Thoughts?  Feelings?  Actions?

1. Get one or two pieces of scrap paper (or more if you have more kids to ‘entertain’), preferably brightly coloured and a hole punch or a pair of scissors.
2. Help your children punch a load of holes out of the paper or cut it into smallish squares/pieces. These are your ‘fish’.
3. Have them scatter the pieces or punch holes all over the floor you want to get hoovered, making sure that if you have more than one kid, that they each have their own colour and they’re all nicely spread out and intermixed (making mess to clean it up again? Yay!! )
4. Get the hoover out. If you have a bagless one with a transparent collection bucket, this works extra specially well. This is your ‘net’.
5. The kids take it in turns to go ‘hoover diving’ and suck up as many of their coloured pieces of paper as they can in 2 minutes as you time them. The only rule is that they’re not allowed to take the end of the hoover off the floor.
6. They take it in turns until all of their coloured paper bits are gone (along with all the other dirt on the floor )
7. The winner is the one who takes the least turns to hoover up their pieces, but you’ll find that it ends up being a tie a lot of the time
8. Marvel in wonder at the pretty coloured paper in the transparent hoover bucket. OOOoooo
9. Dance for joy as the hoovering is done and you realise you and your kids have just won Brownie points with your wife/husband/significant co-habiting other.

Suitable for children age 2+. Only to be played under supervision of an adult (particularly the scissors). Please ensure that the game is finished before your co-habitee returns home. If you don’t, this game could be hazardous to your health.

  On one hand, you have the qualitative readers, who want to be critical of a game based on qualitative merit in comparison to other games.  “Qualitative” is perhaps a sacrificial label- anyone reviewing a game or looking at reviews is attempting to determine the quality of a game, but I use this specifically to refer to those who read the longer articles that break a game down point by point, and read into the numbers less; a lot of that is, unfortunately, focused around a necessary trust in individual reviewers.  That is the “great compromise” of the qualitative review- a lot of reading and analysis, and a lot of trust that someone shares a similar opinion with you about a game.

  The other group are the quantitative reviewers.  A lot more ‘consumer’ oriented in their approach, quantitative review sites tend to aggregate user opinions on key points and condense them into a simple number.  The most prominent example of a quantitative site is Metacritic- each title is given a separate aggregate score made up of review numbers from users and journalists.  One separate number for each class, but one definitive number (the journalist number) for the title.  The downside to this one is pretty clear- an entire interactive experience really can’t be accurately translated through a number, or by a series of short snippets from various sites.

  The most successful interactive journalism sites tend to incorporate elements of both sides of this issue, but the gap is silently left alone.  Metacritic has a section that aggregates editor reviews, but only focuses on one or two definitive sentences to carry the content of those reviews across- user reviews are just as short and usually victim to fan rivalries.  Destructoid and Giant Bomb both focus on encouraging user participation and review through blogging- but they’re encouraging qualitative style review without a clear cut way of seeing the general consensus, and depending on the smaller site-specific community (not merely readers, but active participants) to search out great user content.  Giant Bomb is less guilty of this, as the user input during their live play sessions is at least one way of getting direct answers to direct questions- but that’s a time based solution limited to the choice of the reviewers and the time frame of the game’s release.  Then we have Joystiq, 1up, and Kotaku.  Their reviews are in the basic blog format- which means the user input is limited to direct comments and just as vulnerable to the hivemind as any quantitative site.

  This way of dealing with high criticism is short sighted, and alternatives have risen to rival the powers-that-be.  The big winners so far are Giant Bomb, Youtube, and Justin.tv (or Twitch.tv) which, in spite of individual mistakes, have engaged their userbases through video content-we’re still talking qualitative review here, just coupled with more raw data for a gamer to take in- a widening gap between the lens of the reviewer and your lens as a player.  With that in mind, it’s easy to see why Let’s Play videos on youtube have become such a formidable force to be reckoned with, enough so that the ESA didn’t exactly stop to think their SOPA support all the way through.  Controlling the lens in such a vertical way means controlling the flow of money in such a massive industry.

–
  The point I’m trying to make is:  no site CAN do both perfectly, and no website SHOULD do both perfectly, but there needs to be a site that at least TRIES to achieve a fair balance that respects both sides.

  So I’ve set out to close that gap.  The qualitative side of interactive journalism is very clearly over represented, and the quantitative side suffers from some very clear flaws in the way that it tries to integrate qualitative opinion with quantifiable data.  With that in mind, it would make sense to start from the quantitative side and allow only the advantageous characteristics of qualitative review to bleed over.

  It started pretty simply- I wanted to set up a site to review games.  It was a spontaneous decision, the kind that I make a lot and don’t always follow through on, but I was and remain very motivated to see it through to its completion.  The process of selecting a domain name turned out to be what put me through the question-answer cycle of what would make this site different.  I began dwelling on it for the half a day it took to figure out there was no way to easily register “gam.er” (eritrea CC) or “game.rs” (requires a person living out in Serbia to register, and additionally is also already taken, I found out later).

  I settled on “playth.at,” and there the domain sits waiting for a full design and (more importantly and less easy for me to do) a working back end.  Work on this will be incredibly slow unless someone with some database/back-end experience is interested in collaborating (if so, get in touch).  That said, I have the basic layout and functionality figured out and I’m now pushing ahead with the visual details (and just a bit of the underlying stuff).  There will be a ‘portal page’ with links to a youtube channel of reviews, a livestream link, and some editor articles (less reviewish stuff).  The main draw of the site, however, will be its vote system.

Playth.at (alternatively, shouldiplaythat) will take the the ‘quantitative’ approach in a way closer to social sites like Reddit than to sites like RottenTomatoes or Metacritic.  The “Buy it-Rent it-Avoid it” system of rating a game is fairly old hat at this point, and emphasizing that “archetype” title above others is more of a “best of breed” exercise than one that’s genuinely helpful to someone wanting a realistic impression of a game’s reception.  The site’s standard of critique is present in the name:  Should I Play That?  In other words, would you recommend the game to anyone?  It sounds a bit catch-all, but bear with me, there’s more.

It should definitely be possible to vote a game up or down from the game’s statistics, but it should also be just as fast to cast a vote and nothing more.  Visiting gotta.playth.at will bring you to the upvote page where you’ll select the game.  If the game has no merit at all in your eyes, your destination is never.playth.at, and if you’re looking a game up and want to skip the site’s portal, you’re looking for shouldi.playth.at.

  Voting a game up or down is only the first step.  The second consists of the tags you choose to describe why or why not the game is worth playing.  Purely arbitrary tags, like ‘good, great, bad, awful’ won’t work- the focus is on constructive words that will help another person decide why they should or shouldn’t take a chance on the game.

  If you’re voting a game up, you’re focusing on all the reasons you think someone should try it.  Your tags may consist of unique, gameplay, platformer, replay, wii, and visuals if, for example, the game is a unique platformer with compelling gameplay and great replay value, predominantly fun to play on the Wii (either made for the Wii, or the Wii version is the preferred on which to play) and with great eye candy or visual design.

  If you really think the game has no merit and is worth no one’s time, voting a game down also includes tags.  Perhaps those tags are motion, singleplayer, short, graphics, and easy.  Such tags would indicate that the game has poor motion controls (or the fact that they even have motion controls is a negative), the game lacks any multiplayer component, the storyline of the game is short and the difficulty is decidedly lacking.

  Let’s assume my example was based on the original Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii, and you’ve never played it before.  If you were to look up the game, four pieces of information would appear about the game:

• A Ratio representing the upvotes to downvotes (or a number accurately representing this ratio).
• A cloud of tags representing all the positive reasons to play.
• A cloud of tags representing all negative reasons to avoid the game.
• Links to videos of gameplay, submitted by users (and later, possibly, reviews written by users).

It’s a lot quicker to get an impression of whether you’d like the game from these bits of information than it would be from several elegantly written pieces of prose on how the game represents the ideal evolution of platformer games, or from several highly polarized user comments on an aggregate site arguing about whether the game is “good” or “bad.”  You immediately know the type of game (and thus if you’re in the audience), the reasons people really think it’s worth playing, the major gripes that turn others off of the game, the controversial elements of the game (graphics/visuals in this case), and if you need more information, a link to a youtube video with gameplay.

 I intend to change the interactive journalism formula enough that you can easily choose whether a game is for you.  That’s my pursuit in a nutshell.  Anyone who’s interested in collaborating, my ears are open.  If it’s successful, I’d also like to find a non-intrusive model to earn enough money to sustain it.

]]> http://gameful.org/blog/2012/02/13/the-gaming-of-art-challenge-1/feed/ 0 http://gameful.org/blog/2012/02/13/google-science-fair/ http://gameful.org/blog/2012/02/13/google-science-fair/#comments Mon, 13 Feb 2012 02:27:34 +0000 Samuel http://gameful.org/blog/2012/02/13/google-science-fair/ Hey everyone!

     If you haven’t heard of the Google Science Fair, you can find the link here.  Anyways, I am under 18, and eligible for entry.  I’ve always wondered if I could prove gamification improves efficiency/enjoyment/absorption etc., and this would be a pretty good chance.  Anyway, I’m at a loss as to how to experiment on it.  If I would get into the higher stages of the competition, then it would bring a lot more awareness to gameful and gamification in general.  Any help/ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks! ]]> http://gameful.org/blog/2012/02/13/google-science-fair/feed/ 3 http://gameful.org/blog/2012/02/07/google_and_you/ http://gameful.org/blog/2012/02/07/google_and_you/#comments Tue, 07 Feb 2012 05:09:49 +0000 NeedleOfJustice http://gameful.org/?p=1544 Gameful definitely has a “Tomb Raider” feel to it.  Took forever to figure out how to blog post…All these mazes to unlock!

So.  Google has a new holistic Privacy Policy.  How many people do you think, out of millions affected, will bother reading it?  How can we encourage people to be more thoughtful?  Do you think campaigns like “Take This Lollipop” are effective, or just a novelty?

My current plan is to create a simple Kinect game to use as a study tool for the upcoming state testing and later for finals. The students will choose problems and answer choices for the game from the concepts that they studied earlier in the year. Before the test, the students get to play the game as a fun way to study!

And unpredictability is part of what makes a game interesting. If the outcome of a game is easily predicted, it’s boring. If the game reaches some point midway where the outcome is obvious, then it’s boring from there on out.

But unpredictability is only part of what makes a game interesting. If the game is decided by flipping a coin 1000 times and you win if the heads outnumber the tails, that is unpredictable but not interesting. So, there needs to be a relationship between unpredictability and applied skill.

Logit equilibrium includes a (single) parameter λ for how likely someone is to make a mistake (yes, it’s very oversimplified but oversimplification helps). If λ is very large, they make almost-perfect decisions. If λ is close to zero, they make almost-perfectly-random decisions, as if they decided every move by rolling a die.

It seems to me that the relationship of λ to the predictability of the game could capture how interesting the game is. It could also formalize why adding randomness to games can make some games more interesting and some games less interesting. For instance, if the game is strongly biased toward one player, whether because that player is more skilled (has a higher λ) or because of the nature of the game, adding elements of chance could make it more interesting by giving the disadvantaged player a better shot and therefore give both players an incentive to try their hardest. On the other hand, an evenly matched game would generally lose interest by adding randomness since the randomness would make the game less predictable but at the cost of players’ actions being meaningful.

And speaking of meaningful… even at its best, if I finish working this idea out, it probably can’t be applied to most games y’all design or play because they’ll be too complicated. But it might still provide some insight.