The Name Game

After reading this article by Ian Bogost I thought I might as well redefine my relationship with the word gamification.

The word is currently a bit fuzzy. For some or most people, it seems to mean applying only the easy stuff from games to other contexts. Namely: scores, leaderboards, achievements and rewards. Some people on the other hand like to lump all use of game design for other contexts under the same term. This is bound to create some confusion, especially since there are a lot of people who think gamification (the shallow one) is evil. I think that too. In my earlier post when I defended gamification, I did so in the larger meaning of the word. Now I'm thinking I should abandon the word as well.

The problem with (exploitative) gamification is that it will give more beneficial efforts a bad name. It does not seem very fair to group together something repulsive like frequent flyer points and, say, Sparked. The latter is aimed for a really beneficial cause, the former is aimed for suckering people into flying more. Nope, not really appropriate. Their abundant use of scores etc. can also weaken their usefulness over time. It might be cool for a while, but I cannot help thinking how quickly it gets really tired. We need good game design to survive that.

In my papers and talks, I have been and will be careful not to call my work gamification. I have not yet decided on a really good name, but at the moment I like to call it "game designing activities" or "game designed activities". For one it's a fairly descriptive title. I also don't want to use anyone else's term at the moment because there is no consensus whatsoever. I don't want to pick sides, so I'll just use my own definition for the time being. Once the community agrees upon a name, then I can start using it. Whether it's going to be gamification after all or something else, as long as it's definition fits my work I can use that.

So in the future when I'm talking about gamification on this blog, you should assume I'm talking about the evil, shallow, exploitative marketing trend. If I'm using some other term, then I'm probably talking about the good stuff. So, just FYI.

Vacation & Looking Back

I'm going off on vacation for about two and half weeks. Most likely there will be no updates until I'm back. Unless I feel some strange urge. Anyway, now's a good time to recap what's been going on since I started.

A lot of progress has been done in the reading department. 8 trade books on usability or game design related topics, and I'm now going through Rules of Play (Salen & Zimmerman) I've also been digging through any articles I was able to find about combining games and HCI. There were some, but not that many. So definitely there is still work to be done in this area.

In this blog, I've been outlining things about playful usability, and bits and pieces about interactive spaces as well. The ideas are at this point still all over the place and I haven't landed on an actual topic for my doctoral thesis. But I have time, and I think I should explore a bit of everything just to get a feel of things. I do have a much stronger idea now than I did three months ago, so clearly there's been some progress.

Experimental interfaces are raising their heads. After vacation, I'll try to find some time to work with prototypes using various kinds of controllers. I'm not going to unveil which ones at this point, but I'll be sure to make some noise here once I get to work. At the moment though, these are mostly something I have to do on my own time, and on my own computer at home which is a bit lacking. Probably I'll need to get a new one sooner than later.

At my actual job we're going to finish our prototype in August, and during Autumn there will be user tests and paper writing. And of course, there's the XNA programming course looming ahead, which I'm really looking forward to. If that experiment goes well, we can try and introduce other game related courses. And I do like teaching as well, although I don't have that much experience, yet.

So that's it for the recap. More posts will follow after vacation.

A Look at the Long Road Ahead

It's best to start out with a plan. For readers this post pretty much tells you what kind of content you can expect from this blog in the future, and for myself it's a way to focus my thoughts into coherent form. If all goes according to plan, my doctor's thesis is ready in spring of 2014. The plan could be divided into five different types of activities: theory, analysis, prototypes, publishing and teaching.

Theory consists of the all-important questions I'm going to ask and answer. I will start out with asking the question "why people play games" and a somewhat similar question "why are games considered fun". The initial goal is to find out what attracts people to play games, and what keeps them motivated while playing a game. I'm expecting this to involve a lot of reading, so readers of this blog can expect my thoughts on quite a lot of books and what they have given to my research. Of course, in addition to understanding games, further reading on usability will be required as well. But games come first at the moment as I'm quite a bit ahead in my reading about usability and user interfaces.

Analysis means I'll be playing a lot experimental games and trying out experimental user interfaces (if able, or at least read about or watch demos of them). The first part kind of puts me on unknown territory, as my personal taste in games reeks of tradition. It should be interesting to see how this research shapes my personal view into playing games, and I will definitely share my thoughts on experimental games as I encounter them. I will start out by checking out games where audio is in an important role (such as Rez), because audio in general is very relevant to the project we are currently working on.

Prototypes include the concrete work we are doing here at the university, currently for the II City project. I don't know how many prototypes I have time to work on during the following four years, but I'm expecting the number to be around two projects each year, and possibly smaller participation in several more. My current work is related to audio generation but I'm not sure how much information I'm allowed to share at this moment, so I'll be sure to check and share what I can later on. Since we are academics, there will be published papers about each project, so at least at the end of each project I can discuss how the results affect my research.

Publications are a necessity in the academic world. I'm expected to start out slow, authoring probably just one paper and participating in a couple more in the first year, but later on there should be several publications each year. Some of the papers will discuss our prototypes after their completion and evaluation, whereas in some later papers I will start laying down the theoretical basis for my doctor's thesis. Once there are publications out, I will most likely analyze them further in this blog, and discuss their relevance to the grand plan.

Teaching is another thing that one cannot avoid when on an academic career. I'm actually looking forward to it, because much like this blog, it will help to focus my own thoughts if I have to explain new ideas to other people. Also, one side topic in what we are doing is to research how games can be used to improve education. We already have one course planned, and I'll be sure to report of my experiences with it once I've compiled the course material and when the course is being taught.

That's how I see the road ahead. It does look a bit long but hey, at least I know what I'll be doing for the next four years. And since it involves games, it has to be simply awesome.

Words of Introduction

So, I graduated to M.Sc yesterday from the University of Oulu, Finland. It took me a few years longer than I had hoped, but the timing ultimately got me to where I am now. My studies were rather technically oriented, somewhat heavy on math, signal processing and digital architecture, so I find it rather curious that I ended up doing my master's thesis on usability and user interfaces. Of course, my next step is to start post-graduate studies, on usability.

Game design on the other hand has been one of my driving interests since about fourth grade when I did my first attempt at making a role-playing game rule system, which was sadly (or maybe fortunately?) never finished. Of course, back when I applied for university, game design education was non-existent, so I just thought that I might as well pick up programming. So I did. Now, the good part: with my post-graduate studies, I'm suddenly in a position where I can put to use my technical knowledge, my game design practice and my usability studies.

We haven't decided yet on the exact topic of my doctor's thesis. My research field is designing user experience for interactive spaces*. The title of the blog comes from the following hypothesis: game design and games in general are far better at attracting users to new experiences than traditional applications, so in order to improve the total user experience, games and game-like elements need to be included in user experience design. The research will include games that experiment on new types of user interaction, as well as user interaction with game-like properties.

And that's what it's all about.

* Interactive spaces is a term used in our research group. It falls into the same category with ubiquitous computing and intelligent spaces, but with the term we wanted to emphasize user interaction. The whole point of an interactive space is that people, the users, engage in interaction with the space, and with each other inside the space.