The Ephemeral Notebook

• An Exodus Recession? –
• Unite 10: Jesse Schell And The Future Of Virtual Characters –

• The Rise of the "Game Mechanic in a Box" – - And the dystopian achievement future begins

• Who’s Using Facebook Around the World? The Demographics of Facebook’s Top 15 Country Markets –
• Investment Opportunities in Social Apps – Not Just Publishers and Not Just in the US –
• Zynga Readies for Major International Expansion With $147M SoftBank Investment –
• Apple Opens Game Center for Developer Signups –
• Zynga Runs Virtual Goods Charity Campaign to Aid Gulf Coast Oil Spill Victims –
• Facebook Expands at the Cost of Local Social Networks –

• Gamasutra – Features – Targeted Focus, Broad Audience? –
• Viximo launches social gaming platform for smaller social networks | VentureBeat –
• Pinkelstar makes it easy to integrate social networks into mobile apps | VentureBeat –
• Sometrics launches Game Coins virtual goods market for games (exclusive) | VentureBeat –

• Woozworld Raises $3 Million To Spin Off Tribal Nova –

My main disagreements with Jesse Schell’s lecture:

1. Right now external rewards are an ‘ooh shiny’ within culture.  We have struck some gold with the vein of behavioral psychology, and now everyone is rushing in believe there is gold enough for eternity in there somewhere.  The mind is being cracked open like some blue ocean market.  If there’s anything we know about these things it’s that they saturate.  With each further achievement system that latches on to our daily lives, the rewards become less and less novel.  After enough of them, the benefits will settle down into the background noise of our daily motivations.  Like any drug, the brain develops a tolerance.  Assuming his dystopian vision comes to pass, those reward system will be background noise – expected within any new system or promotion, but not a bullet point feature.  When opening up a new airline company, saying that you have offer frequent flier miles isn’t going to turn any heads.  We’ve dealt with reward structures that have turned background before, and like other drugs, there will need to be an escalation to get any attention.
2. The escalation won’t be more of the same.  Eventually while spelunking in the brain, something new will come along – another ‘ooh shiny’ that will no doubt be the topic of some future ominous keynote.  If anything, external reward schemes aren’t the future, they’re the emerging present.  If we put all our best minds on sapping this gold vein for all its worth, no one will ever find that minerals like uranium might have their value.
3. Many good game designers ARE working on the problem right now and to say that they aren’t present in the field is a bit insulting.  What’s important is that we push the discourse in the direction that benefits both games AND society as a whole.  We as game designers have the power to prevent this rat-and-pellet scenario by pushing the persuasive envelope in the right direction.  There will be no shortage of marketers cum game designers willing to tweak the spreadsheet pivot a bit more.
4. Reward structures are only ONE of the many neural motivators for gaming, and while the most basic and exploitable with our current understanding, they do not represent the true power of games.  If anything we’ve learned from the last decade or two of ludology it’s that games and learning are inexplicably linked – creating reward mechanisms that are devoid of learning and the introduction of new elements seems backwards.  In the old ‘depth and breadth’ game design metric, achievement systems for brushing your teeth have neither – the entire ruleset is one item long and mastery is immediate.  Sure the ‘game’ is in taking advantage of the system as a whole, not just the teeth part, but without learning and mastery how soon will it get stale?  Most facebook games lose my interest after a short while for this reason – I feel I’ve learned everything there is to learn and the rest is just rote repetition.  We’ve fought to elevate this (to some notable successes) within the Free to play and MMO arenas.  Why does he think our future is to give up these efforts and succumb to age old formulas?

I have a lot of respect for Mr. Schell, but I can’t see this one as much more than fear mongering – stirring the pot.  Based on the amount of ‘check this out’ and ‘awesome video’ tweets and the general lack of criticism, I can’t say he’s succeeded.  In summing up, I think the trend is exactly as he put it – but this is a short term trend (really just the last two years) in a long term history of games.  Remember with Full Motion Video was the future of games?  Virtual Reality?  Hyperbole is dangerous, but the exercise of it for sake of argument is good in that it gets people thinking.  Just because the current trend is moving in this one direction does not invalidate all other work and studies that have come before regarding future predictions.

Source: Matter Feast

• 3 Source – Silicon, Germanium, Diamond, Supercarbons, Rare Crystals and Metals (1cm2)
• 2 Source – Carbon-based Life, Petrocarbons, Fossils, Ferrous Metals, Graphite, Coal, Soot (10cm2)
• 1 Source – Anything Else (100cm2)

Abilities

Differential 3

Synthesize

Consume

Kinesis

Sculpt

The Mujin are also called Void Samurai – they do not fear death and instead flirt with it in order to achieve wu wei – actions without a master. Mujin use weaponry and specialize in one and two handed melee weapons, thrown weapons, flex weapons and one handed ranged weapons, the most common being katanas, armknives, claws, pistols, blasters, spears, staves, cutters, heatwhips, sectional staves, kama, scythes, and various implant weapons.  There is a story of one even using a Bow.  However, they pretend weapons that are up close and personal, and ones that aren’t too hampered when there are multiple attackers.   They favor fluid movements and weapons that can become part of the body’s kinetics – they train endless katas and tactical subroutines so that during battle it can be as close to pure reflex memory as possible.  Mujin are often employed as guardians or assassins.

Source: Wu Wei

Abilities:

Shadowstep 5

Imbalance

Disrupt

Divide Heaven

Phantom Recourse

Empty Mind

Preview post of the concepts chapter for Tatha

http://docs.google.com/View?id=dhpn5xkg_44g9fpxwsj

Look forward to a big announcement soon – my project and company are about to go into alpha and out of stealth.