Difficulty Regulation

Lumines got me again. I hadn't played it for a while, and then yesterday I decided to sink my teeth in once again. It had one mode I hadn't really tackled before: a puzzle mode where the aim is not to score points, but to form various shapes of one color from the blocks. The reason I hadn't tried it before was that I had to actually check the internet to understand how I'm supposed to form those shapes. So there's a quick lesson: sometimes instructions are simply needed. But that is not the topic today. There is a reason I mentioned Lumines and the puzzle mode though, and we'll get to it soon enough.

Difficulty regulation strategies in games are important tools for keeping the player in flow. One quite obvious strategy is to simply include multiple difficulty modes to play the game in, allowing the player to choose a mode he deems suitable for himself. Of course, one problem is: how can the player know which one to pick? Sometimes descriptions can help, such as BioShock's "Choose this if you have never played first person shooters before" description for its easy mode. This is a relatively simple strategy to implement and has the benefit of hugely improving a game's life cycle for advanced players. The only thing a game designer needs to worry about is making the correct adjustments to make the feel more difficult but not unfair. Also, players might need some encouragement that after finishing the game, their skills are on the level needed to tackle the more difficult mode.

Difficulty increase built into progression in the game is most likely the most common way. The next level is typically more difficult than the one before it. Yet it is not always easy to design a suitable difficulty ramp. In many games, some of the most challenging moments are somewhere in the middle - towards the end, player skills and character powers are becoming too big for the challenge. Another thing is that the difficulty curve should not be a ramp. I think it's important to drop in tasks that are a bit more lenient than the previous ones. This way the player, after mastering some tough challenge, can actually feel that he has gotten better, as problems that are still much harder than the first ones are becoming easy. This is exactly how the puzzle mode in Lumines got me so addicted. Every time I succeeded at a hard problem, the next ones felt like a breeze and got me to play more and more. When the next harder problem hit, I already had felt the satisfaction of success, and I was mentally prepared to face it.

Finally there's dynamic difficulty regulation. In this case, the game uses some mechanism to figure out when the player is not doing too good, and then proceeds to make the game easier. Sometimes this difficulty reduction is invisible, affecting only numbers inside the game's engine or reducing the effectiveness of artificial intelligence - other times it is more visible, when the game reduces the challenge itself by introducing fewer enemies for example. So essentially the game cheats for the player's advantage. This is quite typical in tabletop role-playing games as well when the game master makes his die rolls in secret, and can then freely adjust the result to keep the game more enjoyable. The problem with this approach is that some players might indeed feel cheated out of the challenge. Frankly, they don't appreciate your concern. Personally I think there should always be the option to turn dynamic difficulty regulation off.

Finally, multi-player games where players compete with each other are difficulty regulated by player skill. In these games, one important aspect is to try and match players with somewhat equal skill levels to keep everyone in the flow zone (i.e. not bored and not frustrated).

So, these are the most typical ways games do their best to keep players in flow. Can these strategies be used for real-life applications and tasks? It does seem to highly depend on the task. Difficulty is typically in the task itself, so we really cannot touch it. What applications can do though is to suggest a good task order for the user, based on past performance and statistics. This way users can more easily find tasks that match their skills. This approach does seem more suitable for tasks that are part of hobbies - at work the list of available tasks is often narrow, and there is not much choice in what to do and when.

One other way applications can do difficulty regulation is the level of automation, which I have already discussed in an earlier post. At first, tasks can be done in less detail, relying more on the application to work its best guess magic. When the user becomes more familiar with the application and tasks, more and more control is placed in the user's hands. Of course, the user will need full capability to override the machine's decision at any time, regardless of "difficulty mode".

I guess that's it for today.

Achieving Something... But What?

In going through the three topics I mentioned in the post on Flow, I'll start with the last one. Today, I'm going to talk about achievements - a particular kind of feedback present in both real life and games. Truth be told, I'm mostly going to talk about games, but you probably already guessed that anyway.

These days, games feature quite literal achievements in form of, well, achievements (XBox Live) or trophies (PlayStation Network) etc. These are built-in goals attached to the games, which can be pursued in addition to simply finishing the game. Some are quite trivial to get and usually gotten without any extra effort. These are not of much interest, as they do not motivate the player to do any extra work. The interesting ones are those that give players more reason to play the game beyond finishing it such as "Finish the game without firing a single shot", "Collect all secret items", "Defeat ultrahardbossmonsterofthemonth" and so on. However, it does seem that these kinds of achievements have more to do with setting goals than feedback. They are of limited use in measuring progress, but it's strictly on/off.

For the purposes of this topic, high scores and time attacks are of more interest. Both are ways of getting feedback immediately after the fact, and even during playing (if score/time is displayed). Hitting a better score or time is a clear sign of improvement - especially if you are improving your average result over time. Another quite similar way to measure one's own progress in a game is to see how far you get before game over. This is especially true in games that never really end, and the only real goal is to get better/faster/further (like Lumines Supernova, discussed in detail earlier). Similar measuring of real world tasks is possible as well, and at least one example was even mentioned in Flow. Of course, this kind of progress measurement works best with tasks that are repeated more than once. My job, for example, has little repetition. I don't write the same software twice or write the same article twice (unless I miserably fail with backups). I can optimize my software though.

Another quite similar method is measuring success in relation to others. Ranking lists, or in activities that support competition, win rates against different opponents work similarly. Of course, this way you are measuring your progress in relation to others and theoretically it's possible not to notice any improvement, assuming everyone progresses at the same rate (but of course in real life this is never the case). Competition also has some possible negative side effects (not everyone likes to compete), which is not the case when using scores or times to simply measure your own progress (of course, if you start comparing results with others, enter competition). I definitely do think everyone should have the benefit of privacy in measuring their progress.

The first step to take advantage of scoring-based feedback is to apply it to interfaces that are used for repeated tasks. The key is to make feedback easily accessible for those who want it. It is once again important to recognize that not everyone wants to be measured in this way. Another important point is to create a scoring system that encourages the best ways of doing the task. For other tasks that are not so easy to score (or time), providing statistics that can help the user make up his own scoring system could still be a useful way of providing more feedback. I for example am among people who are interested in the statistics of their own actions. Which word I use most in my blog? Do I have some preferred programming habits? Maybe I'd like to improve my vocabulary and start using more synonyms - getting statistics could empower me to do this.

So extending feedback beyond what the system is using, including statistics or measurements of user behavior into the application, is one direction I think should be explored more widely than it currently is. I also do think it is one step towards applications that are more supportive of flow activities.

A Look at Games - Lumines Supernova

I've been back from vacation for a week now, so I guess it's time to get back to this blog as well. Last weekend I finally got a router and was able to share my internet connection to the PlayStation 3, granting me access to PSN store and some games I've been wanting to play. Some of these are quite relevant to my research, so you will be most likely seeing posts like this one in the future as well. So let's get this series started with Lumines Supernova.

I took initial interest to Lumines when I was doing research about games where audio plays a bigger role than usual. Lumines is a relatively simple block dropping game, where you as the player need to form squares of blocks with the same color. The playing field is constantly swept over by a moving beat line, and full squares are eliminated only when the line passes over them. The more squares you can eliminate in a single sweep, the more points you get. Sounds simple, right? In other words, it belongs to the category of highly addictive games like Tetris and Bejeweled. But Lumines might be even more successful in this. Why?

Audio in the game is not simply just separated into background music and sound effects. Every skin (kind of a level) in the game has its own music and effects, which are in fact part of the background music. The music being played is a relatively simple loop but when things start happening on the screen, the player, through his block manipulating actions, becomes the composer. Rotating blocks creates small sounds, forming squares bring forth a little more dramatic effect, and of course the most notable sounds are generated when the beat line erases complete squares. On the paper it might not sound very impressive, but the gaming experience is from an entirely another dimension.

The game pace changes over time and the blocks start dropping faster and faster. In the beginning everything is quite relaxed, but sooner or later things start to happen so fast that complete planning becomes impossible and towards the end it's all just hectic panic. In the beginning, when the game itself is relaxing, the player can pay more attention to the complete audiovisual experience that is Lumines, enjoying the results of his actions portrayed in the background music. This occupies the player right off the bat. Of course, towards the end, the brain becomes so occupied with dropping blocks that no attention is paid to the music. For me it gets hazy after the fifth or sixth skin, and I have no recollection of what kind of music is played from that point on. Another neat thing is that when the game becomes more hectic, things start to automatically happen more quickly - because those blocks are dropping fast - and the music becomes increasingly more intense.

And now the interesting question: what can we learn from it? It would be interesting to try out something similar in user interfaces. Play background music and tie part of it to user actions. Produce small sounds when typing letters in a word processor, complete with a longer sound when a full line is written. Or a paragraph. Whatever the implementation, the key idea would be to use this kind of music generation to increase motivation. I think it would be most suitable for an application domain where user actions are relatively simple and doing them quickly is possible and desirable. In a way, something like this would make the rhythm and flow of work quite concrete.

While waiting for someone to come up with a working prototype, I recommend you to try Lumines (any version) or another game that uses the same kind of background music system such as Rez or Chime (neither of which I have been able to play yet, but will in the future as soon as I get an Xbox 360).

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.

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.)