Cracked has a surprisingly interesting article on the psychology of rewards and how it’s applied to game design:

Do you like your job?

Considering half of you are reading this at work, I’m going to guess no. And that brings us to the one thing that makes gaming addiction–and addiction in general–so incredibly hard to beat.

As shocking as this sounds, a whole lot of the “guy who failed all of his classes because he was playing WoW all the time” horror stories are really just about a dude who simply didn’t like his classes very much. This was never some dystopian mind control scheme by Blizzard. The games just filled a void.

Why do so many of us have that void? Because according to everything expert Malcolm Gladwell, to be satisfied with your job you need three things, and I bet most of you don’t even have two of them:

Autonomy (that is, you have some say in what you do day to day);

Complexity (so it’s not mind-numbing repetition);

Connection Between Effort and Reward (i.e. you actually see the awesome results of your hard work).

Most people, particularly in the young gamer demographics, don’t have this in their jobs or in any aspect of their everyday lives. But the most addictive video games are specifically geared to give us all three… or at least the illusion of all three.

Cracked: 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted

(via Social Physicist)

Tom Henderson, aka Mathpunk on Twitter, is a mathematics lecturer at Portland State University and an improve comedian with the group The Light Finger Five. He edits mathpunk.net and is co-host of the podcast Math for Primates (with scientist and professional weightlifter graduate student and competitive weigh lifter Nick Horton). He received the Pandora Award (Bronze) from Chris DiBona, Open Source Program Manager for Google, for his participation in the game Superstruct.

Klint Finley: What does it mean to be a (or, rather THE) “mathpunk”?

Tom Henderson: Ha! Okay. When I was maybe 20 years old, my high school girlfriend was telling me about a punk band called “Green Dave.” I told her that I found punk to be totally unimpressive, because it was a musical genre that, near as I could tell, was founded upon not knowing how to play your instrument.

She set me straight. The point of punk, she said, was that ANYone could get the experience of being in a band, of performing in front of peers, of expressing yourself, without there being a prerequisite to participate.

This blew my mind, and it was that conversation that turned me from a nascent douchebag into a self-aware poser.

Later, a girlfriend who had honest-to-god Southern California punk credibility — this was the time that The Offspring was getting radio play so, what, she was probably most deep in the hardcore scene? — got me interested in the music, and explained to me that punks could be astronomers or Shakespeare devotees with no clash. (Pardon the pun.)

So, these things are tucked into my brain. Later, I move to Portland. I move to Portland with the extensive plan of “take math classes until head blows up, or degree achieved.”

This is the first serious long-term plan I’ve ever had. I figure, Shit, I’m a guy with long term plans now? I need to re-roll my character sheet. I start with appearance (self-aware poser), and ramp up the mathematical angle, to cobble together a philosophy of punk rock mathematics.

Read the rest of this entry »

Above: People playing CryptoZoo

Suzie Boss: For the uninitiated, what are alternate reality games?

Jane McGonigal: When people think of computer or video games, they often think of playing in a virtual world that doesn’t exist in reality. But alternate reality game designers are trying to get people to play in the real world. We want people to bring the same curiosity, wonder, and optimism that you feel when in your favorite video games into your real lives and real problems.

SB: Your games sound pretty different from commercial products like World of Warcraft.

JM: There are two big distinctions. First, alternate reality games are not in a virtual environment. They’re built on top of social networks, so we use ordinary online tools like online video, blogs, wikis, and being part of a network. It’s not about graphics and avatars. Second, it’s real play and not role play. You don’t adopt a fictional personality. You play as yourself.

SB: Do your games actually change how people act in real life?

JM: CryptoZoo is a good example of a game oriented to changing your everyday behavior. I developed it for the American Heart Association with the mission of changing the way people think about physical activity. Right now, many of us think of physical activity as requiring you to carve out an hour and changing into your gym clothes. You think you have to go to a special place to sweat. It feels separate from our everyday lives and not integrated into what we do when we’re hanging out with our friends. CryptoZoo inspires people to say, let’s be active for the next five minutes. We teach people to see real streets, real parks, real physical environments as opportunities for playing the game.

WorldChanging: Jane McGonigal on Gaming for Good

South Korea’s normally clandestine intelligence agency is running an internet game challenging citizens to spot real North Korean spies and uncover communist moles.

South Korea’s National Intelligence Service is running the game on its website, challenging ordinary citizens to keep a close eye on people who praise the communist North.

It also asks people to dob in anyone taking photos of sensitive military bases, those who stick up pro-North Korea propaganda, and even anyone who covers their mouth when they talk.

The spy agency is offering laptops, cameras and game consoles to 200 winners.

ABC: Game challenges Koreans to spot real spies

(Thanks m1k3y)

This is “human computation,” the art of using massive groups of networked human minds to solve problems that computers cannot. Ask a machine to point to a picture of a bird or pick out a particular voice in a crowd, and it usually fails. But even the most dim-witted human can do this easily. Von Ahn has realized that our normal view of the human-computer relationship can be inverted. Most of us assume computers make people smarter. He sees people as a way to make computers smarter.

Odds are you’ve already benefited from von Ahn’s work. Like when you type in one of those stretched and skewed words before getting access to a Yahoo email account or the Ticketmaster store. That’s a Captcha, which von Ahn developed in 2000 to thwart spambots. Or there’s von Ahn’s picture-labeling games, which have lured thousands of bored Web surfers into tagging 300,000 photos online — doing it so effectively that Google bought his idea last year to improve its Image Search engine.

Full Story: Wired

(via mathpunk)

The reason I opened this with the Nick Douglas joke — aside from the fact I thought it was funny — is the fact that all of the best content from the Superstruct project grew outside the original petri dish. Most of the best brainfood wound up growing on the Tumblr platform, which makes sense…I would especially recommend The Gupta Option.

In fact, the Superstruct information works so much better on other platforms, I’m kind of confused why they’d take the time to code up a clunky site in the first place. Check out the Reconstruct Ning page — it handles every aspect of usability and information design better than the actual site. Much like the Obama campaign, the best thing to come out of Superstruct is the community that it created. To me, that’s awesome enough to still give Jane McGonigal, Jamais Cascio and the rest of the folks at IFTF credit for a job well done.

Superstruct Review: Unplayable, Unwinnable, Still Awesome // Skilluminati Research.

I’m quite interested in the posibility of using games to get work done, and here’s a quite interesting application (from Boing Boing):

The game throws up an image in a Java applet, then asks you and an anonymous “partner” elsewhere on the net to type in keywords until both of you have a word in common — IOW, until you and a stranger can agree on a good label for the picture. Presumably, this is being added to a metadata database for the purpose of cataloguing all the images on the net. Neat idea.

I’m gonna do some idea-blogging over the next few days, trying to get some ideas out there for some feedback (or at least so I don’t forget them).

I’ve had this “games as musical interface” idea for a couple years. A number of “generative” and “fractal” music programs out there (check out this listing). Mostly the interfaces consist of typing in numbers, moving sliders around, or dragging something around the screen randomly. These don’t seem like engaging interfaces.

The idea of using games for an interface isn’t new: this guy has a 3D fractal music game: however, I’ve never been able to get it to run on my computer, and now I can’t even find the download on his web site. My idea is to use a series of constantly changing classic games clones – Pacman, Space Invaders, Tetris, etc. The position of different game objects act as the random data for a music and graphics generator, making it easy for almost anyone to create music and visual compositions; even if they’re not good with music or at playing games. It also creates a game in which the goal is not to “win” but to create interesting music. This could also work as a multi-player game, with the data being split between the two players.

One important aspect is that the “voices” should be configurable. Output to MIDI, or to a set of samples (a la MOD tracking programs) .

A bit of a head-trip feature I’d like to see in the game: the games constantly morph into each other. One minute you’re playing Tetris, moving a block around, and then suddenly the blocks you’ve stack start to look like a maze and your block is pac-man. Then ghosts show up and eventually the whole game is Pac-Man. You play this for a while, then it starts to turn into Space Invaders. Which then turns into Astroids. The changes are random, Tetris sometimes turns into Astroids or Space Invaders instead of Pac-Man.

Jeremy Winters doesn’t think Max/MSP is powerful enough to create something like this. I would like to see it done in Flash, but I kind of doubt that’s possible either.

(should I post this to Margin Walker?)

This message is for Brenden Simpson – I don’t have access to ICQ right now, and I’m never sure what your e-mail address is. But, anyone interested is welcome to reply.

While I’m waiting for the perfect Live Journal narrative idea and video graffiti idea to strike me, how about:

1. We write an outline, with say 10 landmarks (more might be necessary).

2. We setup a content managment system.

3. We take turns writing 250 – 500 word chapters.

4. We plan it out so that we alterate hitting landmarks.

5. The idea is, to make it challenging for the other guy to execute his assigned point on the landmark without doing ridiculous things.

6. Also, keeping consistent with characterization will be a challenge.

7. We should probably write the outline ourselves, but it would be fun to invite more people to play.

8. One chapter a week?

Thoughts on the Live Journal interactive narrative idea:

1. I don’t want to do “the story game” (where each person writes a piece of the story).

2. I don’t want to do a simple novel serialization like Class of 91 or a “writing in public” excercise like Listener by Ellis or Unwirer by Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross . But, I wouldn’t rule out the idea of doing a project using Movable Type, a wiki, or some other collaboration ware. (Brenden, you game?)

3. I’m thinking of trying to work with non-fiction (to be true to the journaling purpose of the community). But I don’t want to duplicate the Fray or City Stories and the like.

4. I want to find some way to integrate filters, social network features, commenting and so on.

5. Perhaps a sort of non-fiction role-playing game? Or a game with “assignments” to be carried out in real life, and then reported on in the journal?