Serious Games and Gamification Seminar Talk

This is the talk I gave at the seminar. Or, rather, the script of the talk. I didn't really follow this script to the letter, but I said pretty much the same things. Except because of time constraints I had to skip the player types section.

Slide 1 (Intro)

Hello. I’m Mika Oja from the computer science and engineering laboratory, where I study games and gamification, especially in the context of ubiquitous computing. The topic of this talk says gamification principles but it’s not entirely accurate. I tried to avoid the fundamentals as such. So now that we have seen lots of examples of serious games and gamification, it’s time to let the academic loose. In this talk I will mostly raise questions which I think should be seriously considered when thinking about gamification. I am more interested in gamification for good. Marketing gamification makes me feel a bit uneasy. But I guess that’s how marketing is.

Slide 2
The first big question is of course, what is gamification? Here’s the thing: there are two views of the subject. This is a very recent academic working definition for gamification which was presented at the introductory part of the gamification workshop at CHI this year. “gamification is the use of game design elements in non-game contexts”. It sounds pretty self-explanatory, no? Except, what is a game design element? According to the authors, this can be a lot of things. To translate this into English, it’s more or less designing game-like elements that enhance the experience of doing a task.

So, what is not gamification? Serious games are not gamification, the definition specifically excludes complete games. This is a rather fuzzy border and I’ll come back to it the end of my talk. This academic definition also makes a distinction between gamification and playfulness by stating that gamification only includes games, not play. Again, if we look at some definitions of play and games this is a very fuzzy border. Finally, gamification is a design paradigm thus excluding the use of game technologies and development practices from the definition.

However this is just a working definition and there is no certainty of whether it will stick.

Slide 3
And here’s the second answer, the public opinion. It seems to be a rather general view that gamification is a marketing trend which emphasizes the use of simple things from games. Scores, leaderboards and so on, you know the drill, and if you don’t, we’ll get there soon enough. The presumption is that these are easy to use, which is quite a bit removed from the truth. This type of gamification has penetrated popular web sites far and wide, which is a probable contributor to how the word is presently understood. Nevertheless, this general opinion of the term’s meaning seems to have its share of negative connotations, and many designers dislike the term.

Since it is widely popular, and just growing, let’s take a look at the trend.

Slide 4
Here is the basic toolkit of gamification. Points, levels, leaderboards and achievements. Looking at the list we can easily say that these are all pretty shallow examples of game mechanics. These are not really central pieces in games, just some tools that make games better if used right. Next we are going to take a closer look at these, to get a good grip of what’s going on.

Slide 5
Let’s start with points. That’s my profile from Gameful, a site that uses both points and levels. In games players get points for doing things the game designer wants to encourage. In gamification, the premise is the same. There are two basic schemes of using points. The simplest scheme is simply racking up points for doing actions on a website. This can act as a feedback mechanism, giving the user some information of how well they are doing. Points are also a status indicator in a sense. Although not exactly points, discussion boards typically track and show the number of posts made by each user, and typically users with more posts are taken more seriously.

Points can also be redeemable, in which case users can gain virtual items or even actual prizes by spending their points. In this case the points are more like virtual currency. Think experience points versus money on role-playing games - the former accumulate indefinitely while the latter is spent on regular intervals. Experience is status, money is a resource. Often in virtual currency economies the points can also be given to other users in trade for favors or other virtual resources. For example, users can offer rewards to those who answer their questions. As we all know, virtual currency in games can become a really serious business and points in websites are no different. If the points have high perceived value, they can influence participation and decision making.

Levels are almost entirely a status indicator. In this sense they are quite similar to badges, but not exactly. Again, there are two basic schemes for gaining levels. One is simply tied to points like leveling up in World of Warcraft - rack a certain amount of points, go up a level. Unlike points, levels typically are tied to a scale where there is a maximum. Levels are typically better for indicating user ranking on a site because the numbers are much simpler than points. Levels also act as milestones in a point-gaining system. Levels are not always tied to points however. For example in Gameful levels are gained by completing a bunch of requirements, different for each level. These assignments act as a tutorial for interacting with the site and other users. In this sense levels are like achievements.

Slide 6
Leaderboards are also often linked with points, and they are yet another indicator of status. Put simply, a leaderboard is a ranking system that shows who’s got the most points. They are more competition-oriented than levels, they are, after all, a clear ranking. Leaderboards allow users to set goals for themselves but unlike levels, these goals are tied to performance of other users instead of preset limits. Typically users can see different subsets of the leaderboard, which allows them to set realistic goals for themselves. While getting on top of the all-time global leaderboard can be nigh-impossible, being the best during a single week is more achievable, as is being the best among one’s peers.

However, the suitability of leaderboards can be questionable in many contexts. Not everyone likes competition, and being on the last places of a leaderboard can be discouraging rather than encouraging. Whereas the highest level in a system is achievable by anyone, the top positions on a leaderboard are achievable only to a selected few. This can lead to a situation where users are unable to set realistic goals for themselves and give up trying. This can happen if leaderboards are the only way of setting goals. Smartly designed leaderboards where it is possible to compete in many categories alleviate the problem, but regardless I would say that out of all these techniques, leaderboards are the ones that have potential for doing harm.

Slide 7
Achievements, or badges as they are typically called, have a variety of purposes. These are nowadays really common in video games and also appearing on websites. In a rather recent social psychological analysis five uses for badges have been identified. As with levels, one aspect of badges is goal setting. The badge itself incorporates a goal, which is something that needs to be done in order to gain the badge. They also have an instructional role. Badges can inform what is possible in a system, and also nudge users towards desirable action. In a web community badges can represent the community’s values.

Badges can also tell more about a user’s identity than simple points and levels. They can tell a user’s interests and the ways they are interacting with the site. Badges are also status indicators in a website. The number of badges is one metric, but also the difficulty of gaining various badges can bring larger status rewards to those who hold the toughest ones. In games there are often different levels for achievements to show which ones are harder to get. The discussion that is going on about game achievements is largely applicable to website badges. Good badge design can improve user engagement and experience.

In a way, badges are a step up from levels, and another sideways. When badges get more complex, they can not only provide a goal but also additional requirements such as a specific way of doing something. User-created challenges are also badges of a kind, and even challenges that depend on self-reporting fall under this category.

Slide 8
First we’ll look at the topic of motivation. Extrinsic motivation means being motivated by rewards that come from the outside. A lot of boring jobs are typically motivated by paychecks only. Intrinsic motivation on the other hand comes from the joy of performing a task. A common perception is that intrinsic motivation is the one that drives behavior change, which is a desirable result in typical gamification applications. However, it does look a lot like these basic techniques we just covered are just adding more virtual rewards into the mix. However, this is not exactly that straightforward. Let’s take a quick psych lesson.

Slide 9
The flow theory, familiar for game designers, is a kind of recipe for optimal experience. I’ll explain it quite briefly as it is an important factor in understanding why playing games is so enjoyable. These are different aspects of flow. In flow, the person’s skills are on par with the challenges of the activity. In a sense, the person becomes one with the activity. Track of time is lost. Almost anything can become a flow experience but it’s often not simple. The theory deserves a lot more attention, but unfortunately we have to go back to the topic of gamification. In flow motivation is intrinsic. The question is, does gamification induce flow?

I have circled the aspects of flow where gamification can be useful. First and foremost, the gamification techniques we’ve discussed have two important features: they allow users to set goals for themselves and they act as a clear performance metric. Adding point scoring to activities can make them in a sense measurable. Accumulated points are a clear indication of the effort we have spent doing something. Popular services like last.fm or devices like pedometers all basically do the same thing: they provide us statistics of what we have done. These statistics can increase intrinsic motivation, because they enable us to follow our progress towards our goals. Without a sense of progress, there is no flow.

One problem with gamification is the fact that the actual task is often untouchable. Tasks need to be done in a certain way, and no amount of virtual enhancements change that. However, what gamification can do to alter the difficulty of tasks is to guide people towards those tasks or parts of tasks that match their current skill. These people are also more aware of their skill levels as we just discussed, so they are more able to choose suitable challenges, ones that keep them in the flow channel. In a system where all tasks need to be done eventually this only works to a certain extent though.

Even though there are a lot of things about flow that cannot be directly affected by gamification, enhancing just these two aspects can be helpful. Studies on motivation technology seem to show that it is worth the effort.

Slide 10
Next let’s take a look at Bartle’s player types. This is yet another familiar thing for game designers, but I’ll recap briefly. Killers are players who gain enjoyment from beating others. This can take variety of forms from healthy competition to ruining everyone else’s experience. Some competition aspects of gamification can appeal to these players. However, in gamification it is often much more important to prevent anyone from spoiling the fun of others. Like in a work environment, this kind of behavior would be totally unacceptable.

Achievers are interested in beating all the challenges a game has to offer. If we look at all the gamification techniques so far, it’s pretty clear that they are the best fit for achievers. Whether it is higher levels, leaderboard positions or badges, anything can be a goal for achievers. Socializers are another thing entirely. They mostly seek the company of others from a game and fulfilling the game’s goals is not that interesting to them. I’m not sure if these people even need gamification. Badges could have some utility, in the form of connecting like-minded individuals. If we go too much into this topic, we’ll eventually have to discuss the “social” games on Facebook, and I don’t want to go there.

Finally there’s explorers. Their pleasure comes from exploring a game world and finding possibilities in it. It is again questionable how much these simple gamification techniques can offer for explorer types. Hidden badges and other rewards can be useful, but only in a context where there actually is something to explore. In a more complex system, explorers can also find pleasure in finding new ways to use existing resources.

All in all, it would seem that at least with these basic techniques, achievers are the primary target for gamification. While it is worth noting that people don’t really fall exclusively into one category, in designing gamified systems it’s important to consider all the player types. It would seem that this requires moving away from simple gamification towards more complex systems.

Slide 11
Here’s an interesting question: how much game design can be applied before gamification starts to look more like a serious game? In this graph, on the blue end is a task that has no gamification whatsoever. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s a game that is designed for pure entertainment. We are now assuming that there exists a group of games that do not provide any actual benefit. You know, for the sake of argument. If we move from tasks towards games, we can find some solutions that use some gamification, like points to provide some kind of feedback.

Likewise, in the game end of the spectrum, when we move a bit from pure entertainment we’ll find games that are not designed to be serious games, but nevertheless teach some useful skills. Games that involve some mathematical skills are an easy example of this category. Closer to the center on the gamification side we have really finely crafted gamified systems, which make use of many of the techniques we discussed. This is where it already starts to get quite blurry. Likewise on the other side of the fence, there’s serious games like training simulators which do not really have much entertainment value left in them.

So, what happens in the middle? I don’t really think there is any clear border where something to the left is gamification and something to the right is clearly a game. Still, it seems to be clear that designing a gamified system is a different task from designing a serious game.

Before finishing, I’ll take a quick poke at this subject. One perspective to look at the difference is the starting point of design. Gamification is essentially designing enhancements around an existing activity. The activity in itself does not really change, it is simply made more engaging by auxiliary means. In a sense, the goal of the users is to complete the task, and the goal of design is to make them more engaged in doing so.

Serious games on the other hand start with the game. Typically we are designing a game where the intended task is one of the game mechanics. The goal of the player is to win the game, and the task gets done as a side effect.

The important question is: which one you really want to design?

Slide 12
Thanks for listening, we probably have some time for comments and questions now.

2nd International UBI Summer School

I'm back again. There's been a short break in my updates for two reasons: first there was the summer school, which took one entire week, and then there was a tiredness and a short vacation. I actually started geocaching during my short break, but more about that later.

The UBI Summer School was organized again this year, this time with even more hard work (but hey, more credit points). Unfortunately some workshops had to be cancelled and overall there were not as many students participating as last year. This year I was participating in professor Leopoldina Fortunati's workshop "Social and Cultural Aspects of New Media". This year's experience was quite different from last year's relatively programming oriented workshop - I barely touched my laptop and not a single line of code was written. So what did we do then? Discuss. A lot. And then some. So much in fact that I got some serious mental fatigue from all the thinking and talking. Seriously, I've never been so exhausted.

All the tiredness aside, the workshop was really, really good. We discussed how technology relates with our society and culture from five different angles. Topics included how technology affects space, how emotions are linked to technology and so on. In this workshop it was often my task to consider these questions from one specific point of view: games. I won't go into detail in this post for a particular reason: all the insight from the workshop could fill the pages of an average size textbook. However, my next blog posts will be about topics that were most interesting to me in the workshop. Yes, it will mostly be about games but perhaps other matters as well.

So the workshop was really awesome. I would like to thank everyone for the insightful discussion, and especially our instructor for being there and bringing up all those interesting topics. Hopefully we will see the 3rd International UBI Summer School next year. This year certainly set the bar quite high, so let's see if next time will be even better (assuming there is a next time).

Casual Connect Europe 2011

Let's start by saying that the last couple weeks have been interesting times. The game we made at the Global Game Jam got nominated in the Gamesauce Challenge. As a result, I traveled to Hamburg, Germany, to take part in Casual Connect and to present Hamsters and Plague. While Casual Connect is a business conference, I went there with research interests. Turns it was indeed useful.

First of all, getting involved with the actual games biz helps me understand better what kinds of games sell right now. This valuable information tells me where I should look when searching inspiration. It also gives me a bit of credibility as a game designer, so that when I claim to take influences from game design people can assume I actually know what I'm talking about. Having contacts who know the business facts of games can't hurt either. So yeah, the people angle, definitely a good thing.

Second, the lectures I attended there were also quite useful for my next project. I took special interest in all things related to social gaming (i.e. gaming on social networks) and learned a lot of stuff that might not seem relevant to researchers at first, but is of tremendous advantage when deploying serious games and game-like applications in the real world. It is much easier to do wide scale research if I our applications are actually used by real people, of their own free will.

Now back to the usual stuff. I've been reading on gamification, so perhaps a summary is in order next. Until then, bye.

Global Game Jam 2011

Last weekend was made of small amount of sleep and lots of game development. In about thirty hours we designed and implemented a game, Hamsters and Plague. It's a tile-based puzzle game about the survival of hamsters after a plague. You can find information on the game from our project page. I have also started a blog for future development and other related discussion.

Making a game in such a short time is awesome in many ways. Especially learning. I will try to make a proper post mortem on our project when I'm less tired (later this week) and post it to the Hamsters and Plague blog. Naturally it's also important for my research to have actual game development experience. I once again realized how hard it is to evaluate learnability of something made by yourself and our game definitely could do a better job. Which I hope it will do in the future if I have the time to develop it further.

I'm also thinking that something like this would be a really good way to teach programming and team development. A rather tight time limit does wonders to motivation, at least when the topic is one that interests everyone. While school environment doesn't support over-the-weekend courses very well, something similar should be possible. Maybe we could give students credit points for participating in next year's Global Game Jam.

Audio Mostly in Piteå

Before continuing the Flow-series of posts, I'm presenting you a conference report. Audio Mostly is a conference for interacting with sound, so what was I doing there? Well, coincidentally, the organizing party is collaborating with us in the II City project, and my work just happened to be in demonstrable condition. Of course, now that it's been demoed I guess I can also write a post describing it a bit. Later though.

While I'm no audio expert (in fact, I just know how to listen to music - but I do think I'm fairly good at it!), the conference had much to offer, mostly in the department of game audio. It was also a good glimpse into the field of audio design, something I previously had little or no idea about. So now I know a little bit, and I can put my knowledge to use in game design or elsewhere. Although I will still have to rely on someone else to actually produce the audio - I have vowed to stay off the arts. That is of course a time issue - if I had the time, sure, I'd like to be my own graphics artist and audio producer.

The more interesting papers were about researching how people perceive audio. What kind of audio is suitable for different situations, how well audio expresses something, is it possible to tell stories using non-speech audio only and so on. From game design point of view, this kind of information is highly valuable (there even was one paper about horror game sounds). From the interface point of view, I'm kind of skeptic. As I am writing this, I'm listening to music and I have turned off every single audio signal from my operating system. There is only so much audio that can fit into one environment. Audio feedback is good, but relying on it too heavily can backfire. But that is just my opinion, and I should probably check some papers on the topic.

Since it was a small conference (they're keeping it that way intentionally) the atmosphere was really relaxed and enjoyable. I met a lot of people who were doing interesting things, and many audio-related conversations were had. Overall, Audio Mostly was more fun than Foundations of Digital Games, but not as useful for my research. Also, the chances of me going there again are kind of slim, especially now that I'm slowly transferring my work to a new project from II City (which also ends before Audio Mostly is next held in Piteå, which would be 2012 - they're having it in some more remote location every other year).

Foundations of Digital Games 2010

Another busy week behind. Exactly a week ago I was on my way to California, and more precisely the Foundations of Digital Games 2010 conference in Monterey. Here comes the aftermath.

Considering my own research, FDG2010 was mostly useful for the game design point of view but not that much actually. There were some interesting presentations and conversations with people about experimental game control methods, and finally some proper information about Kineckt. However, considering teaching game-related anything or game-aided education, the conference was much more useful for me. The details about the conference will be available later somewhere in the internet, so I'll just post some collected thoughts.

There was a plethora of sessions about inspiring more interest for computer science by using games and game design as part of CS education as well as to make potential students familiar with game development before college. I'm not exactly sure as to what the situation is here in Finland but I guess we can always use more interest. Probably the single most interesting session was about Microsoft Kodu, which is a visual game programming language, easy enough for children to learn. In the II City project, we are interested in using focus groups to create ideas for games, so you can probably see where this might be going. Yes, we can use Kodu to familiarize non-programmers with game dev.

Another thing I picked up were a lot of ideas for teaching a more serious game development course for post-grad students. This topic was presented in several sessions, and also discussed randomly throughout the conference. I'm mostly interested in doing this as a project-based course, and if possible, as a cooperation between our university and the department of industrial design in the University of Lapland. Bringing in artists from another university can get around the problem that CS students are not expected to have artistic abilities (and therefore we can't require them). This was how I had thought to do it to begin with, but discussions in the conference made me more confident. We can do this.

It was also nice to see a good glimpse of all the work being done in educational games, the Holy Grail of e-learning. There were quite a lot of projects presented that taught students computer science concepts in ways more interesting than plain programming practice. Using these kinds of games for teaching the basics of programming is an idea worth contemplation, especially if people are having a hard time grasping some of the concepts in our introductory course (I haven't asked yet, but in August I'll probably see for myself anyway). Of course, many a presented game taught other concepts than CS, such as how cats see the world.

Finally, game design was definitely not a forgotten topic. However, since there were always two sessions in parallel, I had to make choices, and because of my job, I ended up selecting all the education related sessions. So, like other people, I will have to check the interesting game design presentations when the presentation videos become available.

Jetlag and all that jazz aside, it was a good experience for a first conference trip. Although I definitely didn't expect that it would actually be cold in California. The wind was a real killer, especially on Saturday. In addition to huge amount of inspiration, I got to meet a lot of awesome people. Hopefully I'll be able to visit FDG2011 if it gets organized, wherever it might be. Oh, and the conference center had some serious Norman Doors - I took one pic, which I'll try to post later when I get it on my computer.

(During the trip I also had a lot of time to read books, so book reading report is up next)

1st International UBI Summer School - The Aftermath

I haven't been writing anything for a while, and here comes the explanation. I was attending to the 1st Internation UBI Summer School, held here in Oulu by the UBI project (UrBan Interactions). Basically it took all of my time last week: seminar and workshops every day between 9:00 and 16:00, and social events in the evenings. Of course it was totally worth it - there were lots of interesting people from all around the globe, and the workshop I was in was cool and really relevant to my post-graduate studies.

I was in a workshop called Urban Social Networks Analysis, instructed by professor Vassilis Kostakos from the University of Madeira. Our task during three days was to gather bluetooth data from the city of Oulu, by scanning for bluetooth devices in various locations, and to use that data to analyze how people (carrying the devices) were moving around the city. My workgroup was trying to figure out groups from the data, and some flocking behavior. Sadly it turned out that two and half hours worth of scanning by five groups was not enough for finding any groups of devices that would appear together in more than one location, so we had to to just do some group analysis.

It also turned out that analyzing groups computationally was far from trivial, and turned out to be quite a challenging task to do in about two days of programming. More work needs to be done on the algorithm later on. But anyway, the really useful stuff I took home from the workshop was how can we utilize simple data that has just time stamp, location and identifier to derive quite impressive representations of how people move around. Figuring out this kind of information can be seen as essential when seeking to understand the flow of people in a physical space. It answers the question "where should we put interfaces?", which is a key question if thinking about the difference between typical HCI and HCI for interactive spaces.

On Friday we had the final presentations for all the workshops (six in total). I did have a lot of difficulty choosing the workshop to attend to beforehand, and after seeing the presentations I really wished I could've been in all of the workshops (except one, which was very technically oriented). The other topics included "Real World Context-Aware Applications", "Urban Informatics and Sustainable Cities", "Creating and Sharing Artistic Experiences with Ubiquitous Technology" and "Interactive Textures - Rethinking Materiality". Let's just say that the results for each workshop were pretty amazing, especially considering they were done in just three days.

If any of the guys I met are reading this, thanks again for being there - great times were had! For those who weren't there, I'll try to post some links later if they release any interesting aftermath material about the summer school.

Innovative Interaction Concepts - part 6: M-Point

This is the sixth and final post in a series describing student presentations that we were invited to see and comment during the II City project meeting.

The final presentation was given by Eszter Nagy and Riikka Jefremoff. Their idea was to connect two places, two groups of people and two different ways of interaction together to form a whole, that would improve communication and entertain people. In their example, in one place people would use their hands to interact with a screen while in the other, they would use their feet. What could follow is a cooperative game, where people form pairs (one person using hands, the other feet) and play against other teams. Eszter and Riikka had already done game concept thinking on their own, and the ones we discussed were all quite potential, but we will leave them in favor of some more abstract discussion.

The central idea that I think is present here, is the idea of non-verbal communication. People can only communicate with the other group via the interface. How can you suggest someone else (who you don't even know, you've only ever seen their hands or feet!) what to do by using just your hands to make gestures? What about with your feet? It would actually be an interesting social experiment to use this kind of concept and set some cooperative problem solving task for the test groups and see what kinds of ways to communicate they could come up with.

What about game design then, what kinds of ideas we can come up with based on this idea? First and foremost, I feel this idea has some really direct cooperation - two people are both doing their share of a common task. Of course, the lack of verbal communication is the challenge that is present in this particular concept, and because you don't even know who you are playing with, there is no way to achieve verbal communication that I can think of. It is an interesting variation to typical cooperative games where verbal communication channels are available (and in online games, you can usually use an external program for voice communication if playing with people you know).

While I'm writing this, I'm constantly coming up with mental connections to Francesca and Sami's Sphaere. In a way, M-Point is about expressing your presence via the system into another place, whereas Sphaere was about expressing your presence temporally to future visitors on the same site. In Eszter and Riikka's presentation, M-Point puts more emphasis on having fun, and attracting people to play together for example in an airport terminal while waiting for a flight to leave (the point of Sphaere you can read in part 4 of this post series). But of course, combining both ideas would be very possible, and M-Point is indeed in a way about reaching out to others just differently.

For this same reason, I have a little less to say on M-Point, because I already discussed how games can break the ice on social situations in the post about Sphaere. The idea behind M-Point is basically exactly this. Of course, an additional cool thing about M-Point is that after playing it, I can say "I just played this game with some guy from Paris, and only thing I know about him are the shape and size of his feet", which is in some way kind of amazing thing to say I think. At least it will get people curious if nothing else. So thanks to Eszter and Riikka, we had another interesting lesson in communication and advantages of games. Much like Sphaere, the M-Point also contains ideas that I hope to work with in the future as part of the II City project.

Innovative Interaction Concepts - part 5: thINK

This is the fifth post in a series describing student presentations that we were invited to see and comment during the II City project meeting.

The fifth presentation, given by Deividas Djuozulynas and Jill Pearson, was most similar to the second one (I'm seeing a pattern here!) in that it also introduced an actual user interface concept. Also, much like the second presentation, the interface concept is kind of fuzzy, but whereas the second presentation was based on discovery, Deividas and Jill's concept is based on inaccurate control and the idea that just using an interface can be fun, regardless of actual content. So, let's go through the key points of the presentation and proceed from there as usual.

thINK is a blowing based interface, so instead of using physical touching, the interface is instead used with air. The key idea here is that blowing is not an exact science, so it might be fun to just try to navigate around the user interface ("can I get to that icon before I run out of breath?"). Also, creating art in this way can lead to surprising results. Just pick a color and start blowing, then see where it takes you. Deividas and Jill also presented several other ways of using thINK, but for the purposes of this blog, let's see what I can come up with.

Using blowing as a method of control could be easily used as a basis for a game or several. Of course, it's also easy to think of many existing games where this could be used to improve the gameplay experience, or at least make it different. How to use your breath could become another tactical dimension, although perhaps players of blowing instruments might have an unfair advantage here, but then again, maybe they've deserved it (and hey, maybe the game could be used for breathing training!). However, I want to take the discussion up to a more abstract level once again.

The general idea here is uncertainty of control, and the idea that sometimes you may need to put in a little effort to be able to use a certain service. Of course, this would be disastrous for office work and such that needs to be efficient, but for applications that are mostly entertaining in nature, why not? Getting to use some specific applications could be an achievement that requires some practice, which is actually an interesting way to increase the value of services. Again, we can see this in games: many games in various genres have side missions that are much more difficult than what you have to face in the main game, and the reward for beating the ultimate side quest is, in the end, just the feeling of achievement.

Of course, not all people want to master their games to this level. Even I, fanatic fan of difficult side quests, no longer have the time to play all my games thoroughly. I find this sad, but I digress. So, people definitely do play these difficult tasks, train themselves or their avatars in the game world until they are up to the task, then conquer the achievement. So, what if one day we could brag to our friends "hey guys, I mastered that thINK interface, I was able to get to use ReallyCoolApplication!". The application itself need not be even that cool in itself, just the fact that it's rare makes it cool, because not all people have the will to reach it. Of course it also should not be that crucial or important, because then people would feel compelled to practice, or be "left out".

Uncertain control in games has been done here and there (drunk driving in Grand Theft Auto 4 springs to mind immediately), so it's not exactly new but I can't currently recall any game that has a game mechanic solely based on it, but then again, I've been mostly playing very traditional games and kept up with indie games mostly by reading games magazines (which is something my studies force me to change). I think the idea here is mostly that, the game provides an additional challenge. Not only does the player need to reach certain goal, but also constantly put effort so that he retains an acceptable amount of comfort. Some more difficult parts might need more careful focus, while easier parts could be more relaxed. Visiting the blowing concept quickly, imagine running out of breath on a critical moment.

So what I was able to take home from Deividas and Jill's presentation can be summarized as follows: in entertainment interfaces, the ease of use might not always lead to the best user experience, and uncertainty and certain degree of lack of control might actually be great fun. This is another fuzzy concept, meaning I might be involved in researching it further with the II City project.

Innovative Interaction Concepts - part 4: Sphaere

This is the fourth post in a series describing student presentations that we were invited to see and comment during the II City project meeting.

The fourth presentation, by Francesca Ditroilo and Sami Keskikallio, reminded us of another very important and fundamental concept in interaction, much like the first presentation. Their idea was called Sphaere, a wordplay on sphere and share, and was especially about the latter. The Sphaere would be a special area, where users can use pressure-sensitive surfaces (in their example, benches and floor) to leave a presence, and to create kind of living art together with others. The surfaces assume colors - for example, sitting on the bench leaves your body's shape colored into it. Users can also use their hands to "paint" onto the surfaces, and finally the idea of playing music that can be altered by painting shapes was added to the Sphaere.

Much like the first presentation, I don't think the actual application or even interface is as interesting here as pointing out something that is really important: communicating emotions, and dealing with alienation. I mean, the interface is also neat, although it's less an interface and more an art platform or medium, but the really important thing that Sphaere does is allow one to leave a presence, and for others to sense that presence - it's about connection. A single user can, by painting colors and shaping music, effectively express how they feel. Communication is not always easy, and especially communicating emotions is often really hard in a normal social context. Maybe we're embarrassed by how we feel, or feel shame about showing it to the rest of the world so directly - I don't know, I can only guess.

People can share their joy by leaving cheerful expressions on the surfaces, so that others who come can also sense it, and maybe their mood is improved. Or like in Francesca and Sami's use scenario, a woman who is feeling sad finds comfort when she sees the presence of another who has also been sitting on the bench next to her. And even if a lonely person doesn't find comfort in seeing the presence left by others, they can express their feelings of loneliness, indirectly by leaving a presence (tragic colors, sad music) and perhaps awaken the rest of the world to the problem. Maybe someone will notice them one day, and realize that this person who has been leaving these kinds of expressions on the Sphaere is really lonely.

But, like promised in the prelude, I should be giving a game design point of view into this concept. The Sphaere, where the idea is that everyone can freely paint with colors, could be used as a game platform as well. To keep true to the purpose given by Francesca and Sami, I think we should be talking about cooperative games that people can just pick up and continue from the state someone else left it. For example, I came up with a scenario that could help the lonely person mentioned in the last paragraph.

Say, I am feeling kind of lonely and sad, and come upon the Sphaere. I start to experiment around with it for a while, shaping the music to suit my desolate state and at the same time painting with dark colors. The Sphaere could then notice this and start a game. Of course, I'm already a bit down, the game really needs to cheer me a bit before I even to play it. But let's suppose it gets me (well, games a way of doing that for me...) and I start playing. Someone else comes around, and they may feel from the atmosphere in the Sphaere that I'm feeling down, but also the platform could modify the game in a way that the other person can join in, and we can work toward the same goal. The game would then act as a kind of mediator that gets us into contact with each other.

There maybe quite a lot of black boxes in the above scenario, but it does raise another good aspect of games. Board and card games, and similar that you have to get together in some physical space to play, are indeed quite excellent social mediators. They work especially well in situations where no one is feeling quite comfortable - the people don't really know each other, and no one seems to assume the conversation leader role. It's an awkward situation, until somebody breaks out a board game, and, lo and behold, now the people suddenly do have something to talk about. Of course that's the optimal scenario, if people aren't interested in gaming at all (although, I do believe it's just a matter of bringing the right game) then it's another thing entirely. With the Sphaere, the platform itself can be the one who breaks out the game if it detects many individual people who are just kind of sitting or standing apart from each other.

So we have once again arrived to the core of my hypothesis, that games have a lot to give in many more contexts that we usually think about. The other way around, bringing this concept into games, is not as important, and indeed, in a way it has already been done in multiplayer games, especially the non-online variety. Of course, one challenge would be to make expressing emotion the central theme of a game's gameplay. Unfortunately, I don't feel ready yet to tackle this challenge, but perhaps at a later point of time I might return to it. Or maybe someone else does.

Finally, to conclude I think Francesca and Sami's presentation asks yet another very important question: can we relieve loneliness and alienation by using technology to get people to communicate and connect with each other? It is a good question, and their idea is a good example of how we might be able to do this. Finally, at least some of the aspects in this project, if not all, could be explored further by the II City project.

Innovative Interaction Concepts - part 3: Steam

This is the third post in a series describing student presentations that we were invited to see and comment during the II City project meeting.

The third presentation was given by Jens Baert and Marjo Pohjanen, who had worked with an idea involving fog screens. Their project was called Steam, and it combined circular fog screens with a touch floor. This combination produces a virtual environment of a kind, and their example used it for viewing different cities in the world. In the interaction scenario, the user steps inside a circular area, which contains this technology. Printed on the floor around the edge of the area are five arrows, each containing name of a city and the distance, 0 km. Depending on the direction of entry, the user is presented a realistic view of a given city.

The effect is not unlike virtual reality. The user can walk forward to zoom in on details, or walk around to pan the view. While virtual reality as a concept is nothing new, what was really impressive about this presentation was that Jens and Marjo had done some research on the technologies required for implementing this concept, and it turned out all the pieces to the puzzle in fact do exist already. All that is basically needed is to make a fog screen circular, viewable from the "inside". Also, if it can be layered, it will produce a realistic depth effect, which cannot be achieved with simple wall displays.

Similar concepts have been researched already, but mostly in rooms containing wall screens in every direction. The idea of using fog screens adds an additional effect of really being there, as the screen entirely surrounds the user and isn't simply displayed on a wall on every direction. This is what distinguishes this project from usual attempts at virtual reality. Another advantage of this approach is that at least in theory it doesn't require a huge studio-like environment, only some projecting equipment placed on the ceiling. This means that it can actually become accessible to be used in everyday environment, which coincidentally is also the design environment for interactive spaces.

While the described interaction scenario uses only a touch floor for control, we can clearly see the obvious advantages of adding sensor data to detect hand and other body movements. This kind of sensor technology is already on its way to homes, assuming that Microsoft's Project Natal does what it promises. Generally speaking, the idea of using a fog screen to display a user interface, combined with sensor data for tracking hand movements, could be used effectively to produce an effect similar to holographic user interfaces in science fiction movies. Technologies for making holographic user interfaces also do exist already, at least in some form, but it can't hurt to have other means of implementing them.

I find it kind of hard to compare this idea of using fog screens and holographic virtual realities, because in theory they have the same objectives, but in reality, both will most likely look and feel different. However I do think that the same game design ideas are applicable to any virtual reality environments. But either way, if someone goes ahead and succeeds in implementing Steam, Jens and Marjo might have shown us a way to bring this kind of experience outside laboratories, into pretty much any place with a ceiling. And that opens up yet another alley to explore for the II City project, and for generally designing interactive spaces.

Innovative Interaction Concepts - part 2: City Chills

This is the second post in a series describing student presentations that we were invited to see and comment during the II City project meeting.

The second presentation, by Mark Cosgrave and Ulla Mathaldi, was a more concrete interaction concept. Their idea combined an interesting user interface and an interesting way for finding new places in the city. They also introduced an interesting way of attracting a user to the screen by having the screen acknowledge the user's physical presence. The actual idea is built around fuzzy usability, where the user is not presented with all the options, but kind of discovers them one at a time in an interactive way. The service in their example is a way of navigating the city using the city soundscape to find places that are pleasing to the user.

I think Mark and Ulla's concept has three different things going on, all of them interesting on their own right. So let's do the engineering thing and pick this project apart (forgive me my barbaric manners, I just can't resist my inner engineer). The first interesting point in the above description is how the user is attracted to the screen in the first place. If we think of this in a more abstract way, the screen is concretely showing that it notices the person's presence and identifies with the potential user. We want to be acknowledged by our peers, and I would go as far to say this goes for machines as well.

I'll sidetrack briefly to talk about last.fm. I guess most people know it by now, but anyway, it's a service that tracks what music you play on your computer (or any other music player that can send information to their servers) and keeps statistics for you. The service doesn't require much from the user. You register once, and enable scrobbling. When you visit the site, it identifies a part of you - the music you listen to - and shows content that is relevant for you, like artist recommendations. It's perhaps not the best example, but I think it somehow does show how this automatic service clearly notices the user. Generally speaking, when our computers or web sites show us interesting or relevant information without specifically asking for it, we feel acknowledged.

In the coming age of interactive spaces, it will be increasingly more important to attract users to services that are relevant to their interests, because there are going to be so many services, and if people have to actually explore all the available options, they will be too intimidated to even try. The fuzzy usability idea is actually kind of related to this. It is, simply, a user interface where everything is not visible to the user at start. It inspires exploration and I think it's an interesting way of finding new services. If I have some twenty plus icons on my screen, I'm too intimidated by the sheer amount figure out what can I do with them. But if I just start from one point, and then reveal more based on what I see, it's more like "hey, I wonder what's here".

So instead of being hit in the face with the sledge hammer of twenty icons, I start to discover options by exploring, one at a time. When I find something interesting, I can immediately try it out, and maybe continue exploring the screen later. This is actually a bit like how games teach us to play them. New options are introduced gradually, so at the beginning we are taught just the basics to get started on playing. Then, when we encounter new situations, then the relevant options are revealed to us and we can immediately see how they could be useful. (sidenote: I just finished reading an interesting book by James Paul Gee about how games teach us, and I'll get back to that subject in a later post).

I think it's fairly obvious that this kind of interface concept has applications in game design as well. It has some small similarities with fog of war in strategy games, but as a concept it's much stronger. Just like fog of war, in fuzzy interaction like this the screen doesn't need to stay revealed permanently, but it can slowly fade out the oldest revealed parts. The general idea is that game concepts would revolve around the idea of revealing only parts of the screen at any given time. My first intuition would be to think of puzzle game mechanics around this concept, but I'm sure there will be lots of other possibilities when proper thought is given to the idea.

The third concept here is the idea of navigating a city based on sounds. It is in fact an interesting concept, because sound strongly affects the atmosphere. Say I want to look for some place where I can just relax for a while. I could just pick some park and hope it's not full of noisy kids. But clearly it's much better if I can explore the city as a soundscape. This also fits the theme of exploration and discovery. I just listen to sounds from some abstract presentation, and when I hear something interesting, I can ask for guidance to get there.

It would also be curious if instead of showing the place on a map, I could just get audio instructions on my mobile phone. This brings this new "I wonder where this is taking me" aspect to finding places. It would also break the usual way of moving around where we first decide where we are going and then just figure out how to get there. By following the soundscape like this, I think we would more often get to places where we didn't mean to go to, but afterwards are really glad that we went there anyway. Again, this is an idea that can be used in games, especially massive online games. The player could just ask the game to show them to a place that fulfills certain criteria and then end up in some place that they've never seen before.

It looks like Mark and Ulla's presentation turned out to be an excellent lesson in the joy of discovery. Just to remind you, this was a fifteen minute presentation by two students (although, I'm sure lots and lots of work went to actually preparing it!), and let me assure you that, once again, this post is just a fragment of all the discussion that was and most likely will be inspired by it. We also found this kind of fuzzy interface as a potential research subject for II City, so perhaps there will be more concrete work on it in the future.

Innovative Interaction Concepts - part 1: Energy Exchange

This is the first post in a series describing student presentations that we were invited to see and comment during the II City project meeting.

The first presentation was given by Henna Ahonen and Glen Forde. Their idea was built around the concept of doing something that is interesting and fun (or funteresting, as they liked to call it, and because it's such a nice word, I will too) and storing the energy spent for the benefit of someone else. Their more concrete example of this concept, sharemotion, involved citybikes - bicycles that anyone in the city can pick up and use - and bicycle stations (where users return the bikes). The user gains the immediate benefit of being able to move around the city, and while he's doing that, the bike produces energy. Once the bike is returned to the station, the energy is stored so that the station can produce some small gift for the next user.

The user can also see what kind of gift will be produced for the next user, so he can feel good about not just having done something funteresting but also for giving someone else a pleasant surprise. And for that someone else, well, allow me to sidetrack to a tv series quote: "Harry, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it. Don't wait for it. Just let it happen. It could be a new shirt at the men's store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot black coffee." Seeing how positive take on life agent Cooper has just by giving these presents to himself, it cannot be bad for a person to receive small surprises out of the blue.

The concept is very thought-provoking. Everyone talks about sharing and helping others as good things to do, but real world applications almost never do this concretely. When designing things, we always focus on the user and his goals. The reward systems in games are just like this as well: you do something, you gain the benefits. Henna and Glen's project raises a very solid point: doing the funteresting thing is indeed a benefit in itself, and becomes just more rewarding when someone else's day might improve as a result. It's not like we haven't known this, but have we really thought about this? I can admit that I haven't. So allow me to try:

The immediate thought when taking the game design viewpoint, is that the funteresting thing could be a game that requires the player to produce some energy with physical activity. Or, taken to a more abstract level, the produced benefit could be something else than actual energy, as long as it's something that can make another person happier. The key idea of this point of view is that the game is the attraction, the fun, that the user wants to do. For example, the above example concept could include a pervasive game that involves moving around the city with the bikes (perhaps the game terminal is integrated to the bike's display).

Of course, the general idea can be applied to game design as well. Maybe not in single player games (although, with today's Xbox Live, PlayStation Network etc this is also possible), but in online games the concept of "I have fun playing, and someone else is positively surprised thanks to it" is definitely applicable. Of course, in order to keep faithful to the idea of producing positive emotions, the present cannot be too significant in-game - this would lead to the concept becoming just another type of economy. So, definitely, it should be mostly symbolic and have some personality (most likely decorative items or similar).

Another short example: in an online role-playing game there would be quests that are designed to be especially funteresting to go through (so people would undertake them because the quest itself looks attractive, not its reward). Now, this isn't advertised to the player beforehand, but once the quest is completed he can give a present to a friend. The receiver on the other hand would feel good because someone cared about her (yeahyeah, using classic man-giving-gift-to-woman scenario here, sue me) enough to spend time to get that present.

Now someone might point out that you can already give presents in social medias and online games, and of course real life. But in real life, I definitely think there is a huge emotional difference between receiving a store-bought item, and between receiving something the giver made himself.

I'm hardly scraping the tip of the iceberg on this subject, and there are far more creative people around than me I'm sure (for example, the people who created this project), so I think Henna and Glen are really on to something here. At least these kinds of high level concepts could provide some food for thought when thinking about the future concepts within the II City project.

Prelude to 6 Posts on Innovative Interaction Concepts

As the title suggests, I have quite a bit of stuff to post. Short explanation follows, complete with a song reference (left as an exercise for the reader to figure out, it's not very hard).

Today is a day after yesterday, and yesterday did go really well. Except the part where I had to wake up at 4 am to get to the train station in time. So, we headed to University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, to hold a project meeting for II City. In addition to having a fruitful and entertaining project meeting, we had been invited to listen and comment the final presentations of a course experiment on user interaction. What the students had to on this course was to come up with new and experimental concepts for user interaction. They were allowed to ignore technological constraints (but some of them did consider how their concept could be implemented). Seeing the amazing results, I can imagine that the task certainly wasn't easy.

So, I'm going to write a bit about what I heard yesterday, giving each project its own blog post. Partly because putting everything in one post would result in a long post which no one would read, and partly because it's easier to comment things if the topics are separate. I will discuss these concepts from the viewpoint of game design - how to apply game-like elements to these concepts or how these ideas could inspire game design.

I'll try to post stuff as fast as I can, so that everything is up by the end of next week.

(For those who were there giving the presentations and are now reading this, I'd like to also hear your take on applying your ideas to game design, if you are at all interested in such a topic.)