Knowing and Making

In between work on some more serious posts (not to mention the day job), let me post a brief comment on Margaret Robertson's article on gamification, " Can't play, won't play ". It was written a year ago, so I'm not expecting to provoke an intense debate, but the same argument could easily be made today and it's worth responding to. In short, Margaret claims: gamification isn’t gamification at all. What we’re currently terming gamification is in fact the process of taking the thing that is least essential to games and representing it as the core of the experience. Points and badges have no closer a relationship to games than they do to websites and fitness apps and loyalty cards. Her preferred vision of games is: Games manage to produce [rich cognitive, emotional and social] drivers by being complex, responsive mechanisms. Games set their players goals and then make attaining those goals interestingly hard. My involvement and interest in games is much ...

I found a meme from some game designer friends and acquaintances who have posted "Five things I'm thinking right now": Alice , Dan , Kim and dwlt  [ Update : Also Ian , Matt , Ben and Hilary ]. I've deliberately not read their lists yet, so as not to bias my own thoughts. Another three hours of TV tonight - all entertaining enough, some of it informative, and I can even justify half of it for work. But it is cognitively poisonous. It consumes the energy of attention that could have been channelled into some long-term objective. Thinking is quite hard work, and my curiosity means that silence calls me into thought. Therefore, I resist silence. TV, or even background music, occupies that curiosity with minor mental stimulations which prevent me having to actually think. They make life comfortable, but not constructive. In fact, I believe that TV, like twitter or Facebook, is literally addictive in exactly the same cognitive sense that cigarettes or alcohol are. I ...

They keep on doing it! Our friends (and now clients) at Six to Start have won another South by Southwest award - this year it's Best Game . The prize is for Smokescreen , "a cutting-edge game about life online", developed with Channel 4. The credits  are about four pages long, but congratulations particularly to those I know personally: Adrian Hon, Dan Hon, Claire Bateman, Margaret Robertson, Lisa Long, Dave Aldhouse, Heather Tyrrell and Alex Chapman. One prize might  be regarded as fortune...to win two looks like carefulness . I'm sure many of you will enjoy the project we're doing with Six to Start if it does go into production. I'd love to tell you about it but then I'd have to...send you to this xkcd cartoon .

I met the very interesting Margaret Robertson yesterday to talk about games and behavioural economics. Browsing her site I found this article from 2008 : Psychometric tests - widely used, but also widely criticised for being too formulaic and too easy to cheat - seem a poor and clumsy tool compared to the kind of insight a well designed game can give you into someone's ability and character. Any online gaming veteran knows how quickly games reveal whether someone's a risk-taker or a banker, impetuous or strategic, obedient or rebellious - and how hard it is to fake your responses in the heat of the moment. I wonder how true that is. Do games - instead of revealing "real character" instead show up people's lack of competence at real life? What I mean is: in most situations there is an optimal, "rational" level of risk to take. Businesses would like their employees to take that amount of risk, no more and no less. Games are generally simple enough th...