Gameify

Points = cheating.

These are the Pokewalker things that are supposed to encourage gamer geeks to get out of the house. But instead. . .

I wish Posterous would fix their bookmarklet for movies. I can't see the text under the movie, so there's probably typos.

Authentic.

Art games FTW.

How Blippy used BJ Fogg's Behaviour Change grid to make Blippy more sticky. That was a very lazy para-rhyme rather than an accurate description of the deck - and now I've had to write this disclaimer.

Table 5.1. The Factors That Promote Intrinsic Motivation.
Factor	Description	Related Guidelines
Challenge	People are best motivated when they are working toward personally meaningful goals whose attainment requires activity at a continuously optimal (intermediate) level of difficulty.	Set personally meaningful goals. Make attainment of goals probable but uncertain. Give enroute performance feedback. Relate goals to learners' self esteem.
Curiosity	Something in the physical environment attracts the learner's attention or there is an optimal level of discrepancy between present knowledge or skills and what these could be if the learner engaged in some activity.	Stimulate sensory curiosity by making abrupt changes that will be perceived by the senses. Stimulate cognitive curiosity by making a person wonder about something (i.e., stimulate the learner's interest).
Control	People have a basic tendency to want to control what happens to them.	Make clear the cause-and-effect relationships between what students are doing and things that happen in real life. Enable the learners to believe that their work will lead to powerful effects. Allow learners to freely choose what they want to learn and how they will learn it.
Fantasy	Learners use mental images of things and situations that are not actually present to stimulate their behavior.	Make a game out of learning. Help learners imagine themselves using the learned information in real- life settings. Make the fantasies intrinsic rather than extrinsic.
Competition	Learners feel satisfaction by comparing their performance favorably to that of others.	Competition occurs naturally as well as artificially. Competition is more important for some people than for others. People who lose at competition often suffer more than the winners profit. Competition sometimes reduces the urge to be helpful to other learners.
Cooperation	Learners feel satisfaction by helping others achieve their goals.	Cooperation occurs naturally as well as artificially. Cooperation is more important for some people than for others. Cooperation is a useful real-life skill. Cooperation requires and develops interpersonal skills.
Recognition	Learners feel satisfaction when others recognize and appreciate their accomplishments.	Recognition requires that the process or product or some other result of the learning activity be visible. Recognition differs from competition in that it does not involve a comparison with the performance of someone else.

 

From a fantastic website on all things motivation. Well worth clicking through, highly recommended, it's really good, splendid.

After all, without punishing failure, how does one sufficiently incentivize success? Punishment as a consequence for failure creates a fear of that failure, lending urgency and emotional weight to the challenge. But is that really true? Does punishment motivate, or frustrate? Does punishment create fear or annoyance?

"Creating real fear requires immersion, and sending the player back to the loading screen kills that. A second ago they were afraid for their lives. Now they remember they're in their living room, it's all just a game, and the danger was never real to begin with. You can threaten them all you like but once you actually kill the character, the player will remember you're all bark and no bite because you can't really hurt them. The worst you can do is stop them from progressing in the game, which just isn't all that terrifying."
—Shamus Young (again), You Don't Scare Me

Punishment isn't scary, but it's certainly unpleasant. It's annoying and often repetitive, and it's also insulting.

Yep.

I can also understand the appeal of the ‘metagame’ around Achievements, even though the way some people seem to view it as some kind of score run is really pointless, as the best way to get a high gamerscore is simply to buy lots of games and spend lots of time playing them. The idea that your total Achievement score is much more than a ‘time & money spent gaming’ indicator (a gaming experience counter if you like) is really rather silly to me. Only rarely do Achievements show any real measure of skill

It's difficult to work out whether this is a bug or a feature when it comes to things like education. Are 'employers' interested in skill or the time people have put in, for instance?

In any community, do we want to reward the really great contributions or the really great contributors? There is a subtle but important difference here.

In the money-making casual games world, it's obvious - we want the people who've put in the effort. Not so obvious in any other arena, though.

Does it need to make this little sense or has it been a long day?

People don't become gamers to save the world (most play to escape from the anxiety of things that matter) but that doesn't mean you can't trick them into doing it inadvertently.

She's kind of a nut job but she's on the right track for making the world more streamlined

Been wading through a whole lot of stuff on Jane McGonigal's TED talk today, and this seems to be fairly typical. (This is a comment from a post that's way more negative.)

I like nutjobs.

I think Jane McGonigal's point is that there is an attitude to endeavour, failure and ambition in games that would be healthy to see in real life.

This is good enough for me, so I'm going to stick with that.

There's a big round-up of all the kind of things people have been saying about gameification and Epic Wins here, at the main blog.

VR stands for 'variable reinforcement'. It means that in experiments by behaviourists the most effective way of conditioning animals was to introduce an element of randomness into their condition/reward experiments. Like one-armed bandits.

It comes from this post on how this might spoil games (and game players).

Timbuktu is a game of loss management. Players start the game as rich as they are ever going to be.  Each turn, players are likely to lose a token or two to the robbers, or sacrifice a token to make a special move that will hopefully prevent bigger loses. 

I think the reason the game generates so much suspense is that psychologists tell us that most people feel the pain of loss more than they feel the joy of an equal gain.  If many people were given the opportunity to flip a coin, and win $100 if the coin lands heads up – and lose $25 if the coin lands tails up – many people would forego the opportunity because they could not stand the emotional pain of losing $25.  Even though the payout more than justifies the risk, the bet would be too emotionally stressful for many folks.  In Timbuktu, players are faced with loss every turn of the game, and it can be emotionally painful.  Of course, it also feels good when you escape from a turn with little or no losses. 

Game design is – among other things – emotional management.  The designer hopes his game will stimulate the emotions as well as the reasoning abilities of his players.  By this standard, Timbuktu succeeds.  I spent the game dreading big losses that never actually materialized.  In fact, I won the game.  But the final feeling wasn’t so much one of triumph as simple relief

Kris Hall describes the game as generating tension, due to its loss avoidance mechanic, and it's interesting to note where 'tension' comes in Nicole Lazarro's typology of fun:

It doesn't. Can a game be driven by pure tension? Films can, sort of, occasionally. But games?