Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Functional Software (Amy Jo Kim)

I swear i've referenced & linked a million times to the presentation below Amy Jo Kim from ShuffleBrain gave at Etech 2006, and i recently had the pleasure of catching up with her in SF for a game geek dinner, then in San Diego for Graphing Social Patterns West.  It's one of my absolute favorite discussions on user engagement & how to think about app / web design & user engagement by using strategy from game mechanics.  Amy's one of the noted experts in the field, along with Raph Koster (A Theory of Fun) & a few others.  I highly recommend reading more by both of these folks.

After much begging & pleading, i was able to get Amy to upload her presentation to SlideShare.net for easier display & distribution, and she graciously obliged (thanks amy!).  Hopefully using SlideShare makes it more accessible for her fans (both current & new). i also chose a very basic SEO-friendly headline for this post to make it more findable.

With no further ado, i bring you:

Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Functional Software

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for more on this topic, i suggest checking out both blog & website for Amy & Raph (linked above).  since i'm somewhat new to the field, i'm also interested in other references people are aware of -- please feel free to add more in the comments.  i know Jeremy Liew, Susan Wu, and Andrew Chen have written on these topics from startup / vc perspective as well.

Comments

[Social Network Web Design]

Wow! Thanks Dave for this post! Kudos to Amy too! :)

[Elliott Ng]

Dave, I think I've linked to that Etech presentation a million times too. Some more versions of Amy Jo's pitch is on the Shufflebrain.com site too. Thanks

[DP]

Wow... this is the first time that I went through a 78 slides presentation and finished smiling... :) I usually loose conscience after the 10th slide or so and pronounced dead shortly after.

Thanks Dave for groveling to Amy... it was worthwhile :)