Microsoft Kinect: A Kurious Name

If you’re up on technology-related news at all, you know that Microsoft recently released the Kinect add-on system for the XBox. Kinect is a camera + microphone peripheral that allows you to interact with the XBox and play games using only your gestures, body position, and voice. It’s entirely appropriate to call it a competitor to and the evolution of Nintendo’s Wii. From what I’ve seen and the reviews I’ve read, it’s pretty dang cool.

However, something really stood out to me when I began catching advertisements for the Kinect. Click away and watch this Kinect ad [video]. It’s okay. I’ll wait right here until you get back.

Back? Oh. You ended up going to the bathroom too? That’s fine. No problem. You washed up I hope. I don’t want your nasty bathroom hands scrolling this page or clicking any links. That’s gross.

Did you notice anything striking about the commercial? I did. With few exceptions, every person’s gaze was locked onto the game display. Didn’t catch that? Go on. Watch it again. Once you see it you can’t not see it. Whether it was spectators in the background or even two players side-by-side, everyone’s eyes were directed straight ahead.

Ever try to have a conversation with someone in the passenger seat while you’re driving? And it feels a bit odd because your attention is torn between keeping your eyes on the road and making eye contact with your passenger? We desire direct attention when we, well, connect.

I’m all about play as a means to connection. Play is a fun and intimate thing. This Kinect commercial demonstrates one of the central challenges to creating the sorts of playful technologies I’m after. How do we create play technology that directs the attention of players to one another and not to itself?

Don’t get me wrong. I love shared experiences — movies at the theater, amusement park rides, multi-player games. Microsoft has succeeded in adding a new, fun, immersive element to the shared experience of its video game system. It’s likely going to be a big hit. But the Kinect is so named probably to communicate the idea of an enhanced connection to the game experience, not necessarily because it’s directly connecting us to one another when we play.

UPDATE (November 18, 2010): A different perspective on the potential disconnect of the Kinect: Motion Control in Gaming: Rationalizing a New Dissonance.

When shopping for a piece of technological gadgetry is also playing with it

The Atlantic recently put up a blog post comparing Apple Stores’ retail foot traffic to that of other live entertainment. Did you catch that? Apple Stores as live entertainment and not mere shopping? A graph accompanying the post compares Apple Store visits to trips to Disney theme parks and rock and opera concerts (Apple has much larger traffic numbers).

Apple’s Retail Stores vs. Disneyland:

Apple has managed to transform *hanging out in their stores* into entertainment. Of course, kids have been loitering in malls for decades, but the Apple store experience is far more specific. It’s about playing with all the neat Apple stuff [my emphasis].

Unlike other technology retail stores where one merely browses stacks of colorful (garish?) boxes and display mockups on shelves, Apple actively encourages playing with their wares.

At first I hesitated to link to The Atlantic post. On its surface it didn’t exactly appear to capture the notion of playful technology I endeavor to get at. But then it hit me. The Apple Store experience is unstructured free play — the opportunity to engage in playful exploration in an undirected fashion, punctuated with moments of surprise and joy. Of course, Apple technology all by itself goes a long way to help such an experience along.

The Atlantic post goes on to comment about certain shared experiences, grouping visiting Apple Stores with other “cultural touchpoints.” Definitely. In my opinion, play and technology brought together should create powerful shared experiences that bring people together.

What might happen if retail stores began playing with their customers and not only selling to them?

UPDATE (November 10, 2010): The world’s largest Disney Store opened on Times Square yesterday. The news reminded me of a detailed walk-through of the new redesigned Disney Store experience from this summer. Some of the new features are really quite cool. In certain ways, the new Disney Store experience gets at answering my closing rhetorical question regarding retail stores playing with their customers and not only selling to them.

Gamification — Taken to the Mat

My last half dozen posts have all been related to games or gaming concepts in one fashion or another. While gaming certainly has an important place among playful technologies (structured play, anyhow), I don’t like to dwell on it too much. Nevertheless, since adding game elements to apps, services, and technologies is a big deal right now, we’re going one more round…

Our Main Event

(Play along. This only works if you imagine this next part announced like this.)

[ding, ding ding]

Ladies and gentlemen, a matchup of epic proportions. The rage on the homepage. A flogging in the blogging.

In this corner, wearing no vowels and weighing in at $5M in venture backing from Google, hailing from Cambridge Massachusetts — the Upstart of the Startups SCVNGR.

And, in this corner, weighing in with three little letters after his name1 and a knockout research punch — the Hamburg Hammer Sebastian Deterding.

Round 1

SCVNGR’s Hunt: Retailers Who See Dollars in Game Dynamics:

…SCVNGR, a startup that aims “to build a game layer on top of the world.” The hyperkinetic entrepreneur [Priebatsch] informs me that people can get points in a SCVNGR game by climbing onto the roof of the building and leaping over the bamboo canes. He’s done it.

…SCVNGR’s game takes matters a step further. If other players have been there, they may have left behind challenges, which the user can complete for points. After visiting a location enough times, users earn the right to create their own challenges.

…Priebatsch deals out game dynamics cards from a deck the company has created to showcase the underlying ideas. For example, there is the progression dynamic, which is the idea that if you present people with clear, achievable guideposts on the way to a goal, they will be strongly inclined to aim for the next guidepost.

It’s not yet clear whether this approach will work. SCVNGR is part of a new crop of companies that still must prove themselves. Marketers are uncertain how to measure the value of location-based marketing campaigns, and it remains to be seen whether users who check in at a location are more likely to return or feel loyal to the product.

The article seems to concentrate mostly on location-based marketing. However, to be clear, SCVNGR uses location as an ingredient to create the main dish that is its game models.

SCVNGR and many others are building new applications, services, and retail experiences that are based on a philosophy wherein daily life, game elements, mobile devices, and commerce intermix. It seems compelling. It’s certainly true that all kinds of money and effort are flowing into so-called gamification.

Round 2

Sebastian Deterding recently posted a fantastic slide presentation. This thing has to be seen to be appreciated. Text alone can’t quite capture everything he said, and Sebastian has said simply too many good things to be easily summarized here. Still, I pulled out a few gems.

Pawned. Gamification and Its Discontents:

Gamification: Integrating game dynamics into your site, service, community, content or campaign, in order to drive participation. (see Bunchball)

For all empirical studies on the motivational psychology of video games that I know of make this point articulated by Raph Koster: Playing video games is fun because it provides experiences of competence, self-efficacy, mastery. Conversely, not a single serious empirical study to my knowledge mentions extrinsic rewards as a critical motivating factor.

Study after study says: We play video games because we enjoy overcoming the challenges and puzzles they present us, raising the difficulty with our ability to keep it right at the point where it is neither boring nor frustrating. The joy and thrill of games lies between the tension of a challenge that has us bite out tongue and the release upon our successful resolution of that challenge. Put differently, playing video games is intrinsically motivating, not extrinsically rewarded.

Play offers the freedom to think and act differently.

Sebastian makes several important points. Gamification usually introduces only certain elements of full games to a given service or application. And only winning points, well, misses the point. He goes on to identify many of the assumptions and consequences of gamification which I’ll summarize broadly and thusly: misunderstanding the essential nature of gaming and play and clumsily shellacking “fun” interaction models over top of the real world.

Technical Knockout?

The big question is whether SCVNGR and other gamification-driven services are forcibly injecting play into daily activities (and thus killing the fun to be had) or are revealing new and profitable ways to play. You would be wrong to assume that Sebastian is saying adding game elements to real life won’t work. The key, as in all things, is to do so well — to master the art, science, and design of play in creating that which can be truly fun.

Ultimately, I suspect we’ll see a few stand out examples of gamification that bring together play, technology, and real life in fun, engaging, and compelling new ways. I also suspect we’ll see far more failures than successes in these attempts. Elements of games and play are not magic pixie dust to be sprinkled about guaranteeing fun and profit.

1 Technically, Sebastian Deterding is a PhD candidate, but that’s too much to explain in an impressive boxing announcer voice.

Fundamentals of Game Design

Seems like we’ve had a number of game related posts recently. And the streak continues.

Fundamentals of Game Design:

The first thing to understand is that games are made out of games. A large game is actually composed of minigames. Even a small game is built out of very very simple small games. The smallest games are ones that are so simple and stupid, you can’t lose. You can think of this as “game atoms,” if you like.

The fun comes from the mastery process. But what the player is mastering is the model. All games are mathematical models of something… Even games like Tic-Tac-Toe are expressible as math puzzles. Games of resource management over time (like an RTS or Civilization) are exercises in calculus. RPGs where you make choices in character building are actually examples of exploring possibility spaces searching for local maxima… games lie to us all the time about what they are really about.

More urban play technology: Body-tracking Tetris game lights up streets of Madrid

I’ve written before about the possibilities of playful technologies in urban spaces. But this project is all like “Whatever. I’m too busy being awesome to think about all that.”

Body tracking Tetris game lights up the streets of Madrid [video]:

Part public art project, part video game, Lummo Blocks has taken over the Plaza de Las Letras. Basically Tetris writ large, two players shuffle horizontally in front of the billboard-sized display: one controls the trajectory of the game piece, while the other rotates it into place. The goal of the designers, MediaLab Prado, is to “creat[e] an interaction between the passersby and the public space of the plaza.”