While the snow is falling in Budapest, and the freezing rain is falling in North Carolina, the team gets together to play a few games of games – duh-duh! We also follow-up on our discussion from last week on game stickiness for business, and how the stickiness factor impacts productivity. We also play a bit of buzz word bingo, with big data, mobile, and gameification. We also help Phaedra get setup with a new microphone, while fighting thru some technical difficulties. We look for the magic algorithm to make games sticky. We ask our listeners to give examples of games they are working on and what makes them more sticky. Is it just telekinesis tattoos?
We are back! Phaedra and the Michael’s are back for an exciting episode of games at work, and this week it’s all about pixelated pavlovian responses – and we don’t mention Waze once!. Michael get’s us all to play a few simple games to make a point about pavlovian responses. We start with the cute kitten in Rescue Rush – where you leverage local maps to help rescue animals. And once again, Michael M. shows that while he loves playing the game, he refuses to help the developers by making the obligatory in app purchase. Or is he just showing the courage of his convictions, that he won’t get sucked into the trap! Phaedra then thinks about how the Girl Scouts could benefit from these type of Augmented Reality games – can you really share your cookies?!?!
We then move over to Pixel People, where we you build a city and people for the purpose of discovery via cloning and mutating people. Encouraging discovery and causing flow. Michael R. informs us that he’s flowed out on a few of his reason games, include the Simpson’s Tappd out game.
We ultimately decided that it’s not just a badges or point question, that it is really the Pavlovian bell question. Do you have enough bells in your day job, what is the cool factor that would get you to keep playing at work?
We’d like to go deeper on the subject of game stickiness and rewards, and how it should play out for a business environment. So drop us a comment, email, or tweet, and we’ll discuss in more detail next time on – Games At Work dot Biz!
Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport. The thrill of choose your own adventure, and the agony of crafting for hour upon hour. The human drama of gaming competition. This is Games at Work’s Wide Virtual World of Games.
For the first time in a long while, the co-hosts are all together virtually, while physically in Raleigh, North Carolina, San Francisco, California, and Budapest, Hungary. Michael M, inspired by an @ibogost tweet, spent 15 minutes (and it shows!) to create the Games at Work Podcast Game using Twine, and walks Michael and Phaedra through one of the branches. You can play the game yourself!
The team talks about Minecraft — it’s got a crafting part, it’s got a mining part, it’s got a farming part, it’s got an electrical engineering part and oh, so much more. With the generation playing Minecraft and other such building games that are focused on the player’s imagination, rather than the game designer’s / author’s imagination, Michael R observes that today’s creativity and content will place new demands on the appropriate laws governing the technology. Phaedra brings up the similarities to Lego, and after the recording was long over, Michael M learned a little more about Youth Digital Studios for app and game design classes for kids in Durham and elsewhere.
Michael R is practicing for his role with Durham Savoyards, celebrating their 50th anniversary with their production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance March 14-17 and 22-24th.
Phaedra is excited about the upcoming East Coast Game Conference April 24-25 at the Raleigh Convention Center.
This episode was brought to you by the letters X,Y, ZZ and Y. Was one smart dressed, rockin’ recording, this was…
You too can apply for the one way ticket to Mars by participating in the www.mars-one.com other worldly event. You need to be ready to leave planet Earth, for good. By round three of the selection process, the TV audience, just like on American Idol, will select the group of four pioneers to travel to Mars. There have been over 1,000 applications already, before any announcement was even made! This is a novel way to select our future interplanetary pioneers by leveraging entertainment for funding & publicity. Michael M and Phaedra imagine other such games that could be use to fund big, big things like this, while missing Michael R for this week’s episode.
Rounding out the episode, Michael and Phaedra touch on Facebook’s Social Graph for how friends & connections are used for better searches and Phaedra’s recent trip to Singapore. For their saving throws, Phaedra just can’t get enough of the Mars-One story, while Michael highlights the iOS game Storm Raiders and praises Tune In Radio which provides him with WUNC FM 91.5 radio all the way in Budapest. He is a sustainer, and glad to have his Morning Edition, even if it is in the middle of the day. 🙂
