Games & Learning
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
3/8/11: Gamification – Rajat Paharia | GS&P Digital Education
Description of Class Students will learn about optimizing user behavior through the technique of gamification – the use of game mechanics in non-gaming contexts to influence and motivate user participation, engagement and loyalty. We’ll cover the basic game mechanics, why and how they work, and look at several examples of them being used in live applications across a variety of industries. Rajat Paharia – Founder & Chief Product Officer, Bunchball (SF)Gamify Your Lessons
Game Dynamics
Examples of good design
Richard A. Bartle: Players Who Suit MUDs
Four approaches to playing MUDs are identified and described. These approaches may arise from the inter-relationship of two dimensions of playing style: action versus interaction, and world-oriented versus player-oriented. An account of the dynamics of player populations is given in terms of these dimensions, with particular attention to how to promote balance or equilibrium. This analysis also offers an explanation for the labelling of MUDs as being either "social" or "gamelike". Most MUDs can trace their lineage directly back to Trubshaw's 1978 game ( Bartle, 1990b ; Burka, 1995 ) and, perhaps because of this heritage, the vast majority are regarded as "games" by their "players". For the convenience of its readers, this paper continues to view MUDs in this tradition; however, it should be noted that MUDs can be of considerable value in non-game (ie.
The real title of this post is “Game mechanics for thinking users of non gaming, not necessarily social, non trivial applications”. But that’s not very good copy, I realize. Anyway. There is a lot of discussion these days about game mechanics, and often the discussion assumes a restrictive concept of the field, reducing it to badges and frequent flyer miles / redeeming mechanics. I even read an entire book supposedly on game mechanics but actually discussing exclusively in these restrictive terms, which left me bored and depressed (it is in the references). There is game mechanics for trapping users in online poker and game mechanics for relieving complexity.
Game mechanics for thinking users « Web Worker's (Freak) Anthropology
Some companies keep a playbook of product tips, tricks and trade secrets. Zynga has an internal playbook, for instance, that is a collection of “concepts, techniques, know-how and best practices for developing successful and distinctive social games”. Zynga’s playbook has entered the realm of legend and was even the subject of a lawsuit. SCVNGR , which makes a mobile game with real-world challenges , has a playdeck.
SCVNGR’s Secret Game Mechanics Playdeck
Windows
Superstruct was a massively multiplayer forecasting game, created by the Institute for the Future, and played by more than 8000 citizen future-forecasters from September - November 2008.
Welcome to the Superstruct Game Archive
Evoke Social Game
Greetings EVOKE agents, Over the summer we completed another round of EVOKE for almost 40 classrooms with players from Australia, Bolivia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Morroco, Nepal, New Zealand, Peru, Philippines, South Africa, Taiwan, Uganda, USA, and Zambia. During this phase players created over 2,000 new blog posts. Congratulations to all new agents for sharing [...] Greetings EVOKE agents.
Gamification and Games
[In Ernest Adams' latest Gamasutra column, he digs into difficulty levels in games, interestingly suggesting that player-set difficulty can, in many cases, be preferable to dynamic difficulty settings.] I just finished reading a book called Interactive Storytelling , by Andrew Glassner. While the first couple of hundred pages contain useful introductions to both storytelling and game design (for the novice, anyway), the book has some serious flaws and I can't really recommend it. But along the way, Glassner digresses into a variety of other subjects, and one of them is settable difficulty levels. He's against them.
Features - The Designer's Notebook: Difficulty Modes and Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment
Game with DDA