Sensor Data and Interactivity: Real Time vs Discrete

I need to organize some thoughts for an upcoming article. There is a lot of interest in using Internet of Things sensor data in my research group, and my work in persuasive computing is being linked to it rather heavily. There are multiple ways to categorize sensor data interactivity. I have lately been mostly considering a simple categorization: real time interactive and discrete interactivity.

In the former scenario (real time interaction), the end user application interacts with sensor data in a continuous fashion. This has the potential to create a feedback loop where a change in sensor data prompts action in the application, which in turn affects future sensor readings. For a very simple example, if a GPS navigator shows that the user is going the wrong way, the user can change their course in response, and therefore future GPS readings will be affected. This approach is technologically challenging, because it demands continuous connection between the application platform and the sensors. For instance, as of now, many physical activity meters have limited compatibility with mobile devices. If compatibility exists, it may be limited to only a certain mobile OS. One key agenda in Internet of Things research is enabling wider interoperability between sensors and user devices, but we are not there yet.

If we are able to guarantee real time interaction between sensors and applications, new opportunities open up for designing persuasive games. These opportunities arise because they give us the ability to include new kinds of activities as game actions. In the past, this has been achieved through specialized controllers and more recently with sensors built into devices (accelerometers in mobile phones, Microsoft Kinect etc.) Once sensors in everyday environments become more and more available, they also become more prominent as something to build a game on. All sorts of new physical activity games are rather obvious developments, but for creative designers all kinds of sensors can become game interfaces - whether for a persuasive purpose or simply harmless fun. Contemporary alternate reality games are just a glimpse of all sorts of crazy stuff that can be done in the future with IoT technology.

However, like I stated, we are not there yet. Still it is quite usual for persuasive applications or games to use sensor data in a more discrete fashion. Pedometer step counts are downloaded into an application periodically - and perhaps more importantly - after the fact. While performing the activity itself (walking), the user will not directly see how the application reacts. Therefore the user in turn cannot react to what the application is telling them. All interaction is therefore delayed. Furthermore, by the time the data is downloaded into an application, it has become just a number. Although it still represents activity, the activity itself took place in the past. From the perspective of using the application, we could substitute the data with a random number within the same range and observe no difference. Generating data is not part of the interaction between user and the application.

This is basically the scenario that I suggested the three axes for in my previous post. To reiterate: it highly resembles free-to-play games because something is brought into the game from the outside (i.e. real money in f2p games). No matter how much we try to dance around the issue, the fact remains that the game rewards the user based on the sensor data it receives from them. It is hard to obfuscate this fact due to the discrete nature of interaction. To alleviate the problem, in-game benefits granted by sensor data input should be carefully considered. For instance, the "rewards" should be thematically appropriate and function as gameplay or customization elements instead of direct measure of success. If the game is used to persuade players to become more fit, their in-game "fitness" should reflect improvements in their real life fitness. Powering up an avatar is one rather obvious example. This allows players to see virtual improvements in their virtual selves before real life improvements become perceptible.

In theory there is an upside to this more limited use of sensor data: because the input is just a number, a game developed for one purpose can rather effortlessly be fielded for another purpose. In reality however persuasive power is likely reduced if there is no thematic connection between activity and application. This concludes my random musings for now.

The Three Dimensions Model of Persuasive Game Design

Hi! It's been a very long while since I last updated this blog. Not at a whole lot has been happening to write about because the research has been kinda stuck. I have also been writing entries to that other blog. I've been doing a lot of reading though, and there should have been some more updates about that stuff. Maybe later. This time around I just want to put something on paper.

I have been following the gamification discussion mainly through Twitter, and it pains me that it not much has changed in the past two years. Scores, leaderboards, badges and whatnot are still considered perfectly valid. Although there's no entirely unanimous research against them, the studies are kind of piling up. Although it can be argued that studies supporting rewards are also piling up, the mere fact that the issue is highly controversial should make us pause. We're often working in domains where mistakes can be quite harmful and if a method is potentially damaging, its use should be seriously reconsidered. There's that, and of course there's also the fact that it's not really game design, as has been pointed out by actual game designers in the debate. Awesome people around the world are making "gamified" applications that go way beyond the simplistic approach, and for that I commend them.

Somewhat recently I ran into some advice that had been given to companies that provide well-being programs to other companies' employees. Sure enough, the standard issue gamification bullshit was all there was. Obviously I don't want to take this route because a) I am concerned about the potential risks of using rewards and b) doing so would degrade me as a researchers and designer. However it does turn out that coming up with game concepts while avoiding the obvious routes is freaking hard. To help me in this task, I came up with a three-dimensional model to which all design should adhere to. The basic idea of the model is to help every player being able to feel like they are in the game. For instance if the game is cooperative, everyone should be able to contribute. I generally prefer cooperative games in this domain anyway, because competition has a higher risk of dropping players from the game.

Generally speaking there should be three different axes available for players to affect the game's outcome. The first two axes are directly related to whichever behavior is being reinforced by the game. I use the terms long term progress and short term progress. The former shows how far the player has come since starting to play the game or how much progress has been cumulated from the very beginning; the latter follows more recent trends in behavior and should generally be normalized (e.g. to make amateurs and professionals able to compete, we compare who has the bigger relational increase in the behavior). These two axes form the two core dimensions of persuasive applications. They generally provide rich feedback with the purpose of making the user more aware of their own progress and thus more motivated. The third axis on the other hand is what I think is really required to make a persuasive application into a game: decision making.

Using this model, each player can affect the game in three different ways: improving their overall behavior over a long time span (progress); improving their rate of improvement (improvement); making meaningful decisions in the game (strategy). The model bears similarity to some free-to-play games. We can consider the behavioral axes as something that is bought with currency because it comes from outside the game (e.g. physical exercise measurements) but gives the player some advantage. The last axis reflects how well the player does with what they get from the first two axes. Although there is a similarity, in general the two behavioral axes should not be treated the same as in-game payment systems in f2ps. A game that aims for behavior change should allow these axes to have more impact on the game. Unlike f2p games where "pay to win" is frowned upon, a persuasive game should be e.g. "exercise to win".

It is also noteworthy that the two behavioral axes are interrelated in most scenarios. The higher a player is in the overall progress axis, the harder it is for them to keep improving their performance. It means that players who are "ahead" will be stronger on this axis while players who are "behind" will be stronger in the second axis. Over time, that strength in the second axis will gradually move over to this axis. Notice that these axes are different, which means they should have different effects in the game, making the "ahead" players stronger in one way and the "behind" players useful in another way. When done like this, the poor performers will feel motivated to improve their performance because it yields quick returns all the while the good performers won't feel cheated or punished for "doing too well".

Finally, the third axis does not necessarily serve any behavioral change function on its own. It can do so, if the gameplay is related to the behavioral change goals (e.g. requires knowledge of good habits). Its primary purpose is to make the entire thing more interesting - it's what actually makes it a game. Being good or bad on the third axis is not related to behavioral change goals of the game but simply the player's own interest in the game. It's the glue that actually makes the entire system work. The third axis needs to have significance because otherwise players are likely to lose interest in the game (i.e. it's really just a system for tracking progress - nothing wrong with that, but don't call it a game!). Regardless of your target audience, this is very likely the hardest axis to work with because it requires brilliant game design. However, your target audience is very likely to make it even harder.

So there you have it for now. This model is my design philosophy for behavioral change games and so far I can only tell that designing games that are just games is nowhere near as hard.

Yet Another Blog

A quick ad. I started another blog called Shouting from the Sidelines. Unlike this blog which focuses on academic stuff and beneficial games, the new blog is 100% game design. I'll be analyzing games and also occasionally writing about my own designs.

How the World Affects Games

Back to the topic of the world and games, it's now time to explore it the other way around. Previously it was concluded that games do indeed have a transforming effect outside the game itself. The term of the magic circle, introduced in Homo Ludens (Johan Huizinga), and explored in detail from the perspective of games in Rules of Play (Salen & Zimmerman), is important in the analysis. As already stated by Salen & Zimmerman, the magic circle blurs in certain gaming activities such as live action roleplaying. This blurring has two directions, games affecting the world, and the world affecting games.

What we mean by the blurring of the magic circle is that: 1) the game is no longer entirely determined by its rules alone but rather affected by external influences and 2) the game's influence is no longer limited to its participants and the area of the magic circle. When we were discussing how the meaning of places changes for geocachers, we were talking about the second point. Ditto for discussion on sub cultures emerging around games. This time we're going to talk about point one. It's quite convenient for me to start with something familiar: geocaching.

If any game is highly affected by the environment where it's played, geocaching fits that definition. Caches are hidden into the environment. The play experience of hiding a cache is defined almost entirely by the physical environment: what are the possible places to hide, are there any interesting terrain challenges available, etc. Similarly, the play experience of seeking a cache reflects these environmental influences. This is largely expandable to any game that takes place in the real world but especially true for games where the arena of play is not involved in the game's design. A live action roleplaying game that is bound to a certain area can be designed with full knowledge of the playing area. Geocaching as an overall game cannot.

If we get back to the magic circle, in the LARP example the magic circle is still effectively closed. The area is bound, the game is played within a certain time frame and people inside the playing area are all participants in the game. LARPs that are not bound to a certain area or time frame are different, and indeed they come closer to what we call alternate reality games. The concept of the magic circle becomes more blurred in these cases. In a sense, a geocacher is always inside the magic circle. However, it is clear that they are not constantly actively participating in the game. When I'm seeking a cache, I have the intention to play, and therefore I am in the game. When I do not have the intention to play, my actions nevertheless affect my performance in the game.

This might need some clarification. Suppose I am playing two games: one on my Playstation Portable, and then geocaching using my navigator. If I choose to travel to Helsinki on a weekend, I can take both of these games with me. However, when I power up my PSP and resume playing a game, the state of the game has not changed due to my being in Helsinki. Geocaching on the other hand has definitely changed: I now have access to caches hidden in Helsinki, but not to caches hidden in Oulu, even though that's where I "signed off" from the game. I have traveled inside the game's world without active participation. From theoretical perspective, when I turn off the PSP, the magic circle effectively goes away entirely; this is not so with geocaching. The circle persists even though I choose not to be actively inside it.

So what's the significance? This: since the magic circle is ubiquitous in alternative reality games (and similar), what follows is that any action can affect the game world. Location-aware gaming is just the tip of the iceberg. Link in data from physiological sensors, or even brainwaves. Suddenly it becomes possible to make a game of everything if we so desire. We can skip points, leaderboards and badges - we can do much better than that. The tech is not so far in the future either and we can start with what is available now.

Education: The Game

Just a short post. If we think of typical university education as a game, it is horribly flawed. I'm going to use one abstract course as a test unit for this analysis.

The game starts with the player having some resources (including skills etc.) which they have earned from previous games. Hopefully they can remember all that stuff, because this game is not going to re-iterate over that material. Often they are at least told what resources they should have before starting this game. When the game starts, it's level after level situations where the player gains resources. They just are not told what these resources do and how much they actually have them, because this information is completely invisible. Often these levels feel like grinding. Grinding for random drops, but the player doesn't even know what is dropped.

Skip to the end of the game. The infamous boss monster, The Exam. Now the player is rewarded for having all those bits of resources they have gained. Most players go grind for resources in completed levels just to be sure. Some just run through the levels, and only start getting resources a few days before the boss fight. After the boss dies, the player has to wait a while. Then they are told whether the boss actually died.

Our education system is like a game where all meaning is packed to the very end. We just grind through the levels until we get to the end and only then it is revealed to us whether that grinding was useful or not. Would you play this game? If it takes 40 hours? Or you could just skip the grinding for permanent resources, do a quick grind for some one-time items and defeat the boss. You get the same reward but your character has gained next to nothing. The game doesn't really reward you for having a better character, only defeating bosses.

I think this needs to go.

Level Up!

I gained my first character level in my job game yesterday. My programming and research skills are now at level 2 and my reading skill at level 3. I haven't gained any achievements yet.

Today I started a bigger task and I realized my quest list for that task is way too short. This is one thing that is important with these kinds of games: it's necessary to have quests that cover everything there is to do, and can be done in a short time. If it takes too long to complete a quest, the progress following aspect of the game is lost. So I will need to rewrite the quest list for a bit. I still haven't come up with any really cool achievements.

So is it helping any? I think it is. The small tasks, which I usually hate doing, get done when they are framed as easy experience. The fact that I actually keep a list of them is probably more helpful though. Even though exp gaining doesn't really contribute towards anything, there is a certain amount of satisfaction gained simply from updating the character sheet. It's that small moment of closure, for a task done. I like that. Maybe a normal task list would have the same effect, but it does have slightly less to do when a task is complete - primarily, there is no reward.

I have thought of another thing that could help me guide my efforts: boss monsters. These would be simple challenges that can be defeated when I have the right combination of skill levels. Again, no real purpose, but like achievements, they would provide more goals. More goals often equals better as there are more reasons to do a task. One way to do boss monsters would be to use a random generator with total skill level requirement as an input and per skill level requirements as output. For example, a level ten boss could require programming at 6, game design at 3 and writing at 4. After defeating that boss, there would be another boss, one level higher and so on. At the end of my thesis work I could see how many bosses I have managed to beat.

That was actually such a cool idea that I'll go and implement the boss generator after finishing this post. Maybe I'll have a couple parallel dungeons so that if there is a boss I get stuck on for a really long time, I can explore the other dungeon in the meanwhile. Or maybe there could be three bosses for each level, and I need to beat one in order to proceed. That sounds even better. Let's do it, bye for now.

Color Me Gameful

Like any real scientist, I will need to do a lot of experiments. Yesterday I decided to start with myself. I have had lack of motivation recently. This is mostly because currently my job is a bit fragmented: there are individual tasks here and there, and there are no clear milestones in sight. I started reading McGonigal's book and while reading I realized that if I am to promote this gamification or gameful design, I might as well try it on myself first. Sure, I could have done a task list for milestones like normal people but where's the fun in that?

So I turned my job into a game, of sorts. It's not a hugely impressive design I'm afraid, but it will help me do some things such as keeping a sight on my goals and get a sense of progress, every day. I decided to stick to very basic gameful techniques: experience points, levels and achievements. I wrote a character sheet on the whiteboard in my office, with my name on it, my character class (scientist / game designer), my level and experience. In addition I also wanted to see a bit what I'm doing most, so I added six skills and levels for them as well: programming, writing, design, reading, networking and researching. This is my feedback. At any time during the day I can gaze up from my computer and see how I'm doing.

With feedback system in place, it was time to set some goals. I wanted to call them quests. I decided to divide my tasks into storylines, quests and side-quests. Storylines are larger tasks which consist of several quests. Side-quests are quests that I'm supposed to complete on my own time, and they include mostly designing games for pure entertainment. I assigned an experience point reward for each quest, based on my expectation of how long it will take me to do it. Some tasks I know I don't particularly like I gave some bonus on top to make them more lucrative. In addition, completing a storyline yields bonus experience on top of the quests it's made of.

Finally I added achievements. I will need to think more of these, but the basic purpose is to keep me more challenged and engaged. One important set of achievements are awarded for getting results every day. To earn these achievements, I need to gain experience points every day. Even on weekends (side-quest exp). Vacation is excluded though, because when I'm traveling around somewhere I don't have many chances to do anything productive and, frankly, I don't think I should. I would like to especially come up with achievements that require me to do tasks in a certain way, but it's hard to come up with these just now.

Like I said, these are very basic techniques and I should do a lot better in the future. However, this experiment is meant just for myself, so I'll let it slide. It's also interesting to see if this succeeds in making me more motivated, even if it's really basic. Now, this should be achievable with to do lists and such, but I feel more motivated to keep this going if in itself it supports my goals. While I might not be able to write a paper on this, I am looking forward to learning something. Oh, and getting my job done better. I have also suggested a similar system for our game development team.

Let's see how it goes, I'll be reporting! After all, one set of achievements requires me to blog once per week.

Gamification - Motivation and Motivation Schemes

It's been a while since the last entry - I have been busy with stuff and thinking about what direction my research should take. Now I'm back at writing again and it's time to resume the tradition of book summaries. About a month ago I finished reading three books from the list of gamification books on gamification.org wiki. By the time I selected which books to read the list was actually much shorter and I picked every book I had not read yet. These were: Fun Inc. : Why Gaming Will Dominate the Twenty-First Century (Tom Chatfield), Game-Based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty Through Rewards, Challenges and Contests (Gabe Zichermann & Joselin Linder) and Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete (Byron Reeves & J. Leighton Read).

One common point that was made in all the books was this: like it or not, the future belongs to gamers. The youth of today almost live and breathe video games. Scratch that, it's not just the youth that play games these days. Game-Based Marketing has some relatively recent statistics but the web can most likely do better. Nevertheless, gaming has made some serious conquests: first mobile and more recently social networks. Chatfield focuses his entire book on just exploring the growing phenomenon and does a good job of telling people what is gaming all about. His book might not hold any revolutionary ideas of how to gamify things but is suggested reading for people who are skeptical of gaming in general.

Of course the logical step that should follow is that if everyone's a gamer sooner or later, does it not make sense to transform our daily activities to take advantage of this playful attitude? Indeed, it seems that many people think it does. On top of presenting many good suggestions on how to use virtual worlds and certain principles from them in work, Reeves & Read also present a rather thorough comparison of work and World of Warcraft guild activities. The two are strikingly (but not surprisingly) similar. There is just one major difference: people are paid to work but they pay to play WoW. Clearly, work needs to improve. The answer is gamification of work. I don't think we will see complete virtual worlds to support work anywhere in the future, but that doesn't mean we can't take a lot of good influences from games in general.

The idea is nowhere near new, and has been employed in various forms. The authors of Game-Based Marketing seem to have especially fallen in love with airlines' frequent flyer point systems, and they analyse it heavily. After reading the analysis I actually found it a bit disturbing. In gaming, I think there are good, bad and ugly motivational schemes. Normal, especially single player core games, are mostly on the good side - they are based on learning and problem solving (i.e. the stuff that is emphasized in good game design literature). The bad is grinding (i.e. doing the same thing all over again in hope of (random) prizes), present in massively multiplayer online games in particular. The ugly? Taking advantage of social pressure. The whole "you will look bad at the eyes of your peers if you don't X".

The last one I've labeled ugly because it's kind of in the grey area. Competition also falls there in a way, when you think about the people who are last on various lists. It also has to do with keeping up appearances, which can be an important motivation to some people. However the problem is that it can make some people feel incredibly bad about themselves. This is actually something worth a lot of consideration about gamification: if playing is no longer voluntary (being part of one's job for example), will it have negative consequences on some people? I think it's a problem when games are creating more social pressure. There's enough of that around as is.

Overall, the bad and the ugly are a huge ethic dilemma. The gaming industry is in it for the money, and these motivational schemes are excellent at keeping players playing, and therefore keeping the revenue streams stable. The same goes for other commercial types of gamification such as marketing. Gamification is powerful, I think at this point there's no denying it. In academic research it should be our goal to put some serious consideration to these ethical questions, and strive to create beneficial gamification. I mean, really improve lives. This is what my research will be about.

As a finisher, I seriously recommend reading Fun Inc. and Total Engagement. These are really solid books that summarize why you should consider gamification - of everything.

Learning Game Design - Introduction

Yesterday we had our first game design learning project meeting. The project goal is to learn the basics of game design and put them into practice. It's a project I started for members of STAGE. For me, it's also an important project to get more familiar with game design. I mean sure, I've read some books on game design, and done some designing and even prototyping myself, but getting more practice is key. I don't think I can credibly bring game design concepts into usability design if I haven't designed a lot of games myself.

The plan is to use Ian Schreiber's online course material from last year. The course is called Game Design Concepts, and should take us twenty to thirty weeks. Our study group is something like five people - a suitable size to keep meetings sane. Each of us will do reading and exercises on our own time, and then we will meet weekly to discuss the week's topics and exercises. Once the exercises start to be about actually designing something, we will include play testing into our meeting agendas. The course is about non-digital games, as these are much easier to do solo.

So, I will probably write more about the course, especially about the things I have learned, in the future.

And That's how I Flow

Guess which book I've been reading lately. I've accumulated some topics for blog posts lately, so I'll try and put them into writing in the near future. Starting with this one obviously. So the book I just finished was, if you didn't guess already, Flow - The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) which is a book that gets mentioned constantly when discussing game design. There is, of course, a very good reason for that. In Flow, the fundamental guidelines to enjoyable game play are laid out, although it's not a book about games. The book in itself is not particularly lengthy, and if you just want the fundamentals, reading the first three or so chapters should do the trick (the rest is for you who want to know how to enjoy life to the fullest), but I'll go through the fundamentals very quickly.

Flow is the most enjoyable state of the mind, and flow is a very descriptive word for this state of mind as well. You remember those hours you spent solving that really hard problem at work? They did seem to go past awfully quick, right? That's flow, basically. When we are really focusing on a task that is challenging enough for our skills, that's when we reach flow. While in flow, we can forget about everything unrelated to the task at hand and avoid what is called psychic entropy, or disorder in consciousness. The activity and the person become one entity. Flow exists between boredom and frustration; if the activity becomes too easy, it's boring, and if it becomes too difficult, enter frustration. To stay in flow, the challenge of the activity needs to grow along with the person's skills.

Of course, some people can turn any activity into flow by designing their own goals within the activity while some people can't find flow even in the best circumstances. However, if the activity itself is designed with flow in mind, the state should be far easier to reach. This is why the concept of flow is extremely important for game designers. Games provide a continuous series of challenges and associated long (e.g. finish the game) and short term goals (e.g. defeat the boss). I will go over goals and goal forming in a later entry. In the optimal situation, a game can continuously provide interesting challenges to the player as her skills develop. Reality of course typically falls a bit short of the mark because player skills develop at a different pace. To compensate, difficulty regulation strategies are typically present in games.

The interesting question here is can we use interface or application design to improve the chances of turning tasks into flow activities. I have actually visited this topic earlier in several blog entries, although I didn't use the term flow activity as I hadn't read the book yet. One really simple idea that has been evaluated in at least one research paper* by researchers at Nokia Research and University of Tampere is to add achievements as an additional way to track one's progress. What makes games like Tetris or pinball machines highly addictive is the ability to compare your results to previous achievements of yourself or others. Score keeping is a really powerful feedback machine. When you get more points or break your time record you immediately know that you have improved.

Unsurprisingly, proper feedback is mentioned as one requirement of a flow activity. If we take all the requirements as inputs into a design process of an application and interface, what will come out? Will the outcome make it easier for users to get into flow state when working with that application? I'm thinking these could be among my key research questions. One challenge is to find a way to integrate flow activity requirements into a design process, and another one is to evaluate the results. In this entry I have been merely scratching the surface of things like goal forming, difficulty regulation and achievements. I will delve deeper into these subjects later on and see what interesting things I can dig out. In the meanwhile, I suggest everyone to check out this book. It really is important.

* The paper I'm referring to is "Applying Game Achievement Systems to Enhance User Experience in a Photo Sharing Service" (Markus Montola, Timo Nummenmaa, Andrés Lucero, Marion Boberg, Hannu Korhonen).

Irrationality and What Should We Do with it

Time to discuss some stuff I've read from books recently. The first book is Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational. It's actually a book for behavioral economics, but can tell a lot about how we humans are wired for anyone in any field. Because it's also quite fun, not too long and well-written, I can recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in human behavior.

In the book, Ariely discusses a lot of different types of circumstances where humans repeatedly fail in rational thinking. Hence the name. A lot of the stuff is actually really familiar for most of us, because we've been down those roads. The book does a good job of pointing out the circumstances where people make bad decisions. If people became more aware of these things, maybe they could make better decisions in the future. Who knows, right? For someone in the HCI field, and game design as well, every tidbit of knowledge about human behavior is valuable. Here are some thoughts I gathered while reading:

Actually my first thoughts were whether we could actually use this kind of irrational behavior to purposefully "deceive" the users. For game design, it's also helpful to know how people form their decisions in different circumstances. This way players could be guided implicitly instead of explicitly when the designer would really like the them to pick a certain option. Most players would likely end up picking the intended option, but they would still think they are firmly on the driver's seat. Actually I think it would be an interesting for game researches to analyze how decision making situations are staged in games (although they may have also done this kind of research already).

And what about interfaces? It's kind of a harder case. Here the designer doesn't want to guide the user into doing something. The idea is for users to get what they want, which is something we really cannot predict. I don't have any particular ideas yet, but I'd like to explore the concept of purposeful deception in usability to produce outcomes that make for a better user experience. Maybe it's a dead end but you never know before you try.

Then again, should we exploit irrationality? After all, it causes people to make bad decisions that can be really damaging to themselves in the long run. Perhaps it would actually be better to make games and applications that highlight our irrationality and make us aware of how it affects us even in situations we consider "too important to fail". Some games do require players to abandon certain types of irrational behavior. A lot of board games for example encourage players to make hard decisions instead of keeping all the options open. In order to win, players need to commit to a strategy sooner or later. It promotes simple folklore wisdom; "if you run after two hares you will catch neither".

This I think is another interesting topic where games could be used for teaching people, more effectively than most learning methods. After all, games are good for experimentation, because players don't lose anything permanently (in most games anyway). Of course therein lies a problem as well: we think differently when we know there is nothing to lose. So even if we learn to avoid our irrational behavior in a virtual world, does this wisdom transfer into real life, where losses are also real? It might be a tough challenge to come up with something that produces real benefit, but something that should be considered.

We are already coming up with games and applications that encourage people to exercise and look after their health etc. Should improving our thinking be the next step? After all, it is our thinking that's the root of everything else.

(I've also re-read Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things but it's something I'll get back to later.)

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 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.