Latest Tweets:
Q: What's this?
A: Notes from the interactive track at SXSW 2010 by one Finnish girl. A mishmash from, related to or inspired by the event.
If I see something that's changing the game I'M ON IT. So let's do this.
PS. for everyone I met in Austin: find me at twitter.com/vuokko and we'll take it from there. Thanks!
In my opinion, the single biggest thing at South by Southwest was NOT location. It was game mechanics. What? Yes, there was a lot of talk about location-based services like Gowalla and Foursquare (Foursqualla in SXSW slang), but even there the key word seemed to be game mechanics. Game mechanics. Game mechanics. Game mechanics. Got it? Game mechanics. That was what listening to panels at SXSW was like.
The basics of game mechanics are as follows: Kicking a soccer ball around with friends is fun. You can kick it hard or just juggle it around. But when you add rules, a point system and leaderboard, that’s what makes soccer a game that taps into the human experience.
So what about games? Judging by SXSW we are about to see the gamification on practically everything. Seeing how you rank among friends (like on StackOverflow), how far ahead of the curve you are on discovering new bands (like on thesixtyone), interesting articles or whatever - all of that will be built into data sets that will rank you among your social graph, as Mark Zuckerberg would call it. In a way, liking someone’s Facebook status is a baby step in this direction (even though it still equals to just kicking the ball around). To engage, social sites (something that practically all sites will soon be) will have to build data sets that reflect what and how well users are doing compared to others.
The challenge for developers is to tap into human competitiveness and find the triggers that make users come back and invest in their profile. To close the loop, let’s go back to location. Location still matters, but it will not matter as an isolated gimmick. Instead, location needs to be built into the system in such a way that users will be hooked and benefit from what they are doing compared with others.
