What is the most disruptive - full time conntected or fully disconnected?

Keynote speaker Amber Case (@casorganic) turned out to be the most charming personality ever. She is that sort of person replying every question with a smile and a ‘thank you’ before answering. Telling her story she laughs over and over again, enjoying the world and the people in it.

Amber showed us the story of Steve Mann, an amazing half maniac creative genius from the 80s still active today. We laugh at him because he was so out of the box but he was really ahead of everything – so far in front of us we couldn’t realize it, crazy enough to try out things before they were possible. This made me think of who is that Steve Mann character of today. Who is considered full feathered crazy but will be recognized as genius in 20 years?

Maybe we soon after met that person in Dave Asprey. Dave himself challenged Amber already at her speech asking her if she was only passively talking or if she was actually doing any cyborg practicing herself, which she replied that she did. She, just as Dave himself, measure everything she does. Statistics about you and your body seems to be interesting to the scientists and you can’t avoide the sense of elitism as often with cyborgs. There is always a fine line between health and support and superhumanpowers.

I interpreted Dave’s story about going from a super clever 150 kg computer addicted guy in his 20s to an (almost) normal functional family man with the help of happiness data as a story of healing – a remedy. He has found a way to control his mind and not let it do unhealthy choices, but on the contrary, only do what makes him feel good. You get a little scared by this man and yet I’m wondering if he’s not the Steve Mann of our times. Will we in 20 years look at him and see that he was right even though his practice will seem disruptive even in the future?

Susan Maushart discovered just as Dave that the fulltime connected life can have bad impact on the health of a family, and so she disconnected the entire family for a year – including 3 teenage kids. I wanted to ask her what she believed that the kids will say about it when they are 40... My mom experimented with our lives...or My mom did a real good move back then... To be completely disconnected today means that you put your kids outside both communication with school and moreover with their friends. Again this might have been the only remedy for this family, but I feel that I will not try it at home.

The success of the GameBoy

I held a very short session in a composition of three today, filling in Björn Jeffery's talk on the Toca Boca research on bluckbusters. Here is an even shorter version of my preso:

There are lots of lessons to learn from blockbusters and I’ve been looking into the success of the Nintendo GameBoy.

I started by asking all my game savvy friends about it and they all answered short and direct in one word – Tetris.

Tetris was included in the GameBoy per default from the release in 1989. Nintendo run a long struggle for the rights with both the Russians and other parts, so the game was strategically important for them. But why were Tetris and Gameboy the perfect match when everyone else were doing cooler stuff? Tetris was and is considered a game for girls.

Other gaming consoles of different brands were all cool looking black as something to steer a spaceship with. The Atari Lynx was released right after the GameBoy with mediocre success. They all offered the latest technology at the time, the coolest games and design - the kind of features that appeal to any hard core gamer. The target group was by that limited to primarily boys 16-30 years old, at most 10% of the population.

The Nintendo style was completely different. I’ve urged for everyone of their devices and I own them all. It's clear that they recognized a potential market much bigger than those 10%.

They made a toy that most people could possess and play. It could be carried in a pocket. It was cheap, easy to start and end and had long lasting batteries.
A tech device has wires and ports, a toy has batteries.

Long life time batteries are also important to let people bring it along to school, handle it to others and to get hooked to play for hours.

A toy has easy interaction for the inexperienced. No pre-skills demanded. It’s easy to get started. But to get that quick start you also need a fun short session game that is easy to get into.

The low price was prioritized to let everyone be able to own it. Cheaper weak processors didn't offer complex graphics and action games and Tetris was required to create the perfect match.

This Nintendo reciepy is most relevant today – keep casual games as casual as they can get for casual people.

Musing on Gamification... Motivation... Usability... Fun

John Cook refers to PopCap co-founder Jason Kapalka in GeekWire July 21

Creating a term like gamification does more harm to the business because it actually dilutes down what a game means. And, in his view, a game has one simple goal: to be fun.

On July 24 Peter Friedman suggests 'Maintainable motivation' as a new term for gamification.

The ‘science’ of maintainable motivation extends far beyond games and gamification, because it includes all aspects of persistent engagement, even when the initial intention was ‘single-action’. For instance, a sales message might be a ‘one-off’ opportunity to buy something (for instance, selling your car: ‘perfect condition, one careful owner’) but it might just as easily be sold from a dealership which will want you to only ever buy cars from them for the rest of your life.

My reflections are that
- the term Gamification feels as it is forgeting or denying that much of the knowledge of motivation powers is not deriving from games only but from sciences as pedagogy and psychology. Gamification is all about usability and goals. Previous on this >>

- the goal of gamification is to make something - anything - fun or at least without thresholds for the targetgroup, pretty much the same as a game, pretty much the same as pedagogy.

- the social games don't always have a fun core game (sow and harvest) but the game mechanics make it fun to interact, compare, invite, return, progress and even to pay pushing social or individual triggers.

- there are fun core games that get boring as game mechanics for introduction, virtual economic systems, progress and so on are bad.

- it is sometimes difficult to introduce non gaming or non social media users to the term of gamification, and easier to talk about motivations. But words such as Quests, Missions, Progress and Rewards are not foreign at all.

OMG, I chose a boyfriend in Top Girl

I've tried CrowdStars iPad app Top Girl - same graphics and shopping as in their previous facebook app It Girl, but now with focus on a boyfriend. What a sad story, and yet reckoned to be a huge success. You create your avatar from a few botoxed western Hollywood actress looking features, dress for success to find a boyfriend who will bring you all luck in the form of gifts. In my heart I hope that it is not primarily the game itself, but rather the now classic and well implemented game mechanics that make the girls get started, bring in all their friends and return.

Send your friends gifts on Facebook and maybe they will send you some back - check
Shops not available at this level, work your way up or pay to get there now - check
Return in x hours to attend your relation - check
Share every one of your steps for all your Facebook friends to see - check

But then I guess the message below is one that few girls can resist... (from Facebook Top Girl app)

Ingen nyhet att kvinnor spelar, men rosa spel är ännu ocreddiga

Expressen skriver om 'nyheten' att andelen spelande kvinnor är lika stor som andelen män - men det vet vi väl ändå nu. Stardoll och King.com har i alla fall övertygat mig för länge sen om att jag trodde rätt.

Mattias Snygg tror inte alls på principen med rosa spel.
- Det finnsspelutvecklare som med-vetet riktar sig till kvinnor och unga tjejer som målgrupp och mängder med undersökningar om vad tjejer vill ha att använda sig av, men jag tror att det enda sättet att göra riktigt bra spel på är att göra dem så som man själv vill ha dem. Likheterna är större än skillnaderna när det kommer till vad för storts spelmekanik som tilltalar män och kvinnor.

Det är däremot som alltid trist att se att 'rosa' spel alltid anses vara skit och meningslöst att utveckla alls. Hade jag trott på det hade antagligen Stardoll sett helt annorlunda ut idag.

Både vad gäller de rosa spelen och alla andra spel blir det väldigt viktigt, precis som Mattias Snygg säger - att man ska göra spel som man själv skulle vilja spela - att tjejer fattar att de ska utbilda sig till speldesigners och delta i utvecklingen av spel: Speldesigner verkar fortfarande uppfattas som en helt manligt yrke om man tittar på ansökningarna på högskoleutbildningarna - say what? För mig är det där nyheterna borde fokusera nu.

Ljuvliga Lotta Engberg

Underhållande, charmig, glad, spontan, snygg, rolig och underbar är Lotta. Och bra på att sätta ihop gäster och låtar till en massa glada människor som vill sjunga med. Hon kör Djungelboken på svenska och stjärnonas pappor på scen och alla är med.

Games should have a guided path

I had an hour to spend today at the jury's public discussion of the Stockholm based game education programs of FutureGames. We listend to jury members from DICE (Battlefield), Teotl (The Ball), Lionhead (Fable) och Frictional Games (Amnesia)who were about to elect a winner of the final exam projects. I have not yet had the chance to play the games but the discussions aroused a few thoughts.

The first game discussed was a rhythmical batting game compared to Patapon, but the jury members could not get through it and felt there should be more instructions to it. I spontanously thought about the target group of such a game and finally the designer of the game asked the jury if they had ever played this kind of game before, and no, they had not. A game jury should probably be put together out of different gaming types to be fair I guess. No matter how great each and everyone is in their field, the mix in the jury is crucial.

The second game discussed showed this even more. Someone got disappointed by being alone in a forest while someone appreciated the well rendered pine trees as an experience all alone and yet someone else wanted to find more objects and actions to explore.

Several of the games presented lead to the discussion about whether a game should have a guided path or not. The conclusion was that you always need rewardings for your actions, some hidden and subtle progression and that every action needs to get clear response to make the game meaningful. I thought about Sims where you need to make people fall in love to get children and you need to get children to be able to make them go to school and so on. It's both rewarding and making a path of progression. (as is life)

Well finally I thought about how also fantastic but yet junior game developers tend to concentrate on the core game and forget the same thing as for example e-commerce and communities. They fail to quickly introduce the game functionalities to the user and add more by time. They don't make clear why the user should want to come back soon, or want to go on to the very end of the game. No matter how great a game idea is it is more fun if people will want to play it... a lot.

Looking forward to work with the students on this this fall.

Foursquare turns NY to a giant game of Risk

The board game Risk, in which players maneuver plastic armies on a http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifmap in order to achieve “world domination,” has firmly occupied one corner ohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giff nerdom for about fifty years. Foursquare stationed itself in another more tech-oriented corner of that same kingdom about two years ago. Now, at last, the two categories of nerdom meet.

“World of Fourcraft” uses Foursquare and Google Maps APIs to turn New York City into a giant game of Risk.

Read the post on Mashable

Company culture close to a Cult

Next when reading Tony Hsieh’s book I’m wondering about how it is to have a family at home and friends from before when working at Zappos. It’s great to love to go to work, to feel that you have friends there who care for you and who support you, but as a parent of three kids I wonder how you cope with the other cultures that you must be a part of – the small communities of every school and daycare that your children belong to? It feels quite important to actively take part in your children’s school when parents arrange mingles and activities. If you don’t your kid is soon an alien to school, friends and to you. So how do you fulfill your parental role while being a part of a culture as Zappos, asking you to check in your full time, ethics and soul into the company?

Or maybe it’s a culture created by and for dinkies or at least childless employees and there should be other companies in the society building culture by, with and for parents… and everyone else who is not willing to check in his soul to a company.

It is much more fun to go to work when believing in and embrasing the goals and when being a part of the company, but at the same time it’s easy for this kind of culture to become a cult – a religion - creating new goals and ethics over time that everyone follows out of pure social validation. In my mind it is sound and maybe even human to be precautious to that kind of traps. At the same time as I adore the described Zappos culture and philosophy, it is always scary when groups become strong and powerful. Powerful cultures got power over the group and over others.

More thoughts from Tony Hsieh’s book Delivering Happiness

Soulsearch and Risktaking deliver happiness

There are some parts from Delivering Happiness that I'd like to keep close to heart and that I hope that I will be in position to apply on my own employees sometime. It's Tony Hsieh about him starting to put the company’s core values on paper:

I thought about all the employees I wanted to clone because they represented the Zappos culture well, and tried to figure out what values they personified. I also thought about all the employees and ex-employees who were not culture fits, and tried to figure out where there was a values disconnect. (s155)

I find this a wonderful way to review oneself, the one you want to be and the one you are.

And about one of the company’s final core values Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded:

We want everyone to not be afraid to take risks and to not be afraid to make mistakes, because if people aren’t making mistakes then that means they’re not taking enough risks. (s168)

I love taking risks, and I love people taking risks. How boring everything would be with only safers.