Archive for December, 2009

Gizmodo tells the tale of Kristin, a 24-year-old stay-at-home mom who, well, obsesses over her XBox Live Gamerscore (which she racks up through in-game achievements). However, despite her obvious passion for points (by some accounts she’s the fourth-ranked female Xbox gamer in the world), by her own admission she doesn’t even enjoy the gaming. This Baxter is mortified.

“Once I found sites that had guides on which were the easy games, I beat (20,000) in like a month and a half,” she says. “It got me hooked and it was like a drug. A bad drug. A bad habit … I definitely play more games I don’t enjoy than games I do … Like, maybe 65 percent of the games I play I don’t enjoy.”

That, friends, doesn’t sound like play to us at all.

Help the Baxters bring their A-Game to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. With your participation, we hope to do a little rabble-rousing for applied gaming and put on one helluva show. From the session description:

You don’t need virtual worlds when you game reality. The “serious game” designers at Natron Baxter explore the psychology and application of sponsored enterprise games, and propose a path toward total employee engagement: the very real human traits of curiosity, collaboration, and competition.

Selection is dependent upon public engagement, so hop over to the session proposal, tell us what you think, and dramatically increase the likelihood that we’ll send you fresh-baked cookies.

We’ll toss up one more notice when voting opens, and then never bug you about it again.

The always lovely linkage at kottke.org brought us to this ditty about Target employing some game elements to motivate and track their cashiers. And even though one employee acknowledges that it “makes work feel like a game,” we can’t help but notice that it’s one fugly game.

To be fair, the system developers probably weren’t thinking of their feedback mechanism as a game. But having established a hint of gameplay, they’ve whet the whistles of a whole slew of game-playing employees. With a little aesthetic polish, real-time team challenges / rewards, and high scores (most consecutive “perfect checkouts,” for example), they’d no doubt invigorate that latent spirit of competition.

And you’ll have to get your leisurely checkout banter elsewhere.

Woggers of the world unite!

We’re loving the like minds over at Fitbit, even if their diminutive health monitor has gotten tangled up in production. The nifty personal device — a hybrid pedometer and Nike+ doohickey — “keeps track of your movement, distance traveled and calories burned.” Then get this: the wearable sensor provides simple, real-time feedback using a flower metaphor. Naturally, healthy activities equal a healthy plant. And six-pack abs!

The Garden, our ambient gaming overlay, clearly had a similar muse (we’ve even gleaned a bit of our philosophy from the article’s own BJ Fogg).

But since we Baxters find the most power in the collective, we’re looking forward to seeing how Fitbitters can leverage a Nike+ style community. As we iterate our signature product, for instance, we’re continually discovering unexpected value in spontaneous relationships between Gardeners. With overlapping social media functions — adding friends, creating teams, challenging others — the Fitbit would be a exemplary motivator in this wacky growing industry of Applied Gaming.