Gamification

2011-11-10T16:40:00.001+01:00

A colleague and I attended the Øredev 2011 conference in Malmö and while preparing my schedule for yesterday one speech with the title "Gamification - the art of making fun that piece of reality which is routine, boring or mundane" caught my instant interest. Reading up the summary of the speaker Christoffer Krämer finally made me attend his track - he is beside many things also designer of board and card games (one I found is Kablamo).

As Øredev is a software development oriented conference, his talk was of course not about "analog" games. It was all about todays tendency to turn every software application into a videogame. Elements like achievements and leaderboards appear in nearly every app we use in our daily life, where a lot of attempts just miserably fail and just a few really succeed. To me, classifying the outcomes is very subjective. Some of these motivate me to explore features of the application and have a fairly good gain of knowledge. But being myself part of this market and industry I know that most of the time numbers really matter more than meaningful services or functions. So using the concept of gamificating as a click generator is a good option. This might keep the user longer interested for your application and because of a silly achievement to do random stuff - lets say something like clicking on x different .. banners - and a click in the internet is abstract representation of a virtual currency. Win! But how lasting will it be?

Overall the speech was quite interesting. Especially the introduction, where they hit topics like what makes a game fun and enjoyable. Without surprise you have to deal with the exact same questions when it come to the fundamental part of defining how to attract the player's attention for more than just a few minutes (or clicks) and the long term motivation. The time went quickly by and they mostly only scratched the surface.

Nevertheless it was a good start into the day and I put an interesting bit into my personal check list: a reading recommendation for books from Pierre Bourdieu. He was a French sociologist and parts of his studies are related to the influence of games and education on culture. Sounds really interesting and I will definitely give it a try.

why this blog..

2011-11-08T08:14:00.001+01:00

A great passion of mine are board games. I love all about them. The fun, losing the control of time and being transported into a theme, the strategic challenge, the social interaction - and if possible, do a good job and win.

At some point I decided to try and create my own game - actually I phrased it this way: finish your first game before you can play it with your own kids. So I gave me enough time - I hope. And if I decently finish this project, having fun playing it, I will be more than happy.

So I started .. And this turns out to be way more interesting that I first thought it would be. Resources related to board game development are spread all over the internet and this blog is maybe also my attempt to interlink some of the places I found.

And beside the main goal of describing my path of creating my game, this blog is somehow also an experiment so see how this web media works. Not only consuming information from the web, but also giving something back.

Braindump of the yellow squid

Gamification

why this blog..