Topics in Digital Media – Fall 09

Sorry to have omitted the audio. Here’s that summary, and we’ll go over it in class.

Ralph Koster on Interactivity in Social Media
In this talk, Koster relates the fundamentals of interaction design in games with an eye towards applying it in social media/web 2.0 applications.

• All cultural products (a song, a book, a game.. anything) have a grammar, or a structure.
  • The grammar describes how various pieces fit together
  • It structures the information the product wishes to communicate
  • The structure is fractal: break any product down, and find it’s comprised of tiny versions of the whole. This is called the product’s “deep structure”.
  • Games are thus made up of smaller games within the game, and each of these games should be fun.
• To reiterate: what is fun?
  • The process where a player meets a challenge, comes to understand the structure underlying that challenge, and gains mastery of the structure through trial-and-error.
  • When the player finally masters the challenge, endorphines are released!
  • This is what Koster calls “hard fun”. There are other types of fun, and they can be incorporated into the fun experience. They are:
    • Easy fun (aesthetic delight)
    • Visceral fun (a physical/sensory rush)
    • Social fun (the fun that comes from comparing one’s self to others; schadenfreude)
• Koster then relates several principles of successful interaction design, and demonstrates how these principles can extend into non-game constructs (he frequently calls upon Amazon and eBay as examples):
  • Every interaction has a verb as its goal (whether it’s “slay the Orc” or “purchase the book” or “connect with this person”). This verb should be repeatable, players should want to do it over and over.
  • The player should, over time, do this verb “better” or “worse,” meaning that the platform should involve a system that has to be learned and mastered.
  • There should be a multiplicity of challenges, giving the player the sense of there being a ladder to climb.
  • At every point, the interaction designer should take heed of the following:
    • Where and When the player meets the challenge matters:
      This is the “topology of the environment.” (Did the player enter this battle from the forrest? Did the user stumble upon this Amazon purchase from a blog somewhere?)
    • How the player meets the challenge matters:
      The challenge should test the player’s skills. (In gaming this is obvious, but Koster also mentions the notion of play involved in bidding on eBay in contrast to purchasing a similar item on Amazon.)
    • The range of challenges matter:
      The player’s march towards the goal (put forth by the verb) depends on what that goal is. Different goals encourage different methods of play, different tactics of interaction.
    • What tools does the player bring with him/her as they meet the challenge? (In games, it’s the player’s equipment, naturally. But what about in Facebook, where the user might have some photos to share of last night’s party?) Additionally, players should be able to strategize before meeting their challenge, “equipping” themselves beforehand. As Koster says, in successful interaction design, the player should be given an array of hammers and nails to choose from to help him/her hammer in nails!
    • What feedback does the system offer? The system should let the player know when he/she has failed or won a challenge. Every action should matter, and garner the appropriate response.
    • Low-risk activity should never be met with a high payoff. (This is not fun!) There should be consequences for losing a challenge. (I think this probably fizzles out in regards to Amazon and eBay, where the main verb here is “to purchase” and low-risk interaction with the system is required/desirable for some users.)

  In class today, be prepared to deconstruct some popular social media sites with Koster’s theory in mind. I’m thinking of talking about Facebook and Flickr, and I’ll probably think of some other good examples before 7. What do you guys think?