The Two Angles of Attack

When considering use of games and game design in non-gaming contexts, I think it's safe to say that we can clearly separate two approaches: starting from the game and starting from the activity or task. Nothing spectacular here, but let's discuss this anyway.

I'll start with starting from the task. This is what is called popularly gamification, or what I previously decided to call game designed activity. I am not sure if I'll stick with that though. In an article I'm writing I'm using the term game-enhanced task. Moving back to the point, the core of this approach is that we have a task and by applying game design or game mechanics we seek to increase motivation in people to undertake that particular task. Scores and other means of virtualized feedback can be considered the basic case. The task is typically measured. We can introduce goals and challenges to improve the task's completion structure.

The other angle starts with the game. This is basically what serious games are about. Instead of adding enhancements onto a task, we take the task and include it as a key mechanic in a game. The key difference is that we re-frame the task entirely. Players playing the game need not even be aware of the actual task that is being done. To them it is simply an essential part of the game, and any benefit produced by the task is, again from their point of view, a side product. This bears a whole lot of resemblance to what is suggested by McGonigal (and many others I am sure) in her book and talks.

One interesting question is that do these approaches converge at some point? If we enhance a task enough with game-like elements, do we arrive at a point where there is so much additions around the task that has in fact become a core element of a game. Or do these two approaches start off in entirely different directions, resulting in applications that will generally not resemble each other. This is an interesting question, and one that I believe will be answered in the coming years when simple gamification techniques lose their novelty due to overuse. Soon the easy way will cease to work, then what?

Let's face it, the latter form is much harder to design. Some tasks are really hard to make into a game mechanic, even though it is possible to enhance them with game mechanics. Educational games seem to be running into this problem a lot: making an educational game that really teaches the subject while still being clearly a game is not an easy task. Mathematics has it easy: math is problem solving, games are problem solving. Framing mathematical problems as game puzzles is as straightforward as it gets. This doesn't make it easy of course, but easier. However, initially I think enhancing tasks with game mechanics will seem much more attractive, especially since the name gamification carries the illusion that it is easy (which it is not).

It is unavoidable that both of these approaches will face the same problems as games, or any products really. Novelty wears off quickly and after that only quality matters. However I believe that the future belongs to the game angle, at least where it is applicable. And it will become more applicable with ubiquitous computing technologies and smart game designers. However, all our beneficial games will have to compete with entertainment games (which is one problem with educational games). Are we up to task this time around? We shall see.

Anyhow, the implications of these two angles are an interesting question that I believe has not been asked yet. It is not a straightforward topic to explore, because whenever two approaches are combined there are a lot of variables and it is hard to control the ones that are not relevant to the study. This could well be my topic.

A Moment for the Tech

Let's take a sidestep. It's been mostly design, fun and games here, but of course there's another aspect which should be discussed from time to time. I mean, the title I'm working towards is in fact doctor of technology. In this post I'll present my current opinion of what technology will afford my goals. I have certain strong opinions about tech. I gravitate towards free, open-source technology for ideological reasons. I'm not 100% allergic to proprietary but I avoid it where I can.

When it comes to ubiquitous computing systems, connectivity is key. And in the center, I see web services. Extended to multiple platforms in various scale of course, but ultimately it's the internet that connects services. Ubi infrastructure is beyond the scope of my research but its application is not. At the moment most of the stuff is happening on the mobile device level. Tangible interfaces are still mostly in the lab. Computing has not yet escaped into the open world, sticking to our walls and desks. However, taking advantage of the ubiquity of smart phones and other devices capable of reading RFID or NFC tags, that future could be here any moment.

These technologies will be an important first step as they are inexpensive. The installation cost is minimal: just slap some tags into the environment. All done, and no walls were torn down. These tags can activate services over the web or simply contain information. The interesting part? Tags are tied to location and a specific task. Put another way, it's much easier to understand the context when these variables are fixed. This is a significant aid if we compare it to unaided mobile applications. There is no need to worry about locationing because the tag knows its own location. There is no need for the user to browse the mobile phone's crammed menus to find the application they're looking for, because the correct application is launched when they touch the tag.

While the use of tag-based technologies is ultimately limited, with creativity a lot can be achieved with them. The biggest limitation in fact are the mobile phones themselves - not all models have those necessary readers. This brings us to the next technology, which is way more available: the world wide web itself. Browsers are available in mobile phones, all kinds of terminals and of course desktop computers. These days, almost anything can run in the browser, at least with the correct plugins. The problem with plugins is that they are a bit "pick your poison" variety. Even Flash, the most ubiquitous plugin, is not available for iPhone users. I have chosen to go with HTML5. While it still has availability problems, at its core it is the most available solution, running basically anywhere where JavaScript is enabled.

While at the moment HTML5 with JavaScript cannot do as much as certain plugins, it is slowly getting there with Canvas, SVG, WebGL and HTML audio. A variety of good JavaScript engines, frameworks and libraries exist. I am mostly interested in game development engines. They provide interaction features beyond standardized web user interface widgets. Indeed, I believe that game engines are in many ways the future for interface programming. Sure, they require somewhat more work than widget-based toolkits. However, they are not that hard to work with. Besides, gameful applications won't look very gameful if made with widget toolkits - the association with conventional software is too strong. I am currently favoring Crafty JS. With my current project I will see how far it carries.

Finally, when talking about web services, there's the choice of a backend. Because of my background and general preferences, I'm determined to stick with Python. One of the primary reasonable reasons is the availability of high quality web development frameworks. I have chosen Pyramid. Well, actually I chose Pylons initially, but as it went into legacy state, I decided to pick up Pyramid instead. Fortunately I had not done too much programming with Pylons. While I don't have any particularly good reason for choosing Pyramid over, say, Django, its way of doing things feels better to me. I will also be using Python to program the core server facilities which will communicate with mobile phones reading RFID or NFC tags.

So I think this is the future for me. Web applications running on Python, with HTML5 and JavaScript frontend. The systems will be extended by RFID or NFC tags to provide location-specific services. My choices are, most importantly, feasible for a researcher. There is no need to create different versions of applications and no need for special hardware. And no need to tear down walls, which will be a huge benefit for getting permissions to do live experiments... There is one particular system with which I will be working with for majority of my time, and it will provide me most of the research data I need to write that thesis.

Random Bits

I don't have a big subject just now, but I do have some random things I want to write about. So let's get them out.

I modified my job game a bit again. I realized that the achievements that require me to gain exp every day can be harmful. The problem is with requiring side-quests on weekends. While it's all good to set some goals to do game design on weekends it kind of pushes all the game design tasks from week days to weekends because the exp needs to be gained then. So I ditched those achievements. I might bring them back and limit them to working days only. That was more productive. Note to designers: achievements should be thought out really carefully. Faulty goals can ruin the experience and change the way the game is played.

I have reached level 3 and hacked my way to level 7 bosses. The last one I defeated was Prismatic Ghost. I just make up the names after I've randomly generated the requirements for defeating the boss. I also renamed the skills in the game to theme it into a fantasy setting:

Programming -> Melee

Writing -> Sorcery

Game Design -> Creativity

Reading -> Lore

Networking -> Cooperation

Research -> Experimentation

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My paper "Designing Ubiquitous Computing Systems to Transform Activities into Games" was accepted to the doctoral colloquium workshop in GPC2011. I have not yet received the reviews of my paper but nevertheless it does mean two things: 1) my thesis topic has received a certain level of acceptance; 2) I will get to present it to an audience and receive feedback from people outside my research group. I will tell you more about the exact contents of the paper a bit later after I have read the reviews, given the presentation and received feedback. It will also be available in the proceedings of the conference.

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As a final note, Jane McGonigal's awesome talk at the Game Developers Conference is available for free here.

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.

Not Alone in the Universe

My last entry was about gamification and the good, the bad and the ugly of motivational schemes. Like I wrote, I am concerned about how the power of gamification will be used - not least because even the term's Wikipedia definition makes it sound evil. Turns out I'm definitely not the only one. It's a big world so this hardly surprising, but it's nice to know at least a bit about who these people are.

I've spent good part of the last couple of days watching videos from the GDC vault, especially this year's serious games track. Especially two sessions, We don't Need no Stinkin' Badges: How to Re-Invent Reality without Gamification (Jane McGonigal) and The Great Gamification Debate! (many many people), sparked my interest. Incidentally, I ordered McGonigal's book just a day before watching these sessions and now I'm really looking forward to reading it. To recollect for a bit, (at least some) people involved in gamification are not very happy with the term. The term has an ugly ring to it as it makes game mechanics sound like something you just slap on a product to magically make it better. McGonigal promoted the term gameful design instead, and in her lecture explained rather thoroughly what she meant by that.

To summarize very briefly, the goal should not be simple gamification but to really make games of activities. We should really consider what is it about gaming that makes people do it, and then set out to truly transform the world. Curiously, I arrived mostly at the same conclusions in my recently submitted doctoral colloquium article (not accepted yet, so fingers crossed!). I wrote "Instead of considering how to improve applications or systems by likening them to games, it is the activity that should be the target of design" and "I propose to reach these design goals by treating applications like tools inside a game or as an additional layer of mechanics built on top of ones existing inherently in the activity itself." (pardon me my science). Basically what I mean is, the word processor should be considered like the hero's weapon in a game. Hopefully you can follow the logic of that.

One really good observation McGonigal pointed out in her speech was this: games empower us. This is an angle I have not considered so directly but it's definitely worth a thought. Games are not isolated from our lives, they transform us. Scientifically I would need proof of this, but since we are in a cozy blogging environment, just take my word for it (or McGonigal's or someone else's, and I'm pretty sure I can dig up an article to refer). Like my two hobbies, swordsmanship and Tekken, they exist in symbiosis: I can reflect between them to understand my weaknesses better. Hell, most of my friends are from my various gaming-related hobbies! All in all, empowerment is a really important thing to consider.

But let's get back to the topic for a bit. Gamification or whatever we will call it in the future is not new per se, but its hype cycle has started just a year ago. I did a quick a Google Scholar search for the word and did not turn up that many results. However most definitely the number is bound to rise, quickly. Industry is taking up the challenge. The growing community at Gameful.org (my new home) is yet another sign. The HCI community has been discussing similar stuff for a while now, but they use different names (ambiguity, aesthetics etc). Overall it's a good time to be writing a thesis on the subject, as the possibility to make a strong contribution is definitely there. What's left to be seen is can I rise to the occasion...

Digging into References

For those among my readers (assuming I have any) who are interested enough in this field to read scientific articles, I'm throwing you a bone. Several bones actually. I've been recently digging into research related to my own as I'm preparing to write my first article and an initial literature review for my thesis.

Aesthetic interaction - a pragmatist's aesthetics of interactive systems (Marianne Graves Petersen, Ole Sejer Iversen, Peter Gall Krogh; 2004). This paper discusses different approaches to aesthetics in the design of interactive systems, analytic aesthetics and pragmatist aesthetics. Furthermore, the authors discuss aesthetic interaction, which is in many ways similar to what I call playful interaction. The authors introduce aesthetics as the fifth element of interaction design (the four others being system, tool, dialogue and media). Artistic interaction goes beyond so called added value.

Ambiguity as a Resource for Design (William Gaver, Jacob Beaver, Steve Benford; 2003). The authors of this article question the HCI convention of designing for one correct interpretation of a system. Instead, they suggest, ambiguity can be used in various ways to enhance user experience. The article points out that if users are left to figure out a system for themselves, they will be more affectionate towards it, and are more likely to accept it as is, and find surprising uses for it. They present three example systems that use ambiguity and three types of ambiguity: of information, of context and of relationship.

Designing Interaction, not Interfaces (Michel Beaudouin-Lafon, 2004). In this article, the author suggests a paradigm shift from designing interfaces to designing interaction. Interaction paradigms and interactions models are introduced. The article delves into the computer-as-tool paradigm. Interaction models are frameworks for guiding designers. Interaction design, in contrast to interface design, means considering the how of interaction more deeply than simply constructing interfaces that are easy to understand and efficient. For example, considering how is tool selection done instead of designing an efficient toolbar.

Heuristics for Designing Enjoyable User Interfaces: Lessons from Computer Games (Thomas W Malone, 1981). The first paper I was able to find that suggests taking influences from computer games in designing user interfaces. It suggests heuristics in three categories: challenge, fantasy and curiosity. These same heuristics have been presented first for instructional activities (also by Malone). Heuristics included under challenge are goal and uncertain outcome. Under fantasy there are emotional appeal and metaphors. Finally under curiosity there are the concepts of optimal level of information complexity and "well-formed" knowledge structures. Overall this paper is a good starting point.

Making by Making Strange: Defamiliarization and the Design of Domestic Technologies (Genevieve Bell, Mark Blythe, Phoebe Sengers; 2005). The authors of this article criticize how we can only improve upon current design unless we defamiliarize ourselves from the subject. To stress their point, the authors present examples of three studies that look at homes and domestic life outside our (western) field of familiarity. They present twelve statements to defamiliarize certain standard HCI design goals. I couldn't agree more - compare this article to some of my earlier blog posts and you'll see what I mean.

Staying Open to Interpretation: Engaging Multiple Meanings in Design and Evaluation (Phoebe Sengers, Bill Gaver; 2006). This article questions one of the core HCI principles: single authoritative interpretation. Already stated in The Design of Everyday Things (Don Norman), the goal is to make the designer's model understandable to the user. The authors here present six different strategies to make designs that are open to interpretation. Examples for each strategy are provided. This paper continues along the same lines as the ambiguity paper above.

So there, some of the papers that will most likely influence my research.

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.