Archive for February, 2010

People are particular. We like our coffee a certain way. And really, our particular personalities are the sum of these one-cream-two-sugars-and-only-decaf-after-lunch preferences. Me? I’m a Dapper Dan man.

We’re developing The Garden with everybody and nobody in particular in mind. We want worker/players to feel as though their garden is unique to them, so we’re imbuing The Garden with opportunities for personalization all over the dang place.

Of course, organizations customize The Garden with their unique sales or training or retention objectives. And managers customize The Garden by aligning game performance with individual job performance. But when it comes down to it, The Garden lets worker/players personalize their gameplay experience.

With the help of some amazing designers (including friendlies Emily Lonigro, Terri Falvey and Patrick Olds), we’re assembling a library of skins and sprites that allow folks to design a personal organic space. These aesthetic assets work on a macro and micro level:

Skins define the overall theme for The Garden. A skin might be a desert themed garden, for instance, or a cell-shaded or origami one. Heck, it might not be a garden at all. Depending upon the deployment, the skin might be chosen by your organization (in corporate colors, perhaps), or by the individual player.

Sprites define the style and behavior of individual plants and critters within the garden. As the game progresses, worker/players are given the opportunity to plant increasingly unique and exotic plants, and interact with increasingly curious critters. Some interactions and rewards require the combination of specific sprites, too, so exploration is continually encouraged.

Skins and sprites are designed atop a standard working logic, so styles are infinitely interchangeable. This allows us to continually grow the library of assets and keep the game interesting for the green-thumbed worker/player.

Which begs the question: what sort of interesting things would you grow?

We love what happens when hearty portions of game and play principles are plated with school principals.

Quest to Learn is a new education model in NYC that believes “students of all sorts can and do learn in different ways.” At the center of their lives is a steady diet of innovation, digital media, and play.

Sayeth the brilliant minds:

“Quest supports a dynamic curriculum that uses the underlying design principles of games to create highly immersive, game-like learning experiences for students. Games and other forms of digital media also model the complexity and promise of “systems.” Understanding and accounting for this complexity is a fundamental literacy of the 21st century.

Games work as rule-based learning systems, creating worlds in which players actively participate, use strategic thinking to make choices, solve complex problems, seek content knowledge, receive constant feedback, and consider the point of view of others.”

Huzzah!

Unouplus is the portfolio site of Tokyo interactive designer Yoshihiro Toda. In any language (the site is mostly kanji), Yoshi’s talent is easy to appreciate. Even moreso his skills at sneaking a little asobi into your day.

His work is worth enjoying in its own right, but reward awaits those patient few who choose a longer stay …

Bangalore businessman Vikram Agarwal may have nicked the Attent™ model (which was surely swiped from somewhere else), but his efforts to popularize game elements in the workspace earn him one million spacebucks in our book.

This intercontinental Michael Scott recounts the impetus for his efforts:

“My team used to go overboard with useless emails, thus burying the few important ones somewhere within. And sadly, thanks to the overload, replying to those few important emails would take forever,” said Agarwal, “On the other hand, they loved video games. So when I found an email solution that borrows from games like World of Warcraft, I knew I’d struck gold.”

It seems obvious: encourage employee engagement and productivity by appropriating those experiences that cause employees to _disengage_ from their full time gigs — namely, social networks, shopping, and (you guessed it) games.

We’ve hung our hat on games, given the tendency for sophisticated games to become a lifestyle. Facebook’s Farmville, with far more regular users than Twitter (and across all demographics), might be the most paid-attention-to “activity dashboard” in existence. When companies leverage the psychology of motivated gamers — and subsequently align gameplay with job performance — they’ll be swimming in rupees.