I'm Serious.net

Big Data: The Overlooked Opportunity in Games

Beyond their demonstrated effectiveness as a medium for communications and community-building, serious games have great potential to reveal variables that influence audience retention, engagement and loss as well as the impact of various demographic data on those influences. By examining player data, learning organizations and news organizations can gain new insight into the behaviors, motivations and needs of their target audiences.

Fundamentally, a game is a system built around a series of interactions. Sure, the conceit of the game, the storyline, the characters, the graphical treatment, and social components all have a huge influence on a game’s acceptance and popularity. But at the heart of a game’s attraction are its gameplay and its mechanics (aka, dynamics), i.e., the activities a player engages in while playing the game. Activities, of course, are a predetermined set of interactions between the player, the content of the game, and (in the case of multi-player and social games) other players.

As a player progresses through an online game, the choices she makes at each moment of interaction determine her experience of the game and, ultimately, the game’s outcome for her. The game’s internal infrastructure includes a mechanism for tracking her interactions so that the game responds appropriately to her input. Players who make different choices will get different responses from the system, have different experiences and, likely, different outcomes.

Within a game system, players generate data in two categories: gameplay (the log of player interactions) and demography. Generally, gameplay data enable game designers to tune a game, while demographic data inform marketing decisions.

In the world of serious games, where interactions are designed to yield a particular behavioral or cognitive outcome, player data are important in some key ways. They provide an assessment of a player’s overall performance. They point to areas of difficulty (diagnosis) for a player as she progresses through a game. They can also help to predict how a player will perform in similar activities, whether those activities are embedded in another game or take place in the real world.

When gameplay and demographic data from all players are aggregated, we have the opportunity to look for patterns. They might indicate patterns of interaction – desired or not, intended or not – with especially high occurrence rates. Those patterns may, for example, demonstrate the inclination of a particular demographic subset to make the same wrong choice within an activity.

For publishers of multiple games, data aggregation across all games and all players can be particularly informative. Perhaps players who respond positively to one game type are also frequent players of another game type. Players who are successful with one game mechanic or activity type may be completely unsuccessful with a second type.

Ultimately, the value of trapping, aggregating, and analyzing these kinds of data will be extremely significant. Serious game developers will gain a much better understanding of what “works” with their target audiences. Even better, players will have more successful and fulfilling game experiences.

 

Badges?! We don’t need no stinkin’… Oh, wait, maybe we do.

Are you using badges yet?

If not, you may be feeling the need to “refresh” users’ experience of your content by introducing a badge system. In all likelihood, one or more of your competitors has either introduced badges or is putting together a plan to do so. Just as with games, the conversation about badges is quickly shifting from “Should we…?” to “How do we…?” and “How soon can we…?”

Services like Foursquare and Facebook have reminded us that collecting and displaying badges for others to admire can be satisfying and fun, even as adults. By combining contests and challenges with geo-location data and social networking, these services enable us to receive points and gain status for checking in at various places. Not only are our network connections notified of our peregrinations, participating merchants can publically reward loyal customers and thereby encourage repeat visits from other patrons.

Badges are more than coupons, though. In the aggregate, they tell stories about us, about how we spend time, possibly where and with whom. More importantly, they indicate achievement, skills, affiliations, expertise, and participation. As artifacts of our activities, they also imply something about our determination, curiosity, perseverance and commitment (or, depending on what the badge commemorates, sloth and an ability to waste time).

A well-designed badge system (i.e., a series of inter-related badges) does several things at once:

• It articulates the path(s) to success
• It provides incentives that are meaningful to the target audience
• It rewards desired behaviors and achievements
• It represents the badgeholder’s status, competencies and attainments to the rest of the world
• It facilitates community attachment and reputation-building
• It encourages collaboration and teamwork
• It promotes mentorship and leadership
• It opens doors to new avenues of exploration and accomplishment

It’s no wonder, then, that organizations whose purpose is to educate and inform see badge systems as an important addition to traditional approaches to credentialing and certification. Through badge awards, issuers can reward and communicate much more about a recipient’s performance than a single grade or score could ever hope to convey.

Perhaps the most promising aspect of badge systems is the opportunities they provide for stimulating attainment of higher order thinking (analyzing, evaluating and creating). By building challenges into badge systems that require active application of skills and information in “higher order” activities, badges become reliable indicators of a badgeholder’s abilities to incorporate new knowledge in effective, even sophisticated, ways.

Over the next year or so, we can expect to see badges appear in some interesting venues, from community colleges, training providers, and membership organizations to news websites, social networks and political campaigns. Some of these initiatives will roll out in conjunction with a larger “gamification” strategy. Many will use badges as the on-ramp to the road to game-based communication.

The Mozilla Foundation is giving the badge movement additional gravitas. With support from the MacArthur Foundation, they are building an “Open Badge Infrastructure” (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Badges) so that badgeholders can display the badges they’ve earned across websites, regardless of when or from whom the badges were received.

 

noozYou

I am currently a Fellow at Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute where I am focused on exploring the white space that surrounds the intersection of games and journalism. While my initial fascination with games and game design was in their value as a learning modality, I have shifted my attention more recently to games as a device for telling news stories and engaging news audiences.

I invite you to see some of the work I've been doing during my fellowship at www.noozYou.net. You can also learn more about RJI by going to www.rjionline.org.

Concerns of a Wavering Fangirl

It's not that my relationship with Apple has been without its shaky moments before, of course. You would expect rocky patches in over a quarter century of being together. We've managed to survive Steve I, Lisa, John, Jean-Louis, and Newton. We quickly agreed to put the episode with "the luggable" behind us, never to speak of it again. And, we've agreed to disagree on the "to license or not to license" question.

The past few weeks have been a bit much, however. Apple's pre-occupation with taking out Adobe has the ring of a spurned lover on The Jerry Springer Show. It makes us who are fans of both companies feel like we're watching our best friends' marriage break up in front of us. Will we still be able to be friends with both, or will we ultimately have to pick sides?

But, there is a more pernicious worm eating it's way toward Apple's core. Censorship. 

In order to gain "shelf space" within the closed system that is iTunes, which is the only content distribution platform available for Apple devices, a developer must submit an app for review - and approval. Or rejection. The review process itself is mysterious, as are the criteria for evaluating an app. Apple's interest seemed to be in ensuring technical quality, which was great; Apple could put an app through its paces far more rigorously than a garage-based developer ever could. Everybody wins.

Then, Apple started getting interested in the content of apps. First, they were getting too many "pull my finger" submissions. Then, they announced they would not sell or rent R- or X-rated movies. Next, they started quietly eliminating apps that were already selling on iTunes, either because they contained offensive content (says who? using what standards?) or were developed using unauthorized development tools (read, Adobe tools).

This week was, for me, the pièce de résistance. Louisa Hearn reported in the Sidney Morning Herald that Ellen Degeneres had made a spoof iPhone ad wherein she lampooned her own texting inabilities. (Watch it. It's very funny. You'll think you're watching me, without the cursing.) 

Apple's corporate feelings got hurt, and they insisted that she apologize to them on air. AND SHE DID!

What kind of corporate-backed, ham-handed threats must Apple have made that would convince Ellen Degeneres both to apologize and to endorse Apple and the iPhone? What would compel Ellen to ignore her own free speech rights? Why did she feel obliged to submit to their demands?

Apple, and its astonishing CEO, Steve Jobs, continue to make masterful contributions to technology and culture. But that doesn't give them the right to squelch other corporate citizens - nor does it excuse them when they bully others who might make a joke at their expense.

Grow up, Apple. Enfant terrible just isn't cute anymore.

I'm serious,

Anne

Teach them to search...

Good "search" skills are misundersestimated, to borrow some coinage from our inestimable erstwhile president, George. W. Bush. Indeed, knowing which search engine to use for what purpose and then how to use advanced queries to find useful information can make the difference between an efficient research exercise and a frustrating, potentially unfruitful trial. 

Good search is a matter of entering the right question - or key words - into the search field. Finding the proper key words and the proper syntax for joining those words require complex language and logic skills. Effective search also requires enough knowledge of the subject matter to formulate a query that will yield the desired information. 

For the most part, Internet users gain search skills over time, through trial and error. Unless you're in library school, you are unlikely to be presented with a tutorial on search techniques. We all just kinda wing it, hoping to find the info we want, presuming it's not available if we don't find it right away.

Last Fall, Google released Search Stories Video Creator. It's a nifty little tool that they've released on YouTube that lets you create narrative around search queries to build a short (very short) movie. Enter seven queries in a sequence, indicate whether you want to search the Web, YouTube, maps, etc., then add a soundtrack - et voilå, your very own little 30-sec. movie. Here's mine (my first one, anyway):

I'm reeling from the scads of ways learning designers can embed this tool into all sorts of curricula. Give learners a topic, and have them tell a story to demonstrate content mastery.

• Tell me a story about "metamorphosis."
• Recap the story of "To Kill a Mockingbird."
• Who's got the best story about "quadratic equation?"
• Team A: your group's story is about microlending. Each team member tells a chapter of the story. Each chapter focuses on one key principle. Organize your team. Assign chapters. Tell your story.

There's even a dedicated Search Stories channel on YouTube, with some really fun (and some really not - but they're all PG-rated) examples.

I'm serious,

Anne