Everyone wants to love and be loved. That special person breaks us out of our day-to-day routine, makes each day brighter and the very thought of them brings a smile to our face.
“Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart, and the senses.”
- Lao Tzu
[via SwissMiss]
Our last seminar on serious games was quite enjoyable. Dr. Pippa Avery asked us to brainstorm a serious game that we would like to make. Our class consists of individuals with fairly diverse backgrounds including computer science, digital media, traditional arts, journalism, and myself, the lone business/marketing student.
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.
Want to help save the planet? @edadkins and I created Globes for the Globes (NSFW 18+) to help spread tips that will help the earth.
Ed already wrote about why we made the website, which you can read here. I wanted to quickly talk about what went into making it happen and why we used WordPress to power the whole thing.
WordPress is obviously a blogging platform but the fact that it is lightweight and customization is only limited to the developer’s imagination and knowledge of PHP and the WordPress core.
TDO Mini Forms
Used for image submission. TDO Mini Forms takes the content entered on the G4tG submission page and creates a draft post in WordPress. We are alerted of new posts and can approve or reject those posts.
Popular Posts + Post-Plugin Library
Used for displaying the most viewed images in the sidebar. This plugin and the post-plugin library offers a very robust set of features for filtering and displaying your posts based on related content, highest number of page views and more.
Ad-minister
Used to display our Partner Sites. Ad-minister is another plugin with a very rich feature set including the ability to track ads and an ad’s individual cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression(CPM) in terms of impressions and clicks.
Akismet
Our spam fighting power, thanks to WordPress
Due to the content of the website, we decided to hide the actual images until someone clicks on the “I’m 18 or over” button. We’re using Javascript to set a cookie indicating that the user wishes to turn off the image filter. Setting cookies via Javascript is pretty simple and because they are set in the browser, we can access the cookies later via PHP for showing, or in this case, hiding certain content including the “Flag This” links, most viewed images in the sidebar, and of course our unicorn gatekeeper.
The ability to set, retrieve, and manage cookies within a WordPress theme is a pretty slick way to show content or display options to a viewer. As soon as I get some downtime, I’m going to make it into a plugin that will allow cookies and related template tags, such as <?php if(is_18()) ?> to be created through the admin panel for use in existing themes.
Once the image filters are turned off, each image also has a “Flag this” link that sends a notification to us indicating that someone believes the content to be offensive or have comprised our system somehow.
This was a really fun project to work on and Georgette and Shone over at Bohocrush (NSFW 18+) are awesome as always to work with. We look forward to more community and collaborative efforts in the future.
I was curious to take a look at my Twitter usage over time and found TweetStats, which provides graphs on usage by month, day, time of day, popular keywords, etc. Clearly, my usage (or addiction) of Twitter has steadily grown over time. I’d be curious to see how this has grown in relation to the number of followers and individuals I’m following. I’m pretty sure I’d see a fairly positive correlation between the two. Click on the graph below to see more stats.
Compiled and graphed by TweetStats
My Most Popular Tags
Created using Wordle
WordPress as a Content Management System
I currently use WordPress for many of my projects. Want to start a blog? WordPress is a perfect fit. Do you want to build a website on WordPress? WordPress can do that too. However, because WordPress was originally designed as a blogging platform, there are quite a few tweaks that need to happen in order to get the most out of WordPress as a content management system (CMS).
Current State of Content Management Systems
Why is WordPress an ideal candidate to use as a CMS?
Enter 2009 Google Summer of Code (GSoC)
Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together nearly 2500 successful student participants and 2500 mentors from 98 countries worldwide, all for the love of code. Through Google Summer of Code, accepted student applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors from the participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. In turn, the participating projects are able to more easily identify and bring in new developers. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.
Building a Theme Framework
My proposal for the 2009 Google Summer of Code is a theme framework that provides a rich feature set of tools right out of the box to manage a website powered by WordPress.
The focus of this framework is two-fold:
For CMS users: If I had to guess, I would say more than 75% of CMS users in most organizations and companies do not have any existing knowledge of PHP, CSS, and/or HTML. Creating or even editing a theme to function as more of a traditional website rather than a blog is a herculean task for this type of user. All the user needs to know is how to install WordPress to their server and install the framework.
For WordPress developers: The real power of this framework comes into play for those individuals who do use PHP, CSS, and HTML. The framework provides documentation on how to create or edit existing themes to work well with the CMS framework and extend functionality through the use of existing/custom plugins and widgets.
Features
Hasan Elahi was invited to UNR as a part of the Church of Fine Arts’ Visiting Artist Lecture Series.
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.
Something to think about:
