Week 182

On Mon­day Alper got good news about our sub­mis­sion to the gam­i­fi­ca­tion research net­work work­shop at CHI. Our posi­tion paper was accept­ed, which means we’ll be there to con­tribute to the dis­cus­sion. Alper has promised me he’ll talk a bit more about our sub­mis­sion here soon.

Mean­while that same day, I spent some time fine tun­ing the phys­i­cal pro­to­type for HIRAME, which we’d come up with the week before.

Tues­day, Alper worked on SAKE. He’s been work­ing down a long list of improve­ments to make before we can push out the release client a few weeks from now.

I pre­pared and sub­se­quent­ly ran a HIRAME work­shop togeth­er with Her­man on site at the client. We played through the pro­to­type and from the respons­es we got it looks like we’re at least head­ed in the right direc­tion. I love being able to play some ver­sion of an ini­tial idea with clients at such an ear­ly stage. After­wards, the char­ac­ter of all con­ver­sa­tions imme­di­ate­ly changes, because peo­ple can all of a sud­den imag­ine them­selves play­ing it. Noth­ing else can evoke a play­er expe­ri­ence as effectively.

On Wednes­day Alper con­tin­ued work on SAKE. Also, Niels pub­lished his first Recess! post. After Alper’s ini­tial sal­vo on Pro­teus, we’re now deep in fairy­tale coun­try with Niels’ rumi­na­tion on Ni No Kuni.1

That day, I spent some time sketch­ing for FURAPPA, explor­ing design impli­ca­tions of the var­i­ous ideas Alper and I came up with earlier.

On Thurs­day I had the plea­sure of Simon’s com­pa­ny at the stu­dio again. We were joined by Alper over (an amaz­ing­ly sta­ble) Google+ hang­out. Togeth­er, we put in some seri­ous work on SAKE. I’m real­ly enjoy­ing the way were all work­ing in the same code base—myself mock­ing up UIs in HTML just light­ly pep­pered with Boot­strap markup, Simon going in and apply­ing his graph­ic design mag­ic using LESS and final­ly Alper hook­ing every­thing up to the Djan­go app. We’re col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly shap­ing the game, con­tin­u­ous­ly play­ing with it using the local ver­sions run­ning on our machines. I would not trade this way of work­ing for any reg­i­ment­ed kind of ‘tra­di­tion­al’ design process I can think of. It is more effec­tive, and more fun.

Alper pub­lished Water­snake on Sat­ur­day, which is the fruit of his labor dur­ing Swhack Berlin. Water­snake is a Djan­go app that does “major­i­ty vot­ing on sin­gle pro­pos­als with sup­port for del­e­ga­tion”. It is part­ly inspired by Liq­uid Democ­ra­cy and to me rep­re­sents an inter­est­ing area of future research—applying game design and cre­ative soft­ware engi­neer­ing to issues around deci­sion mak­ing and governance.

Final­ly, on Sat­ur­day & Sun­day I pre­pared a lec­ture for sec­ond year TU Delft indus­tri­al design stu­dents, about the design process behind Beesten­bende, which serves as an intro­duc­tion to inter­ac­tion design. And I also edit­ed my Game­ful World chap­ter, which is now in its third iter­a­tion and close to being sub­mit­ted for a peer review.

Mean­while, back in Berlin, Alper played boardgames…

1. This week I’m up, so keep an eye out for that over at Kit­sune. [↩]