Ways to make your social space more gamey

 Posted by (Visited 11310 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Feb 042009
 

Chat is never enough.

It should be a truism, but far too many social virtual spaces and even sites have fallen down in this regard.You build a social environment, maybe theme it a little bit, and sit back and expect people to turn it into a vibrant community. But nothing happens. It doesn’t catch fire. It doesn’t ever form the nubbin of a community.

It’s probably a cliche to even bring up pearls. Pearls happen inside oysters and mussels (or at least they used to, before we all got used to artificial ones). They aren’t formed around grains of sand specifically, but rather around irritants of many sorts, usually quite tiny ones. The pearl is a protective mechanism, something that wraps around the irritation. In the wild, this happens very rarely — you have to go through hundreds of oysters to find a pearl, and even then, it might not be much of one. But since the 1920s or so, we have cultured pearls, making them happen on purpose.

In the last long post, I talked about how to make a game world more social. In this post, I want to do the opposite — talk about ways to add the irritant that causes the pearl to form. Social interaction is a pearl of great price, especially in worlds devoted to it; and yet, this pearl does not form easily without prompting. And the prompting often takes the form of an irritant.

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How the city hurts your brain

 Posted by (Visited 10377 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Feb 012009
 

How the city hurts your brain is a Boston Globe article that has a ton of relevance to the recent post on sociability in online worlds. It is primarily about natural surroundings serving as a  literal, measurable cognitive balm via “attention restoration theory.” It also speaks about the pressures of city life impairing working memory, attention, and even reducing self-control and increasing aggression.

But the density of city life doesn’t just make it harder to focus: It also interferes with our self-control. In that stroll down Newbury, the brain is also assaulted with temptations — caramel lattes, iPods, discounted cashmere sweaters, and high-heeled shoes. Resisting these temptations requires us to flex the prefrontal cortex, a nub of brain just behind the eyes. Unfortunately, this is the same brain area that’s responsible for directed attention, which means that it’s already been depleted from walking around the city. As a result, it’s less able to exert self-control, which means we’re more likely to splurge on the latte and those shoes we don’t really need. While the human brain possesses incredible computational powers, it’s surprisingly easy to short-circuit: all it takes is a hectic city street.

The hothouse effect also increases innovation, the article says — but it does seem like an interesting question for those of us making crowded virtual worlds, particularly ones chock-full of constant stimuli.

Ways to make your virtual space more social

 Posted by (Visited 28089 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Jan 282009
 

I’ve said before that socialization requires downtime, by which I mean that people who are busy pressing a bunch of other buttons or busy watching a dozen different colored bars have pretty much given all their attention to it, and therefore have difficulty having a conversation (or indeed paying attention to anything else, as other people in that person’s house can attest).

This doesn’t mean that you have to force downtime, necessarily. Users can choose to stop doing whatever it is, and choose instead to just hang out. But they often don’t. So why is that, and can we or should we do anything about it?

The short answer is “yes,” and you can just scroll down to the list at the end if you agree and want concrete actionable things you can do to improve the sociability of your game. But if you want to argue, then the next two big blocks of text are for you. 🙂

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Video game conditioning spills over into real life

 Posted by (Visited 6394 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Jan 282009
 

It’s not my headline — it’s from the New Scientist, which reports something that seems obvious — if you condition users to associate certain movements, colors, actions, etc, with particular emotional stimuli, all in a game, the users will react to those things that way even when seeing them in different contexts.

Volunteers who played a simple cycling game learned to favour one team’s jersey and avoid another’s. Days later, most subjects subconsciously avoided the same jersey in a real-world test.

It’s the same logic used as when people use videogames to treat post-traumatic stress. Really, I think the researcher is a little disingenuous when he says

But no-one has shown that video games can train the kind of conditioned responses that underlie much of our behaviour, Fletcher notes.

I think it most certainly had been, and on many levels. I think here of stuff like the Stanford research on how we treat short avatars, for example. But whatever. More studies is good. 🙂

Of course, this will also go into the pot with the studies associated with raised levels of aggression, and someone will try to link the two… sigh.

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