Slightly overdue, but I’ve posted a bunch of pictures from MIGS 2011. Though most of these took place at Prince of Arcade, which was good fun. It was fantastic to reconnect with so many of my old colleagues from Montreal, and meet a bunch of the Ubisoft Montreal crew!

One of the pictures has also been used in an interesting article at the excellent Kill Screen Daily, What Do You Call It? by Lana Polansky. Weaving a common thread through the various highlights of MIGS is quite a feat, I highly recommend her piece.

My slides from NXNEi are woefully overdue for posting, but in the meantime I highly recommend the following:

• Sebastien Deterding’s review of Gamification by Design


• His followup response to Tim O’Reilly’s puzzled reaction to Deterding’s deft obliteration of the book.

I just had the privilege of speaking about game design and gamification at North by Northeast Interactive. While I want to clean up my slides to be useful to a new reader, I’ve collected a few links and resources either mentioned in my talk or directly relevant to the subject at hand. I’ll add more soon, but this should get you started!

Presentations/Papers

• Sebastien Deterding’s Meaningful Play, Pawned, Just Add Points, and Don’t Play Games With Me!


• Amy Jo Kim has lots of information in this space


• Nicole Lazzaro is another great source


• Richard Bartle’s original Player Types paper, his recent presentation at Digital Shoreditch

Discussions/Blogs

• Kevin Slavin on a rather broken Saatchi & Saatchi study which conflates everything from social, to games, to gamification in ways that could not help but confuse those surveyed.


• Sebastian Deterding on the same study.


• Gamification.co’s blog about both, the comments thread is well worth a read as Slavin dissects the issues further.


• An article on O’Reilly by Gabe Zichermann wherein he begins addressing the criticisms of gamification, but the real meat is in the comments with Deterding providing several of the most well thought out critiques of the entire space thus far.


• Jesse Schell’s tracking of the Gamepocalypse.


• Chris Hecker on Achievements Considered Harmful?

Books

• The Art of Game Design – Jesse Schell


• A Theory of Fun – Raph Koster

CN Tower on a sunny Saturday

After more than two and a half years in New Zealand I have returned to Canada. The distance traveled has been a few thousand kilometres more, and it’s another city I’ve never visited and have no roots in. (Or so I thought, a few old friends have been appearing!) Toronto is more than six times the size of Wellington and it’s going to take some serious getting used to.

New Zealand and Sidhe were incredibly good to me. We shipped Shatter, built some great entertainment, learned heaps, and had lots of good times. Many great friendships were started and will continue regardless of distance and time zone differences. (Skype multi-user video conferencing is brilliant!) I met my love Luba, and I can barely wait the few months until she moves up here. As an attendee and a (minor) contributor I can attest that Webstock is one of the finest conferences in the world.

So what could possibly draw me away from all of that? Particularly to return to Canada just in time for winter?

A shot at one of the biggest games in the world with one of the creative powerhouses of our industry. Ubisoft Toronto is brand new, its staff measure their time with the studio in months, not years, and the push is on to hire senior developers from around the world. From landing on Thursday night, to hanging out over the weekend with some of my new coworkers, to wrapping up my first day today it’s clear that they’re out to conquer the world. Nothing will be done by half measures, the resources are behind us, and the excitement is infectious.

To top it off the chance to work with, and learn from, designers like Maxime Béland and Pat Redding is something I could not possibly pass up. So here I am in Toronto.

I can’t wait to get back to work tomorrow.

When your US label, Interscope, discovered the web-based alternate reality game (ARG) you'd built around Year Zero, were they happy for the free marketing or angry you hadn't let them in on it?

I chose to do this on my own, at great financial expense to myself, because I knew they wouldn't understand what it is, for one. And secondly, I didn't want it coming from a place of marketing, I wanted it coming from a place that was pure to the project. It's a way to present the story and the backdrop, something I would be excited to find as a fan. I knew the minute I talked to someone at the record label about it, they would be looking at it in terms of "How can we tie this in with a mobile provider?" That's what they do. If something lent itself to that, OK, I'm not opposed to the idea of not losing a lot of money (laughs). But it would only be if it made sense. I've had to position myself as the irrational, stubborn, crazy artist. At the end of the day, I'm not out to sabotage my career, but quality matters, and integrity matters. Jumping through any hoop or taking advantage of any desperate situation that comes up just to sell a product is harmful. It is.