"Gamification is the wrong word for the right idea. The word for what’s happening at the moment is pointsification. There are things that should be pointsified. There are things that should be gamified. There are things that should be both. There are many, many things that should be neither."

Is this progress?

Excellent presentation from Playful 2010.

"Raph Koster once said he became disillusioned with games because, after working to come up with a method to universally describe them, he realized that they're all basically math. And that's yet another reason why story games are so freaking cool - they aren't. (Well, technically they are, because the universe is math, but you know what I mean.) With D&D it's pretty easy to see through the story through to the underlying math. But with some of these story games, it's the story that matters - the math just pops up on occasion in service to the story, to resolve disagreements or escalate."

"I'm not willing to accept that it's impossible to create a legitimately enjoyable game experience in the confines of the short attention span Facebook model, though. Scrabble, for example, lends itself perfectly to asynchronous, light, casual play (cf Scrabulous, Words with Friends). But it's legitimately fun at the same time. You're rewarded for imaginative approaches to solving problems. You can play with no skill or lots, but either way, you'll always find ways to get better. Most important: You're genuinely spending time with your friends. Sharing an experience that creates a memory. This is a big deal. This is missing from almost every other pseudo-social game."

"Over the next decade we’ll see game mechanics become ubiquitous amongst companies. Consumers will migrate in droves to companies who properly deploy game mechanics because doing business with them is more fun, rewarding and even addictive." Makes me feel slightly queasy.

Reference. Refusal to actively compete/collect.

"My error in the first place was to think I could make a convincing argument on purely theoretical grounds. What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art. That was a foolish position to take, particularly as it seemed to apply to the entire unseen future of games. This was pointed out to me maybe hundreds of times. How could I disagree? It is quite possible a game could someday be great Art."

"Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver are sold with an included Pokéwalker, which is a pedometer that can provide neat extras in the Pokémon games. Pokéfans can put Pokémon in the device and also use it to find items along certain "routes." According to Bulbapedia, unlocking every route in the Pokéwalker can only be done by walking a minimum of 1,000 miles."

"An entire generation seems to have become used to experiences clogged with menus and text, spammed with awkward cutscenes, choked by voice acting, mangled by incongruent narrative, segmented by load times, stalled by informational messages. These elements serve to undermine the aesthetic coherence of the work -- they can dilute the magic, they can interrupt the flow, they can disrupt the basic audiovisual communication, they can break the spell."

This is brilliant. But argh, Farmville. "The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness."

"The unspoken premise of [Jesse Schell's] DICE 2010 lecture is that people are prisoners to external reward systems. "External reward" is practically a curse word to me, a thing I'm ever vigilant against. I don't need experience point systems giving me a false sense of mastery, or Xbox "achievements" for watching the opening movie of a game (that's a real one). But people absolutely are driven by external rewards. So much so that Schell doesn't even question it, he simply takes it as given."

"Are some games intentionally designed to keep you compulsively playing, even when you're not enjoying it? Oh, hell yes. And their methods are downright creepy."

"Why, then, did we throw everything we'd learned out the window when it came time to design achievements? I think that's what bothered me about early Xbox Live achievements more than anything — as goals, they violated too many game design guidelines. Too many of them wouldn't make any sense as in-game goals for progressing through content."

"A player's motivation is more complex than "to have fun." Think on it closely and you'll agree – everyone plays to scratch a particular itch, and some games serve some itches better than others. While plenty of the details are complex and subjective, it's possible to divide play motivations into four different groups."

"Because we are so fixated on what the next thing might be, we hurry to get the current thing out of the way, even if that means doing the minimum required rather than playing with style. In this sense, games’ standard strategies of motivation are strangely demotivating."

"Use our tools to author playable tracks. Upload and submit your tracks for review by the Rock Band Creators community. Approved tracks become available in the Rock Band Store and on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace*, and you get a cut of every purchase."

"To program songs for the game, you or your developer friend first needs a membership to Microsoft's XNA Creators' Club, which was launched a couple years ago to let independent developers create casual games to sell through the Xbox Live Marketplace; a membership costs $49.99 for four months or $99.99 for a year. You'll then be able to get free tools and instructions from the Rock Band Creators Web site to convert your master recordings to the MIDI charts used by the game."

"Area/Code takes advantage of today's environment of pervasive technologies and overlapping media to create new kinds of entertainment."

"Where this is all going is that the bigger and sandboxier games get, the more it is possible to play cat and mouse with the developers - to see if they have anticipated a particular response to stimuli, or whether unexpected actions can have a positive effect on gameplay - cheating without cheating, in effect."

"I Fight Dragons is Chicago's finest (and quite possibly only) NES-Rock band. They have very detailed delusions of grandeur, most of which include gross misuses of Nintendo products in combination with music in the Popular Rock genre."

Videogaming exhibition in Manchester.

"Enables [...] bookmakers and gaming companies to provide their services over a mobile device."

"A temporary social space that can be setup anywhere from a club night to a squatted art space. We build the ultimate retro gaming area, working with whatever space we have from single monitor setups to multiple projected screens and full size arcade machines."

"The player accumulates points by how much they stretch during gameplay. These points can be submitted online via a character called Sun to another character called Girl. Points submitted online by players to Girl will be added cumulatively, causing Girl to stretch. Beginning on Earth, Girl will stretch to the Moon, then to several other planets, each unlocking new playable environments for Boy to stretch in. The Noby Noby Boy team expects players to take between one and two weeks of cumulative play time to reach the Moon."

"Purchase and download DRM-free classic PC games."

"Urban game based on cameraphones and the use QR-Codes."

"He reveals the philosophy behind his successful flOw, the most-downloaded game on the PlayStation Network, and what led to the creation of Flower, thatgamecompany's follow-up."

"An alliance of creative folk - game designers, coders, writers - working together to create pro bono, pro-social games."

"The following lineup of innovation lessons emerged from a video game conference, an interview, and several experts’ comments."

"PMOG, which is currently in private beta with 150 or so users, is a Firefox add-on that lets you interact with other users asynchronously on websites you visit."

"When testing time came around, we found a way to make it fun… QA Deathmatch." Fun being a relative term in this instance.

"an attempt [...] to simulate the audio ambience of a crowded arcade room during the golden age of arcades in the 1980s."

"Pagulayan runs a testing lab for Bungie that looks more like a psychological research institute than a game studio. The room we're monitoring is wired with video cameras that Pagulayan can swivel around to record the player's expressions or see which but