679-08 | Main / GameDesignForOtherEnds

Using Game Design to Achieve other Ends

One of the most intriguing aspects of the art of game design is that the ideas apply to things beyond games - that you can use the principles to design things that are more enjoyable to use/do. For this reason, I actually prefer to use the term experience engineering rather than game design.

What is fascinating is that by using experience engineering, you can make people enjoy (and actually want) to do things that they might not otherwise want to do. The most obvious applications of this are in education. However, you can see it elsewhere to. Some of if it is, um, less altruistic. Getting people to give you free labor, or spend more money in a theme park, or remember your product, ...

Rather than lecture on the topic, I thought I'd have you watch a lecture from an expert. Its available on Google video. So instead of having lecture on Monday, April 7th, you should instead watch this 52 minute video on the internet:

Human Computation - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143&q=luis+von+ahn&pr=goog-sl

The speaker is Luis van Ahn - now a Professor at CMU, and a MacAuthur "genius" award winner. Not only is the work interesting, but also he's a good speaker.

In order to help you make the lessons from this lecture sink in (and to make sure that you actually watch it), you have the following assignment:

watch the video
give a brief list of the main ideas from the talk (4-5, a sentence each should be fine). enough to convey a sense to us that you actually paid attention to the lecture.
give a discussion of how his attention to the principles of game design (as discussed in class) lead to the success (or are probably a big part of it at least) of the "human computation games".

Write this up on a wiki page, and send a link to it to Yoh (by email) before class on April 14th.

Update: Yoh has posted all links (that were emailed to him) to StudentPages.GameDesignForOtherEnds.

Wired article on Alternate Reality Games (for marketing): http://www.wired.com/images/press/pdf/buzzforyou.pdf - a very different instance of this.