Once upon a time there was a World Wide Web where the information was free and people interacted with each other without needing to fill out forms, register or install new software.

But this Web was too simple for the applications that needed to know who you are. And thus, user registration spread across the Web.

Walled Garden by Gerry Balding (Flickr)

Then, people realized that you couldn’t simply run all these sites for free. Now that we could identify you, we ought to be able to get you to pay. And thus, the paywall was born. But all these walled gardens behind tall paywalls tended to wither–too much information simply yearned to be free. And so advertising, transactions and virtual goods grew.

A few years ago, a few sites realized that even user registation was too much of a barrier. Only a few sites like Facebook could get away with it. Otherwise, most people couldn’t be bothered–and most of the content was freely searchable through Google anyway.

One of the amazing things with “social applications” — be they on Facebook or through mobile apps on Android or iPhone–is that they decreased the barrier for accessing interesting content. Games and applications simply appear on my device or my web browser without all the hoop-jumping of the past…

But I’ve sensed another shift underway. I’m going to call them social walls. These are the social apps you’re asked to install that don’t do anything new that the Web didn’t already do–and may even take away from the interconnections of the Web. You know, the “social news readers” that get in my way every time I just want to follow a link to view news on Facebook.

When you add new steps or complexity, there’s got to be a good reason for it: like a genuine need to differentiate identities. But I do not need an app for the equivalent of every website on the Internet. Savvy?

Penny Arcade Expo has announced that it will be staying in Boston for another ten years!  As part of the same announcement, they’ll also be donating $325,000 to MassDigi, an institute based at Becker College that promotes the growth of the game industry here in Massachusetts.

Following the announcement, I was invited to sit in on an episode of WGBH’s Greater Boston program, where I discussed not only games but why the game industry is so important–both for customers as well as the economy. Watch below! (the interview section begins about halfway through).

My book, Game On, has been translated to Korean.  The title in Korea is Gamification, 소셜게임 모든 비즈니스를 게임화하라 .

It’s an interesting title for my book, since I’ve been a bit critical of the term “gamification” and have tried to help my readers’ understand the magic of games that makes them so satisfying and engaging.

The English version of Game On is be purchased from Amazon.

Want to learn more?  You can view a quick video-review of the book by Chris Brogan, or just read some of the comments on the Amazon link above!

For those of you who would like to purchase the Korean version, you can find it on Kyobobook.

The United States Senate is about to debate PIPA (the Protect IP Act), which is a terribly-conceived law which would empower the US Attorney General to restrict access to “rogue” websites containing copyright infringements, create legal processes for the owners of IP to order search engines and advertising networks to stop supporting the websites in question, along with the hiring of new federal agents to investigate copyright violations.

Flickr Image of Capitol Building by Kevin Burkett

Intellectual property ownership is the legal foundation that has made the modern technology and entertainment industries possible. If you create something novel, you ought to be able to reap the benefits of your invention. But public policy needs to be thought of holistically: the overall costs and benefits to everyone in society need to be considered. Reasonable, noncommercial use of copyrighted content needs to be protected. When it comes to commercial use (such as on a social network), the law shouldn’t be so onerous that it impairs innovation.

If organizations like the MPAA had its way, we probably wouldn’t have an Internet today. Fortunately, the Internet happened out of their view for too long–and then exploded too quickly–for them to do anything about it. Their history with other digital technology is informative: consider how they tried (and failed) to ban the use of VCRs to record your favorite shows for later watching (the Supreme Court ruled that noncommercial private recording was fair use). Or how they tried (and succeeded) at forcing special licensing fees on Digital Audio Tape (DAT) technology, which effectively killed it off.

It’s no wonder that companies like Google are opposed to PIPA, because it will force the creation of a complex corporate bureaucracy for processing copyright infringement claims that can be linked to technology for de-listing sites from their search engine, or restricting the placement of ads on offending sites. Along with the challenges of supporting and enforcing the system required by PIPA, it’s likely to spur an expensive technological-arms race; consider how hard it is for Google to stop search-engine spam. Certain copyright owners (such as those represented by the MPAA) would prefer that companies like Google incur the costs of policing and competing with pirates.

However, it isn’t just large companies like Google that are harmed. If the cost to Google is an inconvenience–the cost to startups is completely devastating. An entire startup website could be shutdown by the law simply because one copyright-holder decides to pursue the remedies allowed under PIPA. Bloggers and activists could be shut-up by powerful corporations, or by organizations such as the Church of Scientology which hasn’t been shy about silencing poorly-funded activists with legal challenges.

Entrepreneurs and investors will avoid markets where it appears that a large media company might have the power to shut you down, or where hackers could exploit the government’s technology to have the same effect. This is because small companies will lack the resources to content with the legal, technical and bureaucratic hassles that the law will create.

Years ago, the head of the MPAA compared the VCR to the Boston strangler, suggesting that the VCR would kill the film industry. Instead, it expanded it by creating new ways to sell movies, and opening up new markets for indie filmmakers. It seems that little has changed since this time: the backers of this legislation fear any form of innovation. If any strangling is happening, it’s by the backers of this bill and the still-nascent Internet industry.

PIPA will require a technological-industrial integration to police content, along with a centralized government authority that undermines the Internet domain name system (DNS). If Internet freedom, American innovation and fair use of copyrights are important to you, now is the time to let your senator know that PIPA is a horrible idea.

The following is a three-minute excerpt from a presentation I gave the Gamification Summit in NYC. This segment highlights the four motivational categories: immersion, achievement, cooperation and competition–and talks about them in the context of how we’ve evolved to enjoy these experiences.

Elsewhere in my talk I covered:

• How games are not Skinner Boxes (continuing my critique of behaviorism)
• How humans evolved in the cognitive-social niche, and how games allow us to play and practice for survival in that niche
• Cognitive, neuroscience, psychology and social research that help explain why games work
• The four major categories of fun/motivation that exist in most games

The following is the presentation itself, although you’ll need to use some imagination to to know what I was talking about (hopefully I’ll get permission from Gamification Summit to include my full video on my website at some future point; when I agreed to give the talk, I expected to have access to a freely redistributable version–not a paywall–so hopefully that will be rectified soon).

Ever since I wrote Game On, I’m frequently asked by people what other books they should read about game design and social media.  My advice has been consistent: yes, there are great titles out there.  Chris Brogan’s books on social media are fantastic, as are Jesse Schell’s book on the art of game design. However, I think that before you narrow your focus on game and online worlds, you should first expand your intellectual universe to think about the big picture of why.

Evolution shaped our brains, minds and behaviors across billions of years. If you want to understand why we act the way we do, you need to start with a framework that includes the deep history that shaped who we are.  Why is art important to people?  Why is communication and sociality central to the human experience? Why are games–which are artifacts of both art and our social interactions–central to what it is to be human?

Brian Boyd tackles the question of why art is important in
On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. This is the book I’m recommending to everyone who wants to understand more about the mind, about evolution, and about why art (which includes games) is so important.  It’s a thick, 500+ page tome that reads quickly thanks to Boyd’s compelling prose, clear explanations and cogent evidence.

Play is important to most mammals we’ve studied, as well as a wide range of other species.  But why is play important?  Boyd argues that play is essentially practicing the behaviors which will be important to an organism’s survival. Human beings occupy a unique niche: one that transcends our day-to-day coping with the natural ecosystem to include the “cognitive niche” in which our environment is formed through our language, social relationships and thought processes.  For humans, success in the cognitive niche is essential to our survival (which mirrors my own claim that evolutionary psychology offers a richer explanation for successful game designs than the superficial behaviorism that is too-often invoked in game design discussions).

Boyd makes the case that art is a form of cognitive play, important for practicing and strengthening the neural fabric which is important for surviving in the cognitive niche. The idea that art is a form of play isn’t entirely novel; this is precisely the argument made by Kendall Walton in  Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts — and writing about the importance of art goes back at least as far as Aristotle.  However, On the Origin of Stories is not a work of philosophy; it is about the science of evolution as it applies to art and fiction.  Boyd solves the problem that’s often deficient in the philosophical treatment of this subject by presenting a mountain of evidence from psychology, biology and neuroscience to support his case–one can hardly turn a page without learning about an important area of current research.

Boyd also explains what makes art successful: it is about grabbing and maintaining attention. I explained in Game On that attention is the currency that makes any form of media work; Boyd takes this subject deeper in his treatment of the subject.

As if presenting a scientific hypothesis wasn’t enough for this book, Boyd also presents a new approach to literary criticism: one that draws upon the knowledge of what’s been important in surviving the cognitive niche. It’s a refreshing, evidence-based way to look at art that connects us to our lives–one that offers more than so much else in the postmodern modes within the humanities. After presenting his evolutionary approach to criticism, Boyd demonstrates it by analyzing Odyssey as well as Horton Hears a Who! – where he offers both fresh insights as well as devastating criticism of some of the alternative approaches that have been used to understand these texts.

A great deal of Boyd’s argument rests on an arguing against Steve Pinker’s “art as an evolutionary byproduct” hypothesis. Pinker frequently claims that art (music in particular) is a pleasure technology that plays on a number of circuits that were important in our evolutionary history.  Boyd offers an alternative hypothesis: that the creation and consumption of art is such a time-consuming behavior in human societies that it could not have perpetuated unless there was an adaptive benefit. He makes a persuasive argument in this respect, but probably should not have relied upon the controversial D.S. Wilson multi-level selection theory (drawing upon his much-quoted line, “Selfishness beats altruism within single groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups.”)  While this does appear to be true in certain cases, it is misleading: D.S. Wilson is referring to a means of genetic evolution, and his theories remain quite controversial among mainstream evolutionary biologists.  On the other hand, the gene-culture coevolution hypothesis–as described by Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd (no relation)–offers a more detailed model of how cultural groups can prosper. Brian Boyd’s thesis would have been strengthened if he had drawn more heavily upon this research (which he does cite within his bibliography). Nevertheless, this is a minor blemish on an impressive and important work–and simply shows that there’s still a great deal more research that’s needed in this domain.

If you are curious about the human mind–or if you’re a creator of any stripe (games, websites, films, paintings, stories) then this book will expand your understanding of what, how and why art works–and why art is important. Indeed, I consider On the Origin of Stories the most important new book I’ve picked up this year. It’s accessible, informative, witty and mind-blowing–and after you read it, all those other design books will make so much more sense.

Ian Bogost’s essay “Gamification is Bullshit” has predictably raised the hackles of a wide range of people, most of who missed his point. Like Ian, I’ve pointed out that much of the “gamification” trend is driven by superficiality. As I wrote in the introduction to Game On:

…points are important. Badges can be helpful. Leaderboards are compelling. But these are simply the tools of game design: they don’t tell you what makes games actually work.

Pigeons in Skinner Box

Games can teach a great deal to businesses, designers and marketers. This concept has come to be known by the unfortunate term gamification. The problem is that gamificiation is generally caught-up in one of the game industry’s overarching myths—the idea that games are nothing more than Skinner boxes (“push-button, get cookie”), a part of behaviorist psychology which has largely been passed by advances in cognitive and evolutionary psychology over the past 50 years.  It’s not to say that reward systems and frequencies aren’t important–it’s just that there’s a lot more going on inside games than the reward mechanism. The belief that games are just reward delivery systems has led to a lot of bad games, not only in “gamifications,” but in games in general.

As Bogost wrote, “bullshit” doesn’t necessarily mean something is wrong—it is that the practitioners of bullshit are more interested in getting their way by impressing each other. As HG Frankfurt writes in On Bullshit:

For the bullshitter…he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says.

I don’t really like the term “gamification.”  Like the label of “serious games,” which Bogost likewise admits is a problematic category, it tends to encompass far too many variants—and within the category, one is likely to find both bullshitters as well as genuine practitioners. Nevertheless, labeling of emergent categories seems inevitable and gamification is the term we have.  What I’m calling bullshit on is the trend I’m observing in game criticism overall, which is to generalize categories of games while ignoring the individual differences between approaches, outcomes, products and people. I’ve seen this in criticism of gamification.  I’ve seen it in criticisms of social games. I’ve seen it in misguided analyses of “game addiction” and media studies of game-induced violence.

Developing any type of game is hard. Generalizations which lump entire categories of effort into an out-group which can be set up as the enemy aren’t helpful. This sort of criticism is similar to Roger Ebert’s grating insistence on the supremacy of film over games; the activism of Frank Thompson; the Frankfurt School’s theory of how culture industries are a conspiratorial capitalist enterprise intended to enslave the consumer; or those who see a division between low-culture and high-culture, the latter being defined by a higher degree of education, experience or financial means which, by economic constraints, limit culture participation to certain elites.

High Culture?

There’s a similar high-culture versus low-culture divide emerging within the game industry. It’s an ironic turn, given how games themselves tend to more frequently associate closer to the history of other low-culture industries such as television, comic books, movies, genre fiction, popular music—versus “serious” literature, symphony orchestras or fine art museums.  In the game industry, the “low culture” is currently social games, gamification and (maybe) mobile games—versus the high-culture of AAA hardcore games. Personally, I enjoy both and fail to see why we can’t find good product within each camp.  Indeed, I think innovation is occurring across the entire spectrum of products.

In his conclusion, Bogost states that “…those of you who would consider that games can offer something different and greater than an affirmation of existing corporate practices, the business world has another name for you: they call you ‘leaders.’” I’m persuaded by this argument, because leadership with games will happen with those who rise above the bullshit to understand what games really have to offer. At the same time, I believe the admonition would apply equally well to much of the game criticism that’s happening today: leadership in criticism will happen not by damning entire categories, but by performing the traditional job of criticism: identifying individual works that require better exposition–and illuminating the specific elements, techniques and theories that succeed or fail within a given endeavor.

The problem with gamification isn’t the term, or its objectives, but how it is applied. As I’ve noted above, it’s the behaviorist approach to games that channels inquiry away from the harder problems of immersion, cooperation and competition that is so important to creating successful game experiences. Behaviorism was popular in psychology because it seemed to offer some easy answers–some of which do work (such as certain forms of conditioning) yet which is built on an erroneously reductive premise that ultimately failed to be supported empirically. The behaviorist model of game design goes way beyond gamification; it’s the same model that has caused a long list of expensive MMORPG products to implode. Rather than focusing on the differences between the high-culture versus low-culture camps within the game industry, truth would be better served by an exploration of the underlying methods and theories which undermine the art and craft of game creation.

Here’s a neat “visual story” about Game On–it is sort of a visual “review” of the book, illustrating through sketches some of the book’s main concepts.  This was created by @damenleeturks, who speaks about how he made it on his blog.

A poster-sized PDF version can be downloaded here: http://d.pr/ez3x

Flurry has just released a report on the usage of mobile applications versus Web browsing. The first conclusion is that mobile app usage now exceeds web browsing. What mobile apps were used the most? That’s right–games!

Games are the Largest Mobile App Category

As usual, some people will gasp with surprise that games have become the largest category. People always seem surprised when games emerge as the top area of engagement for any new technology. Of course, those who follow my blog won’t be surprised at all.

Here is a great video review of Game On, by Chris Brogan. Chris is an expert on how to make your business more human (which is ultimately bigger than simply being “social!”). Chris really got what the book is about–which is to show you how the power and magic of games can be applied to anything you do.