EpicWin turns your life, or at least your to-do list, into an epic role playing game

I just posted a couple days ago about Dan Lockton’s Design with Intent toolkit and its catalog of techniques incorporating playfulness — for example: role playing.

Now I just came across an app that perfectly captures the potency of play + technology and perfectly illustrates using the playfulness of role playing to affect user behavior.

Behold, I give you EpicWin:

EpicWin is an iPhone app that puts the adventure back into your life. It’s a streamlined to-do list, to note down all your everyday tasks, but with a role-playing spin.

Rather than just mentally ticking off your chores, completing each one improves and develops your character in an on-going quest to level-up, gain riches, and develop skills.

By getting points for your chores it’s easier to actually get things done. We all have good intentions but we need a bit of encouragement here and there. Doing the laundry is an epic feat of stamina so why not get stamina points for it?!

Watch as your avatar’s stats develop in ways to represent your own life. Will you be a Maiden of Juggled Priorities, or a King of Win? The lifestyle you lead will decide.

Shouldn’t all to-do apps have their very own preview trailer?

(via Netted)

Design with Intent: The Ludic Lens

Ludic: [adj.] showing spontaneous and undirected playfulness.

‘Design with Intent’ is a fairly simple but quite profound idea — design directly influences behavior and also reveals a designer’s (and/or his or her organization’s) conscious or subconscious intent. How about I just quote PhD candidate Dan Lockton:

What is Design with Intent?:

From the layout of shopping malls to digital rights management, our everyday lives are full of examples of products, systems and environments which have been designed to shape, guide or control — influence — our behaviour, using a wide range of techniques: technological, physical or psychological.

Intended commercial benefit is a major reason behind this; intended social benefit can be too (though it’s often fraught with politics). Sometimes the behaviour-shaping is helpful to the user; sometimes it’s serving someone else against the user’s best interests. Sometimes it’s trying to get the user to do something; sometimes it’s trying to stop the user doing something.

Lockton has released a card deck of patterns for influencing behavior through design.

Design with Intent toolkit 1.0 now online:

Officially titled “Design with Intent: 101 Patterns for Influencing Behaviour Through Design”, it’s in the form of 101 simple cards, each illustrating a particular ‘gambit’ for influencing people’s interactions with products, services, environments, and each other, via the design of systems. They’re loosely grouped according to eight ‘lenses’ bringing different disciplinary perspectives on behaviour change.

One of the eight categories within the toolkit card deck is the “Ludic Lens” dedicated to affecting behavior change via games and playfulness. The cards reference fun examples like those gravity wells for coin donations and web sites that imaginatively use role playing. Download the .pdf from the above link to take a better look; the cards are put together quite well. From the Ludic Lens introduction:

Games are great at engaging people for long periods of time, getting them involved, and, if we put it bluntly, influencing people’s behaviour through their very design. Yet this potential has (so far) been underexplored in application to other kinds of situations outside ‘recreation’.

The Ludic Lens includes a number of techniques for influencing user behaviour that can be derived from games and other ‘playful’ interactions, ranging from basic social psychology mechanisms such as goal-setting via challenges & targets, to operant conditioning via unpredictable reinforcement and rewards, to common game elements such as scores, levels and collections.

NYTimes Magazine: “Video Games Win a Beachhead in the Classroom” — New York’s Public School Experiment

Learning by Playing:

Salen and Torres are at the forefront of a small but increasingly influential group of education specialists who believe that going to school can and should be more like playing a game, which is to say it could be made more participatory, more immersive and also, well, fun. Nearly every aspect of life at Quest to Learn is thus designed to be gamelike, even when it doesn’t involve using a computer. Students don’t receive grades but rather achieve levels of expertise, denoted on their report cards as “pre-novice,” “novice,” “apprentice,” “senior” and “master.” They are enlisted to do things like defeat villains and lend a hand to struggling aliens, mostly by working in groups to overcome multifaceted challenges, all created by a collection of behind-the-scenes game designers. The principles are similar to those used in problem-based learning, a more established educational method in which students collaborate to tackle broad, open-ended problems, with a teacher providing guidance though not necessarily a lot of instruction. But at Quest to Learn, the problems have been expertly aerated with fantasy.

Once it has been worked over by game designers, a lesson doesn’t look like a lesson anymore. It is now a quest. And while students at the school are put through the usual rigors of studying pre-algebra, basic physics, ancient civilizations and writing, they do it inside interdisciplinary classes with names like Codeworlds — a hybrid of math and English class — where the quests blend skills from different subject areas. Students have been called upon to balance the budget and brainstorm business ideas for an imaginary community called Creepytown, for example, and to design architectural blueprints for a village of bumbling little creatures called the Troggles…

They also spend significant time building their own games… Salen’s theory goes like this: building a game — even the kind of simple game a sixth grader might build — is equivalent to building a miniworld, a dynamic system governed by a set of rules, complete with challenges, obstacles and goals. At its best, game design can be an interdisciplinary exercise involving math, writing, art, computer programming, deductive reasoning and critical thinking skills. If children can build, play and understand games that work, it’s possible that someday they will understand and design systems that work. And the world is full of complicated systems.

(via BoingBoing)

What happens when your toys have more followers on twitter than you do?

I talked a while back about context-aware toys as a new media form. The following news feels like a step down that path — though still likely a long ways from what I have in mind.

Disney aiming to establish technology standards for web-connected toys:

…it looks like Disney is doing its part to add a bit of order to the wild technology frontier that is web-connected toys — the company’s consumer products division will reportedly detail a proposal to establish a set of technology standards at the Engage Conference and Expo later this month. That plan will be laid out by the head of Disney’s “Toymorrow” team, Armen Mkrtchyan, who will apparently discuss what sort of standards Disney is currently looking at, and how such standards could lead to things like cost-savings and “increased playability.”

Also. “Toymorrow”? I think I like that.

Meaningful Play 2010 Conference

The Meaningful Play 2010 conference will be held at Michigan State University on October 21-23. It’s so close to me that I think I may attend.

Though it’s your fairly typical glorified-brochure-as-conference-website — even just the list of topics in the program and background on the speakers is quite educational and thought provoking.

Designing and Studying Games that Matter:

Whether designed to entertain or to achieve more “serious” purposes, games have the potential to impact players’ beliefs, knowledge, attitudes, emotions, cognitive abilities, physical and mental health, and behavior.

Meaningful Play 2010 is a conference about theory, research, and game design innovations, principles and practices. Meaningful Play brings scholars and industry professionals together to understand and improve upon games to entertain, inform, educate, and persuade in meaningful ways.

Sadly, it does not appear that Jane McGonigal will be speaking.