Week 159

Last week included sev­eral causes for celebration.

First of all, although mostly a for­mal­ity, Beesten­bende has been signed off on by the client. We’re really pleased with how the game has turned out so we can’t wait for the first fam­i­lies to give it a go in the museum. With devel­op­ment fin­ished we have been furi­ously plan­ning pro­duc­tion of PR mate­ri­als which should hap­pen over the com­ing weeks.

Sec­ond, we man­aged to con­nect the final dots on Pig Chase’s playable pro­to­type. On Fri­day I was hap­pily play­ing around with the iPad app, mov­ing around a dot on what we’ve affec­tion­ately come to call the “pig client”. That’s still set up in the stu­dio now, but will be moved into a pig pen soon­ish. The best part is that we now can start tun­ing the video stream and the com­mu­ni­ca­tion between the pig and human clients. Tun­ing is an impor­tant part of inter­ac­tion design. A big chal­lenge in any project is get­ting to the point where you can start “turn­ing the knobs”. We’ve now reached that point on Buta, so hooray!

Those make two good rea­sons to open a bot­tle of cham­pagne, I guess.

Finally, in par­al­lel to our project work, we’ve been ded­i­cat­ing some time to fur­ther artic­u­lat­ing a for­mat for a design work­shop. It’s aimed at help­ing orga­ni­za­tions iden­tify and develop oppor­tu­ni­ties in game­ful design.¹ I’m quite excited about this because I think we have the peo­ple and the expe­ri­ence to really offer a unique per­spec­tive on the topic. (Of course, if this sounds like some­thing that might be of use to you, don’t hes­i­tate to get in touch.)

Sales pitch off. Bring on week 160.

1. I know, I know, yet another buzz­word. But this paper (PDF) makes a good case for ditch­ing gam­i­fi­ca­tion and going with game­ful design when it comes to the things we typ­i­cally do. [↩]