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Tom Armitage - is a software developer and designer at Headshift, a London-based social software consultancy (www.headshift.com). He also plays rather a lot of videogames. He has spoken on web development, social software, and games at conferences such as Reboot and O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference. His blog, where he writes about games, design, software, and more, can be found at http://infovore.org/.
Playing together: what games can learn from social software
Much of the focus on the so-called "Web 2.0 movement" is on social software - not just social "networking" sites, but sites that place their focus on a bottom-up, user-generated ecosystem. Whilst people rarely use these products for work, they are also unlikely to describe their usage of social software as "play" - and yet that, often, is the act it most commonly resemble. Indeed, whilst the tools and products they are using are not games, they often end up exhibiting game-like behaviour. These applications are compelling, even "addictive" experiences, that reward investment of time not just with metrical growth - "points", if you like - but also kudos and social capital. Isn't it time we looked at this relationship the other way around? Right now, there's a huge buzz around "casual gaming", but the most popular spaces for casual play at the moment aren't games at all - they're services like Flickr or Facebook. Web 2.0 hints at a new understanding of what "multiplayer" could mean. What, then, are the lessons for game design that we can learn from social software? And what would games based upon the lessons we can learn from social software perhaps look like? This talk seeks to provide answers to both of these questions. |
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 The design of games
 The offline side of games
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