Forbes are saying it too. WoW gets all the press - I wonder what people think about Eve?

There's some interesting stuff in Second Lives to cull in relation to this - compare/contrast.

There seem to be a whole host of these. See that Pinboard thing too.

Compare with Nethernet, Stumbleupon, I suppose.

Here's an interesting one, related to the viral learning things that are everywhere - fatness, divorce, happiness, sadness.

And this is pretty much what everybody's saying. It's like 'arty' films where you know - in advance - it's going to be difficult so you think harder. Non-gamers just won't tolerate this, so they keep telling me.

Which makes it hard to produce something original.

Not sure about this. Here via rejuvenilia and all of that sequence of books that came out a couple of years ago (that I didn't read).

The data on failure in games is extraordinarily rich. It's, after all, one of the defining features of games.

Players like failing. At least, they like specific types of failure. "Although players do not want to fail, they may nevertheless enjoy it when feeling responsible for it."

Game mechs and gameification - what a headline.

There really needs to be a whole series on this, I think.

A whole motherloving series. It's really interesting stuff.

The 'right to dream' is the right description of Echo Bazaar. As, I suppose, is wabi-sabi. And trickery. All of those are good things.

The idea that you make something appear much bigger than it actually is is one of those things that's easy to say and very hard to do.

What are the tricks?

There's also a lot here about the role of script/screen/writing in the art of games design. You don't tell people what to think but give them enough clues etc. Again, if it was easy, everybody would be doing it.

Is this Skinner-boxing? Or motivational? Or fun?

Much to ponder about these things.

This is really interesting. One: for the sheer potential of it all. Two: for the information about how much our sense of proportion is completely skewed.

Why is this 'digital' literacy? I'm guessing the PDF makes it clear. Investigate.

Wikipedia blurs the line between work and play - it's playful in that the system is dynamic.

This kind of makes sense.

And it's another take on Cognitive Surplus? Cognitive Surplus is translated into Play, not torpor?

This is related to the High-achiever/Low-achiever gestalt shift/dichotomy of fun. Fun doesn't work for about half the people. Challenge doesn't work for the other.

Is immersion the same as FLOW? Hmmmm.

This actually works for me - a pervasive game where the core mechanic (in this case running around the streets) is actually related to the objects. Which is a bit like urban development and town planning, as far as I can make out.

One the problems of 2+-sided games and collaboration/kingmaking/gamestates and all that palaver. Good stuff, ugly decks.

I loved Choice of Broadsides, so I'm glad this is here.

Note: this game was used to teach people about non-verbal comms and psychology and all kinds of stuff. It looks a bit mental, to be honest.


There's a set of epic rules on this epic wiki for Epic Mafia!
http://wiki.epicmafia.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

And the 'game was big in Silicon Valley'
http://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine/archive/2010/03/features/werewolf?page=all

Selected as one of the top 50 most important games since 1800:
http://boardgames.about.com/cs/gamehistories/a/timeline.htm

Extra:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/18219/the-50-most-historically-and-culturally-significan

It's like they've chosen the most evil name they could find.

Are they on the big list of companies?

Sensible list. Everybody will ignore it.

It's a bit like Foursquare except you score points for traversing plots of land using your GPS. It'll ony be useful to a select few, but it seems more playable than Foursquare for non-city dwellers.

Part of a meditation on memory - as many as 10% of people just can't friggin' remember. Why don't we give more metacognitive support.

Japan is excellent, truly excellent at this. But it comes at a price.

Performance Support specialists need to include this as part of the work they do, I think. There should be a Sommelier service for PKM and PID.

This is, as Nick points out, relevant to the Affective Context thing. And it's also relevant to the presentation-is-key thing too.

Tools - are designed to help ideas have sex?

An amazing thing to say: tools changed more slowly than skeletons at the time of the hand-axe (we made the same flint adzes for 30 000 generations).

Matt Ridly also explains why sex is so important; asexual reproduction is zero-sum - if there's two mutations in two different creatures, only the 'best' will survive, one will become extinct. If there's sexual reproduction, you can inherit mutations from *other lineages* at some point in the future.

The key word he keeps using is 'combinatorial'. And he draws on the analogy of Ricardo and comparative advantage - good explanation at around 5:35 onwards of Ricardo using the example of stone axes.

[Random thought: is Ricardo and the comparative advantage a 'fact'? If so, why do people doubt that trade is beneficial?]

Neanderthals died out because they *didn't* have sexual division of labour? Because they didn't exploit comparative advantage? They also show no evidence of trading.

Tools are Engines of Trade - this is a big CleaveFast idea.

Matt Ridley quote: we are neurons [in the Collective Brain]

Simple, but effective. Pretty much works for me.

Part of a how-to on making the viral social. Which is a stupid way to put it. Which is why I use this as a staging post.

via Jesse Schell. Get points for riding the bus.

Pretty much the same as 'Rescue the Princess' and is related to the ideas of Jordan Mechner too.

Is it an art game? Or a joke? In any case, there's something here, even if it's only atoms.

Finite and Infinite Games? I've lost this reference.

Wow.

Fits in with Horror-story learning. Or Flash Gordon, at least.

The bit about the questions is hot, hot, hot.

Rethinking Onboarding - AR, field guides and pervasive games

This is actually interesting.One to test out over the weekend.

It's all a bit macho. But, seriously, very very interesting stuff.

From Dave Gray. And so it's awesome, natch. Not necessarily this post but the whole ruddy thing.

Lots of good stuff in here from Mirror Worlds guy.

I keep on wondering how important the Uncanny Valley is. AI will come. And as soon as it does, it won't be AI but just I. The big question is whether we'll imagine it's there before it really is or won't notice it until after the fact. There's no other possibility, really.

The counterpart of Collaboration, Performance Support and Learnscaping.

Can you demand that people collaborate? A fraught decision.

Apparently, a quick search on The Google shows this to be a fairly common thing to say in 'marketing circles'.

Very very good points. Facebook interacts with the real world and that's why it's disruptive.

Social Games also interact with the real world.

This is confusing.

Hom Ludens 2.0 is probably enough for me. Key points: Digimedia encourages playfulness because it's easy to take apart without breaking it.

If you analyse a film, it soon becomes broken. You need the willing suspension of disbelief. The same is not true of digimedia because of infinite deferral. This is a half-thought.

Young people play with sexual identity online. This confusion will cause problems for the oldsters. Who are used to geography not topology. You can be in two places at the same time.

Make-believe is mimicry. Learning was too much alea. New sim-learning can be agon and ilinx. This is a crucial crucial point. Allocentricity FTW.

Via @aquito

There's some good points here. The main one is that 'aesthetics' doesn't mean the look and the feel. It's more similar to the ethos.

Game aesthetics matter - especially in gameification. If you have a Farmville/metric-led aesthetic, your game will, ultimately, suck.

This ones for the Darwinian Monkeys series.

The points made here are slightly opaque, to me. But the fact there isn't an aesthetics vs mechanics dichotomy makes intuitive sense.

The big question is whether they're a duality.

Whorf-Sapir kind of.

Yep, it's a round-up. But it highlights my key/core belief. It's play, not games, that is important.

The Enterprise is always about playing dicky games that aren't playful. How did they ever accomplish this feat?

Actually, that's a surprisingly good question. How the heck do I answer it?

When people talk about training and education, they forget stuff like this.

This is fairly textbook disruptive innovation. It's Enders Game, kind of.

Oh man. It's him again. But this is interesting.

Some of these cross over. Is this a problem? Do I cross post or do two-parters with a learning bit and a game end?

Anyhoo, Systems Thinking For The Win.

Key: embodying.

Interesting toy. I use the word advisedly. I think that, slowly, the #KM-ers are beginning to realise that people prefer KM toys rather than KM apps.

See video about 1 min in for the key line about playing.

You have to be able to play with the data for it to be any use at all.

Starts off meh. Gets more interesting when you think about it.

I started on Twitter as a single-player. And there's loads of things I don't play with properly because I can't think of a single-player option.

This, for me, is the big weakness of ARGs and the like.

Forgot about this. It's kind of fun and there are some interesting questions/results. NB the Woebegone Effect is demonstrated. (I've saved some screenshots in Evernote)

Add this to 'problems with points' and see Goodhart's Law.

Like the ARGs, this joins the long list of things that are really cool but that I will never ever play in a million years.

This is a really good point. And one that's been made about games time and time again.

Mario was super-successful because of its game verb. It is a game about jumping. And that's all it does and it does it very well.

Most RPGs have loads of game mechanics but they're primarily about the story. And that's all they do.

You do get jumping and shooting games. But there's a gestalt thing going on there.

STILL don't know what to call these frickin' things.

Good point here: how many games are designed where the team either wins or loses and there's no individual score possible.

Pandemic comes up everywhere and is worth investigating further.

See Ramona and Watson and how people are working on these Grand Projects.

Kind of tangentially related to this:
I'd like to play a RPG with people that works in a very simple way - you play as yourself.

Players get together and spend a day customising their 'character' based on a number of pertinent questions. They're working on personas, basically.

And the 'game' is played about a year later. Ah, there's the twist. The 'game' is a wargame or other kind of sim.

Quora's a slightly less icky version of those Q & A sites you see and which end up link spamming Google.

A question close to the heart.

We're getting closer to the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.

Big theme:
Small pieces closely joined to make the mega-projects: AI - new life and YLIP - ultimate teacher/companion

Play is found in the space between ‘what is’ and ‘what if’. It’s when we find it difficult to cross that space that things become interesting.

Too much crossing into the 'what if' and you have a problem. Too little and you have stultification. How to tell if you have too much or too little?

Kickstarter? Prediction Markets? Markets, in general?

One thing's for sure. It's not 'management', if you want to have any fun.

Bacteria outnumber our own cells 10:1

You can have corporate Facebook, Yammer, Prediction Markets - why not something playful like Kickstarter?

How about using a Google-like 20% time?

"The original ELIZA tricked a surprising number of people into feeling there was some "there" there, when actually it was just a fixed list of IF-THEN rules. Today people are more sophisticated than that. But still it's easy -- well, for me anyway -- to get seduced into the amusement of interacting with a system like Ramona 4. The way she combines erudition with absurdity appeals to me (perhaps not surprisingly, because I helped design her!), and I'd like to hope that this combination will still be there in the generally-intelligent dialogue systems we'll build in the future. Knowledge and humor can be a powerful combination."

you> Ramona, are you conscious?

Ramona> I'm working on it.

you> am I conscious?

Ramona> Oh I really don't know whether you are or not.

you> What is consciousness?

Ramona> This is when humans feel aware of themselves and how they see themselves. Computers can't quite do this yet, but they will, you just wait and see. However, think about this. How are you going to know when it happens?

How are we going to know when it happens (the two bits above are quotes)? Either we'll imagine it's true before it actually is, or we won't notice it until after it's true. This has implications.

Playing Jeopardy is a kind of obvious thing to do. I don't mean this as a criticism, just an observation. The magic 8-ball things that play 20 Questions are really cool. Playing Jeopardy will be cooler.

I suppose I'm curious about how long it will take to get your own one of these. Would it make you smarter? I think it probably would - if you had a team of bots doing stuff like this in the background.

Butlers? Sommeliers? What servants will we have?

Will this be the Neo-Victorian revolution, when we all have people living downstairs doing stuff for us?

Very funny. Very sad. It's a bit like anything that involves teaching in a rigid format.

Great. But you can only use it on the web. So not so great.

Key idea here, I think, is that a focus on deficits/competition will - inevitably - reduce cognitive diversity and the number of mental models a company can draw on.

Things *have* to remain messy.

Yep, makes sense. Design Thinking is just design.

Nope, doesn't make sense. Design Thinking is what non-designers call 'design'.

"Leave it to the professionals" is never going to wash. Not ever.

RT @iOPT Formal Learning All the Way...Baby - (Kapp Notes)

Medicine's always an outlier. And people forget just how much informal learning there is embedded in hospitals. It's phenomenal. And, of course, doctors - outside the surgery - really know very little. It's interesting to think about the cost of all this - when you look at Atul Gawande's figures about how long it takes to transmit knowledge around the world.

There's the elements of the complex and the obligatory cynefin diagram but there's also the element of persuasion. Formal does this badly, often. Not always, but often.

And there's the fact of organisational learning. This is very different to transmission of learning. It's the organisation learning new things - formal training is an attempt to manage complexity. You can't do this, you need to add in some mess to the surroundings.

Is informal learning the same as social learning? No, but it's instructive to see the differences:
http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/media/social_learning.html

Doctor examples where they know little: constipation

The idea of half-truths. There are good types and bad types. Social or Informal learning works with the good types. See wabi-sabi and Hegel.

The concept of the Zero-learning Curve is key here.