Đang tải... (xem toàn văn)
Fun is the easiest way to change people‘s behaviour. Fun from games arises out of mastery. It arises out of comprehension. It is theact of solving puzzles that makes games fun. With games, learning is the drug. The core fun in games is learning under optimal conditions. To create it, we must be able to design goals and environments as well.Play depends on voluntary contexts without serious consequence.Game design gives us patterns, models and words for emotion and rule design.
Sebastian Deterding UXCamp Europe Berlin, May 30, 2010 cbn Just add points? what ux designers can (and cannot) learn from games 1 The Fun Theory 2 3 4 Why games are fun Problems What we can learn There‘s a meme currently circulating in the UX community that the best way to motivate user behaviour is to make it fun – and the best way to make it fun is game mechanics. Today, I‘d like to (1) present this meme, (2) summarise the research on why games are fun, (3) show some problems with applying game design in other contexts, and (4) point out what we can actually learn from game design. 1 The Fun Theory So on to point number one. Can we get more people to use the bottle bank by making it fun to do? The most articulate version of »The Fun Theory« is a recent viral video campaign by Volkswagen Sweden that runs by that name. Here‘s one example how they use game mechanics to motivate users to use the bottle bank. Play video Thefuntheory.com »Fun is the easiest way to change people‘s behaviour.« On the campaign website, you‘ll find more videos, a (now closed) competition and the core idea: »Fun is the easiest way to change people‘s behaviour.« (One thing I always wonder is: What happens on day 2? What is the »replay value« of these designs? But more on that later.) 1982: Thomas Malone To wit, the idea that we can deduce heuristics for designing more enjoyable applications from video games is nothing new. If you look up the scholarly HCI databases, you‘ll already find papers on this in the early 1980s, the first heydays of video games (http://bit.ly/ csscek.) Work made fun gets done! 1994: The Fish! Strategy In the 1990s, there was a business bible craze around »The FISH! strategy«. Briefly, it states that for employees to be productive and creative, they have to be intrinsically motivated, which is best achieved by a playful attitude towards their work. (In a sense, Dan H. Pink‘s recent business bible »Drive« is just a reiteration of this focus on intrinsic motivation.) Research Design Application Yet there is also a growing amount of serious research (especially within the learning sciences) on creating more motivating work and learning environments by leveraging game design. Within the design community, you find no shortage of presentations and blog posts on the topic, and there are already some applications explicitly using game mechanics (links at the end of this presentation). Games With A Purpose Maybe the most well-known application are the »Games With A Purpose« by re:captcha inventor Luis von Ahn, like the »ESP Game«: On the surface, players earn points by guessing which word comes to mind of an anonymous counterpart when seeing a picture. In the background, the inputs are used as highly accurate image tags. [...]... So what makes the difference? »Fun is just another word for learning.« under optimal conditions Raph Koster a theory of fun for game design What separates games from school (and what we have to add to Koster‘s definition) is that games create optimal conditions for learning Fun is learning – under optimal conditions And games show us just what exactly those optimal conditions are »Reality is broken... are fun when he said: »Fun is just another word for learning.« »Fun from games arises out of mastery It arises out of comprehension It is the act of solving puzzles that makes games fun With games, learning is the drug.« Raph Koster a theory of fun for game design Now, »fun is learning« sounds quite counterintuitive at first What Koster means (and what is backed up by research on intrinsic motivation)... Usability and UX come from the world of tasks and productivity Our primary goal has always been to make applications as easy as possible, to keep the learning curve as flat as possible – boring, but simple If you‘d ask a usability engineer to optimize a video game, this is what probably would come out: http://lostgarden.com/2008/10/princess-rescuing-application-slides.html On the other hand, game designers. .. comparison Game designers test and balance this difficulty curve of their game until it perfectly matches the learning curve of their audience; often, the difficulty dynamically adjusts to player performance Now to the seventh and last principle: Games create social comparison to facilitate both social learning and motivating competition Twitter does this subtly by displaying who‘s in the game and at what level... games are fun So the obvious question is: Why? Why is this so motivating, so much fun? What exactly is at work here? Just add points! The answer I find reiterated over and over in most of the current debate in UX design is: »Just add points (and leaderboards)!« Points are seen as a kind of monosodium glutamate you can spice up any interaction or product with Foursquare Foursquare best exemplifies this... competition, and users can achieve levels or badges with a certain number of points or combination of check-ins »Fun is just another word for learning.« Raph Koster a theory of fun for game design However, this approach is way too simplistic if seen in context of the wealth of thought and research in game studies and game design Personally, I think that Raph Koster most concisely summed up what we currently... graphs) Excessive positive feedback Principle #5: Games give instant, unambiguous, excessively strong positive (and negative) feedback My favourite example is the Pachinko-like game »Peggle« by Popcap Games The goal is to shoot all orange pellets from a screen with a bouncing metal ball Here‘s what happens if you clear the last orange pellet of a level: Play video Scaffolded challenges That‘s the kind... http://www.flickr.com/photos/sulamith/1342528771/sizes/o/ We flee from We flee into To give you an example: The same kind of mathematics that school kids usually despise in school is actively sought out and performed by them with intense focus and joy in Trading Card Games like »Magic: The Gathering«, where mastery requires complex multiplication, fractions, and statistic analysis of which card combinations form a winning deck So what makes the difference?... »f boredom Skill/time Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi flow: the psychology of optimal experience The answer comes from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: We usually feel best when the challenges we face perfectly match our skills More, and we are stressed, less, and we‘re bored Since we constantly learn and improve our skills, the challenges must grow with our skills – otherwise, boredom ensues http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1524/the_chemistry_of_game_design.php... »Reality is broken Games work better … Games are the ultimate happiness machines.« Jane McGonigal ux week 2009 In a sense, this is the point researcher and game designer Jane McGonigal makes: Games take to heart many principles of positive psychology, which is why they are far more enjoyable than everyday life So – what are those principles? Let‘s return to the crowdsourced twitter translation Even this simple . Deterding UXCamp Europe Berlin, May 30, 2010 cbn Just add points? what ux designers can (and cannot) learn from games 1 The Fun Theory 2 3 4 Why games are fun Problems What we can learn There‘s. applying game design in other contexts, and (4) point out what we can actually learn from game design. 1 The Fun Theory So on to point number one. Can we get more people to use the bottle bank by making. makes games fun. With games, learning is the drug.« a theory of fun for game design Now, »fun is learning« sounds quite counterintuitive at first. What Koster means (and what is backed up by research