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Date: Sat, 15 May 2004 17:45:32 -0700
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.553)
Dear All,
Please join us at swissnex for our next exciting event May 21 at
6.30pm, on "Why we play games - Gaming beyond Games" (details below,
co-organized with Future Salon, www.futuresalon.org) and save following
dates for much more to come :
- June 4, 12.30-1.30pm, Social Network Analysis of the Economy, with
Don Steiny (in the framework of the Entrepeneurship & Venture Capital
course of the California School of International Management. Contacts :
Bill Willoughby or Frank Aguilar, (619) 702-9400, www.csim.edu)
- June 6, 6pm, Michel Audet, Minister of Economic and Regional
Development and Research from Québec
- June 7, evening, BioCruise on the San Francisco Bay
- June 8, 6.30pm, “BioArt vs BioTech", a dialogue between a Professor
of Art and a Serial Biotech Entrepreneur, an exhibition of art work
related to biotech commissioned specially for BIO2004, and a lot of
networking with food and beverages
- June 9, 6-9pm, Cal-IT pre-London conference (www.cal-it.com)
swissnex is at 730 Montgomery Street, San Francisco, CA 94111 (between
Washington and Jackson Streets). There is nearby parking at 621
Sansome, 622 Washington, 800 Kearny, 170 Columbus, among others. For
directions :
http://www.swissnex.org/about_location.html
Looking forward to welcoming you ...
The swissnex Team
----------------------------------------------------------
FRIDAY MAY 21, 2004, 7.30 - 10am
----------------------------------------------------------
«Why we play games - gaming beyond games»
with Nicole Lazzaro, President and Founder of XEOD Design
Free event, but registration required at :
http://www.ScienceLink.org/about/events.htm
Life as Game
Life is a game where men and women are merely players. Just as film and
television eclipsed the stage and literature as the dominant mediums of
expression in the 20th century, computer games are emerging as the new
ambassador of culture and taste for the 21st. As over 50% of US
households play some form of computer games, next generation products
and services will look increasingly to games for ways to connect with
new consumers, how to become more emotionally and mentally engaging,
and to seize the opportunity to offer emotions and challenges for
optimal human experiences. Future products and services, work, and
other cultural artifacts will provide better customer experiences by
carefully crafting a consumer's cognitive and emotional responses.
People will play more games in more places. What happens when the
services offered by today's laptop become cheap enough to print on a
candy wrapper? Mobile gaming will improve other experiences such as
interacting with friends and waiting in line. Augmented reality games
break out into the real world through Geo-casching or games of tag
through a city. With ubiquitous computing soon everything from your
mobile phone, to your front door to the ketchup bottle in a diner could
contain enough smarts to offer services. Will everything from your car,
elevator, to coffeepot contains a screen and therefore the potential to
host a game? Will we surf the net from our salt shaker or will it
provide other opportunities to delight us and engage our attention?
Today everyone may not play computer games, but as game designers
create increasingly compelling and expressive games their influence on
other media and culture will be profound. Plus the generation raised on
games (today's college students all played Oregon Trail in grade
school) will play more games as adults than their parents did. Already
we have the automotive industry consulting the designers of racing
games on how to make more exciting cars, and politicians such as Howard
Dean using web-games to teach democracy and increase interest in their
campaigns.
Like games, products create experiences. Cutting edge product designers
now focus on customer experiences not products. Designers aim for
engagement in addition to making something better/faster/cheaper, and
easier to use or market. Nowhere is this more true than in the field of
computer games with its fierce competition for a world market valued at
over $10 Billion dollars a year (surpassing Hollywood's domestic US box
office receipts). And this is just the beginning. To make truly
mass-market games designers are racing to innovate beyond graphical
realism and high scores to create deeper player experiences.
Understanding how games create emotions can make products and services
more engaging. For example remove all challenge from a task or job and
it becomes boring.
Games will re-design how we work and shop. Employers will use games to
screen potential hires for 3D reasoning skills and train them to solve
problems with multiple variables. Games will change consumer processes
such as the game of buying and selling on eBay or the games and dining
experience at Dave and Busters (Chuckie Cheese for adults). Even
software applications will include more fun to increase appeal like the
artwork for Roxio's Toast CD burning application, or by offering
features to be gamed as in Orkut, Google's social networking software.
Not only is life is getting more game like, games and elements of play
are used to increase product appeal. Adding playful elements to goods
and services increase the attraction of everything from advertising
messages, to South West's in-flight safety announcements to the design
of public spaces. We see the increasing importance of emotions in
design already in products such as the playful squid shape of the
Phillip Stark juicer, Danger's Sidekick mobile phone, and in the
pleasing octave chords produced by Seqway's acoustically designed
motors. Understanding how games create emotions offers further insight
into how to make other products and services more enjoyable and even
improve the quality of life.
Why We Play Games
Experiences that tap into who we are create emotion, produce flow, and
offer more compelling experiences. What we know about games improves
how we design other aspects of life. But will game penetration go so
far as to change serious processes such as monitoring nuclear reactors,
security screening, or air traffic control to improve attention and
employee motivation?
To answer these questions we first need to understand what adults like
about playing current games. As the first phase of designing new types
of gaming experiences we needed to know. So XEODesign conducted a study
with 30 hard core and casual players to understand what people like
most about playing and how games unlock player emotion. This research
is the first step in defining what makes Player Experiences so
compelling and offers insight into how we can increase enjoyment of
non-game activities and products.
XEODesign's results provide a glimpse as to why people play games,
establishing 4 Keys to how games produce emotion through doing. These
results also contain insights into how to make other products and
services more enjoyable.
The Speaker
Nicole Lazzaro, President and founder of XEODesign®, Inc., provides
over 13 years of extensive expertise in designing Player Experiences
for mass market entertainment and has consulted on games and consumer
creativity products for Sony, Leap Frog, Mattel, The Learning Company,
Mindscape, Broderbund, Roxio, and Maxis. She has enhanced the player
experience of Sony Online's multiplayer games shows such as Jeopardy as
well as pumped up the fun for more casual entertainment experiences
such as Cosmopolitan Virtual Makeover 2, Mad Magazine Archive, Mavis
Beacon Teaches Typing, Easy CD Creator, and Toast. Nicole contributed
to the birth of the Bay Area Multimedia Industry by Co-Founding the
Multimedia Studies Program at San Francisco State University. With over
150 classes it has trained over 9,000 students over the past 10 years.
As part of this faculty she taught several classes including Interface
Design and Rapid Prototyping as well as wrote the program's
instructor's guide on
Interface
Design. As past Chapter Vice President of the IICS she also organized
lectures and tripled society membership. She has spoken at several
previous GDCs on the topic of Rapid Prototyping and continues give
workshops and writes articles for several industry publications. Prior
to founding XEODesign® in 1992 Nicole developed interactive health
education games in Berkeley and was a successful consultant in New York
City creating interactive media installations for Chemical Bank, IBM,
the Johnson Space Center, National Geographic, and Intel. Prior to her
fascination with Player Experiences and games she worked in film and
earned a degree in Psychology from Stanford University.
Free event, but registration required at :
http://www.ScienceLink.org/about/events.htm
______________________________________________________________
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swissnex, San Francisco
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Received on Sat May 15 2004 - 21:17:35 PDT
