If you add game mechanics to motivate behavior and you ingrain that action as a habit (perhaps for more than ~22 days), what happens when you take away the game elements?

Will new behaviors continue to stand on their own without these game elements? As luck might have it, instead of having to do my own experiment, I got to see what this might look like using the website 750words.

750 Words

750words, a website created by Buster Benson, encourages people to write at least 3 pages (or 750 words) every day. Buster has built many features into the site that actually make writing more fun including tracking of days completed as writing streaks, badges for various levels of streaks, points of number of words written, a postmortem analysis of your writing, leader boards and more.

While game mechanics seems to be the new buzzword for marketers and companies trying to figure out how to turn replying to emails, checking in to your office or walking the dog into a game, I believe Buster is doing some of the most remarkable work in gamification today. He isn’t doing it to increase customer acquisition and lifetime value, he’s doing it to make positive effects in the real world by inspiring creativity (with 750words) and wellness (with HealthMonth).

If you look at my last two posts, you’ll see that I’ve been using 750 Words to become a better writer and after just 9 days, I feel addicted. I have always enjoyed writing but would neglect to find the time to sit down and do it. 750 Words has helped me focus on my writing. While the badges and points are great for tracking progress, I am most impressed and excited about the postmortem analysis of my writing which includes a breakdown of things like grammar, words per minute, emotions, concerns, sense of time and others. I became addicted to writing. In the grand scheme of things, its a wonderful thing to be addicted to!

750 Words Outage

On March 5th, the website was migrated to a new server and a glitch surfaced. People could write and save their words up to 749 words. If you typed 750 words, it would not save completely and you would not get credit for that day. In Buster’s defense, these kind of things happen when dealing with technology and before the migration he did announce that he would fix any broken writing streaks that may occur from the move. He’s been great about getting these things sorted out and the site is a great tool for writing, it just happened to have a small hiccup.

What happened?

People were frustrated, some were pissed. As of this writing, there are 42 comments on the 750Words tumblr and over 35 pleads for help on GetSatifsaction. Now fortunately, many people have voiced their understanding (shit happens) but there were a few people who were muttering self-censored obscenities. The moods on GetSatifsaction ranged from “frustrated” to “confused”. It was as if people were robbed of an experience.

There were even a few people  who had written for very long streaks, say 196 days of 750+ words a day (at least 147,000 words). A standard novel is approximately 70,000-90,000 words. They had written the equivalent of 1-2 novels over 6 months and were very unhappy and seemingly frantic because they might not get credit in the form of a virtual badge.

Buster wrote about intrinsic value and intrinsic signifiers on his blog, which I thought described the value of virtual badges very well but after this outage, it has amused me that the fact that these folks were achieving their goal was not enough for them. They are writing 750 words a day, every day for long streaks of time. Don’t these words have some intrinsic value? The whole point was to write every day and these people had accomplished that but have lost the forest through the trees, or in this case, virtual badges and status.

There are certainly far fewer people who have a 200 day streak than have a 15 day streak and I have a hard time believing that anyone is participating in 750words for status but rather to become better writers, get thoughts on paper or finish their first novel.

The book Drive by Daniel Pink talks about three values important to intrinsic value: autonomy, mastery and purpose. 750words implements autonomy well, it does not control when you write, how you write, or what you write, it just simply asks that you write your words between each 24 hour period to get “credit.” However, the glitch was a virtual barrier, a mocking and teasingly invisible forcefield holding you back from getting a badge, despite having accomplished the actual goal of writing 3 pages a day.

I know that Buster will have the problem sorted out soon (he’s currently working on it and repairing any broken streaks) and look forward to getting back to my new found addiction of writing with 750Words, in the meantime, I’ll just be writing in my journal.

My experiences and coursework through the College of Business has exposed me to more than my fair share of “serious games.” In MKT 316 we played New Shoes, which was a marketing simulation game surrounding a shoe company. The focus of the game was on marketing principles such as forecasting demand, deciding on advertising and promotion budgets and managing product quality in both domestic and foreign markets.

In MGT 496 this semester, we are playing yet another shoe simulator called BSG Online (I’m not sure where everyone’s fascination with shoe simulation games is coming from) that focuses on building and executing strategies for a multinational shoe conglomerate. This game is much more complex in that, each company/team is able to control the amount of production, product support, imports/exports, and product development, on top of the marketing principles covered in the other game. This game has so many options that if you are actually able to grasp the cause-effect relationship your decisions have on the game, you’d be well on your way to understanding what is needed to execute a global, multinational strategy within an organization.

While these games have educational value, they are certainly lacking in engagement. Yes, they are serious games but who says they can’t be fun as well? After all, a game is meant to be fun and it allows learning to happen through hands-on interactions. If there isn’t going to be some element of fun and enjoyment, why use the medium at all?

Our Game
Our group began to discuss ideas for a game we would like to create. I’ve always loved playing MMORPG games (a past addiction of mine) including Star Wars Galaxies and World of Warcraft because they are so complex and offer a wide variety of roles for players and encourages interaction with others in order for you to be successful.

Our idea builds on a world such as those in MMORPGs and SecondLife and basically, after building a character in the game, you start at the bottom of the social ladder in the community. Your actions influence your rise (or fall) along the social ladder, much as we experience in real life. This concept is already seen in a game like The Sims but by adding the MMORPG aspect you again encourage interaction with others to achieve synergy. The actions of yourself and others will hopefully bring value to the both parties and the community as a whole (1+1=3). Ok. So far, this sounds like games that are already out there and most of them are not overt teaching tools. Our biggest addition to the genre is the idea of a “current event engine.”

The current event engine will generate outside forces that will once again influence the actions and behaviors of the players. There is a basic human need to collect things which can be seen in games such as Pokemon, Animal Crossing, and most MMORPGs, but how would that need change when faced with real-world scenarios like economic depressions, epidemics, and more subtle changes like the changes in political leaders and more. You could be playing the game one day and be on your way to becoming a movie star, a corporate bigwig, or a hermit in the forest and the next day, the environment could change.

This game would be fairly complex to build in such a manner that the game does not become predictable or repetitive. Obviously we would not want the same influencing events happening over and over again and they should occur to a degree that is fairly realistic (we won’t have multiple economic recessions in a year, get hit by hurricanes every day, etc.) Fortunately, not everything that influences our game’s environment and characters needs to be negative.

Other Ideas
Considering my experience with business simulation games, there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of making a game that allows for learning of business strategy, marketing, and sales without being absolutely mind-numbing. The interactivity of BSG Online is actually limited by the technology it is built on. The entire game is built on Microsoft Excel using complex series of views, macros, and sheets to create a game. Games like Roller Coaster Tycoon allow people of all ages to “learn” the mechanics of running a business but in a very oversimplified sense in order to appeal to a mass audience. A more complex game, a mixture of Roller Coaster Tycoon and BSG Online would prove to be a very engaging and powerful teaching tool with business schools.

His work is a product of a personal experience he had with the U.S. government while trying to reenter the United States from Africa. He had been placed on the no-fly list and was detained in an INS detention facility and questioned for months regarding his activities before and after September 11, 2001 in the United States and abroad. Elahi’s work has him traveling to countries all over the world. In fact, there are probably very few countries in the world that are not stamped inside his passport. Even after months of questioning, he still had to let the FBI know when he was leaving the country, where he was going, and how long he’d be gone so that they could clear him in any airports he might pass through. Unfortunately for Elahi, he was never officially charged or accused of anything so he could never officially be cleared.

From this experience, Elahi decided that he could keep track and report on his activities much better than anyone from the government. From this, trackingtranscience.net was born. His website now documents his location (from his cellphone), images of the food he eats, urinals he uses and other data that is pertinent to disclosing his whereabouts and activities including phone records and bank statements, each one showing time-stamped phone calls and debit card purchases in cities all over the world.

Elahi has worked with museums and other exhibitors to create art pieces using the data he collects. One such art piece included a display of emergency procedures and routes for airplanes. For more on Elahi, visit his website at http://elahi.sjsu.edu/ and trackingtranscience.net

Above: Elahi’s position as of Wednesday, April 1, 2009 at 11:47am as reported from his website, trackingtranscience.net.

So what is art?
You will be hard pressed to find any two people who will give you the same answer. To me art is any expression of an idea. This expression can be conveyed through any medium and/or utilize any set of tools, mechanics, etc.

Interested in how others would define art, I sent the question out to Twitter and here are some of the responses:

KristenAmazing @colinloretz whatever you want it to be. That is a hard question.

bliccy @colinloretz But seriously… a subjective, expressive interpretation of…anything. Defining art second in line to “meaning of life”.

clustrfck @colinloretz The answer you seek is unobtainable

teepoole @colinloretz A desired communication between an artist and a public.

teepoole @colinloretz Rather, the materialization of.

keith_anderson @colinloretz the seeking of the question (by doing) usually creates the answer.

tahoedrew @colinloretz re: art! an external expression of an internal concept, emotion or world

AngelaRaeBrooks Art is the creative soul inside yourself

Art in Games

For some of the best art that I’ve ever seen in a game, check out Project Offset. Not only is the art stunning but it is all real-time imagery generated by the game engine itself. Ordinarily, you would have to create prerendered cinematic video clips to attain this high level of quality, forcing you to watch it like a movie instead of interacting with it. Check out the videos for more information.

What is art to you?
Leave your opinion in the comments!

Art and digital media are very important components of gaming. A game can have a great concept but fall flat on its face without some sort of digital representation, whether it be images, sounds, or even physical feedback such as vibration, that allows us to interact with the code that runs the game.

Art can be applied to gaming in two ways. First there is the art within the game itself, which is usually created by the game developer. The art is used to provide representations with which players can interact with the digital world. The other type of art in gaming consists of artists translating their real world talent to the digital world in games like Second Life, where most of the content is user-generated.

Professor DeLappe’s demonstration of his Ghandi Project in Second Life is a good example of this. By creating an interface between a computer and an old treadmill, DeLappe was able to express himself in Second Life by physically exerting himself in the real world, by walking 240 miles in both realms. Another example of mixing reality with gaming is Aram Bartholl’s first-person shooter glasses, which are below.

My brother introduced me to “augmented reality” a few months ago and I can see a lot of practical applications for displaying data with respect to real world objects. Below is a video of a game that was for the Gizmondo:

If you have a webcam and want to try out augmented reality yourself, check this out: Papervision – Augmented Reality