And then there’s the relationship between us, the communication barrier that separates us, and the empathy that allows us to understand each other in spite of that.…

Both games I’ve helped design, "Journey" and "WAY", attempt to herd two strangers toward friendship. And both do it in similar and different ways.

But how do we do that? How do we design so friendship will emerge? And what is friendship really?…

What I’m interested in, is that spontaneous bond between strangers. I want to focus on online multiplayer that emphasizes shared goals, freedom of choice, anonymity, vulnerability, and communication.…

What were the seeds of my connections?…investment & responsibility…high stakes & real consequences…empathy…vulnerability…free choice…teaching…communication…

If the world isn’t valuing what we consider significant, we have the responsibility to create worlds that do.…

It’s what you choose to make that reveals who you are..."

"[Saint] Augustine wrote: 'People will venture out to the height of the mountain to seek for wonder. They will stand and stare at the width of the ocean to be filled with wonder. But they will pass one another in the street and feel nothing. Yet every individual is a miracle. How strange that nobody sees the wonder in one another.'"

"And because we are mostly lonely as human beings the desire to be accepted by others is so strong. When people experience a shared sense of loneliness their immediate reaction is to reach out and make contact. I would imagine anyone who is creating something is searching for connection.""

"…only three ways to create valuable games for adults…intellectually…emotionally…by creating a social environment…"

"Stephanie Morgan, game producer to the game stars, stops in to chat with Mike and Katie about hot spots, self-flagellation, and not about casino buffets. When they have a few minutes, they discuss "gamification" in it's most meaningful as well as its most useless forms. Stephanie shares her past as a professional card player and some deep analysis of gameplay. This show rocks. As a bonus, Katie doesn't actually throw up in this episode, but Mike tries his hardest to instigate."

“I think twitter is a really interesting example of a very tightly honed game play loop.” [As pointed out here: http://twitter.com/litherland/status/182277474724491264 ]

"Copenhagen Game Collective is a multi-gender, multi-national, non-profit game design collective based in Copenhagen, Denmark. The collective comprises a network of people and companies interested in independent game culture. Our members include creative individuals first of all, but also small companies, non-commercial interest groups, and game communicators and disseminators.

We play, exhibit, create, and care about games of all types – digital or otherwise – with a slant towards types of play that the game industry’s big boys can’t or won’t address. The diversity of our exhibits and game projects reflects our belief that creativity breeds creativity. The loose structure of the collective, encompassing a network of developers and collaborators, aims to create synergies between all our various projects."

"A world is more than a space, more than a place; it is something to inhabit & be inhabited by. What you infuse a space w/ to make it habitable, to make it memorable (since memory is profoundly spatial), gives the place its character, its soul…

Zelda would be better if it had no story…no plot to structure the adventure…first Zs barely had any plot…were better for it. With plot, sequence matters too much…early Zs had situations, worlds & scenarios that framed action, gaps to be filled in by player, sequences to be broken. Optimal paths & shortcuts weren’t a given; they had to be earned. Items were the most prominent plot devices, & even they were not unduly strict about order. You could be slow & steady or blast straight through with a little know-how…basic rules of the gameworld were what bound you, not some artificial necessity imposed for the sake of plot."

…a world is not for you. A world needs a substance, independence, sense that it doesn’t just disappear when you turn around."

"Picaro is a way to make and play small adventure games. They play a bit like interactive fiction with the control scheme of an old Sierra/LucasArts adventure game. If that was gibberish: the games are completely text-driven, but require no text input. You don’t type “use the key on the door”, you tap “Use”, “Key”, “Door”, then you’re told in a few sentences what happened.

In a way, this is the worst of both worlds: the restrictive agency of mouse input and the limited expression of text output. But this is precisely why it’s exciting: clicks in, text out is the cheapest, simplest format for a narrative game."

"DO let me flush the toilets and turn on the taps. Scenery, in any game of any genre, shouldn’t be painted on the walls. And so many games before have put in a nice toilet flushing noise. Since all games do insist in including a toilet, as well they should, then all games should include the splishy sploshy noise of flushing it.

DON’T tell me that you’re a game any more. You want to capture something of Brechtian estrangement, break down that fourth wall with mallets and wrecking balls, because you think it’s a fresh and original approach. It’s not. It’s been done a lot, and it’s probably a sign that you’re not confident enough in your own creation. If you feel the urge to winkingly acknowledge to the player that they’re playing a game, then you need to go back to work to create a more convincing world."

"I used to prefer Vimeo over YouTube. Vimeo was always a bit better in quality, had a nicer looking player and website. Most importantly, it had a more mature and tasteful community. So when I released my game TRAUMA, it was a no-brainer to publish the trailer for it on Vimeo. It was an arty project that was made exactly for the kind of audience I would meet on Vimeo.

Today, I’m regretting that decision…"

"The second thing I learned about video games is that they are long…not like watching one ninety-minute movie…like watching one whole season of a TV show…in a state of staring, jaw-clenched concentration…<br />
<br />
On the other hand, the games can be beautiful."<br />
<br />
"The good thing about Halo 3: ODST is…I don’t know. If I was fonder of 1970s cast-concrete architecture, I’m sure I would have enjoyed the experience more…game seemed to me to be both desolate & repetitive, w/ incomprehensible Biblical & race-war undermeanings."<br />
<br />
"…best time I had w/ Uncharted 2 was while eating a submarine sandwich & watching the making-of videos that came w/ the game disk, fantasizing about what it would be like to work for Naughty Dog as a late-afternoon-lighting designer or a stony-ledge-placement specialist. These people know how to have fun."<br />
<br />
"This list…made w/ my son’s help. He reads video-game Web sites & listens every week…Giant Bombcast…like “Car Talk” but with 4 vastly knowledgeable gamers."

"Welcome to StencylWorks, 2D game creation done right. StencylWorks isn't your average game creation software; it's a gorgeous, intuitive toolset that integrates seamlessly with the Stencyl ecosystem.<br />
Exclusive collaboration and sharing features will have you making Flash games in a flash. For free."

"As our first digital toy, we are proud to announce the release of Helicopter Taxi for iPhone! The story is that Rita and Skip, our pilots, run a helicopter taxi that picks up five different characters that need to get to certain places. Your kids can fly the helicopter by walking around in the room and moving the iPhone. Since it is in 3D, you can look at the helicopter from all angles by simply turning the iPhone. After picking all of the characters up and flying them to where they want to go, you fly the helicopter home so Rita and Skip can rest for the night. After that, you’re ready to play again!<br />
<br />
Helicopter Taxi uses the camera on the iPhone in an innovative way in order to create an augmented reality effect. It looks like the helicopter is flying in the room with you! You pick the characters up by simply laying the iPhone down on a flat surface, and then they get in or out."

"Playing is behaving. From childhood experimentation & role-play to the competitive simulations of adults, it's impossible to separate even the most abstract forms of play from human expression. Yet video game design is dominated by the perceived need for win conditions.

If an interaction can't be parsed into passing or failing it can't be counted as fun. Without the threat of failure there is no fun. Yet, it's not victory that drives the invented play of kids on a playground, nor friends laughing over an inside joke.

Video games built around behavior aren't often given the same attention more competitively oriented games are, but they're no less important a part of the industry.

Games like The Sims 3, Heavy Rain, Nintendogs, Façade, Animal Crossing, & Harvest Moon are all made for the pleasures of expression. These are games played for their creative experiences more than their victory conditions."

[See also the Comment from Bart Stewart.]

"In the same way that Call of Duty games only work when you're moving forward and trying to complete the objectives, Façade worked surprisingly well when you acclimated to its limitations and learned to play within them."

"Q: This is like the unholy marriage of Animal Crossing & EVE Online.

SB: …That's actually a very good way [of describing it.] LittleBigPlanet is obviously an inspiration…in the aesthetics. I wish that we had a PS3 underneath this & that we're a lot better on 3D. But EVE, MOOs, & Animal Crossing have a cult following [here]

…I've never played EVE before…never got into it because it just seemed too hard to me. It's my favorite game to read about.

Q: Most games are boring to play & boring to read about. I'm not sure if EVE's boring to play; it's just an investment I don't want to make. But it's fascinating to read about.

SB: I've always imagined that while the fights can be exciting & it can be cool…to have victory in one of the fights, it's not really what it's about. I mean, people are playing the game to create the world. They're part of the corporations because they're buying into the agenda, even if it's roleplaying, against some other agenda. That's where the fun is."

"Short documentary film shot at NAMCO BANDAI Games Inc in March 2010 in Tokyo, Japan. Features interviews with the genius creator of the Katamari and Noby Noby Boy video games, Keita Takahashi, and the man behind the strange and wonderful Muscle March, Shinya Satake.<br />
<br />
Following Keita Takahashi's departure from NAMCO BANDAI in autumn 2010, the film was never released, but we were pleased with how it turned out and NAMCO BANDAI have kindly given me permission to show it here."

"Miyamoto has told variations on the cave story a few times over the years, in order to emphasize the extent to which he was surrounded by nature, as a child, and also to claim his youthful explorations as a source of his aptitude and enthusiasm for inventing and designing video games."

"The Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga, in his classic 1938 study “Homo Ludens” (“Man the Player”), argued that play was one of the essential components of culture—that it in fact predates culture, because even animals play. His definition of play is instructive. One, play is free—it must be voluntary. Prisoners of war forced to play Russian roulette are not at play. Two, it is separate; it takes place outside the realm of ordinary life and is unserious, in terms of its consequences. A game of chess has no bearing on your survival (unless the opponent is Death). Three, it is unproductive; nothing comes of it—nothing of material value, anyway. Plastic trophies, plush stuffed animals, and bragging rights cannot be monetized. Four, it follows an established set of parameters and rules, and requires some artificial boundary of time and space. Tennis requires lines and a net and the agreement of its participants to abide by the conceit that those boundaries matter. Five, it is uncertain; the outcome is unknown, and uncertainty can create opportunities for discretion and improvisation. In Hyrule, you may or may not get past the Deku Babas, and you can slay them with your own particular panache.

The French intellectual Roger Caillois, in a 1958 response to Huizinga entitled “Man, Play and Games,” called play “an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money.” Therein lies its utility, as a simulation that exists outside regular life. Caillois divides play into four categories: agon (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (simulation), and ilinx (vertigo). Super Mario has all four. You are competing against the game, trying to predict the seemingly random flurry of impediments it sets in your way, and pretending to be a bouncy Italian plumber in a realm of mushrooms and bricks. As for vertigo, what Caillois has in mind is the surrender of stability and the embrace of panic, such as you might experience while skiing. Mario’s dizzying rate of passage through whatever world he’s in—the onslaught of enemies and options—confers a kind of vertigo on the gaming experience. Like skiing, it requires a certain degree of mastery, a countervailing ability to contend with the panic and reassert a measure of stability. In short, the game requires participation, and so you can call it play.

Caillois also introduces the idea that games range along a continuum between two modes: ludus, “the taste for gratuitous difficulty,” and paidia, “the power of improvisation and joy.” A crossword puzzle is ludus. Kill the Carrier is paidia (unless you’re the carrier). Super Mario and Zelda seem to be perched right between the two."

"Designed for designers.

There's no faster or easier way to get started building a game than with GameSalad Creator. Its visual, drag & drop based style requires absolutely no coding whatsoever. Avoid spending hours poring over code, and spend more time finding the fun.

"Rapid" is an understatement. GameSalad's wide variety of complex behaviors provide almost limitless freedom for varied game genres, styles, and mechanics. On top of its incredible versatility, GameSalad brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "rapid prototyping". Explore the possibilities in hours and days instead of weeks. It's fast. It's versatile. It's GameSalad."

"That problem being that 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. They’re great tools for communicating progress and acknowledging effort, but neither points nor badges in any way constitute a game. Games just use them – as primary school teachers, military hierarchies and coffee shops have for centuries – to help people visualise things they might otherwise lose track of. They are the least important bit of a game, the bit that has the least to do with all of the rich cognitive, emotional and social drivers which gamifiers are intending to connect with."

"The overview of my concept has not changed since the beginning of this project. It is to create something that anyone can play with, kids, adults, dogs. But the way 3 years old kids would play is very different from 5 years old. Besides that, who to play with is also a big element that changes the way they play. For example, they would play more safely with parents, while they would play more adventurously with other kids. I designed the equipments considering such things, although I am not sure if my designs fully reflect them. As a result, I think the design has become something very simple and familiar, while respecting the plays which already exist.

Now, I will introduce each of the equipments."

"public place, part of all of our lives, where children & adults can gather & discover something exciting…playground…

I don’t intend to create something game-like, electronic or high tech…what I want most from the park is for it to be a space for children & adults (dogs or squirrels too) to be able to play, although it might be a little bit dangerous…

this might seem harsh, but I think it would be great if we could take ‘video’ part out of ‘video game’. Now the term ‘game’ thought about simply is too restrictive so we could change it further to mean ‘play’. To put it another way, ‘play’ is another word for ‘fun’…

So what is the meaning of the existence of games? Is it merely something for passing the time? an instrument for eliminating stress? a business? Because it is a thing that can make people happy, by playing them, by making them, & even more so, by broadening our perspectives, they can make the world a more enjoyable & at the same time more peaceful place to live."

"S:S&S EP is a 21st century interpretation of the archetypical old school videogame adventure, designed exclusively for Apple's iPad, iPhone & iPod Touch.

It's a mix of laid-back exploration, careful investigation & mysterious musical problem-solving occasionally punctuated by hard-hitting combat encounters. S:S&S EP is an unusual genre-bending effort with an emphasis on sound, music & audiovisual style that has been positioned as 'a brave experiment in Input Output Cinema'."

"The Glass Bead Game takes place at an unspecified date, centuries into the future. Hesse suggested that he imagined the book's narrator writing around the start of the 25th century. The setting is a fictional province of central Europe called Castalia, reserved by political decision for the life of the mind; technology and economic life are kept to a strict minimum. Castalia is home to an austere order of intellectuals with a twofold mission: to run boarding schools for boys, and to nurture & play the Glass Bead Game, whose exact nature remains elusive & whose devotees occupy a special school within Castalia known as Waldzell. The rules of the game are only alluded to, and are so sophisticated that they are not easy to imagine. Playing the game well requires years of hard study of music, mathematics, & cultural history. Essentially the game is an abstract synthesis of all arts and sciences. It proceeds by players making deep connections between seemingly unrelated topics."

"The thing that make games Games isn’t joypads, or scores, or 3D graphics, or little bits of cardboard, or many-sided dice. It’s the rules and mechanics beating in their little clockwork hearts. That may be a somewhat dry reduction of thousands of years of fun, but my aim is to celebrate and explore the many things that games (and other systemic media) do with the rules at their foundation. And, on the way, perhaps change your mind at exactly what rules are for."

"This is Keita Takahashi. I became a freelancer in October. I want to continue fun activities and help somebody with fun people of the world along with my wife who is a composer." [original: http://www.uvula.jp/2010/09/blog-post.html]

"what's wrong w/ gameification: 1: games are not fun because they are games, they are fun because they are well designed! Sturgeon’s Law “90% of everything is crap” 2: rewards are not achievements, this is just bad psychology. Vendors who sell this have a Pavlovian model in mind. “it’s so 1940″ as Deterding said…exemplified by showing game on which there’s big button called “earn 1,000,000,000,000 $” you can click & win. Based on the reward model, this would be the best game. As described by Raph Koster, “fun in games arises from mastery”. 3: competition is not for everyone!

…problem is also that gameification has side-effects: creates unintended behavior, people game the system & it messes w/ implicit social norms.

When people take gameification too directly, they generally miss that games are about: fictions, make believe, talk, & freedom to play (”whoever plays plays freely, whoever must play cannot play!“). Playing = “as if” & playing is fun because of the autonomy."

"Kodu, built by a team at Microsoft’s main campus outside Seattle, is a programming environment that runs on an Xbox 360, using the game console’s controller rather than a keyboard. Instead of typing if/then statements in a syntax that must be memorized — as adult programmers do — the student uses the Xbox controller to pop up menus that contain options from which to choose. Kodu itself resembles a video game, with a point-and-click interface instead of the thousand-lines-of-text coding tools used by grown-ups."

"Doyle was, at 54, a veteran teacher and had logged 32 years in schools all over Manhattan, where he primarily taught art and computer graphics. In the school, which was called Quest to Learn, he was teaching a class, Sports for the Mind, which every student attended three times a week. It was described in a jargony flourish on the school’s Web site as “a primary space of practice attuned to new media literacies, which are multimodal and multicultural, operating as they do within specific contexts for specific purposes.” What it was, really, was a class in technology and game design."

"When I learned about performance and mastery orientations, I realized with growing horror just what I'd been doing for most of my life. Going through school as a "gifted" kid, most of the praise I'd received had been of the "Wow, you must be smart!" variety. I had very little ability to follow through or persevere, and my grades tended to be either A's or F's, as I either understood things right away (such as, say, calculus) or gave up on them completely (trigonometry). I had a serious performance orientation. And I was reinforcing it every time I played an RPG…<br />
<br />
Be aware of why you play the games you do the way you do. Be aware of how you use them. We humans are remarkably adept at finding ways to lie to ourselves, and ways to be self-destructive."

via John Naughton via David Smith, http://memex.naughtons.org/archives/2010/08/13/11597 : "“Painkiller Deathstreak” by Nicolson Baker. An extraordinary piece (alas, available only to subscribers to print or digital editions of the New Yorker, so maybe it’s unfair to include it here) about what happens when a gifted and observant writer spends a month of his life playing computer games. I’ve often blanched at the arrogance of adults denouncing ‘mindless’ computer games which (a) they’ve never tried to play, and (b) are actually far too complex for them to master. The result is a chasm between the shared cultural experience of entire generations — and total ignorance on the part of adults. The kids who understand and play games have better things to do than to delineate the contours of this exotic subculture for the benefit of their elders. So it was an extraordinarily good idea to get a sophisticated, observant, articulate writer to have a go."

"But if videogame achievements can make us ignore the end goal in favour of a little gold star, is there any doubt that real-life "achievements" can distract us from what’s actually important in life?<br />
<br />
Certainly, incentives can be used to drive good behaviour, but there’s no guarantee that companies or organisations able to provide the most effective incentives will be the ones with the most altruistic motives. (And, of course, if I’m the one unconsciously making up my own achievements, I know they’re not always going to be what’s best for me.)<br />
<br />
I’m not saying that achievements in videogames are inherently a bad thing. I’m just saying that perhaps we should take a step back and consider how they make us relate to the world."

"Our lives are full of quests. Remember that birthday card, send that email, or drag ourselves to the gym on a regular basis.<br />
<br />
Trouble is, sometimes we’re having too much fun doing other virtual stuff like hunting down rare items in WoW or leveling-up in Facebook games, to remember the stuff we’re supposed to be doing.<br />
<br />
EpicWin is an iPhone app that puts the adventure back into your life. It’s a streamlined to-do list, to note down all your everday tasks, but with a role-playing spin.<br />
<br />
Rather than just mentally ticking off your chores, completing each one improves & develops your character in an onging quest to level-up, gain riches, & develop skills.<br />
<br />
By getting points for your chores it's easier to actually get things done. We all have good intentions but we need a bit of encouragement here and there. Doing the laundry is an epic feat of stamina so why not get stamina points for it?!<br />
<br />
Watch as your avatars stats develop in ways to represent your own life."

"2. We focused on real, intrinsic motivation & real activity. We didn’t adopt a “sugar with the medicine” approach. The rewards weren’t artificial; the rewards were to learn world-changing ideas and to be creative and to master social innovation skills. & we didn’t do simulation or virtual worlds. We linked real-world stories & efforts with online interaction & feedback.

"since around 1990, American kids have been getting measurably less creative. Alas, early in the article, we see games getting blamed...Is this in fact the case? After all, the rest of the article (and the rest of the research in the field) seems to suggest that handing students problems and obliging them to think about possible solutions, is a much better way to go than rote memorization. And that is what the best games do. But it is also definitely true that many games these days “come with the answers”...Personally, I have always found creativity to be all about juxtaposing concepts and ideas from different fields and places, making unexpected connections...it behooves us as game developers to at least attempt to make games that encourage creative thinking, if not out of some sense of civic or moral obligation, then as a way of “paying it forward” — something made us creative enough to make the games in the first place, so we shouldn’t hog all the fun."

"Imagine if tennis worked like video games. Every 5 years, latest gizmos dreamed up by engineers would be revealed...To be sure, results might be awesome. But that new awesomeness would likely never produce a result like Isner-Mahut match, which required a century...to reveal itself...

"if Farmville is laborious to play & aesthetically boring, why are so many people playing it?...answer is disarmingly simple: people are playing Farmville because people are playing Farmville..."

[via: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/06/29/farmville with this addition "Says DF reader James Murray via email, FarmVille is like a “Ponzi scheme of attention.”" ]

"This, I'm afraid, is how I do things. I learn by stating the obvious in public... [love that line, I think it describes me too and I hope that we allow learners like that to thrive at tcsnmy]

"don't like...these new social, interacting-w/-real-people games...[they're not] bad, just not for me. & I'm not that special, so I bet they don't appeal to some other people...might be worth thinking about. Because...seems to be some consensus that more social = better & I'm not sure that's true...I don't like meeting people I don't [know]. That's why web has been such joy, I've been able to 'meet' people & get to know something of them before I really meet them...Which means I find many of efforts of social & pervasive gamers scary. Werewolf seems to be codification & enforcement of all horrible about dinner party...lots of my favorite games are only slightly social...why I'm drawn towards idea of 'pretending apps' - not about imposing rules, [but] suggesting context...you can play them in your own head...[they're] Social Toys...toys because they're for playing w/, not in...social because they're connected & you can play in a shared context. But it's your play, in your head."

"Got this question via Twitter from @eugaet, and realized that I was drawing a blank! ... When I was ten, I was learning about computers with Creative Computing. I was typing in listings, hacking in MS-BASIC and CP/M, that sort of thing. Books like the Atari computer-based ANTIC ones were something I could dig my teeth into. These days, of course, your computer may not have a programming language on it, and the barrier is higher.

"Remember when Miyamoto made that videogame about those plumbers? The real revolution with that videogame was in the style of communication. It was a tremendous leap forward in how articulate synesthetic audiovisual could be. Coins looked like they sounded and they sounded the way they behaved in the context of the mechanics. Each element -- the brick, the turtle, the pipe -- was a well-formed, understandable audiovisual videogame unit.

"Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how."

"And that, ultimately, will be Sleep is Death's true test on its April release. Most of us consume media because we've lost the capacity, interest or time to construct thrilling tales of our own, and it's unproven how much an easily grasped set of pared down tools can inspire — whether they'll turn even a few of us into budding Rohrer's or whether we still need him to entertain us.

"I urge you to be vigilant against external rewards. Brush your teeth because it fights tooth decay, not because you get points for it. Read a book because it enriches your mind, not because your Kindle score goes up. Play a game because it's intellectually stimulating or relaxing or challenging or social, not because of your Xbox Live Achievement score. Jesse Schell's future is coming. How resistant are you to letting others manipulate you with hollow external rewards?" See also Ian Bogost: "when people act because incentives compel them toward particular choices, they cannot be said to be making choices at all": http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4294/persuasive_games_shell_games.php?page=2

"At its core, play, and by extension video games, is learning. Call it discovery or mastery but a good game introduces new ideas (teaches), leverages existing ones (reviews) and layers them to create unique challenges (tests). Teaching, at its core, is communicating. Verbosity is an academic sleeping pill. A game’s graphics are the player’s teacher and a good teacher is consistent, clear, and concise. Like good pixel art

"My name is Catherine Herdlick. I make cross-media games and game-like things to entertain and delight. I have designed games that last 20 minutes and games that last 2 months about things like bicycles, perfume, and ghosts. You can find out more about all of my projects right here on this website! [...] After Wesleyan, I worked at the Boston Children's Museum where I caught the learning-while-doing bug while creating hands-on activities and programs for the museum's community outreach initiatives."

"You might think making games is all about putting 40 percent awesome in a box, throwing in a pinch of zazz and calling it a SKU, but that's not true. Games, you may have noticed, are all around us, all the time.

"The social games market makes extensive use of psych hacks, datamining, & incentive structures, in a small way very much like the above 3 concerns:

"Facebook games & others that use the “free to play” business model, where you can play a game for free & make money by selling virtual goods, hook their users via clever psychological tricks that convince you to buy things, either with real cash or by fulfilling some kind of special offer. These little incentives add up, creating a silly compulsion loop, forcing people to search for achievement points in everything they do. They keep playing because they get little rewards all of the time…"

[video: http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/702668/DICE-2010-Video-Design-Outside-The-Box.html]

"This is by far the best guide ever written for designing games. All kinds of games, simple and traditional, but of course video games too. This fat book is packed with practical, comprehensive, imaginative, deep, and broad lessons. Every page contained amazing insights for me. The more I read and re-read, the more important I ranked this work. I now view it as not just about designing games, but one of the best guides for designing anything that demands complex interaction. My 13-year-old son, who, like most 13-year-olds, dreams of designing games, has been devouring its 470 pages, telling me, "You've got to read this, Dad!" It's that kind of book: You begin to imagine your life as a game, and how you might tweak its design. Author Jesse Schell offers 100 "lenses" through which you can view your game, and each one is a useful maxim for any assignment."

"The rich, unique and intriguing thing about games as a form is that they are both worlds and stories, architectures and adventures at the same time. This is a feat of design primarily - of design, engineering and aesthetic attainment balanced. … I must admit to being a fairly hardcore 'ludologist' when it comes to appreciating games. The scenery and backstory come a very poor second to the physics, mechanics and 'toyetics' … of the world I get to play in. So as a result, for me, games really are frameworks for fun, rather than 'interactive stories'. I tend to see them as having much more in common with the approach of an architect or landscape designer in terms of shaping and creating flows, confluences and possibilities for enjoyment. … As a result I really do think that critical appreciation and commentary from the world of architecture and design could be illuminating and progressive."

"This afternoon, I interviewed Tom Armitage. He’s a software designer who recently came to our attention because of a talk he gave recently, called “If Gamers Ran the World.” In it, he puts forth the idea that in another 10 years, leaders who are the same age as Barack Obama or British Conservative Party leader David Cameron are now, will be children of the 1970s, and as such, more than likely the first leaders who grew up with video games as a core part of their way of interact with the world around them. What would that mean for how they would behave as leaders?"

"While gameplay at the core of game making, it comes with a lot of baggage & makes certain meanings harder to realize in the medium...most striking issue is the entire failure mechanism that is used in just about any game. You try a certain task, you fail & then have to repeat it. As described in other posts, this can be especially damaging in horror games, where repeating scenes seriously lessens the experience. This mechanism also imposes limits on the player’s rate of progress & effectively tells the player: “Either you complete this or you will not proceed!”. Other baggage include the notion that gameplay must be fun & the need to constantly pose challenges. What I mean with the last point is that players assume that a game will always keep them occupied w/ some kind of obstacle to overcome. This leads to very little interactive content that is added for its intrinsic sake alone. Instead a game’s interactive content almost always have some connection to the goals of the gameplay."

"E-learning designers [ELD] believe that people learn through "content"...Games designers [GD] believe that people learn through "experience"...[ELD] believe we must be "nice" to our learners in case they go away...[GD] believe that we can challenge people and they'll stick with it. Indeed, it is progressive challenges that form much of the motivation for gamers...[ELD] believe that we learn step by step (hence linearity, page-turning etc.) [GD] believe we absorb lots of things all at once (hence HUDs, complex information screens etc.)....[ELD] believe that learning experiences are emotionally neutral...[GD] always seek an "angle", an attitude...[GD] slow in general to pick up on the potential of social gaming...[ELD] picked up on the potential of social-network-like features relatively quickly...there is a creative opportunity for game-makers and webheads to work together towards new horizons, leaving those chasms back in the decade where they belong."

"Today, the first generation to grow up w/ video games in their home is coming into its own. They are becoming responsible, even influential, adults. Not only do they have a great deal of capital to expend on the leisure of their youth, they also have a great desire to see it legitimized, to see it become as respectable as playing golf or going to the theater. ... 1. Game schools mean more qualified developers are being produced...[who are also] encouraged to innovate. 2. Lower cost platforms makes experimentation economically viable. 3. Improved tools lower production costs while allowing for a greater degree of amateur & "off the grid" development. 4. Widening demographics demand yet undiscovered game types. 5. The first generation to grow up with home consoles is now in a position to fiscally incentivize the creation of new game types. They are also motivated to help games be viewed as a legitimate medium. 6. Graphical fidelity is no longer the main driver for development budget."

"In 2006 New Visions for Public Schools approached the Institute of Play with an idea. Would they design a new school based on their work with games and learning? Q2L (Q2L) is the result of this collaboration, a 6-12th grade school designed from the ground up for the kids of today—kids who are eager to learn, quest, and play. The school has been designed to help students to bridge old and new literacies through learning about the world as a set of interconnected systems. Design and innovation are two big ideas of the school, as is a commitment to deep content learning with a strong focus on learning in engaging, relevant ways. It is a place where digital media meets books and students learn to think like designers, inventors, mathematicians, and more. Q2L brings together teachers with a passion for content, a vision for helping kids to learn best, and a commitment to changing the way students will grow in the world."

"The pupils move through the curriculum by means of 10-week “missions” - scenarios in which pupils have a problem to solve & take on dramatic roles (explorer, scientist, investigator) to do so...all measurable - pupils here are “finding relevant resources, doing mathematical calculations, reading & analysing texts, designing tools, repairing broken systems, creating models, doing scientific experiments, building games, or a host of other activities”. Far from spending all day on commercial computer games, the school uses the underlying principles of the games to create “highly immersive” learning experiences...obvious how radical Q2L’s curriculum is. Instead of a visual arts...“sports for the mind”...not just some desultory clicking through levels of edu-game...using 3-D visualisation program to make own labyrinths & mazes already richly manifested in paint, paper & collage...not merely literacy in playing games, but in making games & more deeply, seeing the world in a game-like way."

"Games are now generally acknowledged as culturally significant, comparable with film or television in their economic strength if not their public mindshare. But can they be art?

"So let’s think about what play actually is. Johan Huizinga was a Dutch historian, cultural theorist who wrote a pretty seminal text in 1938 called Homo Ludens or “Man the Player”. He explores how essential play is to culture and society, and argues that play is absolutely fundamental to the human condition and has permeated all cultures from the beginning. We’re born to play. Because playing is how we learn. We’re all here because of the skills and knowledge we learned through playing as small children.

"Gladwell suggests people w/ the best stories are those whose jobs involve lots of sitting around w/ their colleagues; cricketers, for instance, or pilots. I'd suggest it's not just the sitting around, it's sitting around while half paying attention to something else (the match, automatic pilot). This leaves enough room for proper story-telling, for holding court, not interrupted by sniping, conversation or one-up-person-ship...I'm still not sure that story is that important to stories. You know, all that beginning, middle, end stuff, narrative arc...Games people go on about it all the time, ad people are convinced they're masters of story miniatures. I think, very often, story is just something to hang all the important bits on. & not in a significant, meaningful way, like a backbone or scaffold...more of a coat-hanger. The actual stuff that connects isn't about plot or narrative; it's texture, observations, images, jokes, juxtapositions, felicitous phrases & little moments of aha."

"We believe you buy games to be entertained, not to be whacked over the head every time you make a mistake. So we don’t bring the game to a screeching halt and run you off the road when you poke your nose into a place you haven’t been before. Unlike conventional computer games, you won’t find yourself accidentally stepping off a path or dying because you’ve picked up a sharp object. Anything potentially disastrous that happens to Ben is supposed to happen to him. A biker’s life is not a stroll through the mall."

"I was completely blown away by this video the first time through. Such a simple, low-tech, solution produces such an amazingly rich, engaging experience that’s just bursting with possibility for further creativity.

"So, while I initially thought the points were a good incentive, maybe they’re not helping. Or maybe I’m just odd and don’t like competition being introduced into something that should be friendly and social. It doesn’t feel polite. Or maybe I’d be happier if there were more standard rules and some way — peer pressure alone? — to enforce them."

"Often insomnia would strike in, and I would ask aloud, to the darkness of the room, “will anyone appreciate this”?... And then in a spectacle of light rays and stars, the Fairy of Reason would appear to me and speak tenderly: “good hearted child, if you love it, some people, who have things in common with you, will too”. And then, on my knees, holding my hands together, tears shaking on the corners of my begging eyes, I would ask, “what if I’m just a freak and no one is like me?” And then she’d say, in her soothing voice: “Well, it’s true that you do some weird shit. Do you always have to do the dishes with gloves on?” And then I’d reply: “I don’t like detergent, my hands get all dehydrated and”. But the Fairy of Reason would not wait for me to finish: “Do you really need four duvets, in springtime?” And me: “Look, I get chilly when I sleep. Can we get back to my game?” And then, just as she appeared, in a beautiful glow of white color, she was gone."

"I’m always impressed with good, hard decisions. If you’ve ever had a sleepness night over a project, you can imagine how tough it must be to, a year or even more later, walk away from it. Projects are tangled thickets of history and emotion. Corner turns are hard, and killing your babies doubly so. GameLayers have displayed good strategy."

"As educators in games -- or by extension in any subject formed by the love affair between unlikely mates -- we are more matchmakers than pedagogues. Our job is not to find the best way to merge disciplines that share little commonality of history and method, but to let the two embrace, snit, settle, grouse, infuriate, storm off, and reconcile. Let's reject the cold industrialism of interdisciplinarity and embrace the warm humanity of unlikely mates. Indeed, perhaps the right word for the binding of inherently different disciplines is the same as that of inherently different people: love."

"It is time you took that game you created and publish it. No more homemade board or cards. You have arrived. Now, publish it!"

"The Digital Open is an online technology community and competition for youth around the world, age 17 and under."

"What makes you come back to the game for “one more try” or “just a little longer”? Once again, it can be tied back to the pleasure centre (nucleus accumbens), as we saw with the enjoyment of all games. ... I call this phenomena of compulsion in play Grip, and consider it to be a complimentary behaviour to Csikszentmihalyi's Flow, which I deconstructed in neurobiological terms the other week. If Flow is the constant and steady supply of the “reward protein” dopamine from the pleasure centre associated with a period of intense focus, then Grip occurs as a team-effort between the pleasure centre and the decision centre (orbit-frontal cortex), two parts of the brain that are very closely linked. The decision centre generates rewards (dopamine from the pleasure centre) when we make good decisions, and thus encourages us to learn good strategies and behaviours."

"Which got me thinking about what it is that we want from a game, and how it's different to what we want from a story. Superficially, games have a lot in common with other screen-based media: movies and TV shows. They have the same glossy production values, the same multiple franchises, the same all-action blockbusters. But games aren't movies; the interactivity that makes it possible for me to email a character in Routes and receive an in-game response pulls against traditional storytelling. I write both novels and games, and the crucial difference is this: in a novel I'm telling a story to the reader, but in a game I'm allowing the player to construct the story with me. There's a constant tension between allowing players to feel they can do what they want, and guiding them through a satisfying-feeling experience."

"informal learning, at least of the sort we see in today’s popular culture, does involve teaching in a major way. It is just that the teaching it involves is not like what we see in school. Teaching in informal learning, in much of today’s popular culture, involves three things: design, resources & what we will call “affinity spaces.”" ... "When a word is associated with a verbal definition, we say it has a verbal meaning. When it is associated with an image, action, goal, experience, or dialogue, we say it has a situated meaning. Situated meanings are crucial for understandings that lead to being able to apply one's knowledge to problem solving." ... "Affinity spaces are well-designed spaces that resource and mentor learners, old and new, beginners and masters alike. They are the "learning system" built around a popular culture practice." ... "We believe that learning how to produce and not just consume in popular culture, as Jade did, is one good way to start the critical process."

"But videogames seem more and more to resemble work in a different sense: working for the Man. They hire us for imaginary, meaningless jobs that replicate the structures of real-world employment." ... "This can’t be the only way. In replacement, we might imagine a new videogaming manifesto inspired by the Slow Food movement. It would speak of games where you really could choose your own adventure, but also where, if you preferred, you could just take time to smell the coffee, with no shadowy boss figure watching your clock and tapping his foot. It would be called Slow Gaming. Gamers of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but your boring virtual jobs."

see also discussion in comments

"The reason we and many others got excited about Rolando back in July was that it was the first seemingly full featured game that was actually designed specifically for the iPhone. ... Rolando is a platform puzzle game set in Rolandoland. Rolandos are small round creatures who seem to worship you (aka “Finger”) and ask for your help to defeat the shadow creatures that have invaded their land. Your job is to free the Rolandos from evil across 36 levels of play. ... The compete package for this game easily justifies the $9.99 price point, and comes highly recommended. Rolando is amongst the best games the App Store has to offer."

"Why does this game get its hooks into my brain so effectively? Why does it feel so much more visceral? I think it's because Mirror's Edge is the first game to hack your proprioception. That's a fancy word for your body's sense of its own physicality — its "map" of itself. Proprioception is how you know where your various body parts are — and what they're doing — even when you're not looking at them. It's why you can pass a baseball from one hand to another behind your back; it's how you can climb stairs without looking down at your feet....Mirror's Edge...does something very subtle, but very radical. It lets you see other parts of your body in motion.

"And that’s why they ambush you and they beat on you. They’re not exactly your enemies, but they’re deeply alien to your chosen paradigm. So they have a kind of control over your destiny that you do not allow yourselves to have." ... and ... "Someday the computer entertainment industry would be big. Big enough, and stodgy enough, that it actually WOULD employ towel designers. There would be oceans of money and huge budgets on an industrial scale. There would be room for armies of creative guys who actually did create towels."

"And what do you discover about Nike+? You discover there’s a metagame to it. People start syncing late - filling up their run data and then only syncing at the last minute - to disguise how much they’re doing. They mess around! Nike+ is ticking so many of our boxes: it’s asynchronous; it’s designed perhaps best for small groups; it turns running into a social object, putting it online. It’s a really great example of future for social play. And it goes where I am: it’s a game that I don’t have to learn how to play. I already know how to run"

"A simple one variable theory is that the qualities of the games you play reflect the qualities which are missing in your regular life.