Facebook = Deactivated

When you deactivate a Facebook account, it asks you to choose a reason from a number of radio button options, or provide your own. The following is the text I cobbled together on my iPad to inform Facebook why I was leaving:

I'm uninterested in where facebook is going. I recognize that I am the product and not the customer on facebook. This is a compromise I've been willing to accept because of the number of friends, family, and colleagues I have who use it. However, as of the recent ui change and #f8 announcements, I'm done. Not only is the interface worse than ever, but I have no interest in my information being moderated through your algorithm, and I don't want to contribute any more of my information to your database. I'm willing to forgo large swaths of content my friends would like to share with me at this point because as far as I'm concerned it's not worth being your product in exchange for that service (and the ui sucks).

Gamification: Ready Check

If you're thinking about gamification in relation to your clients, workers, or students, you might want to start by asking yourself the following questions.

1. What are you trying to get done in your organization?
2. Do you believe it can be improved by being made more gameful/playful?
3. What are the core activities of the users in your system?
4. Are there game mechanics that can be fitted to those core activities, and if so what are they?
5. Is the addition of those mechanics likely to improve the user experience?
6. Is the addition of those mechanics likely to improve your outcomes?
7. Are you willing to risk failure?

If you can't answer questions 1 and 3, then you are not prepared to consider gamification as an approach.

If the answer to question 5, 6, or 7 is no, then gamification is definitely not for you.

If you've answered question 2 without thinking it over seriously for at least a week, gamification is probably not for you.

Question 4 should require research and/or consulting. It can potentially take a very long time to answer this question.

Slow gaming (minor Portal 2 spoilers)

So I finally got around to watching that Wolpaw interview, good stuff. Loved the part where we was talking about play testing "early and often", players playing levels "all the time" . . . really solid. Also, there's that one part where he talks about Richard Lord and the Animal King. That makes me happy...

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captain obvious

I know this might come across as kind of a shock to some of you, but I'm going to have to say it anyway. Not all games are the same. I say this in light of having just read Ian Bogost's article on conservative and aberrant reformists in game design (and the aesthetic filter). But really, that's just the trigger for this post. I've been talking about this for months, although my fervor was slightly diminished when I found that Jim Gee had already touched on the topic.

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Gamers 3

I've never actually written an elevator pitch for a film, let alone a treatment, let alone a screenplay. Still, at the end of the day I'm from Los Angeles, and it's a proverb as old as the the Santa Monica Mountains that everyone in Los Angeles has a film to pitch. Of course, I don't live there currently, and I didn't come up with this idea while living there, but . . . yeah, while, here's the idea:

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