If you go 18 km by train to the South from Potsdam, you can reach Beelitz Heilstätten, a town of abandoned hospitals. I was there three times in different seasons. It would be possible to create quite a creepy scary movie or a game there. 
Others also were here:
Even if Mr. Dale Dougherty hadn’t introduced the term Web 2.0 to the world, the world would still go round and we would still have the nowadays phenomenon of the social changes on the web. As earlier we just had our PROPERTY online for informational purposes, today we SHARE photos, multimedia, code, and thoughts with each other. And the future of the Internet will be the online habits and processes GAMIFIED.
Gamification is integrating game dynamics and mechanics into your site, product, service, community, content or campaign, in order to drive participation, solve problems, and engage users. People tend to return back to places where they leave a part of themselves. Gamification provides tools which influence users’ emotions and induce them to act.
The user engagement is happening by combining game dynamics, mechanics and aesthetics. Dynamics are time-based patterns and systems in your game:
Mechanics are the systems and features that make progress visible:
Aesthetics are the overall experience that yields emotional engagement:
Some real life examples of gamification would be happy hours where you get an appointment when to come to get a discount for food and drinks, collecting stickers or stamps to get a discount or a product for free, and the usual studying system where you get marks for your skills and there are leaderboards of best students.
Some website examples of gamification would be foursquare, SuperMe, and Stack Overflow. Foursquare is a website where you use your smartphone to unlock places in your city and get badges for achievements. SuperMe is a website about personal success where you grow your skills of Wisdom, Ability, Influence, and Connection by watching videos, doing quizzes, and playing minigames. Also you are assigned different levels, get badges, and can see the activity of your facebook friends. Another great example of a gamified website is Stack Overflow and its sister websites Game Development, User Experience, English Language & Usage, Personal Productivity, OnStartups, etc. These are websites where users ask questions and answer them, vote for the best questions and answers, collect reputation points and badges, and unlock moderation privileges by reputation points.
A lot more about gamification can be learned from gamification.org. Especially I would recommend you the talks by Gabe Zichermann and Seth Priebatsch and also the workshop slides by Amy Jo Kim.
I have been working as website developer in Germany for almost six years. During this time I had quite a lot of deadlines and sleepless nights, and also I reached the limits of concentration and skills a few times. Moreover I work at my HalmaStar game, blog and other projects during my free time. I want to share experiences how to keep productivity when you have a lot of work to do yourself.
The first thing what you need to be productive is motivation. You need a reason to work responsibly, be it monetary payment, step in career, or recognition and reputation. Inspirations can be raised by TED talks. One can also program motivation using Meta states.
In order to stay calm and not to get lost in all perplexing tasks of large scope, it’s necessary to write down a list of tasks, assign priorities, and complete them one by one, not taking care about the rest. Usually I create a list of tasks for each project on a separate sheet of paper. When I complete a task, I strike it out from the list. When I complete the sheet of tasks, I throw it away. Every completion is like an accomplished mission. You can feel the progress visually. The method of writing tasks down and assigning priorities is called “Getting Things Done” by the book of the same name written by David Allen.
One needs breaks, otherwise the brain will burn. Some people go to smoke whereas I go to make tea from time to time. So I drink about 5 cups of tea a day. Usually I make tea-breaks between different tasks. One can find Pomodoro technique in the Internets which is about doing tasks in 25-minute intervals doing 5-minute breaks. The name is coming from a kitchen timer of a shape of tomato used to count time how long to cook food.
To keep my mind sharp and comprehending, I use quite a lot of caffeine in the form of coffee, tea, red bull, fritz cola or club mate. Usually a red bull drank after lunch keeps me productive for about six hours.
Routine and easy, but long tasks are best to do at the end of a day, when the organism is tired, but there is some power left.
Jade horses get shot. But who isn’t at risk, doesn’t drink champagne!
I flew to and from America by Virgin Atlantic Airlines. I liked the fact that we got some food, but especially I liked the TV sets at each place showing a chosen movie, episode of some series, or a video game.
The movies to choose had been shown in the cinemas quite recently, e.g. “The Social Network”, “Black Swan”, or “Unknown”. Unfortunately the offered games were too simple and not hooking. Also when I went forward, the control panel was with one directional button not working.
Anyway the seven hours of flight passed unnoticed.
While traveling to New York I expected to find something that would attract me to return there again in the future. The city made a lot of impressions especially on the first days, but during eleven days I got used and got tired of the size of the city.
New York consists of five boroughs. They are Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. We settled and spent the most time in Manhattan – the island of skyscrapers. We visited Brooklyn, the borough of blacks, and the Bronx, the native land of hip hop. We stayed for five days relatively close to the central park and then another days in China Town, in a hotel where every person gets a room cabin of six square meters with only a bed and a shelf.
We have purchased New York City Passes, which allowed us to visit the main sightseeings with a discount and waiting in less queues. We saw the city from the highest building – Empire State Building – it looked similarly as from an airplane. Also we went around Manhattan by cruise ship also passing the Statue of Liberty. We walked by the embankment and had rest in parks. Also we walked in the Times Square – the street full of screens and advertisements washing your brains. Then you want hamburgers, M&M’s and Coke (to gnaw out the eaten food).
Now I’ll tell shortly about everything. Mc Donalds and Starbuck’s provide a free wifi access. People read electronic books on Amazon Kindle and similar readers in the subway. Buildings and subway trains have air conditioning. Public transportation is quite uncomfortable comparing to Berlin – there are no time schedules and it’s difficult to find stations to change trains. Electricity sockets differ from European and English, so you need adapters.
“Welcome to America, my darling!”, said a woman of a shape of a ball to her tiny friend, the waves mildly hit the embankment, and you could see the Statue of Liberty far far away. There are not so many fat people, but the S size of t-shirts in America is the same as M size in Europe. There are not so many smoking people. Bouncers at the bars demand to show IDs to check the age. There are people leading two or three dogs at once.
During the nights mice and big cockroaches run in the streets. People of homeless lifestyle sleep under staircases. Somewhere the drain holes smoke. Water drops down from air conditioners attached to windows. How hot the weather can be! The streets are full of sacks of rubbish at nights. China Town smells of fish.
The transportation system reminds Grand Theft Auto. There are lots of different cars including limousines. There are lots of taxis. Cutters, Yachts and Cruise Ships float at the piers. The most impressive thing in the architecture are Gothic churches build between many-storied buildings. One of the twins is being rebuilt again close to the original place where a memorial will be built.
That’s my mixture of impressions. I was lack of alternative people and places. I liked the trip, but I would go there next time only if I had some business there.
Everybody has different problems. Out of different readings and watching around I glued together a bunch of ways how to get rid of personal problems.
While writing this entry, I uncovered a pile of my own problems and that made me sad. Anyway, I hope this will help to understand your own problems and find ways to solve them.
I happened to climb 100 metres up the metal stairs to the tower of a church in Hamburg. There were interesting constructions inside, the bell, the mechanism of the clock, and an unexpected restaurant above. The interior associated to me with the next version of Tomb Raider, Hitman, or Prince of Persia.
From time to time I meet people who think that computer games are just a waste of time with no value. Usually those people associate games with ancient tetrises or supermarios, or with some maniac friends counterstrikers who isolate themselves from the real world losing the sense of time and of themselves. Various shootings in the schools of the USA make the situation look even worse.
As I am diving into this sphere deeper and deeper, I will share my opinion with you. It will also partly be the propaganda of gaming with a hope that it will prompt the interest in gaming culture and development, developers will start doing their job more seriously, and we’ll have more games of high quality in the future.
While talking about games in this article, I will mostly talk about video games, but won’t limit myself to that. In my opinion, party games, board games, mobile games, computer games, and playful life in general seem to be related, overlapping and complementing each other. I will look at games from different perspectives: entertainment, education, art, socialization, media, simulation, and job.
Not everyone accepts his days as gifts. Not all jobs are interesting. And even in the interesting jobs there are boring tasks that use your energy. After all people need to relax and run away from every-day problems. So people need entertainment.
People need experiences different from every-day life, stories, videos sounds, activities, and self-expression. Therefore, depending on the possibilities and personal choices, we go to clubs, cinemas, amusement parks, play TV games, and attend different competitions. Video games are one of additional forms providing storytelling and expression via video, sounds, animation and interaction with computer. Additional amazement is given by the newest technological possibilities to manage the system by motion, and to express the special effects not only by video and sound, but also by vibration and smells. Moreover there have been technologies developed to manage computer systems directly by brains through a helmet.
Games help you to reduce stress. Playing games, you can unleash negative energy on virtual opponents, not harming any real beings. The results in games can be achieved relatively faster than results in real life. Achievements release hormone Endorphin which gives the sense of joy. While playing more active partly computer outside games, adrenalin might be produced. While playing you compete with other players or with your own achievements. Excitement is felt. Sometimes it’s not as important to win as it’s important to communicate with each other and the game becomes an interesting way of communication where you don’t need to talk about weather when all the other topics have already been exhausted.
School is important not because it’s an obligation. And Diploma is not the main reason to study. It’s necessary to learn all your life. You need to improve not only professional skills, but also many others, so that you could survive personal crises as well as global catastrophes and also that we could create maximal comfort for ourselves and for others.
Games are an attractive form to improve some skills. Games train our brains to manage audiovisual information, interpret it, and react to it fast. The coordination of arms and eyes is improved. Many games tell stories, so many facts are created by imagination of the player as when reading a good book. So games improve imagination too. Diving deeply into a virtual world also increases the attention for one thing for a longer period of time. Every one of us has a sleeping genius and attention to one thing is a way to wake him up. Games also improves logical thinking: we experience causes and effects through them. Games prompt to overcome the difficulties, persistently doing the job till the end. Virtual 3D worlds develop spacial memory and orientation. It’s easier to find out where you are, when you get lost in a big city (proved by my own experience ). Games teach to learn to understand more difficult structures than the primary natural ones, for example the forking and overlapping of time, alternative worlds existing at the same time, mutating states of the characters, changing gravitation sources, etc. Active computer games and some mobile games train balance. After-all, the computer literacy is getting better.
Games causes their developers also to be interested in many different spheres. Games are some of the most difficult software products. Usually they are created by big groups of people specializing in different spheres, but the project managers should have basic understanding everywhere. The developers have to understand natural, social and humanitarian sciences and be creative. Besides programming, programmers should educate physics, geometry, 3D modeling, development of artificial intelligence, and user interfaces. Game developers should understand psychology to predict user movements, and sociology so be able to manage gamer communities. The story creators should predict non-lineal possibilities of the script (one beginning and multiple endings or multiple paths to achieve the ending). Sound creators should be able to adapt music to the mood of the moment dynamically like in movies, depending on the players choices. And this is still not the full list of spheres game developers should know. As I am mostly interested in independent games and I am planning to publish them myself, I need to be interested in advertisement and marketing too.
What is the point of art for a human being? We conceive the world through contrasts. The more arguments for different ideas or features we get, the more we choose how to live our lives. Art is a subjective artists view to different things. The more subjective ideas we get, the more objective is our point of view. A game can be a form to convey the viewpoint of its creators. The game becomes an indirect dialog between game creators and game players.
Game itself can be very creative, re-mixing other forms of art, such as photography, 3D arts, architecture, fashion, music, dance, or theater play. Games stand close to movies or interactive video installations at modern-art galleries or at night clubs.
The process of gaming can be creative itself while solving some logical problem. Sometimes instead of normal game flow, the player can use game resources in a creative way making their own pieces of art in social games. Also different modification tools allow to modify the games or create 3D animations called machinima.
A man is a social creature in an animal body. Like birds we need to communicate.
Therefore, bars and clubs are full of people, we like home parties, we attend different courses, or use facebook. Games are one of the means to communicate with other people.
While playing we communicate both, verbally and non-verbally. By words we communicate when we play together or by turns at a console or with mobile phones. Also by words we communicate at the chats of online games. It’s been said that the bigger part of information is transferred non-verbally by body language. In games the nonverbal communication happens when helping each other to overcome obstacles, competing with each other, sharing or exchanging virtual goods.
Local-area-network games bring existing gamers’ communities together. Online games create communities in themselves. Also gamers usually have their forums where they can share experiences about the game.
There is a saying that a picture is worth one thousand words. I will extend it saying that a video is worth one thousand pictures, and a game is worth one thousand videos.
Games are strong media form getting much deeper into the memory because the idea of the game is conceived by practicing. A game can explain difficult things simply, clearly and visually.
One could compare video games to newspapers, magazines, books, comics, publicistic photos, movies and animations.
If the developers want to make an interesting game, they should be always on the cutting edge of actual things.
Even playful life isn’t a game. There are many difficult, dangerous or too influential spheres, where it’s better to avoid them, for example, martial arts, extreme sports, or stock quotes. Games can simulate risky situations enabling you to try them in a virtual atmosphere and experience just virtual awards and punishments and to decide later if that sphere is interesting for you in the real life.
We can start, pause and stop playing games whenever we decide. In real life, if you want to start something, you need some preparation (courses, studies, or contacts), and when you want to end something, you need to take others’ (family, colleagues, or clients) interests into consideration.
Virtual game world is always simpler than the real world. And you can feel as the manager of your own simple world, where all the rules are clear and all causes have clear effects.
The game can show you two different opinions letting you decide the conclusions which opinion is more correct as it’s done in discussions, debates, publicistic broadcasts and news.
Games can convey artificial reality: what would be if something existed or happened. One can be embodied as avatars of different profession, sex, race or even as things.
Simulation in games can also give profit to the developers, because modules tested on entertained players can be later applied in important software packages, for example, path search in the maps, artificial intelligence, user interfaces and so on.
Money is an important means in the nowadays world. Players can earn some money by gambling games or by selling virtual goods. But the most important from my point of view, that the games is the source of money for gamemakers.
The most games today are created for adults and the most players are adult people, not kids. That means that the most players do something in their lives to earn money which can be spent for entertainment.
There are many ways for game developers to get money, e.g. funding, donations, subscriptions, freemium subscriptions, box sales, in-game advertising, microtransactions, virtual currency, server leasing, and merchandise.
I gave you ideas, but no game examples. Anyway, I can give you some examples in the comments on request. The most important is direction what to achieve to get well developed game industry in the future with more open source and more collaboration, little by little, step by step.
All of a sudden I will tell you about the latest updates of HalmaStar game website.
In the last half of a year I worked at the game about 10 days all in all. During that time I added user profiles, information about logged-in users, interplanetary ticket system, and some more. Also the style was tweaked. Unfortunately not everything has been tested.
The avatars of the game are aliens called insighters. As that is related to sights, I copied the idea of faces with four eyes from the internets.
I still have these tasks on my TODO list:
If you have any ideas or critics, I accepts all that here in the comments, in the feedback section of the website, or at a cup of tea.
Why are some people more successful than others? I have been interested in this question all my life. Maybe that happened because my parents were not very rich, o maybe because very often I wasn’t as successful as I wanted to be, or maybe because lots of people told me their unlucky stories and I noticed how much badness and bad luck exist in lives. Therefore I have been always doing my best to learn success from good examples, books, TV, readings on the web, and other resources that I happened to get. The comparison of emotional stability with columns at a book by Alain De Botton made me a big impression.
If the luck of your life is based only on one need where you give your attention, for example, outer looks, money, or relationships with another person, then in the case when this thing falls appart for some external reasons, you might fall into total depression leading your personality to low self-esteem or even suicide.
If your life is based on many activities like human relations, career, social networking, traveling, creativity, hobbies, etc. then in the case of catastrophe in one of the areas, the situation won’t impact on you too much.
You have to educate yourself in all the areas that interest you and not to be afraid to adapt to novelties or create original solutions.
Here I remember an article in which Richard Brandson from the Virgin company mentioned that he started investing into the flights to the open space, because if he had only given all his attention to records, the company might get into risk of crumbling, as nowadays people share MP3 for free on the internet (I can’t find the article now to provide a link to it).
Changes are the only stability.
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