Category Archives: Magazine

Epic Win puts Play Factor in your life (and in your iPhone)

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Apps that help you control your life with tasks are common. There are dozens of them on the App Store and Cydia.

But they are boring as hell (well, i love EverNote anyway). So two guys called Tak Funk and Rex Crowle created an application that added a layer of fun over task managing. It’s aptly named Epic Win and using it, for a nerd like me, is a blast.

You can use the apps tasks and create new ones. There are feasts of Strength, Stamina, Intellect, Spirit or Social. The whole interface is delliciously designed and it has many cute animations and movements.

The first tasks are cleverly designed to make you navigate in the app and understand it’s concepts and functionalities. And everything gives you some kind of reward. Let’s see if, over time, the whole concept is balanced enough to go further and become a hit.

On Edge magazine, there is a story about the app and a review.

Games shaping behavior

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It´s no accident that game designers are looking with lusty eyes to social and behavioral shaping. They have been developing and refining clever techniques to manipulate us for decades now. If you look at some of the most intriguing games from the last few years, they make a huge effort to drive you in some way without you noticing that your are being influenced in doing exactly that specific action. You think that the decision is your own. But if you replay a game and try different things the design emerges and the magic, sometimes, is gone.

Too bad.

Fast Company has a story about how game designers are creating titles that try to influence you in doing good things for you and for the world. It is not new, let´s be clear. But they are getting better at it and more people are turning their attention to this subject. So we will clearly see this trend getting stronger in the next months and years.

Getting back

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Last year, I finished my dissertation and got back to work one week later in Brazil. It made it almost impossible to go back to my work, unfinished and unpolished as it was at that point, regardless (or because) of the deadline.

This is how it works. At some point you just let it go, and send the work to the university. But if you really have something good in your hands, should go back and revise, expand, evolve your work. That is the point here. I am coming back, revising it point by point, questioning it, and getting ready to release it in digital and open form.

I am working right now with the mobile operations of the company i work for, Editora Globo. I can´t disclose some projects for obvious reasons. But i can assure that some of the concepts i believe in will guide how some of my projects will end up looking like.

The last one is open to the public now, the iPad project for Época, the weekly news magazine from Globo in Brazil. We released the first version of the app and our plan is to evolve for a full fledged digital magazine that will change over time.

It will have more and more Play Factors added as it gets new features and the journalists, deisgners and advertising agencies create content for the platform. Our goal is to make it as flexible as possible.

Anyway, the point is: I am back. Check back here or just subscribe to the RSS feed and we will talk about how game design concepts can help the world to make better media. Before the breakfast.