Archive for the ‘Design’ Category
Some Thoughts on (Warcraft) Guilds - Part II
This is the second part in a short essay regarding some thinking about World of Warcraft Guilds. For Part I of the series which focuses on the purpose of guilds in the context of the game, click here.
Why Guilds Fail
Ask any Warcraft player what the word “Drama” means to them in relationship to the game and they will most likely provide you with a definition focused around one of two game elements – loot or raiding.
Some thoughts on (Warcraft) Guilds - Part I
I’ll start with my disclaimer (and a little bit of background)…
I’ve never been a Guild Master. I was an officer for a while of a small-medium size Horde casual raiding guild on Draenor. We enjoyed a long and successful run before our guild dissolved and scattered in its own little Diaspora.
What essentially prompted our dissolution was that our Guild Master and a few other leaders of the guild decided it was time for them to leave. We had successfully made guild leader transitions before, but this time we couldn’t find an established and respected member who at that time had the time and willingness to take on the responsibility.
As a result, about four months ago (although it seems much longer than that), I with some of the other officers in the guild helped to facilitate a merger (of sorts) with another guild on the server that appeared to have a culture and approach to the game that was close to that of our original guild. I, along with a number of my previous guild mates, are still at the new guild.
Currently, the new guild is experiencing its own growing pains and evolving from where it was at the point of our addition. All of this has gotten me thinking about the purpose of guilds, what it takes to make them successful, what causes them to fail and what is going to happen when the next expansion is released.
Happiness and Game Design
From the “blog entries that should have been written months ago” category…
In hindsight, probably the single most valuable session (among the many valuable sessions) from SXSWi this past March was Jane McGonigal’s keynote (SXSWi Podcast, Slides). I say that simply because I am still thinking about it and how it applies to the experience design work that I do at IBM Interactive on a regular basis.
One of the underpinnings of Jane’s keynote was the application of happiness research (or positive psychology) to understanding the engagement created by games (specifically, mmorpgs) - or alternatively, how we can use game design techniques to create happiness whether it through online user experience design or in general life.
In the Center, we’ve actually been talking about game-like user interfaces and interaction models for quite some time with our clients, but Jane’s linkage of happiness (and engagement) to game design provides a wonderful (and better) framework to think and talk about the value of game design in a way that is more complex that I had been previously thinking about it.
Two specific elements of her keynote which I found particularly interesting were her Economics of Engagement (also referred to as the “Four Key Principles of Happiness”) and her “10 Super Hero Powers” or new types of happiness that people are getting from playing multiplayer games (which she refers to as the “ultimate happiness engine”).
Delightful Experiences - Some Characteristics
Sometimes, as a part of the initial experience design workshops we conduct for our clients, we include an exercise asking them to think about and share some delightful product or service experiences that they have had recently. After they share these experiences, we ask them to describe what made it delightful.
For purposes of the exercise, we define “delightful” as an experience that exceeds expectations and is something that was so good that you want to share the story of the experience with other people.