Joel Spolsky on CHAOS aka online community building: “This job will be sort of like being a community organizer at a non-profit. It combines elements of marketing, PR, and sales, but it’s really something different. I don’t expect that there are a lot of people out there who already know how to do this well, so I’m going to train them, personally.” The team has grown from two people to eight agents in the last few months. “Everyone who joins the program (and survives for a year) will come out with an almost supernatural ability to take a dead, lifeless site on the internet and make it into the hottest bar in town. That’s a skill worth learning for the 21st century,” Mr. Spolsky concluded.
Kickstarter is the breakout star of the crowd-funding notion because they embrace the crowd but don’t allow a free-for-all. They champion the underdog — but in particular the underdog who self-markets with aplomb. If they hadn’t cared what “a Kickstarter project” would mean, then it would not have meant anything at all.
While many of the other social news sites are dominated by current headlines, reddit attracts more offbeat news and commentary on current news. This makes it a good site for those that get their news from a more conventional source and just want to hear what people are saying about it.
Pay Attention Gamers: Facebook Changes promote Spectator Mode
At the F8 conference last week, the main example used to demonstrate this new functionality was a game of Words With Friends from Zynga. Not only will games between your friends show up in the Ticker stream, but you can hover over the update to get a live view of what the current word being played is, and even click on the thumbnail to watch the game in a larger window.
The American Dream is dying a long, slow death – its core premise – a better life – has been badly misinterpreted by multiple generations of Americans as a bigger life. Now a bigger life is achievable by fewer and fewer Americans. And ironically, that may not be a bad thing in the end. Perhaps this is what it will take for us to finally realize that bigger does not necessarily mean better – and that the quantity of our lives is not always a relevant measure of the quality of our lives. The truly hopeful thing is this: If we interpret the American Dream to mean a better life – and no longer a bigger life – then we make it possible for every American to achieve the American Dream.
Politicians don’t represent the interests of people who don’t vote. They barely care about the people who do vote. They look after the corporations who get them elected.
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| — | m.guardian.co.uk |
I’m prepping for a FailChat about gamification this evening http://t.co/Y55aztu
Charles Hudson, the moderator, just sent me a set of interesting questions, including this one:
Loyalty programs, reward programs, etc have been around before we had the term “gamification” - how are the things we’re talking about now different from classic concepts of loyalty or other usage incentive systems?
I see a lot of confusion between loyalty programs and games — partly because the two areas share a common set of mechanics — Redeemable Points, Levels, Rewards, Collectibles, and Premium Services for Big Spenders.
One fundamental DIFFERENCE between loyalty and games revolves around skill, learning and mastery (or lack thereof). As you progress within a loyalty/rewards program, there’s no real skill involved - you’re learning to “play the points game” and maximize your points. It’s not about engagement - it’s about sticking around and spending/consuming.
OTOH when you progress in a (good) game, you’re learning something - you’re developing some cognitive, social or perceptual skill. That’s part of what makes games so compelling - the sense of getting better at something, of being engaged and shaped by the experience.
Here’s a VENN diagram showing some common mechanics is Gaming and Loyalty. I’ve also thrown in Cialdini’s Influence Principles, because they’re so common and central in social gaming.
What you do think? Can you make a better version of this diagram? Ever seen something similar? Let me know.
Although we’re only starting to grasp how the insides of buildings influence the insides of the mind, it’s possible to begin prescribing different kinds of spaces for different tasks. If we’re performing a job that requires accuracy and focus (say, copy editing a manuscript), we should seek out confined spaces with a red color scheme. But for tasks that require a little bit of creativity, we seem to benefit from high ceilings, lots of windows and bright blue walls that match the sky.
Games that originally emerged in the hobby gaming market (such as Magic: the Gathering) laid the groundwork for virtual economies by showing that elements of games could be collected, traded and derive value from the intersection of their scarcity and utility. Most early MMORPGs built business models around subscription rather than virtual goods–which caused secondary markets to emerge for trading in items. Today, many games in the Free-to-Play (F2P) market have turned this on its head, by making virtual goods the way the game publisher monetizes; because this has become such a good way to attract players and monetize attention, this has become “the” business model of current social network games. Likewise, virtual reward systems and metagames such as the Xbox Live Achievement system prefigured the underlying mechanic of Foursquare and Music Pets. The current social network game market is the confluence of several big trends: social gameplay, along with asynchronous play patterns and a virtual-goods business model that has been shaped by market forces. We’re only at the beginning of seeing how far we can take the genre. It’s my belief that the next wave of games will draw upon many of the elements we’ve seen work in the past: great storytelling, challenging decision-making and a sense of tribal belongingness that surrounds popular games.
