Scott Kim has an odd talent—he’s a brilliant problem maker. Mr. Kim belongs to an elite cadre of “puzzle masters” who spend their days building logical mazes and brain teasers. In more than 20 years as a professional puzzle designer, Mr. Kim has worked on everything from word, number and logic puzzles to toys such as Railroad Rush Hour and computer games such as “Obsidian” and “Escher Interactive,” which features interactive puzzles based on M.C. Escher’s optical illusions. Lately, he has been developing smartphone game apps and contributing a bimonthly puzzle column to Psychology Today. More…

Download Reflection Maze, a puzzle Scott created specially for The Wall Street Journal.

The New York Times interviewed Scott about his ambigram lettering designs in connection with his Apr 7 talk “Symmetry, Art, and Illusion” for the Museum of Mathematics. Click here to read more about Scott’s mathematical art.

Best Practices and Hands-on Learning
During this Workshop, you’ll learn key insights from gaming psychology, techniques and best practices. We’ll reveal the best practices behind some of gaming’s biggest hits — including The Sims, Rock Band, Farmville, and Frontierville — and lead you through a series of hands-on design exercises for applying these ideas to your project. You’ll learn how to craft a gaming experience that drives lasting engagement and retention – and how to apply smart game thinking to your current project.

Key Takeaways

•  7 core concepts for applying game design to your product experience

•  How dynamics, mechanics & aesthetics work together to drive engagement

•  Design for Social: bringing Bartles 4 Player Types into the Facebook age

•  Design for Progress: game mechanics that “light the way” towards mastery

•  Design for Engagement: build fun/delight/satisfaction into your core activity loop

•  Design for Retention: use Social Engagement Loops to drive Lifecycle engagement

Instructor
Amy Jo Kim, Ph.D. is social game designer who’s worked on Rock Band, The Sims, Ultima Online, eBay, Netflix, Lumosity, MetroGirl, family.com and there.com. Amy Jo is a world-renowned speaker and educator – currently adjunct professor of Game Design at USC’s Digital Media school, recently named top US-based game design school. She also wrote Community Building on the Web (2000), a design handbook for digital communities that’s used worldwide at game studios & universities

Click here for details and registration

As part of the Museum of Mathematics talk series “Math Encounters”, Scott Kim of Shufflebrain will give a presentation called Symmetry, Art & Illusion on Thursday, April 7, at 4:00 and 6:30pm, in New York City. Summary: Join artist and author Scott Kim on a dazzling journey of exploration into the world of symmetry and art. Discover the surprising mathematical patterns behind the art, and see how the same patterns reappear in art, music, dance, and animation. Audience members are also invited to participate in a hands-on workshop with Scott, where they will learn to draw their own symmetrical ambigram lettering designs (as featured in the book Inversions), play with symmetrical rhythmic patterns, and join in a full-body investigation of symmetry. This talk is appropriate for ages 12 and up. Details….

I’m excited to be speaking at GamesBeat next week. Our panel is at 2:15, here’s the description.

The Influences of Video Design
How are gaming principles stimulating innovation in the non-gaming world?
Moderator: David Edery (co-author “Changing the Game”)
Participants: Bing Gordon (Kleiner Perkins), Rajat Paharia (Bunchball), Amy Jo Kim (Shufflebrain), Gabe Zichermann (rmbr)
Promoting human interaction is the key to achieving success in business and in life, and gaming has become the most effective way of encouraging these interactions. We’ll discuss how gaming principles are changing the rules of engagement to the extent where they foster learning, reading, customer acquisition and basic application design

The lineup looks great — check out the agenda and speakers.  Should be an illuminating day.

There’s still a few seats left — you can register here and get 10% off with discount code. Please come say hi if you’re able to make it. I hope to see you there!

There’s an interesting discussion going on about the brain-changing effects of social networking, especially on kids. A British neuroscientist, Lady Greenfield (professor of synaptic pharmacology at Oxford) claimed that Facebook is “infantalizing” kids’ brains. She makes some good points about reward systems and brain plasticity:

“The sheer compulsion of reliable and almost immediate reward is being linked to similar chemical systems in the brain that may also play a part in drug addiction. So we should not underestimate the ‘pleasure’ of interacting with a screen when we puzzle over why it seems so appealing to young people.”

I completely agree — feedback systems are powerful drivers of behavior, and social networks provide almost constant feedback with variable reward size – AKA the classic “one-armed bandit” variable reinforcement schedule that’s so diabolically addictive. She continues:

“It is hard to see how living this way on a daily basis will not result in brains, or rather minds, different from those of previous generations. We know that the human brain is exquisitely sensitive to the outside world.”

She’s right — we are HIGHLY adaptable creatures. Our brains are wired differently than our ancestors, because we grew up in a different world. Books, telephones, movies, TV, and video games have dramatically changed the entertainment and communications landscape for humans – and inevitably shaped our brains.

Our kids are growing up with social networks — not to mention a dizzying variety of compelling computer games. Kids often communicate as fluidly online as they do in person. For them, it’s not about whether you’re online or F2F, it’s all part of the flow of communicating, socializing, and staying in touch.

Which brings us to this post by Sarah Lacy on why Social Networks Are Good for the Kids In refuting Lady Greenfield’s conclusions, Sarah points out:

…like a lot of people who don’t actually use these sites, she’s missing a fundamental shift from Web 1.0 chat room days to Web 2.0 social networks: Real identity.

We no longer “go to the Internet” to interact with some shadowy user name where we pretend to be someone we’re not. Ok, maybe people on Second Life do. But sites like Facebook and Twitter are more about extending your real identity and relationships online. That’s what makes them so addictive: The little endorphin rushes from reconnecting with an old friend, the ability to passively stay in touch with people you care about but don’t have the time to call everyday.

Bingo. That’s the compelling, unpredictable payoff of social networks – you never know who’s going to show up next, or connect with you, or post an intriguing status update or photo. SNS’s keep you lightly connected to a larger group of people, and enable you to stay in touch via a shared digital lifestream of status updates, photos, videos, notes, and affiliations. You get to know a different side to people – and when you see them in person, you have more context for what’s going on.

Whether it’s movies, TV, videogames, slot machines, or even books, humans will always compelled AND shaped by new technologies. Some people will abuse new technologies – that’s a given. Check out the cheap slots in Vegas, or the sad stories from WOW widows, or neglected convalescent patients drooling in front of an always-on TV, to see that phenomenon in action.

As a parent – and former Neuroscientist – I embrace new technology knowing full well that it will shape our brains. How could it not? We’re born to adapt — and our technologies are an increasingly big part of our environment. Rather than bemoaning this inevitable fact, I think it’s more forward-thinking and practical to embrace our brain plasticity, and learn how to use the technoligies in a healthy, life-enhancing way.