Fitting mobile games into players' lives

Isaac Knowles on Mar 18, 2014
Scott Rigby and Troy Skinner of Immersyve opened this year's Mobile and Tablet Summit today with a presentation entitled "Rituals of mobile gaming: Understanding the true building blocks of consumer value". Rigby and Skinner’s argument rests on...

Q&A with Riot's Jeffrey Lin, Ph.D.

Jim Cummings on Jul 2, 2013
As part of our coverage of this year's Game Developers Conference, I offered a summary of Jeffrey Lin's (Lead Designer of Social Systems for Riot Games) talk on research-informed design and his teams's work managing toxic player behavior in League...

7 Essential Resources for Understanding Motivation...

Travis L. Ross on Apr 4, 2013
Motivation 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...

Self-determination theory at GDC

Gabriel Recchia on Mar 29, 2013
In 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...

Productivity and Replay Value

Lauren Collister on Mar 18, 2013
One 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...

Sixteen ways to motivate

Gabriel Recchia on Feb 22, 2013
7 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...