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[GDC] SpaceChem’s Zach Barth on educational ...
Gabriel Recchia on May 5, 2013In 2011, Wired UK and New Scientist described how “SpaceChem, a science-themed puzzler hailed as one of the year’s best indie games, is aiming to make the leap from bedrooms to classrooms.” Today, SpaceChem is used by schools in the...
Player Culture: The RealID Fiasco and the Magic Ci...
Lauren Collister on Apr 22, 2013One of the things I’m most interested in as an ethnographer is the interface between online and offline life, and how this line is increasingly blurred. I originally became interested in this when reading about the Magic Circle, a concept which...
7 Essential Resources for Understanding Motivation...
Travis L. Ross on Apr 4, 2013Motivation is an important topic for game designers and social scientists. Many herald the ability of games to motivate players through incentive systems, by fulfilling intrinsic needs, capturing attention, or hooking into evolved motivational...
Video games, violence, and common sense
Nicholas Matthews on Apr 2, 2013Media violence research waxes and wanes like many other research topics. Focusing events train the collective gaze of the world on single point. When Facebook changes how it shares our information, we discuss our tenuous grip on privacy. When...
GDC: Riot Experimentally Investigates Online Toxic...
Jim Cummings on Mar 31, 2013Riot Games has gotten a fair amount of press in recent months regarding their empirically-based research on the nature of “toxic” player behavior in League of Legends. As a result, I wasn’t surprised to find standing room only for Jeffrey...
Self-determination theory at GDC
Gabriel Recchia on Mar 29, 2013In a previous article, I argued that theories of motivation that include a diverse range of motivators might be more useful to game designers than parsimonious theories that pick out a small handful of motivators as primary. Apparently, I have much...
GDC: A brighter future for collaboration between i...
Gabriel Recchia on Mar 27, 2013Motivate. Play. “seeks to form a bridge between the gaming and scientific communities, offering analysis and commentary on games from a social sciences perspective”–it’s right there in our mission statement. As such,...
Productivity and Replay Value
Lauren Collister on Mar 18, 2013One of the things that has captured my attention recently is the replay value of games. If you have already played through a game once (assuming it isn’t a game with new released content), why play it again? Some players take joy in reliving a...
Emergence (and some devastation) in Sim City
Jared Lorince on Mar 6, 2013I’ll admit. I was one of those kids. I never had the patience to start from scratch in Sim City, to take a humble town to a bustling metropolis, paying constant attention to the state of my citizens and my budget. No, I would eagerly wait...
Sixteen ways to motivate
Gabriel Recchia on Feb 22, 20137 Habits of Highly Effective People. The 8 Essential Steps to Conflict Resolution. I’ll be the first to agree that including an arbitrary number in a headline makes an article sound like something that you’d find in the bargain bin of your local...
The trouble with trolls
Lauren Collister on Jan 31, 2013I have been digesting the fascinating blog post by Whitney Phillips over at Ethnography Matters about her ethnography of trolling. Phillips studied trolling communities like 4chan’s /b/ board, the Internet Hate Machine (Anonymous), and...
Intrinsic/extrinsic motivation: A false dichotomy?
Gabriel Recchia on Jan 14, 2013The impact of Deci & Ryan’s self-determination theory in social psychology is difficult to overstate. This is the source of the frequently argued point that intrinsic motivation (motivation to do something based on inherent properties of the...