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Category Archives: Featured

Engaging sleep mode

By Kars | Published: January 6, 2016

First of all, best wishes for the new year. Before looking ahead, a quick look back. 2015 was great for us. In our end-of-year review of 2014 we said we wanted to balance creative success with more commercial success. And we did. Business was good in 2015. We did much more consulting compared to the […]

Also posted in Announcements | Tagged business, design, gamification, play, serious games | Comments closed

Shifting from Gamification to Playful Design

By Kars | Published: November 12, 2015

This is a lightly edited transcript of a short lecture I delivered some time ago at an off-site gathering organized by one of NL’s largest construction-services businesses. The event explored the potential of games, game design and gamification for property development and construction. This talk creates a common frame of understanding about gamification and why […]

Also posted in Talks, Thoughts | Tagged autonomy, competence, engagement loops, feedback systems, game design, gamefulness, games, gamification, motivation, play, playful design, playfulness, relatedness, SDT, Self-Determination Theory | Comments closed

‘Playful Design for Activism’ at E‑Motive Day 2015

By Kars | Published: October 29, 2015

At the start of this year I was invited to demo Standing and to speak at E‑Motive Day, a joining of innovative civil society organisations interested in (as they put it) North-South exchanges. In my lecture I talked about how Standing works and why it is interesting for civil society organisations (or NGOs). I also […]

Also posted in Articles, Talks | Tagged activism, Arab Spring, civil disobedience, Civil Rights Movement, civil society organisations, clicktivism, digital transformation, E-Motive, Erdem Gunduz, Gezi Park, Istanbul, Mediamatic, NGOs, nonviolent protest, Play Matters, playful design, Provo, Rules of Play, salvador breed, slacktivism, Standing, The Office, Thunderclap | Comments closed

New Planning Methods

By Kars | Published: October 9, 2015

This is a writeup of my talk at the event ‘Nieuwe Planningsmethoden’ (‘New Planning Methods’) in Pakhuis de Zwijger, Amsterdam on October 8, 2015. Hello. My name is Kars Alfrink. I am a designer and partner at Hubbub, a small playful design agency, based in Utrecht and Berlin. Hubbub helps organisations do things with games, […]

Also posted in Talks, Thoughts | Tagged 3D Print Canal House, architecture, cities, Cruel 2 B Kind, Dan Hill, Edward Soja, games, Godsbanen, James Rojas, L.A.S.E.R. Tag, new planning methods, Nomic, Open Source City, parkour, Pieces of Berlin, play, Play the City, Playful Commons, playful tools, playfulness, Rezone, space, SpaceLabs, State of Flux, Straatlokaal, The Gameful World, The Harbor Laboratory, urban planning, urbanism | Comments closed

Procedural Instruments Enable Powerful Ways of Making and Seeing Playable Systems

By Kars | Published: August 3, 2015

“No Man’s Sky is so big, the developers built space probes to explore it for them.” That’s from a Polygon report on what is probably the most hyped videogame of the moment. The main thing that seems to fascinate people about No Man’s Sky is its extensive use of procedural content generation (PCG). Put simply, […]

Also posted in Articles | Tagged automated game design, mixed-initiative, PCG, procedural content generation, procedural instruments | Comments closed

Designing Playful Museum Exhibitions

By Kars | Published: June 16, 2015

In February of this year I went over to Reinwardt Academy to work with exhibition direction students. I was invited by Mario Jellema to share my perspective on the role of play and playfulness in museums. I enjoy talking to students, but I like working hands-on with them even more. So we turned the session […]

Also posted in Articles, Teaching | Tagged Ann Hamilton, art, Bill Buxton, dogfooding, exhibitions, impro, improv, improvisation, iterative design, language, LEGO, Mario Jellema, Miguel Sicart, minifigs, minifigures, museums, Peggy Guggenheim, play, playful design, playfulness, prototyping, Reinwardt Academy, sketching, Sketching User Experiences, The Art of This Century gallery, The Event of a Thread, user experience, workshops | Comments closed

Three Perspectives on Serious Games

By Kars | Published: April 29, 2015

Your browser does not play MP4 video; download the video. Video by CreativeMornings Utrecht. At the end of last year I was invited to give a talk at Creative Mornings Utrecht on the theme “education”. I figured it would be a nice opportunity to share the things I’ve learned over the past 5+ years of […]

Also posted in Articles, Talks, Thoughts | Tagged adaptive reuse, critical play, cultural practices, decision-making, education, ethical play, flux dogma, fun, game-based learning, games for change, generative games, improvisation, issue games, iterative design, learning, performative play, play community, playful design, playgrounds, serious games, simulations, spontaneity, systems, systems thinking, toys, underspecification | Comments closed

Five Behaviour Design Principles You Never Suspected Would Work

By Kars | Published: July 9, 2014

A while ago, I was invited by friend-of-the-studio Iskander Smit to speak at a Behavior Design Amsterdam meetup. Much of our work is related to behaviour change, but we try to steer clear of the reductionist thinking that is quite prevalent in the field. So I decided to use the opportunity of presenting to a […]

Also posted in Talks | Tagged aerobie, Alan Adler, Animal Upon Animal, Apple, bdams, Beestenbende, behavior design amsterdam, behaviour design, Bernie De Koven, CHUTORO, COM-B system, communtity, Dave Eggers, David Kanaga, Douglas Wilson, ethics, Fiasco, flux dogma, Frank Lantz, fun, gamification, Heather Kelley, Ian Bogost, Infinite Sketchpad, Johann Sebastian Joust, Krokobil, Miguel Sicart, Paolo Pedercini, Pig Chase, play, procedural rhetoric, procedurality, shifting possibility spaces, Skinner box, soft gamification, The Well-Played Game, Victory Boogie Woogie, Yellow Claw, Your Verse | Comments closed

Video of our Playing with Rules workshop at Mozilla Festival 2013

By Alper | Published: December 6, 2013

This October Kars and I were in London (see notes for that week) to do a workshop titled Playing with Rules at Mozilla Festival among many other things. We modified an exercise we had used previously in a workshop with Sebastian Deterding. The task is to take Parcheesi and modify it to address a social […]

Also posted in Events | Tagged boardgames, exercises, game design, london, modification, MozFest, Mozilla Festival, Parcheesi, Playing with Rules, Sebastian Deterding, social issues, video, workshops | Comments closed

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