Amy Jo Kim

Blogging for Learning

Thu, 17 May 2012 10:36:29 -0700

Inspired by Chris Dixon I’m re-starting my blog to catalog and share what I’m learning.

Social product design is evolving - I’m seeing increasing signs of a backlash against complexity, obscurity and manipulation, and movement towards simplicity and transparency.

I’m also seeing a new wave of creative non-zero-sum games and gamified services that buck the tired trend of points, levels, badges and coins in favor of more powerful and truly social mechanics.

The next few years will be very interesting — I’d love to see these trends collide.

"We shouldn’t be shaming people for embracing the concept of gamification; we should be..."

Mon, 07 May 2012 10:21:03 -0700

“We shouldn’t be shaming people for embracing the concept of gamification; we should be educating people on what good game and gamification design looks like so that they can spot the bad design. As a designer of games for learning, I’ve worked hard to get to a place where I can talk to organizations openly about the potential of games for learning and performance improvement. It was inevitable, once that door was opened, that the snake oil salesmen would start clouding the market…and so they have.”

- Learning in Tandem: The Shamification of Gamification

"Game design is not actually easy. Good game design is difficult, great game design is rare. To think..."

Mon, 07 May 2012 10:20:13 -0700

“Game design is not actually easy. Good game design is difficult, great game design is rare. To think that you can slap a reward mechanism on any system or pattern of behavior and suddenly its a game is naive. To think that you can give people badges to reinforce behavior and that will translate into long-term learning and behavior change, or overall performance improvement? Really? It’s not how humans learn, and its certainly not how we change.”

- Learning in Tandem: The Shamification of Gamification

"So basically, without women’s rights, without girls going to school, without girls learning things,..."

Wed, 02 May 2012 13:21:18 -0700

““So basically, without women’s rights, without girls going to school, without girls learning things, without girls becoming part of it, then you get a lot of illiteracy and you get a lot of hungry people who don’t know what to do, and that’s a good recipe for violence. If we were to go back in time, maybe what we shouldn’t have been trying to push on the world is democracy but maybe we should have been pushed women’s rights. Maybe that was the first thing to push, and once we have women’s rights we can talk about free press and democracy once people know how to read.””

- Women 2.0 » VC Ben Horowitz: “The Future Of Humankind Is Dependent On Technovation Girls” (The Girl Effect)

"on mobile apps, it’s harder to switch between commerce and content sites. One the Web, no..."

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 19:06:22 -0700

“on mobile apps, it’s harder to switch between commerce and content sites. One the Web, no matter how much you like reading about a product on a popular site, when it’s time to buy it you’re very likely to shoot over to Amazon, which is just a click away. On a mobile device, switching between sites or apps, and then re-entering information to do a transaction, is frustrating; apps can do both content and commerce successfully.”

- Mama Bear conference lesson: Aim for the grandparents | Bootstrap - CNET News

"Good games can rarely be created in a vacuum, which is why many designers advocate an iterative..."

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 11:28:16 -0700

“Good games can rarely be created in a vacuum, which is why many designers advocate an iterative design process, during which a simple prototype of the game is built very early and then iterated on repeatedly until the game becomes a shippable product.”

- Gamasutra - News - Analysis: Sid Meier’s Key Design Lessons

Lila on the Trampoline, in the Rain (by sUWgbv6bfs)

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 16:24:40 -0700

Lila on the Trampoline, in the Rain (by __sUWgbv6bfs__)

"Joel Spolsky on CHAOS aka online community building: “This job will be sort of like being a..."

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 13:47:03 -0800

“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.”

- Conquering the CHAOS of Online Community at Stack Exchange | Betabeat — News, gossip and intel from Silicon Alley 2.0.

"Kickstarter is the breakout star of the crowd-funding notion because they embrace the crowd but..."

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 10:49:18 -0700

“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.”

- The Trivialities and Transcendence of Kickstarter - NYTimes.com

"While many of the other social news sites are dominated by current headlines, reddit attracts more..."

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 11:57:35 -0700

“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.”

- Social News - Reddit - A Review of Reddit

Pay Attention Gamers: Facebook Changes promote Spectator Mode

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 09:55:43 -0700

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..."

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 09:52:35 -0700

“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.”

- The People’s Economist: The New American Dream

"Politicians don’t represent the interests of people who don’t vote. They barely care..."

Sat, 13 Aug 2011 10:34:42 -0700

“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.”

- m.guardian.co.uk

I’m prepping for a FailChat about gamification this...

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 12:19:13 -0700

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.

Countdown to Smart Gamification

Mon, 09 May 2011 08:24:57 -0700

Event Registration Online for Smart Gamification: 7 Core Concepts for Compelling Products

"Although we’re only starting to grasp how the insides of buildings influence the insides of..."

Mon, 02 May 2011 17:42:55 -0700

“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.”

- Jonah Lehrer on Buildings, Health and Creativity | Head Case - WSJ.com

"Games that originally emerged in the hobby gaming market (such as Magic: the Gathering) laid the..."

Mon, 02 May 2011 11:15:07 -0700

“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.”

- History of Social Games

How Engagement Killed Gameplay [Language] - What Games Are

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 12:44:30 -0700

How Engagement Killed Gameplay [Language] - What Games Are:

The downside is that because negative engagement ultimately squeezes players, these games do not generate sustained virality (I mean true virality, not the spam-publishing kind). If they are novel then they might see a significant early bump, but after that they rely on permanent advertising budgets to nag players back into playing again and again. So while their business process is replicable and expandable, it does not inherently sustain itself. Games based on negative engagement are also very easily copied by competitors.

Why Glenn Beck lost it - The Washington Post

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 15:08:56 -0700

Why Glenn Beck lost it - The Washington Post:

Beck, in losing his mass-media perch, is repeating the history of Father Charles Coughlin, the radio priest of the Great Depression. Economic hardship gave him an audience even greater than Beck’s, but as his calls to drive “the money changers from the temple” became more vitriolic, his broadcast sponsors dropped him. He gradually faded from relevance as his angry themes lost their hold on Americans and his anti-Semitism became more pronounced. It is a sign of the nation’s health and resilience that Beck, after 27 months at Fox, is meeting a similar end.

Social Gaming Is Not the Answer for All Marketers | Small Agency Diary - Advertising Age

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 21:07:22 -0700

Social Gaming Is Not the Answer for All Marketers | Small Agency Diary - Advertising Age:

Maybe some of the concerns that I have may simply come down to the name itself. The term “gamification” sounds as if you can wave a wand and badges, points and mayorships magically appear, instantly transforming your site or application into something more engaging and successful. Games are lot more complex than that. There is no generic solution. Designing them well is a custom challenge, for every audience and context.