Group items tagged

loading the behavioural dice

Asking children to pester their parents to spend money to cure a sick kitten, as Pet Shop Story does, is as bad and wrong as game design gets.

Panini Sticker books are gambling for kids

giving us money for random stickers

you have to be lucky

Gambling for children is fine - so long as it has footballers on the front and glue on the bac

Penny falls machines

it’s fine to give the kids a handful of coins to push into the glittering piles of treasure with the hope and aim of claiming back even more.

sticker packs are usually located at exactly the right place to calm an annoying child on a trip to the supermarket

Daddy will buy you some stickers when we get to the end

6 billion stickers a year. 1 billion packs. 50p a pack. That’s quite a lot of numbers. Quite a lot of money. Quite a lot of money from children learning how thrilling gambling can be

It’s not showing you how you can make money into more money using nothing but luck

at least has the decency to ring-fence its evil and malicious behaviours

his is about the real and the virtual and control

Penny Falls machines are yet more real. They run on real money and give out real money

Children don’t usually have access to electronic money, and reasonably so

there are still very few people who really get what makes games tick in the first place

problem with gamification of course, was that the people who were trying to do it didn’t know their games

Gamification is actually this; adding non-game elements to games

Typing of the Dead

Unsurprisingly, the threat of being eaten alive by zombies and the promise of defeating evil is a more effective motivator than a nice lady telling you that you’re ok really

Mavis Bacon Teaches Typing

Games can be tautologically described as ‘things with game mechanics’.

fact we use the word ‘mechanics’ to describe games in no accident. Games are machines. They are cogs and gears and cranks and rods and connections and dependancies and causes and effects and results

If you want to enjoy the same levels of dedication, enjoyment and motivation that games exhibit, then make a game and add your product, service or desired behavioural outcome to it

Of course doing so requires selecting or creating exactly the right game in the first place and inserting exactly the correct parts of your non-game in exactly the right quantities in exactly the right places

So it’s still really, really hard and requires some unusually clever game design. But if you want to do it, that’s how.