CLMOOK

So other than confirming the obvious, the crux of this exercise is to realize that nothing actually guarantees the achievement of ideal average player lifetimes, retention rates, virality and ARPDAUs. The best a gaming company can really do is set up internal processes and pipelines, such as the ones below, that give it the best shot at producing a game with ideal metrics: Rapid prototyping and play testing: This is critical for quickly gauging the potential retention of a proposed game design before full-fledged work is to start on it. Many game designs are just not worth the effort of taking to fruition. Extensive A/B testing: Robust, extensive A/B testing throughout the life cycle of a game is very important because even minor bumps in analytics have a directly measurable effect on profitability. Pipeline for frequent updates: A reliable pipeline to deliver frequent content updates is a must-have in the bid to prolong average player lifetimes. Once a gaming company commits to a game, it needs to consistently perceive the game as a work-in-progress. Big-name gaming companies are already following the aforementioned fundamental tenets in their production pipeline – it’s more often the smaller studios which persist with informal methodologies. That’s bad practice because instead of facilitating the smaller studios to catch up, it exacerbates the gap between the big and small fish over time. As the mobile gaming market continues to spew riches for the foreseeable future, it is imperative that modern day game developers structure their entire operations around the fundamentals of data analytics instead of trying to fit a metrics-based veneer over introverted, blind game development. Their jobs are basically to create digital entertainment products that activate the maximum possible number of highly viral users on a daily basis for the longest sessions. Nothing more, nothing less.

And I have some metaphors up here to help people grasp how they should understand this. Football. Following football. There must be some football fans here; I've heard it's popular. And there are teams all over the world. How many of you follow the South American leagues? What, nobody? Some of you may follow the European leagues, Manchester United, yeah? How many of you follow Australian football; have you been following what Brisbane's been doing lately? No! Well how can you be a football fan if you're not following all of these? Aren't you tearing out your hair? You just can't keep up? Of course not. You are a football fan by choosing those football games, those teams, those associations that are interesting to you. And you know that there are ten-year olds playing football in the back yard, but you don't feel compelled to go out and watch just because it's football. You learn to let it go.

And he contrasted that with the social kind of course that we see in Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, or the MOOCs that George, Dave and I have put on, where the action of the course is predominately interaction with each other.

Dave Cormier, who might also be in the room - he's in the back doing his hallelujah wave - has done a number of really nice videos about what a MOOC is and how to be successful, and again, it's like I said before, success in a MOOC isn't just remembering content. Success is very much what you define success to be, and that sounds a little anti-intuitive. How can you get a job if success is what you define it to be? Then again, that comes back to the purpose of this in the first place. What is success in a MOOC? Dave defines five steps: - orient (figure out where stuff is), - declare (and what that means is, setting up a place for yourself, setting up an identity for yourself, even, a little but, using course tags to identify that part of your material that you're contributing as part of the course), - and then network (because once you set up your space and write some posts nothing happens; it's when you begin to connect with other people), - and as you network you begin to find people you have affinity with (not necessarily people who are the same as you, but people who you can talk to, people who have an interest in a subject that corresponds with your interests), - and then finally and most interestingly, find a purpose for the work that you are doing (why are you in this educational experience, where are you going to apply it).

We are moving away from the model in which learning is organized around stable, usually hierarchical institutions (schools, colleges, universities) that, for better and worse, have served as the main gateways to education and social mobility. Replacing that model is a new system in which learning is best conceived of as a flow, where learning resources are not scarce but widely available, opportunities for learning are abundant, and learners increasingly have the ability to autonomously dip into and out of continuous learning flows.