Monday Morning Gamification and Gaming the System
So it is Monday and I thought I’d blog a little about gamification as it’s been on my mind. I heard the term from Simon of Slingshot Games. In a nutshell the term is about games that go beyond the normal area that a game occupies into work, school, college and more Here’s one definition:
[Gamification] is the application of game technology and game design outside “gamespace” and the acceptance of games in non-gaming sectors.
When you think about it, this is a common occurrence anyway – we just might not be aware that we a playing. If you define a game as a challenge with rules (I know there is a huge debate as the definition of a game, but bear with me…) then we’re always playing; Be it an accountant trying to game the tax system, a student reading through past exam papers to try and try a predict the coming questions, a parent turning lunch into a game so their child eats all the vegetables…
If gamification is expanding the game into everyday life then we need to explore the ideas of where the line in gaming is.
There is playing within the system – sticking to the rules and trying to win. There is also gaming the system – trying to win but by bending the rules and/or exploiting loopholes within the system. This is where the dividing line between ‘gaming’ and ‘gaming the system’ blurs…
Let me give you an example – in Rugby if you throw or kick the ball off the edge of the pitch then the other side gets a throw-in. This rule is to keep the ball in play and theoretically penalises the team who knocked it out. Yet this is often exploited – delibertaly kicking the ball off the edge of the pitch but as far into the oppositing team’s side as you can. It’s a deliberate breaking of the rules for a calculated advantage and sport is full of such tactics. It’s gaming the system.
This may (or may not) be against the spirit of the game – but it can help your team to win. This (for me) in in contrast to video gaming where a good game gives multiple strategies and I see it as a success of the game system if you can find an exploit within it. That is the spirit of video gaming – beat the game system. In short as a player and a games designer – I’m looking for people to game the system. Again, here’s an example: In The Great Escape you were able to sneak up behind a German guard and grab him round the neck. What followed then was a bit of button bashing where the guard struggled to escape and you had to subdue him. What I then noticed was that people would grab the guard and only partially subdue him, so as not to knock him out – then use him as a human-shield when fired upon by other guards. They were gaming the system and I was really pleased when I noticed this.
Here’s another interesting post on gamification and gaming the system – this time in real life..
Epic Sounds Off on Mobile Gaming
Epic’s VP of engine-power Mark Rein has weighed in on the mobile gaming debate. If you missed past announcements, then Epic has really buzzing about their new technology for mobiles. They are also not short of a few opinions (which is good) suggesting that the new Windows Mobile may be a disruptive force and that Android has a way to go…
“I think [Google] still has a long way to go… I’m also worried that every Android phone vendor seems to have a different user interface than the other. It is unclear whether Google will step in and straighten it out or continue to let it grow out of control…. Another problem with Android is the carriers run wild with the OS and are adding all kinds of bloatware and not-so-great custom user interfaces.”
Cory Doctorow Slams Critics
This is an interesting post on the subject of new digital business models and the debate over giving content away for free. Here Boing-Boing editor and author Cory Doctorow fires a salvo back at a fellow columnist who accused him of being hypocritical. What I find interesting about it is how he frames the issue of technology change – in that digital technology is not going to get any less digital – it’s here to stay. Not only that, it’s going to get even more digital!
The topic I leave my family and my desk to talk to people all over the world about is the risks to freedom arising from the failure of copyright giants to adapt to a world where it’s impossible to prevent copying. Because it is impossible. Despite 15 long years of the copyright wars, despite draconian laws and savage penalties, despite secret treaties and widespread censorship, despite millions spent on ill-advised copy-prevention tools, more copying takes place today than ever before.
As I’ve written here before, copying isn’t going to get harder, ever. Hard drives won’t magically get bulkier but hold fewer bits and cost more.
Networks won’t be harder to use. PCs won’t be slower. People won’t stop learning to type “Toy Story 3 bittorrent” into Google. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling something – generally some kind of unworkable magic anti-copying beans that they swear, this time, will really work.
So, assuming that copyright holders will never be able to stop or even slow down copying, what is to be done?
For me, the answer is simple: if I give away my ebooks under a Creative Commons licence that allows non-commercial sharing, I’ll attract readers who buy hard copies. It’s worked for me – I’ve had books on the New York Times bestseller list for the past two years.
Starting at the Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol
I’ve moved on from FluffyLogic now – and best wishes to the fluffy team for the future – and I’m now working on a couple of interesting projects I hope to be able to blog about very soon. I’m going to be based some of the time (and other times in London…) at the PM (PM as in Pervasive Media) Studio in Bristol’s harbourside.
There are lots of interesting people and projects going on there and when I chatted to them about office space I was really impressed with the vibe around collaboration being the key there. As a resident you have to aggregate your skills into the pool. Looking forward to a swim there…
The outside of the PM Studio in Bristol
Meta Time Strategy Gaming
I’ve been messing around with game concepts around time travel in strategy & action games for a while now – it’s a gameplay theme that interests me. Time is a dimension we can mess with as games designers; from the slowing of time in games like Max Payne to rewinding time is the amazing Braid.
Now we get meta-time gameplay! Sending units into the future, editing the past. It’s Achron!
(Hat tip to Seb for the link)
Game Piracy: Out-pirate the pirates!
This is an interesting post – that the best way to deal with piracy is by making your games more widely available and cheaper:
By making games more readily accessible, faster to skim and easier to pass along to friends, game makers may actually be doing more to combat piracy than any lawsuit or fancy technical countermeasure ever could.
This chimes with other’s view on how to combat music piracy via the same methods:
The truth is, file sharing’s a pain in the neck and most people only do it when there isn’t a good alternative.
You need to get to grips with BitTorrent and in some cases muck around with ports; you run the risk of faked, incomplete or poor quality files; your downloads might be throttled by your ISP; and you’re entirely reliant on other people seeding the files you want – which is fine for popular, recent, mainstream stuff but not so good for anything else.
Compare that with services such as Spotify. We’ve had much more luck finding obscure tracks on Spotify than on BitTorrent, we don’t need to worry about ISP throttling or whether there are enough seeders and if you go for the premium version you can take your music with you on an iPhone, on an iPod touch, on Android phones and on Symbian ones, too.
When you’ve got that, why would you bother with BitTorrent?
Too many WW2 games? Try L’Abbaye des Morts!
I wrote a post recently looking at the issue of how many games are set in the same few historical settings. My point is that there is so much interesting history that can be used as an inspiration that just using a tiny handful of wars is a bit of a shame.
So imagine my delight to see this:
Locomalito and his companion Gryzor87 have released L’Abbaye des Morts (download mirror), a Jet Set Willy-inspired platformer based on the persecution of the Cathars by the Catholic Church (read the Wikipedia entry – it’s pretty horrible stuff). Despite being labeled “a minor game” by its creator, L’Abbaye is well-made and very fun, with great challenge and lots of secrets packed into a small package. The limited graphics and audio actually do a lot to bolster the creepiness of the game’s occult theme.
Cool. v. cool.
The Rush for Android
Interesting that Sony-Ericsson is the latest smart phone venture to not bother with it’s own operating system and instead adopt Google’s Android:
A spokesperson for Sony Ericsson says that the company has no plans to build new Symbian-based smartphones. Much like Motorola, which restored its competitiveness by dropping Symbian and its own in-house Linux effort in favor of Android in 2008, Sony Ericsson appears to be committed to Google’s mobile operating system.
This is interesting and it looks like for operating systems, the race is becoming tighter as the competition thins..
Deep Sea Monsters!
Deep sea creatures are very alien looking. I guess it’s because they are adapted to a totally different environment from us air-breathing folk – which includes the enormous pressure of the sea above them. That also means the often look amazing!
Media Molecule Do a ‘Blizzard’ – and that’s a good thing!
Sony have announced that they are delaying the hotly anticipated release of LittleBigPlanet 2 to January 2011. This game is high on my instabuy list, so I was really looking forward to it, so it’s a bit of a shame from that point of view:
LittleBigPlanet 2 is a crazy dream, a dream to allow players to make whatever kind of game they want, but also to play though a great adventure of drama and excitement, power-ups and cinematics. But like all the most ambitious ideas, it can be a considerable challenge to turn these dreams in fun games. We’ve all been working like powered-up space ninjas and we’re almost there, but because we love what we’ve made, and we love our little sack-friends, and most of all we love all our fans out there, we couldn’t let you all get together until we knew we were giving you the best experience imaginable. Which is why we’ve taken the hard decision to delay the worldwide release of LittleBigPlanet 2, originally slated for later this year to January 2011.
However all good things come to those who wait and what Media Molecule (the developers) who are creating LBP2 clearly have plans that are very ambitious and very, very cool. If an extra few months is what it takes to make it work, then I think that is time well spent.
The would be true if it was just any game; nobody wants to shell-out cash on a game only to fight bugs and not monsters. But this also a game that allows people to make their own content, and I know from development experience that fixing bugs can result in a knock-on that impacts on the file formats. What I mean by this is that if they released it with bugs in, then fixing those bugs might result in people having to re-do levels games they’d created. Which would not be good at all.
I also say this is ‘doing a Blizzard‘ because Blizzard are notorious for delaying the release of games to make sure they are happy with them. Sure, waiting can be a bummer, but again the plus side is you know that if you do buy a game from Blizzard, your money is not going to be wasted. Each game they do release is amazing. Same now for Media Molecule? I think that may be the case.
(Disclaimer: I do know some of the people at Media Molecule.)
A Great Becoming... 