Tag : Playful | Made by Many

Playful 2010

27 September 2010
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A few of us were at Playful on Friday.

There were a number of great talks, but one of the themes that stood out for me was gamification, as elaborated on by Sebastien Deterding in his talk. It’s almost a recurring theme of sorts nowadays, with Dan Hon having touched upon it in his PSFK conference talk too. Sebastien spoke about how, with the advent of Foursquare, plenty of services seem to have taken it upon themselves togamify their sites in some way or the other. We now get badges and/or points not just for checking in to a place on Foursquare or Gowalla, but for reading blogs and even for eating food (Foodspotting, if you’re wondering). And that’s where people start losing the plot. He mentioned an excellent quote by James Carse:

It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever *must* play, *cannot* play.

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Playful 2008

03 November 2008
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At the Dconstruct conference on the social web earlier this year, Alex Krotoski spoke about building a bridge between the game and web communities. The difference between these two, she claims, is mainly that while game developers get to design products that target people like themselves, the web community designs solutions targeted towards very different people than themselves. But as games become main stream (Nicole Kidman appearing in the Nitendo DS lite ads for instance), and room for play is more accepted as a way of enhancing the user experience in web applications, the two communities definitely have something to learn from each other.

So, largely agreeing with Alex I spent last Friday at Playful, a one day event about games and play hosted by Pixel-Lab here in London. There were many great speakers on the program and although a few of these came disappointingly unprepared, the atmosphere in Conway Hall was warm, fun and engaging.

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