­ging tools, sketch-cast­ing, pho­to-shar­ing etc.

Have good exam­ples of prod­ucts and ser­vices that help their users tell sto­ries about their expe­ri­ences? Let me know in the comments!

  1. For instance using dif­fer­ent cam­era angles, lens­es or fil­ters for a more dra­mat­ic look. []
  2. My favorite exam­ple being this video of a cou­ple of guys play­ing Gui­tar Hero. []

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.

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.

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?

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.

Mobile Social Play — my Reboot 9.0 proposal

Vadr

I’ve just sub­mit­ted my pro­pos­al for a talk at Reboot 9.0. It’s on the three areas I am most fas­ci­nat­ed with at the moment: mobile, social soft­ware and gaming/play. After attend­ing this great con­fer­ence twice it’d be real­ly cool to get the oppor­tu­ni­ty to present there.1

Take a look at it and let me know what you think2, I’d love to get some feed­back up-front so I can maybe work that in there. What do you want to know about this topic? 

Curi­ous what this might be like? Take a look at the Pecha Kucha I deliv­ered on mobile gam­ing for a taste of what’s to come.

  1. If it does­n’t work out I can always turn it into a micro pre­sen­ta­tion.
  2. If you like it, vote it up!