A RECIPE for Meaningful Gamification

In this video Scott Nicholson at Syracuse University shares his ideas around Meaningful Gamification that goes beyond the simple points, badges, and levels to dig more deeply into factors that will generate intrinsic motivation and engagement.
Here's a link to his blog - http://becauseplaymatters.com/

The story behind "The Game That Can Give You 10 Extra Years of Life."

This great piece in the Huffington Post describes "...the biggest disaster in TED history!" It gave me an opportunity to revisit Jane McGonigal's talk from last year to hear how games (among other things) can make us live richer and healthier lives.

Be sure to follow up on http://blog.superbetter.com and look at some of the research behind those remarks. In addition, just watching and engaging with the talk would also add 7.68245837 minutes to your life-span. So, while the talk is 19 minutes, your are really only spending less than 12 minutes watching it...?

GLS 9.0 conference presentations

Myself and Brendon Mikula from our GeoGames team presented two posters at this year's Games+Learning+Society 9.0 conference. It was an energetic and stimulating meeting as usual and our latest work and results were very positively received by those who visited our displays (and there were a lot of people). Poster 1 describe the overall architecture of our Online Map Game platform and Poster 2 presents some of the early results from user studies using the game in Geography undergraduate classrooms.

A Futurology of GIScience

Yesterday I had the great opportunity to address the 2013 University Consortium for GIS symposium attendees gathered at George Mason University. I was asked to talk a bit about what I think are important trends that will affect the GIS area in the near future, so I provided these few observations:

• Location are becoming a required feature of (ever smarter) services 
• Maps are created, designed and used differently –socially driven by anyone 
• Any spatiality (Warped and imagined spaces and places) that helps organize an activity will be used.
• Most applications will not be “serious and some will be "super-serious"

If you care to look through it here is the full presentation.

New map games

A bunch of things are emerging, both in terms of online map games (OMG!) and research that look at what these creations have to offer. Some of the more interesting example from my own navigation is MapAttack from Geoloqi, and the new Google Maps promo game. Both offer some entertainment and fun, although I must say that I quickly stopped thinking about the real places when I played cube, and just treated it as a marble board with obstacles. On the research horizon I recently found one of the first journal papers reporting from the geospatial domain by Alenka Poplin in Hamburg who looks at the potential uses of online serious games for public participation in urban planning.

April fool's quest

April fool's weekend is over and I will admit that I fell for one of the jokes, the Google Maps Quest (see Brett Molina's USA Today report here including links to some funny landmarks). The regular interface was mysteriously appended with a Quest layer when I launched it on Saturday morning. Being a GeoGame evangelist I was obviously overexcited to see this playful addition to Google's services and started to look around for clues on how to play/use it. Some time later I realized my embarrassment but it was a fun joke, see this YouTube video. Although, as readers of this blog will know, I do not usually joke around when it comes to online map games (OMG!)  If you missed it you can still look around in the Quest mode here. We stay tuned for Google's next step into the OMG! world.

Social network charrettes

Brian Berry notes in his ArcNews commentary entitled "Quo Vadimus?" (where are we going), that the millennial generation is among a growing segment of US Internet users who play games on social network, and that the geospatial community has yet to realize the potential of social games for addressing real world issues. He points at an interesting parallel with the 'charrettes' that designers/planners frequently use find participatory solutions to scenarios with conflicting goals and trade-offs. I elaborated on that very theme earlier this year under the title GIS + Games = GeoDesign. It's great to see more people recognize the power of new dynamics afforded by the use of emerging technologies and constant connectivity. Thanks to colleague Yuri Medvedkov for alerting me to the article.