Hey, boys and girls, let’s all play with our data!

Playing the Game of (Your) Life, Revisited

I wrote a while back about the prospect of your life becoming a game. Jessie Schell gave a talk in which he connected the future of electronics (ever cheaper and smaller) to all the mundane tasks in our lives, bringing about a whole new class of gaming and play technology.

We haven’t quite arrived at online gaming leagues for tooth brushing fanatics, but the future is closer than we might think.

Your Data — Now with 100% More Fun!

Bayer’s new blood glucose meter attaches to the Nintendo DS:

Bayer’s DIDGET™ meter was developed in conjunction with Paul Wessel — the parent of a child with type 1 diabetes. Paul noticed that although his son Luke was constantly losing his blood glucose meter, he could always find his Nintendo™ Game Boy. It was this observation that inspired Paul and Bayer to work together to develop the first and only blood glucose meter that connects to the Nintendo DS™ and Nintendo DS™ Lite gaming systems to reward kids for good testing habits.

Bayer’s DIDGET™ meter rewards consistent testing habits with points that can be used with Nintendo DS™, Nintendo DS™ Lite or on Bayer’s DIDGET™ World web community. Kids earn points for regular daily testing, with additional rewards for being within their target range and sticking with their testing regimen over time. They can use these points to purchase items in the games, unlock mini-games and customize their experience on Bayer’s DIDGET™ World web community.

Includes Knock ‘Em Downs™: World’s Fair video game and Mini Game Arcade…

Cool idea, right? If you think about it, the Nike + iPod running system is the adult version of the DIDGET. Both systems extend an existing technology platform with a new, external sensor and then use that data for some form of gaming (Nike+ runners can compete against each other online in sophisticated ways using their uploaded stats).

Once you’ve uploaded your utility bill information, Welectricity “allows you to engage your friends, relatives, co-workers (anyone in your country actually) in a little friendly competition to reduce energy consumption.”

Progressive Insurance now offers their Tripsense program to electronically monitor your vehicle’s usage to lower your insurance premium. I suspect even better results for both Progressive and their customers could be achieved if the system gamed that data (and I don’t mean insurance fraud).

This is the Conclusion Where I Make Thought-Provoking Predictions

Because variations of DIDGET and Nike + iPod can help us achieve any number of goals or reinforce any number of good, healthy habits, this style of data-driven play will become more and more popular in step with the associated falling costs of the technology involved.

A startup will offer a new must-have product that pundits will initially label a “cute toy” until it becomes a huge hit. Then everyone will scramble to copy it, and corporations will begin retrofitting existing, popular products with data-driven gameplay.

Those “careers of the future” lists? They will soon start detailing design, engineering, and product development disciplines that are oriented around gathering real-life, personal data (referencing the phrase exhaust data frequently) and creating game constructs that put it to use.

You’ll know these ideas have really matured when informercials shift toward selling time-saving / life-improving products (“… all this for just $19.99!”) that are incarnations of all that’s been discussed here.

(DIDGET via BoingBoing)

Cub Scouts recognizes video game skillz

[Attention girls seeking future boyfriends with great skills: The Cub Scouts also offers awards in archery and computers — sadly, nothing listed for nunchucks.]

New Cub Scout belt loop and academic pin:

Earn the Video Games belt loop and complete five of the following requirements:

1. With your parents, create a plan to buy a video game that is right for your age group.
2. Compare two game systems (for example, Microsoft Xbox, Sony PlayStation, Nintendo Wii, and so on). Explain some of the differences between the two. List good reasons to purchase or use a game system.
3. Play a video game with family members in a family tournament.
4. Teach an adult or a friend how to play a video game.
5. List at least five tips that would help someone who was learning how to play your favorite video game.
6. Play an appropriate video game with a friend for one hour.
7. Play a video game that will help you practice your math, spelling, or another skill that helps you in your schoolwork.
8. Choose a game you might like to purchase. Compare the price for this game at three different stores. Decide which store has the best deal. In your decision, be sure to consider things like the store return policy and manufacturer’s warranty.
9. With an adult’s supervision, install a gaming system.

Why not?

I appreciate the critical thinking skills (though not necessarily the potential consumerism), the schoolwork angle, and especially the focus on playing together with others.

(via Engadget)

Perplexus is Such a %@*#$!& Cool Toy (or, Lessons in Playful Design)

One of the Coolest Puzzles You’ll Ever Try to Solve

Ever play a labyrinth game — tilting a maze board just so to move a steel ball around wooden rails, avoiding holes along the way? Imagine that but in 3 dimensions encased in an acrylic sphere and, ta-da, you have Perplexus.

I thought about including a photo, but, frankly, a photo just won’t do justice to this piece of play sculpture, er, toy. So, instead, I give you glorious video…

Perplexus 3-dimensional labyrinth [video]

Please do yourself a favor and watch the quickie video. It will delight you. I promise. Cross my heart.

Case Study in Excellent Playful Design

What’s so beautiful about Perplexus is how instantly engaging it is. It just sucks you in. I’ve never touched one, and yet I’ve watched that video at least 5 times while writing this post. Reportedly people can’t help but pick it up out of curiosity only to then instantly recognize that it’s a puzzle and spend hour upon joyful hour working to solve it. Which brings me to today’s lesson, boys and girls. I think good playful design engenders these same responses in that order:

1. Curiosity — “Ooooh. What’s this??” Good playful design must be inviting and approachable and spark interest.
2. Comprehension — The Ah-Ha moment. No matter how complex the user interface or rules of engagement, the essential moment of understanding the big picture should come quickly and clearly.
3. Abandon — “Wheeeeee!” The technology itself should fade away in service to the fun experience.

Too often any sort of “advanced” technology is off-putting to only the geekiest among us. Technology can only truly be called “advanced” when it essentially disappears from the user’s frame of experience. Is that too bold a statement? Regardless, I think it especially applies in the context of play technologies. Just adding bright colors or adding beeps, boops, and flashing lights doesn’t help anything.

More Goodies: The Story Behind Perplexus

Perplexus is the creation of artist Michael McGinnis; it took decades to come to fruition. Visualizing and designing it was a tremendous and mind-bending challenge. Bringing it to market had more twists and turns than Perplexus itself. McGinnis is today building commissioned, large-scale versions called Giant Superplexuses for museums and other similar venues.

History & backstory including many sketches and photos:

• How the creator of Superplexus turned a childhood idea into a lifelong passion

  Superplexus evolved from a project given to me 31 years ago by my 11th-grade art instructor, Ed Hairston. His project: design a boardgame.

  Since I was bad at board games, and felt especially terrible about losing or even beating others at them, I decided I’d rather design a maze.

• History of Perplexus / Superplexus

  There is an “ah hah” moment when someone for the first time picks up the game, says, “what the heck is this thing? What do I do?”, and then understands the entire concept.

  Deep at its core, Perplexus feels to me topologically similar to a Möbius strip. I am an artist, not mathematician…

Your Personal Funsmith

Kevin Kelly talking about Bernie DeKoven:

We have personal trainers, therapists, money advisors, why not funsmiths? Funsmiths help us unleash the power of play, that most vital spirit. Bernie DeKoven is a master funsmith. He is a constant river of new games, weird junkyard sports and someone who attends the serious business of having fun. In one of his wonderful blogs he imagines a greater role for people like himself.

Bernie DeKoven on Funsmiths:

Say you want to make something more fun — a game, a toy, your job, your company, your relationship with your spouse or kids, your life…

So you call or email or Skype your local Funsmith, and you say: “I want to make something more fun.” And you arrange to meet, by phone, by email, over Skype, at a coffee shop, or at a local park for a walk’n talk. For, say, a couple hours. For some agreed-upon, agreeable sum.

You know this Funsmith is a fun guy - warm, welcoming, caring, insightful, and most of all, playful, very playful. An expert player, in fact - someone who knows many different ways to play, many different kinds of games and many ways to play them, who knows how to have fun, how to create fun, how to share fun, how to be fun. A professional player. Someone so playful and so knowledgeable that you’d pay to play with that person - for a lot of reasons. Because it’s fun to be with that person. Because you like yourself even more when you’re with that person.

… And because this professional player always makes the rules negotiable, adjustable, the only goal being to find a way to play so that you can all enjoy the game, all be challenged, together — it’d be a lesson in how you, too, could make things fun again, even if they were only games.

But let’s imagine that you go further, you and this person, and you also focus on how you might make other things more fun. Not just games, but things like work, school, relationships.

Let’s say that, G*d forbid, you’ve lost someone. Someone close. Or you’ve lost something important to you - like your money, your job, your house, your wallet, your pet. And you’re still grieving. And you go to this play expert, and play. It’s almost a miracle, you know, how you and this expert player can manage to set all that grief aside for a while, and actually have fun again. Which reminds you, naturally, how many ways are still open for you to feel whole again, feel at play, in play. That, alone, would be worth whatever it costs. Just being reminded, experiencing yourself at play again. And if you want, you and this expert player could also spend some time thinking about other opportunities for fun in your life, for bringing fun to your children, parents, spouse, neighborhood, community. Or thinking about what you’ve already tried, and what was the most fun, and what you could do next.

… This isn’t therapy. Or if it is, it’s not about the talk. It’s the fun. That’s the whole point of it. It’s not about playing so that you talk about all the painful things in your life. It’s about playing so that you can learn to play more with the rest of your life. It’s what I call the practice of Deep Fun. And the practitioner is what I call a “Funsmith.” Which, coincidentally, is the very thing I’ve been calling myself.

Play may be the primary means nature has found to develop our brains

(The Atlantic) Play’s the Thing:

This monumental book [The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind] — more than 900 pages long, 30 years in the making, at once grand and intricate, breathtakingly inclusive and painstakingly particular — exhaustively explores the biological evolution of human behavior and specifically the behavior of children. Melvin Konner, an anthropologist and neuroscientist at Emory, weaves a compelling web of theories and studies across a remarkable array of disciplines…

Konner is especially interested in play, which is not unique to humans and, indeed, seems to have been present, like the mother-offspring bond, from the dawn of mammals. The smartest mammals are the most playful, so these traits have apparently evolved together. Play, Konner says, “combining as it does great energy expenditure and risk with apparent pointlessness, is a central paradox of evolutionary biology.” It seems to have multiple functions — exercise, learning, sharpening skills — and the positive emotions it invokes may be an adaptation that encourages us to try new things and learn with more flexibility. In fact, it may be the primary means nature has found to develop our brains.

(via Bobulate)