Session Title
Sketching Facebook Games
Presenter
Aki Jarvinen, IT University of Copenhagen / mygamestudies.com
Session Type: Activity
Game applications have become highly popular among Facebook users: Games like Mafia Wars and Farmville have over 20 million active monthly users. Game applications in social networks present an interesting challenge for game and interaction designers alike: Game designers need to engage with interaction and service design practices in order to successfully embed their concept to the social web of the network, and Interaction designers need to learn from game design in order to entertain and motivate their players into playful interactions.
In Interaction10, the session ‘Sketching Facebook Games’ will challenge the participants with two 10-minute game design assignments where Facebook is the target platform. The participants will be provided with particular design drivers and constraints, and templates that support rapid production of ideas and sketches. The participants will leave the session full of ideas for games, and a better understanding of what makes people play in social networks – and how to design for them.
Biography
The session will be tutored by Aki Jarvinen, an academic and an entrepreneur who has ten years of combined experience from both game, interaction, and service design. Aki holds a Ph.D. in game design theory, and he is writing a book on the design and business of games for social networks. He teaches game design at the IT University of Copenhagen, and works on social game projects through his consultancy mygamestudies.com.
More information:
http://www.mygamestudies.com/content/game-design-social-networks-part-2-design-framework
http://www.etc.cmu.edu/etcpress/node/314
http://www.linkedin.com/in/akijarvinen
2 Comments
This sounds fascinating! I like the idea of doing an activity that is very targeted towards social media and specifically Facebook. It’s a great opportunity to look at designing something I wouldn’t normally get to design.
Would it be fair to describe this as a Rapid Game Prototyping Lab? I hope that the principles this activity teaches are presented in a fashion that one can extrapolate beyond Facebook.
This sounds like an engaging activity for all participants interested in game-like interactions for online applications.