Games and narrative: Conflicting definitions

I've tried to keep this installment on games and narrative shorter than the previous one, but I'm afraid I haven't been entirly successful. After all, this post dips into some pretty deep theoretical territory and you know how that goes. At any rate, this post starts with a conversation that happened on Google+ in a thread John Woodring started about gamification in education . At some point in the thread, Roger Travis and I drifted into a fairly theoretical conversation about games and narrative.

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Games and narrative: Narrative vs. story

The perennial "narrative in games" conversation has been in pretty high gear on the internets of late. I'm less interested in why the topic is popping up again with such regularity, and more concerned with trying to find some clarity on the topic so that we can move past rehashing ye olde ludology vs. narratology debate when we talk about what games are. I intend to resurrect some of the threads of that conversation in order to reconcile them with my own stance on games and narrative, but before I do that there's a little backfilling to do. For that reason, I'm going to proceed through a number of smaller posts on this topic (starting with this one) rather than dumping all of my thoughts on narrative and games in one massive wall of text.

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Facebook = Deactivated

When you deactivate a Facebook account, it asks you to choose a reason from a number of radio button options, or provide your own. The following is the text I cobbled together on my iPad to inform Facebook why I was leaving:

I'm uninterested in where facebook is going. I recognize that I am the product and not the customer on facebook. This is a compromise I've been willing to accept because of the number of friends, family, and colleagues I have who use it. However, as of the recent ui change and #f8 announcements, I'm done. Not only is the interface worse than ever, but I have no interest in my information being moderated through your algorithm, and I don't want to contribute any more of my information to your database. I'm willing to forgo large swaths of content my friends would like to share with me at this point because as far as I'm concerned it's not worth being your product in exchange for that service (and the ui sucks).

Gamification: Ready Check

If you're thinking about gamification in relation to your clients, workers, or students, you might want to start by asking yourself the following questions.

1. What are you trying to get done in your organization?
2. Do you believe it can be improved by being made more gameful/playful?
3. What are the core activities of the users in your system?
4. Are there game mechanics that can be fitted to those core activities, and if so what are they?
5. Is the addition of those mechanics likely to improve the user experience?
6. Is the addition of those mechanics likely to improve your outcomes?
7. Are you willing to risk failure?

If you can't answer questions 1 and 3, then you are not prepared to consider gamification as an approach.

If the answer to question 5, 6, or 7 is no, then gamification is definitely not for you.

If you've answered question 2 without thinking it over seriously for at least a week, gamification is probably not for you.

Question 4 should require research and/or consulting. It can potentially take a very long time to answer this question.

Slow gaming (minor Portal 2 spoilers)

So I finally got around to watching that Wolpaw interview, good stuff. Loved the part where we was talking about play testing "early and often", players playing levels "all the time" . . . really solid. Also, there's that one part where he talks about Richard Lord and the Animal King. That makes me happy...

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