A few quick thoughts

There will be more blog posts coming on various topics I've mentioned before (or tweeted about), I promise. In fact, it's quite possible I finally got past my bloggers block today by doing a little work on one of my slow moving posts. In the mean time though here are a few more thoughts on gamification.

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you gotta have a simulation

This is just a brief blast on this topic of gamification, or as Ian Bogost has referred to it Exploitationware.

Rewarding badges doesn't make a product more like a video game, but more importantly if you don't have a simulation you're not making a game.

The bottom line is that tracking points doesn't mean anything unless those points have meaning, and in any worthwhile simulation, you have good modeling of numerous points in relation to each other in meaningful ways.

Hence, without simulation you're not making anything more game like.

Also, as has been discussed previously in numerous places, a simulation alone does not a game make.

Nested Communities of Practice #AERA2011

This post is a little delayed (as usual), but here are my slides from AERA. Notes and slides after the jump.

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More Slides About Game Design

Last week I had the pleasure of giving another guest lecture for Roxana Hadad's awesome online Game Design & Development course for  Year 10 students in the UK (they'd be freshmen in the American HS system). Last year I gave a talk to her students about genre, but this year I decided to change it up a bit seeing as genre isn't necessarily the most useful construct in actually designing games. Instead I presented the idea of approaching game design as an inquiry process (using the term inquiry loosely). If you click the image below, you can download my slides for the talk as a .pdf.

Sometime later this week I'll try to post some content explaining what each slide was about, although hopefully many of them are self explanatory. I should also note that I've got a ton of screen shots in here, and I continue to borrow Valve's TF2 fonts for these presentations. If anyone has a better attribution for something than the ones I've provided, do let me know.

Cognitive Dissonance and Social Media

I started writing this post last Sunday (the 13th). I'd just posted images from the protests in Madison the day before, and had planned on getting some real content out the next day. However, that proved significantly harder than I'd anticipated . . .

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