Tag Archives: esp game


Gaming the system: how rewards affect performance

Posted on April 28, 2011 by Tommaso De Benetti

… Share Sometimes the simplest things are the hardest to define. Everyone knows what a game is, but agreeing on a definition is another story. Wikipedia’s no-nonsense entry defines a game as: “structured playing, usually undertaken for enjoyment…with goals, challenges, rules and interactions.” Jesse Schell is somewhat more fun, saying it is simply “a problem solving activity, approached with a playful attitude”.

Although not mentioned in these definitions, a …

Tags: crowd crowdsourcing eBay game game design game mechanics Gamification Jesse Schell microtask microwork Stack Overflow Wikipedia

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Too cool to play: the gamification backlash

Posted on April 11, 2011 by Ville Miettinen

… games like Digitalkoot. Instead they tend to attack companies like Foursquare, who apply game-mechanics to non-game sites and apps.

Counter-intuitively, game designers are often the biggest gamification skeptics. Designers argue that game mechanics are subtle and complex. Good games, they say, are like art: engaging players deeply and emotionally ( not sure how Grand Theft Auto fits in here ). In contrast gamification, as game developer Margaret Robertson puts it, “tricks …

Tags: crowd crowdsourcing game game design game mechanics gamesourcing Gamification Gamify iPhone Margaret Robertson microwork Video Games

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Science and the “Nobel” art of gaming

Posted on March 31, 2011 by Tommaso De Benetti

… science fun. Back in November we blogged about Foldit, a freely-available online protein-folding game. Foldit players contribute directly to scientific discovery: the more proteins they fold, the closer scientists get to curing diseases like Alzheimer’s and AIDS.

Refusing to be out-innovated by mere protein professors, geneticists at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford University have created EteRNA. EteRNA is another folding game: this time the goal is to help create the first large-scale …

Tags: AIDS biotic games Carnegie Mellon University crowd crowdsourcing fate of the world foldit Game Developers Conference Golden Gate Bridge interface microtask microwork Pac-Man san francisco Stanford University Twitter Video game Web 2.0 Summit widesourcing World

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A ticket to play

Posted on March 7, 2011 by Tommaso De Benetti

… Every year thousands of tech-seeking tourists cross the Golden Gate Bridge to attend events: the Game Developers Conference, Apple Keynotes, the Web 2.0 Summit – there’s an expo for everyone.

In such a tech-friendly town, it’s not surprising that computing is spreading into public spaces, affecting the way citizens interact with their urban environment. The first stop? That most boring of public places: the bus stop.

Routed to the stop

In late 2010 large touch screens were …

Tags: crowd crowdsourcing Game Developers Conference Golden Gate Bridge interface microwork san francisco Twitter Web 2.0 Summit widesourcing

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Revenge of the gamers: an epic win for the world

Posted on December 7, 2010 by Tommaso De Benetti

… your chores”, and the so called “real world” waiting outside the damn door.

Now, at last, game designer and researcher Jane McGonigal has finally given me the argument I so desperately needed as a child (given I started with a Commodore 16 at age five, it’s been a long wait). Playing games can now help to save the real world.

Massive, multiplayer and misunderstood

Jane McGonigal argues that, far from the stereotype of the slack-jawed loner, videogame players are, in fact, …

Tags: commodore 16 crowd crowdsourcing crowdsourcing platform distributed work game designer jane mcgonigal massive multiplayer playing games space invaders superstruct virtual worlds world of wacraft wow

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