An interface to manage your life
Posted on 07.11.10 by Alexandre Maron @ 12:50

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…


Filed under: Interfaces andMy Projects andThe World as a Playground
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Getting back
Posted on 05.17.10 by Alexandre Maron @ 16:50

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.


Filed under: General Statement andMagazine andMy Projects
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Hi, my name is Alexandre Maron. PlayFactor gathers my research and random ideas about the use of play concepts to make your product (be it a newspaper, a magazine or just your company website) engaging for the right audience. To do that, I will talk about interaction and game design, community management and all that crazy stuff that make your head spin. It will be a lot of fun.

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