Category Archives: New Ways to Play

Dinner time!

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There are things in life that are necessary, but not exactly exciting.

Let’s look at the good old moment when an urban, hip and well informed couple wants to go out for dinner and have to decide where to go. Well, if you are in London, you could go to Yelp.

Choose a cuisine…

Then, betwen a plethora of options, choose a restaurant…

And take a look at what is people saying about the place.

Three straight forward steps. Simple, but have nothing special and sometimes not finding the right place could be frustrating.

Now. Let’s go back one step. Lets break it down in pieces. Well, we need to find a restaurant. We may define the kind of food, where and how much we are willing to spend. Three variables? There maybe more, but let’s stay with these ones for now.

Does it have to be this way? Is there any way we could do the same thing and make it, hum, sexier? Make it funny? Fun? Let’s see how Urbanspoon answered this question…

Cool. I know that if you are a passionate Iphone user, you may already know this app, but the point is: this is one of the most perfect examples of the Play Factor. But we can’t forget that an Iphone app is going to a specific kind of audience. So, the website of Urbanspoon is still a very conventional one, although tey have a version of the application there.


The UK version of Urbanspoon, very normal

So they have in mind that they need to be able to offer the right experience for the right customer.

Playing the April Fool’s day game

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Didn’t you look for jokes yesterday? I love April Fool’s Day. I just browse everywhere looking for practical jokes in media outlets that are, most of the time, serious.

The Guardian (that dropped the paper in favor of turning into a Tweetercentric site) made a list of some cons spotted through the internet.

And I have my personal list:

eye-camera

Eye-Camera, from Kodak

Google launches Cadie, an intelligent system that will help them in the near future in keeping the company as the most innovative. Well, there’s a learning curve…

Amazon announces the REAL cloud computing. They are taking computer up-up-and awayyy!!

CrunchGear became part of a line of cereals (crunch, got it?) of General Mills!!

Kodak shows its pretty Eye-Camera. Wow!! What a gadget!

Gmail shows it’s new amazing functionality: auto-pilot. The, hum, intelligent system answers your messages for you! As an example, they show how it would answer the classic nigerian prince spam.

screenshots

And there is obviously a lot more around. Life is playground.

Wolverine: the leak

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wolverine

Big story of the week for Hollywood execs is the fact that Wolverine’s movie leaked and anybody with a peer-to-peer software is able to download it. So here comes the execs with those good old stories. The copies will hurt ticket sales! We are doomed!! Things like that.

For me it is very simple. Wolverine is a big action estravaganza. People that chose to see a movie like this in a computer screen, in a terrible copy, with crappy sound and poor picture quality, taken with a camera from a movie theater in some obscure corner of the world, would not pay for a ticket anyway. This is people that don’t care about going to a theater. Plain and simple.

Or else. Could be a really curious fan that wants to see the movie as soon as possible and, surprise, will go to watch on a theater anyway. Crap! He will go again, one week later, watch it on Imax. And, oh!, will buy the special edition in august too. So, enough with the screams!

The thing is. All these fireworks just hide the really juicy fact in this curious case: it is not the final movie, but a high quality copy with unfinished effects and soundtrack. It is the kind of thing that journalists and executives have the chance to see all the time, but not the crowd that would go to a theater. Hell! I don’t download this kind of stuff and this time I even was curious to see how this copy looked.

People will download it just to see how an unfinished movie looks. Plain simple. This case has an edge, a challenge embedded.

This copy has something completely different. Works as a souvenir for the fans. People will download it and, if the movie rocks, since they couldn’t see the finished effects, they will run to theaters on may 1st. This is such an interesting situation that, if I wasn’t such a nice guy I would even think that Fox leaked this on purpose.

But if the movie is terrible. Well. Fox is in serious trouble, because that first week crowd may not appear in such big numbers, after bad reviews start popping everywhere on the internet. In the end, whoever makes good stuff can have good results from positive buzz. But your product better be good, dude, or you are in serious trouble. New world, different rules.

A game of sorts

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Busy week. Next one I will deal with some final assignments and I think this website will start to see some real development and calrification of the issues at hand.

For now, just a nice slideshow I found on slideshare, about mobile journalism. It is slightly out of topic in a way (although it fascinates me and even helped me develop a website in Brazil called Urblog) , but serves to remind us about how we can break down, restructure and redesign almost any experience as a game of sorts. And sometimes, we don’t even know that we built one.

Mobile Journalism
View more presentations from Xu Xiaoge.

Why so shallow?

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It is hard to think of better examples of Play Factor application than deep media products. You know them. TV shows like Lost, The Office, Battlestar Galactica, Gossip Girl. Movies like The Blair Witch Project, Matrix, A.I., Batman – The Dark Knight and Watchmen. Book series like The Da Vinci Code, The 39 Clues, music artists like Trent Reznor or the band Radiohead. And games. Oh, come on, they had to be there too, right? You can start with the Alternate REality Games and now wich some big titles like Halo and Dead Space. But it doesn’t stop here. If you just stop to look at Deep Focus and 42 Entertainment projects for a few seconds you will see the possibilities emerging.

They are everywhere, as the South by Southwest Conference can show us. And they use all the possibilities of the Play Factor. They try to engage the audience in various ways. They even are capable of engaging different demographics in the same fictional universe through different channels. But more importantly, they make people interact, play the products and with the products.

But, please, there is a difference between a product that is adapted for more than one media and a real deep media experience. Gone With the Wind the book became Gone With the Wind, the movie. Great. We are talking about a TV show like Lost. It has a mythology that transpires to the real world and make it’s audience enjoy it at various levels of complexity. Being complex, naturally chalenging it’s audience in subtle and sometimes in very direct ways, the show becomes more than a show, and the game, and the books, and the websites. The Play Factor is obvious here.

How did I get into this?

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How did i get here? Why do i have a passion about playing? You didn’t ask this question, but since I am writing a blog on the subject I think that I should talk about this.

Firstly, it has an obvious link with my personal experiences. I collect games since I was a kid. I love playing for the sake of playing. And don’t care a lot about winning (although I like to win, of course), but I love to see people having fun around me.

I am 36. I saw a great part of the evolution of the world we live in now. When I was a kid, I played pong, then Atari, then computer games, then Nintendo, PS2, Wii, DS, PSP, Iphone games…

When I saw the first ATMs, in the eighties, in Brazil, it seemed to me like really simple arcade games. Only I was playing with money. When internet banking started to really work, I looked at that and thought: geee, it looks like Sim City. Then came Friendster, Orkut, My Space and… Facebook. Now we organize our social lifes as they were… games. As if we were playing The Sims (the most popular computer game EVER).

But, ok. Come on. It is just the games inside our life, right? But what if we finally admitted the fact that play is a part of what we are? Animals play all the time. If you have a cat or a dog, you know what I mean.

A long time ago, I read a book, an old one, called Homo Ludens. And boy, it made me feel so bang on the subject. We need to play. It is part of us. Simple as that. I didn’t want to be a real game designer, but I wanted to make my work as editor of magazines a good thing. Because of that, I became a deep lover of design and always looked for ways to make the pages of my magazines pretty and engaging. But I am not a designer. So it becomes a search for the person that will be able to translate that vision and go forward with it. Add something. Do something special, amusing, interesting. Some times it worked. But not always.

Last year, while I was making a new magazine called Época São Paulo for Editora Globo, in Brazil, I was reading every local magazine possible: many different Time Outs, Los Angeles Magazine, Chicago, Washingtonian, New York and those many New York Times magazines. That was when I saw a great cover article about the subject that I love: play. It made me have long talks with some of my friends about our relationship with this urge. How we look for fun in so many different ways.

Now I am intensively researching the subject, looking for different ways to approach play and a circle closed. Looking at TED lectures I found Stuart Brown’s session and he starts it talking about that article from the NYT magazine. And the session, of course, is amazing.

I think it will help to put some light on what I am trying to do.

Not your usual game

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bok_wood_blocks

We are more sophisticated by the minute. You don’t expect that with all the technology, all the interfaces surrounding us, all the stimulae we would keep doing things the same way, right?

We change and evolve. We look at old things and make them different and new. Let me give you an example: the good old building blocks. Everybody with a heart liked them as kids. They are colorful, have shapes, texture and we can move them around and build things. We can play with them and we can play games with them, if we develop the right rules.

Wood blocks. Beautiful and simple.

A few years ago, in a toy store at New York, I saw these blocks here: Cubeworld. Simple as they were, they blew my mind.

They were just an amazing idea. See? There is a game component, some rules about assembling. But the whole thing is more like a sandbox where you put things together and just ave fun with the result.

Really, really interesting. But, as I said, I saw it years ago. You couldn’t think that things would stop there, right? The MIT guys agree…

Now, think about the possibilities. Think about the fact that play is a lot more than just games, puzzles, sudoku and crosswords. Playing could be something more subtle, a small challenge that people don’t even realize that is happening but that is able to move them.

Look at the building blocks and open your mind for new ideas. Shuffle them and think again.

Update: The prototype showed here ended up in a company called Sifteo. Check it out.