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Danah Boyd on the need for user centred social design: “Would it be possible for a culture of profitable startups to emerge that focus on niche audiences by going after the practices and needs that they experience?”
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
links for 2008-02-25
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Spotted this at GDC, dangerously close to being convincingly real.
links for 2008-02-22
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Vlad Micu writes about GDC. Here’s a short report of my lecture (in Dutch). Vlad Micu schrijft over GDC. Hier een kort verslag van mijn presentatie.
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My friend Mark is moving to Copenhagen and looking for a job at “a company changing the world”. Check him out.
links for 2008-02-20
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My friends at CIID are organizing a cool event: “A 2-day symposium bringing together some of the most talented pioneers and practitioners of service design from all around the world.”
links for 2008-02-16
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“Aviary is a suite of web-based applications (RIAs) for people who create. From image editing to typography to music to 3D to video, we have a tool for artists of all genres.”
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“Soundsnap is the best platform to find and share free sound effects and loops- legally. It is a collection of original sounds made or recorded by its users, and not songs or sound FX found on commercial libraries or sample CD’s.”
GDC and another interview
This Saturday I’ll be jumping on a plane to San Francisco. As mentioned earlier, I’ll be attending the Game Developers Conference. I have a session at the GDC Mobile sub-conference elegantly titled “Designing a Casual Social Gaming Experience for Generation C”. Read more about my session on the conference site. It’ll basically be 1/3 crash course on the social web, 1/3 rant on mobile gaming and 1/3 talk about enabling creative expression through games. We’ll see how it goes.
I’ll be in SF the full week (flying back the next weekend) so if you happen to be around, and feel like hanging out, do drop me a line. (Your best bet is an email to “kars” at this domain or d-ing me on Twitter.)
Finally, if that isn’t enough self-promotion for one post, (I’m risking a mass unsubscribe here) I was interviewed a second time for the Playyoo blog. Head over there for some talk about the Game Creator—a tool I designed for them that allows people to customise classic games and publish them to mobile:
“And then there are the games that are entirely personal. They make no sense to you or me, only to the person who created it and their friends. For example, I saw one variation of Lunar Lander where you need to land a crab on someone’s, let’s say Debbie’s, head. Now, I have no idea who Debbie is, but I can imagine Debbie is a friend or sister of the game’s creator. And it must have been a lot of fun for them to include the picture, and then have an easy way to distribute it to their friends.”
links for 2008-02-09
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“Surely […] if it was Yahoo who was the dominant player, we would be regularly extolling the virtues of [their] design expertise.”
links for 2008-02-08
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“Pressing the button makes the kodo move in the direction it is facing. If a Kodo is left standing still for a short while, it will automatically rotate to a new direction. This allows many players to play simultaneously on a single phone.”
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Peter Bogaards links to a nice piece by Buxton about how he got started in ‘HCI’.
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“The 4 Fun Keys create games’ four most important emotions: 1. Hard Fun: Fiero – in the moment personal triumph over adversity 2. Easy Fun: Curiosity 3. Serious Fun: Relaxation and excitement 4. People Fun: Amusement”
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A guy gets his laptop confiscated by Danish police: ‘We traced the transaction back to the wireless network in this apartment.’ ‘But we have an open wireless connection. It’s unsecured.’ ‘The internet doesn’t work that way.’ ‘What? Wait. What?’
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“[A] new theme for [Wordpress]: Prologue. Imagine it like a group Twitter.”
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“How is life offline? Logout and do stuff in the real world for once. Tell us about it. Repeats on the first friday each month, or whenever you feel like it.” Wonderful idea. I’ve been doing this for a while now every other weekend or so.
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1st in a 4-part series of reviews by Saffer of a book I will have to read. The descriptions of how practitioners frame problems and their own practice feel very familiar. I myself seem to be struggling with at least 2 frames: interaction and game design.
links for 2008-02-07
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I was too lazy to listen to this interview with Thackara earlier but honestly it’s just 10 mins and well worth it. “Designers feel a weight of responsibility becasue they suffer from delusions of grandeur…” Via Alexandra and Jeff Howard.
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A site archiving lots and lots of documentation from Atari’s history. Recent additions include a 60 page memo on Centipede. Wonderful, wonderful stuff well worth a look for interaction designers
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“You are a deer. So are the other players. You meet each other in an endless forest on the internet. The setting is idyllic, the atmosphere peaceful. You communicate with one another through sounds and body language.”
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Webb might not see himself as a designer but this is required viewing/reading for designers as far as I’m concerned. Lots of goodness here but I’ll pick 1 thing: The motivations flowchart are interesting and remind me of the skill chains from game design.
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“Snap is a simple human interface to common actions, on a website or desktop application.” Smart interaction pattern thought up bu Webb and prototyped by Armitage.
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Tom Armitage shares his side of the story about Snap (“Syndicated Next Action Pattern”) for which he built a prototype application called Dentrassi: “A simple, hacky approach that exists beats any amount of RFC-drafting and hypothesising.”