Skip to main content

Home/ @Publish/ Group items tagged Gaming

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Pedro Gonçalves

How Game Mechanics Will Solve Global Warming - 0 views

  • now, a new decade is upon us - the decade of games. These are not children's games, however. These are games that could change the world.
  • how game mechanics would solve global warming.
  • "The last decade was the decade of social. The framework for the social layer is now built," declared Priebatsch. "It's called Facebook."
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • With that battle won (at least according to Priebatsch), the next battle is over gaming. But we're not talking about simple video games and the like - we're talking about a "game layer on top of the world."
  • "The game layer is he next decade of human technological interaction," he explained. "Unlike the social layer, which trafficked in connections, the game layer traffics in influence. The game layer seeks to act on individual motivation - where we go, how we do it and why we do it."
  • Priebatsch says that the game layer could be 10 times as large as the social layer and that, used correctly, could help to solve the world's problems.
  • To prove his point, he then ended the session with a game - a massive game involving the entire several hundred member audience. As each person entered the room, they were given anywhere from one to three cards with different colors on each side. Each card had one of three colors on each side and were handed out randomly. To win the game, each row of the audience had to self organize to show only one color by trading with the audience members around them. That is, the entire room had to move from chaos to order, with each row only showing one color, within 180 seconds. If they did this, he said, SCVNGR would donate $10,000 to the National Wildlife Federation. One minute after he started the clock, he stopped it. The audience had self-organized, despite a variety of problems, in just one minute.
  • Priebatsch compared the various rules and problems faced by its players into ones the world population might face in solving global issues. There was a lack of communication, there were micro-trading issues, different allocations of resources from player to player, restricted movement decentralized leadership, and even different "countries," as aisles served as "oceans" between the rows. The audience did, however, have two things to work with - a countdown and a common goal. Despite these various factors, and through the proper motivation, a large problem was solved quickly through applied game mechanics.
  •  
    now, a new decade is upon us - the decade of games. These are not children's games, however. These are games that could change the world.
Pedro Gonçalves

Make the Job a Game - Robert H. Schaffer - Harvard Business Review - 0 views

  • Sixty-nine percent of the heads of households in the U.S. play computer and video games. And 97% of young people — your emerging talent pool — play them
  • Endless sameness. People come to work and, without climactic events, do essentially the same thing every day forever — like a mountain climber who never sees a peak ahead.
  • Little sense of personal achievement. Most people lack sharply measured goals. They can work diligently every day but never have a significant success — or failure.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • No celebrations. Individuals throughout the organization may contribute to some very crucial project. But when the project succeeds — and there is a new jet engine or a new drug — very few of those people will enjoy the exhilaration of a personal win.
  • Long time spans. In their personal lives people enjoy activities with shorter and shorter time spans — sports events, computer games, texting and so on — whereas at work they must live through glacial planning cycles.
  • When there are sudden customer orders that must get shipped, or power outages, or fires and other emergencies, most employees come to life and get things done with spirit and enthusiasm.
  • These must-do situations all have some common elements that evoke the remarkable performance: A sharply focused, urgent goal A very tight deadline Autonomous team encouraged to experiment Results clearly noticed and celebrated
  • by designing jobs with these game-like characteristics and infusing a spirit of fun it is possible to enliven work and produce the kind of high-level, zesty behavior provoked by crises.
  • No matter how long-term a goal may be, carve off some sub-goals that have to be accomplished in a short time — 10 or 15 weeks not 6 months or a year. For each goal a team should be asked to plan an approach and carry it out. The whole effort should encourage some fun and creativity along the way. People should be encouraged to experiment. Success at the end should be celebrated.
Pedro Gonçalves

Want To Hook Your Users? Drive Them Crazy. | TechCrunch - 0 views

  • online, feedback loops aren’t cutting it. Users are increasingly inundated with distractions, and companies find they need to hook users quickly if they want to stay in business. Today, companies are using more than feedback loops. They are deploying desire engines.
  • Desire engines go beyond reinforcing behavior; they create habits, spurring users to act on their own, without the need for expensive external stimuli like advertising. Desire engines are at the heart of many of today’s most habit-forming technologies. Social media, online games, and even good ol’ email utilize desire engines to compel us to use them.
  • At the heart of the desire engine is a powerful cognitive quirk described by B.F. Skinner in the 1950s, called a variable schedule of rewards. Skinner observed that lab mice responded most voraciously to random rewards.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Humans, like the mice in Skinner’s box, crave predictability and struggle to find patterns, even when none exist. Variability is the brain’s cognitive nemesis and our minds make deduction of cause and effect a priority over other functions like self-control and moderation.
  • Recent neuroscience has revealed that our dopamine system works not to provide us with rewards for our efforts, but to keep us searching by inducing a semi-stressful response we call desire.
  • Email, for example, is addictive because it provides all three reward types at random intervals. First, we have a social obligation to answer our emails (the tribe). We are also conditioned to know that an email may tell us information about a potential business opportunity (the hunt). And finally, our email seems to call for us to complete the task of removing the unopened item notification in a sort of challenge to gain control over it (the self). Interestingly, these motivations go away as soon as we’ve actually opened all our emails and the mystery disappears. We’re addicted to checking email while there is still variability of reward and once that’s gone, emails languish in our inboxes.
  • We’re meant to be part of a tribe so our brains seek out rewards that make us feel accepted, important, attractive, and included.
  • But as sociable as we are, our individual need for sustenance is even more crucial. The need to acquire physical things, such as food and supplies, is part of the brain’s operating system and we clearly wouldn’t have survived the millennia without this impulse. But where we once hunted for food, today we hunt for deals and information. The same compulsion that kept us searching for food coerces us to open emails from Groupon and Appsumo. New shopping startups make the hunt for products entertaining by introducing variability to what the user may find next. Pinterest and Wanelo keep users searching with an endless supply of eye candy, a trove of dopamine flooding desirables. To see an example of how the hunt for information engages users, look no further then the right side of this page. There, you will find a listing of popular posts. Using intriguing images and short, attention-grabbing text, the list is a variable reward mechanism designed to keep you hunting for your next discovery.
  • We also seek mastery of the world around us. Game mechanics, found everywhere from Zynga games to business productivity apps like to-do lists, provide a variable rewards system built around our need to control, dominate, and complete challenges. Slaying new messages in your inbox stimulates neurons similar to those stimulated by playing StarCraft.
  • Variable rewards come in three types and involve the persistent pursuit of: rewards of the tribe, rewards of the hunt, and rewards of the self.
  • As B.F. Skinner discovered over 50 years ago, variable rewards are a powerful inducement to creating compulsions.
Pedro Gonçalves

Facebook launches Graph Search to aid users and take on Google | Technology | guardian.... - 0 views

  • an example a search for a spicy meal in San Francisco. A search for "restaurants liked by my friends from India" revealed a long list. Narrowing that to "Indian restaurants liked by my friends from India" yielded another list. Then he searched for restaurants in San Francisco liked by Culinary Institute of America graduates.
  • In cases where Graph Search comes up blank – which is likely to be a frequent occurrence in its infancy – the service defaults to the web search engine Bing, which is run by Google's rival Microsoft.
  • "I want to invite friends over for Game of Thrones," he said, "but who among my friends likes Games of Thrones? Graph Search tells me."
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Graph Search also enables the user to search, for instance, for "photos of my friends taken in national parks" or "photos of my friends taken before 1990".
  • Tom Stocky, another Google import, showed what appeared to be a market researchers' dream tool: the new feature allows users to ask, for instance, what TV shows are most liked by doctors (Grey's Anatomy, House, The Doctors), or software engineers (Big Bang Theory).
  • A search for music liked by those who like Mitt Romney revealed Johnny Cash. Obama-likers liked Michael Jackson.
  • Brian Blau, who tracks social media for the tech research firm Gartner, said the service offered a brand new way for users to experience Facebook. Confined to Facebook's eco-system, the service was not an immediate threat to Google but would gradually increase in importance, he said. "In the future, you know Facebook will figure out how to monetize this. It's going to change the way people think about search."
Pedro Gonçalves

Flat Pixels: The Battle Between Flat Design And Skeuomorphism - 0 views

  • Defining Skeuomorphism This obscure word describes the way designs often borrow a particular feature from the past, even when the functional need for it is gone. Examples include pre-recorded shutter noises on smartphones to remind us of film cameras, or calendar apps that feature torn paper and metal rings. Or, as Wikipedia tells us [1]: A skeuomorph is a physical ornament or design on an object copied from a form of the object when made from another material or by other techniques.
  • the digital world has seen skeuomorphism popularized in the past couple years mainly thanks to the recent iOS-inspired trend of rich textures and life-like controls.
  • By opposition, the other side of the coin would be the newly popular "flat style", of which Microsoft's Metro UI is probably the main example. Flat Style embraces visual minimalism, eschewing textures and lighting effects for simple shapes and flat colors.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • this trend is not always about skeuomorphism – which implies a connection to a past incarnation of a similar design – but rather often about realism [2]: a purely visual style that tries to imitate real-world materials and textures, exemplified by Apple's tacky over-use of leather textures in some of their own apps.
  • skeuomorphic designs tend to look realistic (to make the connection with the original object clear), and realistic designs tend to be skeuomorphic (otherwise the realism would look out of place).
  • touch target couldn't be smaller than a certain size (Apple's Human Interface Guidelines recommend at least 44 by 44 pixels).
  • showing less on the screen, but doing more with it.
  • realism done wrong can morph into kitsch
  • the problem of getting skeuomorphism wrong: making something look like a physical object, but not work like it
  • That problem is that when borrowing elements from a design's previous incarnation, you often also bring its limitations along for the ride, even when these limitations have no reason to exist anymore
  • When done right, skeuomorphism and realism will trigger strong associations with real-world counterparts. This is both a strength and a weakness: sometimes, the association can be so strong that it will stop you from improving on what's already been done.
  • Gone were the shadows, highlights, gradients, and textures of iOS apps. Instead, Metro offered flat squares of color with big typography.
  • Microsoft's new design philosophy certainly seemed to strike a chord within the tech sphere, with many praising Metro's strong focus on typography and colors.
  • And while flat design is often purely visual, it does resonate with designer's love of minimalist concepts, embodied by the famous Antoine de Saint-Exupery that “perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”.
  • Two of the most talked-about games in recent month, Letterpress and Hundreds both feature flat designs. In fact, Letterpress creator Loren Brichter even revealed that the whole game only uses a single image!
  • When you have a high-definition display and screen-optimized fonts, you quickly realize you don't need much else to create beautiful work.
  • is pushing many designers towards prototyping in the browser directly, foregoing static mockups entirely.
  • Add all this together and you begin to see why many designers are moving away from texture-heavy realism towards the more flexible and lighter-weight flat style.
  • keep in mind that the needs of users should always come before our aesthetic pursuits
  • visual style is nothing more than a means to an end [15]. If the situation calls for realism, go nuts on textures and highlights. On the other hand, if a flat aesthetic achieves the design's goal better then it might be time to go on a gradient diet.
  • With the recent releases of their newer mobile apps, Google has started pushing a style that some describe as "almost flat" [18], or maybe "skeuominimalism" [19]. Unlike the drastic visual wastelands of Gmail or Google Reader, this new style uses elements like shadows and gradients in a tasteful, subtle way. This style offers the best of both world: realism's affordances and subtle hints combined with the purity and simplicity off flat design.
  • another way to look at it is that it's simply design done right: seeking efficiency and simplicity without sacrificing usability to the altar of minimalism.
  • I will pick a camp and put my chips in with flat design (specifically, Google's less-extreme variety).
  • Google is not so much pioneering a new style as showing us what digital design looks like when it's done right
  • catch up with what the web has to offer, we'll have to get our hands dirty and start coding [21]. And when you're both designing and coding a layout, you start to appreciate the value of keeping things lightweight.
  • Flat design also forces you to really care about typography and layout, two areas where web design has traditionally lagged behind its more established print cousin.
Pedro Gonçalves

Microsoft Premieres TV-Quality 'Halo' Series on YouTube - 0 views

  • “You talk about low barriers to entry and reaching potential sci-fi and game consumers, and its hard to look much further than the numbers on Machinima’s YouTube channel,” McCloskey says. “It’s a fantastic vehicle to accomplish what we want to accomplish. We wouldn’t have reached as many people or gotten them excited about the game if we had put up a bunch of barriers to entry, like making them pay, going to a theater, stuff like that.”
  • Scripted web shows are taking off online, but many of the popular ones focused on gamers. Felicia Day‘s web series The Guild receives millions of views on YouTube, and is on its sixth season of production. Machinima also runs other popular shows, like Mortal Combat: Legacy.
Pedro Gonçalves

Facebook Advertising Report: It's the Fan Engagement, Stupid - 0 views

  • traditional advertisers have treated Facebook and other social networks as traditional media: Something where a click should have a measurable return on investment. Advertisers who “get” social media understand that it's about strengthening relationships with their biggest fans, and hoping those fans can turn their friends onto the product as well.
  • The report said the focus on click-through rates of display ads and brand pages on Facebook downplays the impact that has on a user's friends and followers.
  • too many brands, the report argues, still focus on accumulating the most number of likes instead of figuring out how best to engage those fans. It’s not to say that fan accumulation isn’t important; it is the crucial starting point. But too many brands treat it like an end game instead of a first step in getting to the real end game - the return on investment of time and money in building a social media presence.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • there is still no reliable way to measure the return on investment. Analytics companies are getting better at tracking whether engaged fans eventually make a purchase decision, but brands are still, by-and-large, forced to look at the number of clicks a brand page feeds to its website.
  • The ComScore report is littered with the phrase “Fans and Friends of Fans,” signaling the strong emphasis successful brands are taking to cater to the people who can implicitly endorse them to others. If one of your friends is a fan of Starbucks, you’re more likely to be exposed to a Starbucks message on Facebook. And if you’re exposed to a Starbucks message on Facebook, you’re 38% more likely to make a purchase in the next four weeks.
  • “The idea behind amplification is that Fans who are reached with brand messages can also serve as a conduit for brand exposure to Friends within their respective social networks,” the report said. “Because the average Facebook Fan has hundreds of Friends, each person has the ability to potentially reach dozens of Friends with earned impressions through their engagement with brand messages.”
  • “While this research adds weight to the importance of social media, it also brings an important questions to the forefront – are the elevated spend levels among Fans and Friends of Fans the result of the messaging or a predisposition among these segments?
  • In other words, am I spending more at Best Buy because my friends like it, or because I hang out with people who are into tech gadgets? Am I 38% more likely to get coffee at Starbucks in the next four weeks because I saw a friend liked the brand on Facebook, or am I 38% more likely to get coffee at Starbucks because I run with people who like Starbucks - whether or not they choose to publicly declare so on Facebook?
  • Most likely, it’s a combination of both, as well as other factors including traditional advertising and proximity. In my case, I end up drinking more Starbucks than I’d like because it’s the only passable coffee shop within walking distance to my house. It’s a decision that I feel better about, perhaps because so many of my friends implicitly endorse Starbucks by liking the company on Facebook.
Pedro Gonçalves

Facebook Adding Posts To News Feed Where Pages Have Tagged Other Pages - AllFacebook - 0 views

  • Product Manager Andrew Song detailed the new initiative in a Newsroom post, using a post from Bleacher Report about Houston Rockets Center Dwight Howard as an example, and saying that the post may appear in the News Feeds of users who follow or like Bleacher Report, Howard, or both.
Pedro Gonçalves

Tumblr Is for Fashion, YouTube Is for Music [INFOGRAPHIC] - 0 views

  • music and gaming dominate the ranks of popular channels on YouTube, accounting collectively for 45% of the 1,000 most-viewed. Comedy (14%), entertainment (13%), and How-to & Style (7%) round out the top five categories.
  • Interestingly, nearly a quarter of the 100 original content channels YouTube has funded are in the top 1,000, suggesting that the program is enjoying at least a moderate level of success. In fact, the company just announced that it is investing $200 million more in the project, expanding the number of original channels to 150. One show, Everyday Health’s Recipe Rehab, has been picked up by ABC.
Pedro Gonçalves

Advertisers can now target Facebook ads by recency of activity - 0 views

  • Facebook has created a new way for businesses and developers to target ads to users who have taken an action on Facebook or in an app within a more specific time range. Using the “action spec” targeting capability, which allows advertisers to reach users by the actions they take in Open Graph apps and on Facebook directly, an advertiser could designate a time range shorter than 14 days
  • a local business might want to reach users who checked into their store within the past week. A developer might want to target users who installed their app in the past three days. A page owner might want to retarget users who viewed one of their page tabs the day before.
  • Action spec targeting is still a beta feature limited to advertisers working with Preferred Marketing Developers
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • the feature offers developers unique opportunities to reach users who have taken specific in-app actions, including in their competitor’s apps. It also gives brands ways to segment and target their fans by the actions they take on their page or a competitor’s page.
  • Action spec targeting is also interesting in that advertisers can define a “negative action spec,” meaning users who have not taken a particular action. For example, a developer could reach users who have played a game, but not made an in-app purchase in the last 10 days. Advertisers can also reach friends of users who have taken a particular action.
Pedro Gonçalves

Is Pinterest Cutting Into Facebook's Market Share? - AllFacebook - 0 views

  • Facebook has been losing traffic and sales since the 2012 holidays, while Pinterest has been steadily trending upward.
  • Facebook’s share of traffic hit 92 percent in mid-December, then plummeted to 69 percent in the week leading up to Easter. Pinterest has grown from 6 percent to 25 percent in that time. Also in mid-December, at the peak of the holiday shopping season, Facebook’s market share of sales hit 89 percent, then fell to 78 percent by Easter. Pinterest grew from 10 percent to 21 percent in that same period.
  • the fundamental differences in how people use Facebook and Pinterest make the latter a better option for commerce. She likened Facebook ads to a marketer pitching wares while users are having conversations with friends, while Pinterest is more like window shopping at a store that the user chooses.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Pinterest shoppers are spending $140 to $180 per order, compared with $60 to $80 on Facebook. This gap became more vast in the days leading up to Easter, as Pinterest users started spending $194 percent (versus $84 on Facebook and $35 on Twitter).
  • This is not meant to knock Facebook. The social network is great for building awareness and connecting with customers
  • and Pinterest is better for conversions, since users already know what they want, but are simply discovering where to buy these items. Smart brands that work across Facebook and Pinterest can both build awareness and get users to buy.
  • If you’re trying to drive awareness and the point of promotion, I think Facebook is highly valuable. Pinterest offers a very different type of exposure.
Pedro Gonçalves

New Deal Between Twitter And Starcom MediaVest Intended To "Shape The Future Of The Ind... - 0 views

  • social TV lab: “Our team and Bluefin Labs (which Twitter purchased earlier this year) will come together, put mutual skin in game, and create a social TV lab that we think will give our clients unprecedented real-time data on how consumers are watching, buying and the conversations that amplify brand messages."
  • “the idea that the digital marketplace is moving from ad exchange and targeting and re-targeting to, while still including those things, much more toward creating real-time content and experiences.”
  • SMV sees Twitter not as a media silo in itself but a platform that extends across paid, owned, and earned media. "If you think the future of marketing is convergence and amplification of big moments over time, as we do, then Twitter becomes one of the essential channels you have to evaluate in any marketing plan.”
Pedro Gonçalves

Content strategy 101, Part 2: making data meaningful | Feature | .net magazine - 0 views

  • the role of content strategy is focused on the brand’s relationship with its target audience
  • with your content. Desktop PCs and laptops are where the internet matured, but nothing in technology stands still – and while platforms such as game consoles and TVs are currently underutilised, this will not be for long. It’s clear that mobile devices will be key in the future, but smartphones and tablets are not yet fully featured computers, and this poses one of the biggest challenges.
  • when planning you will need to ensure that your content is planned and built so that it renders in the way you intend on different browsers, operating systems, native mobile interfaces, mobile applications, media players and access technologies.
Pedro Gonçalves

12 Best Practices For Media Companies' Facebook Pages - AllFacebook - 0 views

  • Share breaking news updates: Lavrusik and Hershkowitz said posts that included the terms “breaking” or “breaking news” saw engagement 57 percent higher than non-breaking news posts
  • Use a conversational tone and include analysis: Posts with a personal tone or clever language saw engagement of 120 percent above the average, and posts with analysis received 20 percent more referral clicks.
  • Start conversations by asking questions and responding: Posts with prompts for conversation of questions saw engagement 70 percent above the average
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Share stories visually with photos and videos to grab users’ attention: Posts with photos receive 50 percent more likes.
  • Page targeting enables page admins to publish stories into the News Feeds of audiences who are going to be most interested in the content, without inundating those who may not.
  • Use engaging thumbnails for link stories: Links with thumbnails received 65 percent more likes and 50 percent more comments.
  • Vary your post type — users don’t engage the same way with every post: Mix it up between status updates, links, polls, and photos.
  • Optimize your page for Graph Search and mobile: Ensure that your page description is complete and up-to-date, which will help its performance in Graph Search results, and pin posts to ensure that users see the most important stories on both desktop and mobile.
Pedro Gonçalves

Why Is Facebook Blue? The Science Behind Colors In Marketing | Fast Company | Business ... - 0 views

  • KISSmetrics suggests that women love blue, purple, and green, and dislike orange, brown, and gray.
  • In case your app is strictly targeting men, the rules of the game are slightly different. Men love blue, green, and black, but can do without brown, orange, and purple.
  • The red button outperformed the green button by 21%.
  • ...1 more annotation...
    • Pedro Gonçalves
       
      Like a perfum, it's not just about the scent: it's all about CONTEXT.
1 - 20 of 28 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page