games

Are Mario, YouTube & My Little Pony killing my Daughters Imagination?

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Imagination 1440664813 Are Mario YouTube 038 My Little Pony killing my Daughters Imagination

I am a huge advocate of the benefit of games. They are amazing and I would quite happily argue with anyone shouting about games and violence, or games being bad for kids. I am also not against T.V. My youngest has amazing shape recognition, counting and even spelling and maths abilities – at three – thanks in large part to Team UmiZoomi!

However, I have started to notice a slightly concerning issue with my eldest daughter. She seems to have no imagination any more, or at least a very reduced functionality one! Read More ...

How do you deal with being wrong?

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Error 1432641088 How do you deal with being wrong

Not really a gamification related post today, though it could pertain to the gamification community!

It happens to us all at some point. Someone says something, you see something, read something, hear something – whatever – but it shakes the foundations of something you knew in your hear was correct. Until you discovered this new information, you would have staked the life of your entire family line on what you knew to be correct. Now, you find out that you had been wrong all along – how do you deal with it? Read More ...

7 Deadly sins of making serious / educational games

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7 deadly sins of serious game design 7 Deadly sins of making serious educational games

I wanted to add a short post just highlighting 7 things that I repeatedly see people doing wrong when they are making or considering making serious / educational games. This is by no means an exhaustive list though – I just like the idea of 7 deadly sins 😀

  1. Assume because you think it is fun that everyone else will.
  2. Forget that it is actually a game.
  3. Forget that it is meant to teach something or provide a message.
  4. Test with the wrong people.
  5. Think that it doesn’t need to look good.
  6. Think that playing games will make you a good game designer.
  7. Underestimate how hard it is to make a good game.

In a little more detail.

Assume because you think it is fun that everyone else will.

  • Fun is really subjective and just because you think it is amazing doesn’t mean that the rest of us will! See sin 2…
    • Read More ...

    A framework for creating play-like systems

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    Enterprise Play Like System Framework A framework for creating play like systems

    Separating Games from Play and using it

    All of this research into play and talking about play has been for a reason. I wanted to try and open up the idea of making more play-like experiences rather than more game-like experiences. I was trying to introduce some of the basics that separate games and play. For this there are three important differences between play and games that we need to keep in mind.

    • Games have prelusory goals – ie, goals that you must achieve that have been set by the system.
    • Games have rules that define how you have to achieve the prelusory goals (Lusory Means).
    • They also have rules that create challenges to achieve the goals. Rather than going from A to B in a straight line, you have to overcome obstacles and solve puzzles going A to Z to E to B and back again! (Constitutive Rules)

    In play, the goals are often less defined or not consciously apparent. Whilst there may be rules that dictate how play progresses (social rules, physical rules and so on), there are not that are there to deliberately challenge you or make things harder. Read More ...

    Learning about playfulness from Toca Boca

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    Photo 06 03 2015 10 27 52 Learning about playfulness from Toca Boca

    Continuing my investigations into play, I wanted to talk about a few things my kids have been teaching me about just letting go and giving in to the fantasy and the lack of imaginative boundaries that real play demands. It is not as easy as it would first seem either.

    There are lots of views of play out there. I offered some of my thoughts in a recent post, that play is a free form activity that is undertaken almost just because it can be and it brings fun and joy. In this sort of description, play is an activity – it follows a similar line of thought to  that proposed by Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens. It was also Huizinga who gave us the concept of the Magic Circle – the boundary between reality and play. Read More ...