Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: September 29, 2010
Sebastien Deterding’s presentation, “Pawned: Gamification and Its Discontents”, from this year”s Playful conference, is up on Slideshare, and embedded below. Watch full-screen on Slideshare and read the notes at the bottom of each slide. (You may need to close the ads.) I made a few notes about the presentation in my write-up of Playful, but [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: September 17, 2010
This talk by Matt Leacock, the designer of the board game Pandemic, is fascinating both for the insight into the board game development process itself but also for generally applicable game mechanics. I’m doing it a great injustice by drawing a few points out, but hopefully the below acts as a teaser so you’ll watch [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: September 15, 2010
Soren Johnson has produced another post, previously published in Game Developer magazine, called The Social Revolution. In it he takes a look at some of the trends in social games such as Farmville and starts to think about how these might change the role of the game designer both in social and other games. I [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: September 10, 2010
A TEDtalk from Seth Priebatsch of Scvngr introducing some ideas of game dynamics applied to the real world. In the middle of the talk Seth claims there are seven game mechanics that “can get anyone to do anything”, and lists four of them: The Appointment Dynamic Players have to do something at a predefined time, [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: July 9, 2010
Commuters stuck in traffic when a motorway was closed near Manchester decided to use the empty carriageway as a makeshift football pitch: More details here.
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: July 1, 2010
The blog post by Woot about their acquisition by Amazon, which contains a letter from the CEO to all employees, is pretty good. But the monkey rapping video about the acquisition it is even better:
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: June 15, 2010
A while back I briefly wrote about Soren Johnson’s presentation “Theme is Not Meaning“, which was based on an article he’d written for Game Developer magazine. Now Soren has started putting the article into a blog post, so if you’d rather digest it in that form (and hear the analysis straight from the author) then [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: June 15, 2010
“The New Social Grind: Begging as Gameplay” is an interesting post on how social games are currently in a state of being “viral” by making players literally beg their friends for help. “That’s not viral except in the meanest, ugliest sense. Like Ebola”. It ties in with the analysis of Farmville as a web of [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: June 8, 2010
Flook is a location-based service with a fairly small userbase (apparently 50,000), but what’s interesting is that the service seems to be gaining a much stronger female than male following. According to the article on Flook in TechCrunch it’s around a 70/30 split. The idea behind Flook seems quite simple, and not far away from [...]
Posted by: Karl Bunyan on: June 1, 2010
An excellent animation to go with a recorded talk about how poor a profit is as a motivator. There’s a strong argument for purpose as a driver for both people and organisations. The video contains some interesting points, such as the experimental outcome that money is a task motivator if the task is manual but [...]
