[il2007] Closing Keynote - Gaming, Learning, & the Information World
Elizabeth Lawley presented on this, and as she notes on her blog Information Today took her joke that she’d appear in costume seriously and advertised that fact. So, here’s what she looks like (apologies for the blurriness of photos):
That’s her character Maleficent’s outfit in World of Warcraft (WoW).
The focus of her talk was on ways to take the engaging elements of gaming and bring them to everyday life (and to point out the already existing parallels).
What makes games engaging isn’t especially surprising:
- Understanding
- Accomplishment
- Progress
- Acquisition
- Communication
Actually, that might have been the important things to get in the first five minutes, now that I think of it. The important elements she talked about in terms of game design were:
- Collecting (i.e., getting stuff)
- Points (i.e., keeping score)
- Feedback
- Communications exchanges
- Customization
She compared the first five minutes of World of Warcraft (building a character, the introduction which explains the backstory, nice design bits like exclamation points appearing over people’s heads or making sure you’ll survive the first combat) with Second Life (movement is unclear, no “goal” per se, no rewards or sense of accomplishment). And to be fair, she did point out there’s a lot of neat stuff in Second Life.
She pointed out that the lines between online games and offline social interaction are blurring - WoW guilds consisting solely of people who’ve met in real life, Joi Ito’s line about WoW as the new golf.
Liz showed Nick Yee’s 5 stages of MMO players and compared them to everyday jobs.
She also pointed to things like Budweiser’s Passively Massive Multiplayer Online Game which turns web browsing into a game with quests and prizes and such, something developed for the Social Computing Symposium which encouraged people to learn each others’ names and faces by rewarding them with contact info and points, to Chore Wars which turns household chores into a roleplaying game.
I have some issues with the notion of making the corporate world even more like a game, and I would have liked to see some discussion of cooperative games, how to build humane games into household and work activities. Possibly I am turning into a mushy-headed feel-good type after two months in California, though.
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November 2, 2007 at 4:34 pm
My key take-away from the talk was the run-through of the ‘first five minute’ experiences of WoW and Second Life. It made me think I need to revisit the first impressions to my own site. While I won’t make people go off and kill an ork or a rat, there may be some ideas worth having in this area.
Nice to meet you at dinner the other night
November 2, 2007 at 6:13 pm
“I have some issues with the notion of making the corporate world even more like a game, and I would have liked to see some discussion of cooperative games, how to build humane games into household and work activities.”
Yes. But, Chore Wars works because it takes something essentially cooperative and makes it competitive (at least self-competitive) to add motivation. (And it’s spawned Knit Wars, which is unbelievably silly. No, I haven’t played either.) I think the most interesting idea is to introduce new framing elements to old situations, such as cooperative games in a competitive corporate setting.