Recently, I watched a great talk by Jesse Schell. Jesse teaches game design at Carnegie Mellon University, and he is also CEO of videogame studio Schell Games.
In his talk, Jesse explores the psychology of video games: what actually makes them work beyond the strict content of the game play itself. He also talks about a possible future where the motivating power of games is used in everything from advertising to achieving public policy goals. What’s the potential if we open up video games beyond entertainment? Is there a down side, if we come to see ourselves as behavioural specimens on the look out for the next prize?
I found Jesse’s talk fascinating, and I’m really looking forward to interviewing him. If you have questions for Jesse, or would like to comment on the video, please do!
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I work in the web startup space where user-contributed content is often crucial to an application's success, but is difficult to obtain.
After addicting myself to Foursquare and watching Schell's talk, I've come to recognize that game mechanics could be a magic bullet for creating the motivation required from users.
Unfortunately, in my recent experience, decision-makers resist the notion of applying game mechanics to applications since they don't want to be associated to "toys".
So my question is, how does one convince non-gaming decision makers on the merits of game mechanics?
Interesting. The game aspect certainly seems to have helped Foursquare.
Like he said in the lecture, crowdsourcing games are often sneered upon since they (currently) are not made by actual game designers; just whoever happens to be there at the time. The mainstream gaming community doesn't even look at Facebook games as "real games" in this sense, and are often quick to make fun of them and their purposes for milking people of their actual money.
However, the main gaming crowd might actually be a little conservative in this idea. While gamers today demand more quality and focus on the games they play (and with the climbing price of games, they rightfully should), they've also been suffering from anthropological pattern exhaustion. While games have gotten better with time, they've also gotten harder to innovate with. We haven't had any new styles of play for 2D games since 1993 and 3D games have remained structurally the same since they were first patted out on the Nintendo 64 and Sony Playstation. Game designers are having harder and harder times escaping from "basic" ideas. Everything is either a platformer, puzzler, first person shooter, or RPG. These concepts were entirely built around input/output schemes designed for 1980's/1990's home consoles, so now we only have new technology to go with our old philosophies. Very rarely do we get a new sort of game that either ignores these idioms or makes something new, like Killer7 or Katamari Damacy.
If you do interview him, ask him what core aspects crowdsourcing games introduce to the makeup of actual gameplay that current games do not offer. The way it is described so far, it doesn't seem to be anything more than turning everything into an MMO, and that's been happening for a while already.
Sometimes I think its funny to contrast my experience on a game development team, with all these "future possibilities" that academics theorize on. While they talk about the future of gaming, how it can be used, etc… all the projects I've been involved on, the extent of the planning is "how much blood can we squeeze in here?"
I've been following the work and research of Christy Dena and Henry Jenkins, who also operate in the fields of gaming and other transmedia, so you may be able to come up with more questions and/or other avenues of dialogue for Jesse Schell by checking out what they have to say on those subjects.
Gaming has produced some fantastic simulations of a variety of situations…some pretty neat and others of questionable value to society. I hope that the gaming industry will move into some serious simulations for educational purposes. These could be used in schools to have a chance at say, spending a couple of days running a bulldozer, or an airplane, or a ship, or any other piece of heavy machinery. This could be really useful in career selection without actually having leave the classroom. Hey you game designers, it doesn't all have to be "first person shooters". Lets see a bit of evolution.