Is this an art game or is there something more? Or less.

If you're slightly dysludic, you'll never finish this. Strange how this can be so relaxing and then so not.

More Goodhart's Law here and gaming the system for KM sharing.

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.

Perhaps, this is one reason why we invented games of chance? To handle the costs of procrastination (as well as to invoke the gods to ensure fairness).

Randomness was hard. So we invented games.

(Remember how much I used to puzzle over writing a random number generator.)

via Jesse Schell. Get points for riding the bus.

Rules for pervasive games - they're good and they make sense. And few pass the test. This includes gameify games as well as ARGs.

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.

What the frak are we going to do with all this data? Some of the stuff we're finding out is astonishing simply because the size of the things make you think they should have been discovered before. I'm guessing there's stuff that's smaller too - it's difficult to shake the feeling we're all being stalked by our own cognitive biases. What else will we discover?

There's a metaphor here which it would be fun to break.

This is going to get weird. How did the world change when the mirror was invented and people first began to see themselves? (I suspect it was a non-trivial thing.)

This is bigger.

It'd be pretty weird if we weren't narcissists. What would any creature be like who wasn't interested in themself?

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

More on games-based marketing. From the guys who wrote the book.

I'm tagging these GBM for future ref.

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

As usual, the Snarkers capture it perfectly.

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 is awesome. I can imagine this being used in a maths class as a kind of reverse sum generator.

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.

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?

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

Unity are a key player here. And the guy from Unity knows onions.

An interesting talk. And everbody but everybody is not spending enough time thinking about the sheer number of programmers we're churning out.

Seriously, play with this idea for a few minutes. This is fucking huge.

I suppose this is a kind of 1-person ARG.

It looks beautiful, but who has time to play with all these things?

Okay, these people are calling it Immersive Journalism. Where will the madness end.

This is a great site. Wunderbar.

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.

Hmmm. SocInGames seems a bit unwieldy.

The principles seem to work, though.

One for the gameify checklist/card game.

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.

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.

Heavy-handed? Possibly.

Stuff to ponder. It all seems so joyless, though.

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.

Another round-up and a bit of refactoring.

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

I love this kind of stuff. In theory.

But, I'm English. Seriously, how do English people play these kind of things.

Shyness, somebody once said, is arrogance out of its depth. Am I shy? I don't feel shy.

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.

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

How about using a Google-like 20% time?

Not played this. Looks fairly inviting and may have to test it out on the boy.

I still don't know what to call these things. And this is bugging me and my IA efforts.

An AI (erm, not really) chatbot which helps people decide if they want to join the army.

It doesn't appear to learn, so it's more like a Choose Your Own Adventure than anything else.

I'm rubbish at Linked-In. Must get better.

An omen of the impending wave of disillusion. A while off yet, though.

Funware are another group of people to watch.

Certainly true of most of the ones on Kongregate. Forgets dashboard.

Neat list from BigDoor who will be riding the Hype Cycle like few others.

The fact that this badge website about your writing style tells me 'I write like Dan Brown' has nothing to do with the reason I think it's shit.

Who can say, really?

How do I tag these ones? It'll come to me after in a while.

It's true, people can have evil, destructive hobbies and nobody cares - despite this being a choice. And we blame people for getting paid for collecting parking tickets.

I'd rather be in the army than sell Coca Cola, if that makes any sense.

I love this. Who knows what it all means?

Adobe compare Space Invaders to web development,or the other way round. I just couldn't die - which should give you an idea to how good the game is. Still, the punters seem to like it.

An inflection point, jumping the shark is sure to follow on after a post on Mashable. . .

Wow, this one has a cool interface. Whether 'cool' means 'usable' is another story. Onwards and upwards.

The key question, again and again, is whether the rewards punish (cf Alfie Kohn) or we get that hedonic numbness or whether they work. This is true even in games.

There's a whole load of these. This one seems to get mentioned more than the others and it certainly looks neat/nice.

These things are where games theory meets game theory. There's a few of these for Social Media and web usage, but none of them seem to work for me. People used to love the Fantasy Football games and this fits in with that kind of thing.

You can't judge these games from the outside, I suppose.

The interface looks nice. I like the look of the ticker which feels very 'real'.

I hate these things. Hate them. My dad likes them, though. Because he's worried about Alzheimers.

There's so many of these informatics toys. Who uses them? I don't know anybody, as yet. Informatics is great fun. Data entry sucks rank ass.

I've seen these prediction markets being used as a teaching technique - usually attracting 'ethical' doubts from commenters.

Is that justified?

As I'm the type of person who bangs on about learning through games, wouldn't it be a good idea to put my money/attention where my mouth is and have a go at this?

I basically don't get these games. Which probably makes me the worst person to play them - or makes me ripe for learning.

Hmmm.

Actually, cynicism aside (white guys with dreadlocks, pur-lease), there's lots of good stuff here.

Some round-up/comments on game mechs for marketing mehism.

Not tried this, so don't know if it's on the positive side of dungeon-mastery or the negative side of Skinner-boxing.

More news at 11.

This is what Gameify project is all about. How the hell am I going to get people to pay for this, though?

Like Freedom Bridge, this game's simple and moving.

Description of some relentlessly awful games. Though, to be fair, the Perrier game with Dita von Teese is equally moronic and involving simple stripping mechanics.

I like most of these - in a 'that's interesting' way more than a 'wow that's making me twitch with Skinner-box reflexes and endorphin rushes' way.

They're probably all, ultimately, failures. Like those early black-and-white French shorts were. A rocket going to the moon and it turns out to be a man, how trite!?