The Acagamic

Annakaisa Kultima is a game designer, game researcher, and very creative person, who works at the Game Research Lab of the Finnish University of Tampere. She focuses among other things on game idea generation with digital games. She uses general lateral thinking and idea engineering approaches to develop game specific ideas (similar to the German company called Zephram run by a former student colleague of mine). As with many idea engineering techniques, it is important to stimulate one’s creativity first, given a question or topic that people start thinking about. In a process of iterative refinement the large array of collected ideas is then filtered according to the more specific application area as in this case, digital games. Annakaisa’s slides themselves are a stimulating, colorful collection of interesting points, which I hope will inspire you as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Technology » Features » Experience. Experience is the product is a three-year old slidecast from Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path. In his slides, he explains the concept of product design in light of user experience and what design features successful products have. Data » Logic » User Interface was an early design approach for software, while now it is more User Interface » Logic » Data. Good development oscillates between those two. Essentially, the slides tell us that we design and develop for more than an artifact, but rather for a whole experience. I find this especially true in game design (again). Read the rest of this entry »

She says: “Let’s make the future!” Jane McGonigal is a prolific alternate-reality-games designer and leads game research and development at the institute for the future. Occasionally, she also gives really cool presentations with stimulating ideas in them. Nobel prizes for game developers? Sure thing. And again, we are talking about using the power of games for everyday life. In her slides, she outlines the collaborative potential of games, appealing to the central inner craving for happiness we humans feel. She summarizes her key points for this human craving repeatedly:

• Satisfying work
• Experience of being good at something
• Time with friends/people we like
• Being part of something bigger

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Today, we have a technical talk from Adam M. Smith of the expressive intelligence studio at University of California, Santa Cruz. He makes the claim in his slides, which apparently outline his Ph.D. research project, that a machine can become a creative entity that designs a game. To achieve this goal, he aims at developing an “intelligent designer” (a computational agent) that turns experience into communicable knowledge. Intelligence in this scenario comes from experience, which he describes as knowledge production based on fixed knowledge of past designs and expanding knowledge of discoverable actions. The design activity in games is reduced then to its very basics, being an action that produces rule systems and the necessary logic behind those. Thus, the more basic a rule system is, the more complex the actions resulting from human interaction with it might be. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s Sunday, the 13th, which means we will be speaking German today. Sorry, folks – but this presentation was simply too good not to post it in the advent special. Fellow game researcher and UX designer, Sebastian Deterding, has some amazing, well-structured, aesthetically designed slides on the little things that UX designers can pick up from game designers (to improve design and everyone’s experience). Parts of his slides are also in English, but I will try to sum up some of his main ideas. First, he presents some thoughts on theories of fun and outlines fun as a driver to change peoples’ behavior and motivator for learning. After this, he briefly explains some game-style purposeful applications (so-called “games with a purpose” [PDF]). Examples for this are the Google Image Labeler, Phrase detectives, Spectral Game, Tag a Tune,Book Oven and many others. He goes on to analyze Twitter from a gaming point of view with it having clear goals, bite-size action options, visible relationship between action and goal, clear feedback of current status, and extremely audiovisual positive feedback (see video below).

He also talks about gradually rising challenges in sequence, which brings him to discussing Flow theory a bit. He then addresses some major differences between game and UX design, for example that game designers need to provide an increasing amount of difficulty as the gamer learns to play/interact with a game, while UX designers have the goal to keep functional software as simple as possible even for experienced users (while fans of shortcuts and applications like Vim might disagree – believing that steep learning will results in more efficient power users). It also interesting that he outlines the goal conflict of work vs. play: In the first, you try to get to the goal as fast as possible while in the second you are in for the ride that gets you there. The funny thing is that some games are not so different from regular work. You might not like calculating statistics at work in Excel all day, but as soon as it comes to propping your World of Warcraft character for the next raid, you start comparing numbers easily. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the transparent life of the future. Although this might be a bit off topic, I wanted to include it here in the advent special as well. Matthew Buckland from South Africa, head of 20FourLabs.com, delivered a striking and brilliant presentation about the Future Of Social Networking. He outlines how information about people, objects and locations could become instantly accessible with the next generation of mobile devices. The mockups are excellent and the vision is not too aloof to become true one day. Have a look at this visionary presentation below: Read the rest of this entry »

Philip Fierlinger from New Zealand is the head of design at Xero, a company focused on an online accounting system. For the inaugural Wellington Web Meetup, he gave a presentation with a set of beautiful slides on applying game mechanics to interaction design (for the web in this case) to transform experiences from painful to pleasurable. In his slides he does not concentrate too much on aesthetic aspects of game design, but more on the rules and conditions that are inherent to all games and our human need to expose ourselves to such rule systems for our own personal pleasure. One of the really nice things I could take away from his presentation is that even in banking (as one of the quotes he uses shows), some people consider games equal to high-quality, pleasurable interaction. Read the rest of this entry »

Suze Ingram, a User Experience consultant from Australia, has succinct and interesting presentation slides about User-Centered Design (UCD) Techniques. UCD focuses on the needs (dare I say also the motivations and emotions) of people who use applications and products. This usually informs the vision and direction of the design and development of a product. The techniques she talks about are in detail:

• Contextual enquiries
• Diary studies
• User Workshops
• Card Sorting
• Personas & Scenarios
• Wireframing
• Paper Prototyping
• User Testing

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