Tag: GD

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. [↩]

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!

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.

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.”

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?

The experience of playful IAs

Solving a Rubik's Cube

It’s time for a short update on my thinking about Playful IAs (the topic of my Euro IA Summit talk). One of the under-served aspects so far is the actual user experience of an architecture that is playful.

Brian Sutton-Smith describes a model describing the ways in which games are experienced in his book Toys as Culture. I first came across this book in (not surprisingly) Rules of Play. He lists five aspects:

  1. Visual scanning
  2. Auditory discrimination
  3. Motor responses
  4. Concentration
  5. Perceptual patterns of learning

Of most importance to my subject is the 5th one.

Game design, like the design of emergent IAs is a 2nd order design problem. You can only shape the user’s experience indirectly. One of the most important sources of pleasure for the user is the way you offer feedback on the ways he or she has explored and discovered the information space.

Obviously, I’m not saying you should make the use of your service deliberately hard. However, what I am saying is that if you’re interested in offering a playful experience on the level of IA, then Sutton-Smith’s perceptual patterns of learning is the best suited experiential dimension.

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.