Category Archives: My Projects

To right a wrong: my dissertation

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It’s funny. I promised myself i would expand and add stuff for this project and i kinda did. But suddenly, I was working so much that i just didn’t have the time to keep updating this space.

But there is a very interesting thing in keeping this blog: the historical value.

I started the research in the winter of 2008, and finished it in the summer of 2009. It was submitted in the end of august of that year. So, the words “gamification” and “funware” are not in the paper. It’s odd.

To my knowledge, Jane McGonigal had already done her seminal presentation on GDC but, for some reason, I didn’t find anything about in time for the paper. Too bad. I am happy I found Jesse Schell and interviewed him. Even though I tried hard, I couldn’t interview two guys I thought did amazing work: Clay Shirky and Henry Jenkins. Too bad.

The point was to get different minds to help me reflect on media and its untapped potential to use game design to make it more engaging. Simple as that. Easier said than done. Even now that Gamification is in the cover of magazines.

So, to correct a wrong, i am putting up my paper: The Play Factor: Engaging the Audience in the Age of Social Media.

Exactly as it was, flaws, misspelling and all. It’s old now, only two years after. But it has its merits. Actualy, I graduated with distinction, so it must have something interesting. I hope you find it good. :)

An interface to manage your life

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It is a matter of perspective. Life is not a game per se, but if you apply the right metaphor, look from a specific angle, you could make it look more like one, and have some good results from thar.

Imagine, for a second, that you ask yourself a series of questions about your life and establish a series of goals completed and to be completed. College? Check. First million dollars? Working on it. How far are you to that objective. Oh, 43%. Nice.

With the right framework of questions, you could in a first attempt, visualize your life in terms of the stats of a game character. Your age against the general life expectancy. Your income and savings against the first million. Your health status against what a person at your age, in your country.

The tricky part could be how to update all these stats. Some of them could be perfectly automatic. Some would rely on your ability to update, only. Think about it as FourSquare or Goall meets real life and go deeper that just location. And it is kinda happening now. If you have a look at Get Glue’s App for iPhone, you will see that they are trying to make you check in in media products like books, TV shows and such.

You could manage your life in a whole different way. You could establish financial and even emotional goals and look how far or close you are to them. And you could visualize everything in an interesting and exciting way. I am working on how to do that…

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.