• Fun in class, in sex?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 39 Comments

    When a game designer (or student) first starts trying to define why games are “fun” they have trouble even conceptualizing it beyond “I know it when I see it.” Then they encounter Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow and/or Koster’s Theory of Fun and have this huge epiphany: Eureka, all fun comes from learning a new skill! Then after awhile, they enter another stage of questioning this: wait a minute, if all fun comes from skill mastery, why aren’t students driven by the promise of fun to get straight A’s in all their classes (even the poorly taught ones), since that involves mastery of the material? Why is sex fun (by some standards), and yet doesn’t involve mastery (ahem, again by some standards)? At any rate, you could think of this as three stages of evolution of a game designer, and different designers are going to be in different stages, and when they encounter one another there will be chaos when they start discussing the nature of “fun.”

    Teaching Game Design: Lessons learned from SIEGE.

    Some interesting questions there.

    • “if all fun comes from skill mastery, why aren’t students driven by the promise of fun to get straight A’s in all their classes (even the poorly taught ones), since that involves mastery of the material?”

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  • How much I walked in London

    Hours Categories Misc
    Comments 6 Comments

    I walked around a lot. All over Clerkenwell (where my hotel was), doing a bit of a tour of locations from Oliver Twist. Over to Covent Garden the day of the unconference. Past the Barbican on the day of the SXSW party. And from Tower Hill to the South Bank and all the way across to Westminster Abbey, on the last day. Along the way I stopped in at The Tower of London, Southwark Cathedral, The Globe, and lots of other interesting locations. I have a kajillion photos, of course, but in the meantime, here’s a quick map of where I walked.
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  • New Daedalus project!

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 9 Comments

    The Daedalus Project.

    Lots of stuff to dig into, but here’s some highlights:

    • 23% of users create their own guild
    • 20% join because a real life friend invited them
    • Only 4% come via random invite
    • 26% have been in guilds for longer than 2 years
    • 59% join guilds where they know someone in RL
    • Women were twice as likely to be in guilds with romantic partners
    • 20% of people pick a class and always go for it in game after game
    • 17% go for class abilities instead (hardest, crowd control, overpowered, etc)
    • 11% go for the aesthetic of a player race
    • 67% have a preferred class type.
    • On average players have 8.7 characters on their account, but most everyone can identify a “main”
    • Genre: Both genders like fantasy best, but men also like futuristic spaceships a lot.
    • More people like being a vampire than a vampire hunter, but women are more into being a vampire than men are.
    • 80% of people would rather be in the least popular faction.

  • Play driving games to reduce car insurance?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 6 Comments

    Could playing computer games enhance mental agility enough to turn people over 50 into better drivers? Allstate Corp. wants to find out, and if the answer is yes, it might offer insurance discounts to people who play the games.

    Alas,I am not old enough to qualify. But it sure seems like a classic application of my theory of fun. 🙂

    PsycPORT.com | Testing whether computer games can improve driving.

    (Via Morgan).