Duncan Gough's posts

Have you heard of Portal 2? Surprisingly, for what is effectively an esoteric puzzle game, you might have.

The developers, Valve, have promoted it heavily having had little success finding an agency that understood the game.

No one knows the product better than the people who made it. We’ve had many creative kick-off meetings with agencies over the years, and you’d be shocked by the treatments that have come back. Copycat treatments. Cliché treatments. Treatments that reveal the agency weren’t listening in the initial meeting."

The really interesting thing about Portal 2, though, is the humour. The original game, Portal, was funny, but as this review highlights, where "Portal was a sequence of great jokes, Portal 2 is that rare beast, an actual video game comedy – and one of the funniest ever".

Like many people, I've considered deleting my Facebook account. Not out of spite, or the desire to make a stand, but mainly because it's no longer useful. I've met all the people I'm going to meet on Facebook, and I struggle to see the value in remaining a member.

Whenever I seriously think about deleting my account, though, I can't go through with it.

It might be that I'm holding out for some of those long-lost friends to get in contact. I keep the Facebook beacon alight and fire the occasional flare into the internet, where I know the people who don't Twitter or Instagram will see me.

But that's not really it, and now I see what keeps me connected to Facebook when the value in the service has disappeared:

I don't like toys, I've lost the imagination required to play with them, and I have too many adult pretensions to play without the inhibitions required.

Toys are great predictors of the future, though. When technology is cheap enough to be embedded in toys, then we should be paying attention.

Recently I've been tinkering with Bakugans. Toys that would probably qualify as a craze just a few years ago, but from what I can tell are still popular now.

I almost universally hate them. They're unreliable. A confused mash of game mechanics and hooks designed to extract money from children with the smallest amount of fun in return. But aren't they pretty?

Over the last month it's been exciting to watch Instagram grow within Made By Many. Tim's post Quora is from Mars, Instagram is from Venus talks about the "simple pre-verbal delight of sharing something beautiful by showing it to other people" and that's the heart of the attraction. Instagram is incredibly casual, it doesn't demand you share your location, and the community is clearly encouraged to "like" other photos, rather than submitting comments, or rating pictures.

My first reaction to realising how much and how often I checked the Instagram feed was to start thinking about an API. Perhaps that's a natural reaction, wanting to build things on top of a successful, social application, but I'm becoming more convinced that it's also the wrong one.

Launching today, the Hackers! newspaper is an exciting new idea aimed at doing things you're not supposed to do. A quarterly paper edited by Leila Johnston, fresh from a highly entertaining live-on-Skype interview with Dominic Diamond at Playful '10, it features articles on wide range of subjects, from hacking time to side-channel attacks and even Victorian hackers.

Whatever people say it is, gameification isn't about games.

Mind you, enough people are saying it's not about games already. So I'll tell you what gameification is about, and it's called community building.

Amy Jo Kim wrote Community Building on the Web a good few years ago. Enough time has passed for those lessons to have been incorporated into a lot of the more successful websites of the last boom, and clearly enough time has passed for those lessons to have been forgotten.

At the Nesta Serious Games conference the other morning, Anjali and I listened to Mary Matthews from Blitz Games and Alex Fleetwood from Hide & Seek discuss the application of games that make a difference. Her post, The business of games is an excellent read that covers pretty much everything that happened, so here's my take on the idea of serious games and the rising requirement for everything to be playfully interactive.

Minecraft, the indie game making all the news right now, exists as a kind of incantation repeated by game designers and developers. As a backlash against the kind of emasculated experiences that purport to be playful by nature, Minecraft is a powerful weapon.

A somewhat intentionally late entry to the question of “5 things you’re thinking about right now“:

1. The Opposite of Foursquare

Foursquare is huge, check-ins are big, but I wouldn’t play that game or use that service. Whilst the idea is sound and people will still use the service, I find the concept of what the network looks like to FourSquare so much more interesting. When I check-in on Foursquare, what does that look like? And how does the map of London, for example, change during the day as people check in and drop offline.

Given that a lot of people are not going to use Foursquare because each contact with the network compromises their privacy and reveals more and more information about them, I think there’s a hard limit to how successful the idea can be. However, the opposite of foursquare, focussing on the shape of the network rather than the individuals connecting to it, removes that limit. Each time I check in, rather than just appending my +1 to a long list of identical entries, I disrupt the fabric of the network and make it better. I think a lot about the way “massively multiplayer” games are anything but, and flatter to deceive on the promise of joining a virtual, alternate world. Flipping the idea of Foursquare and looking at the network as a constantly evolving organism has a lot of potential for fun, games and stories, and that’s what I’m thinking about right now.

Papa Sangre, being a “video game with no video” is just the kind of obtuse idea that I like. Furthermore, it appears to be closing in on a public release, and having read a short preview of the game, I’m excited to see that there are ideas under the skin. Real ideas, too. Something that might make you wonder about more than just the social or playful dynamics. Ideas that are worth thinking about.

The games industry is incredible self-referential, to the point of obsessive cloning and stagnation, so it’s refreshing to see a game with a new approach, not just from the point of view of innovative games, but also in terms of immersive experiences. Listen to, if you will, the video below:

Entering the Palace of Bones from Papa Sangre on Vimeo.