archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Here’s my presentation from the Italian IA Summit on Killzone.com as a leading example of the next generation of Massively Social On-line Games.
As usual, I try to share some of the best thinking on these ideas; in this case I quote liberally from Nicole Lazarro. (I hope she takes this as a compliment.) Her insights into the emotional drivers for social and game experiences and the nature of cross media are – no surprise – right on, and coming true years after first publication.
Some of the more eye-opening material I discovered while looking into the design of this game / community hybrid concerns the direct connection between game mechanics (a design question), the space of possible choices for players, the emotions these choices inspire and encourage, and the resulting experience of the game environment.
From the functional to the psychological, it seems there really is an ‘architecture of fun’ for both games and social experiences. It is just another example of how architecture of any (and all) kinds is an enormous influencing factor on peoples’ experiences.
This is the first of two parts – stay tuned for the follow-up, once we clear the disclosure question.
A slidecast will follow shortly, now that my laptop is back in working order, and I can fire up ScreenFlow.

If you’re keen to help shape the way that the user experiences of the future are conceived and defined, join Andrew Hinton, Matthew Milan, Livia Labate, and yours truly in a full-day workshop / seminar titled “Beyond Findability: Reframing IA Practice & Strategy for Turbulent Times” at the 2009 IA Summit in Memphis.
We’ve got a lot of great material to share – and shape – on where this new[ish] discipline is headed, from four complementary but distinct professional perspectives (digital agency, in-house services group, management, design consultancy), shared by leading practitioners.

Here’s a quick description:
“Changes are happening fast in technology, the economy, and even the various User Experience professions. In the midst of such turbulence, conventional Information Architecture can have trouble seeming fully relevant. Some may see it as a commodity, or a narrow specialty that has little to do with the game-changing emergence of social media, ubiquitous & mobile computing, and the rest.
This full-day workshop will address such concerns with a boundary-pushing foray into IA craft and strategy. We’ll show how core IA skills are more relevant and strategically important than ever, and we’ll explore how we can extend IA to its full potential in 21st century UX design.”

Read more about Beyond Findability here.

Register here.

See you in Memphis!

I’ll be speaking at the Italian IA Summit next week on some of the exciting work MediaCatalyst has been doing in the area of massively social on-line games. We’re the digital agency behind Killzone.com, the integrated on-line community for the Killzone game series, which is just about to release it’s second installment (selling well – KillZone 2 is #10 on Amazon, in pre-orders alone).
I think hybrid experiences that combine games dynamism and sophisticated social spaces are a very important part of the future for interactive experiences, and the organizers have been kind enough to offer us the opening keynote, so if you can get a ticket to Forli, we’d love to see you in the audience.

Here’s the full description of our talk:

Co-evolution of a Socially Rich Game Experience and Community Architecture

What form will the next generation of interactive experiences take? The exact nature of the future is always unknown. But now that everything is ‘social’, and games are a fully legitimate cultural phenomenon more profitable and more popular than Hollywood films, we can expect to see the emergence of experiences that combine aspects of games and social media in new ways.

One example of a hybrid experience that combines game elements and complex social interactions is the cross-media environment formed by the popular Killzone games and their companion site Killzone.com. By design, the Killzone games and the Killzone.com site have co-evolved over time to interconnect on many levels. In the most recent version (planned for public release in early 2009), the game console and web site experiences work in concert to enhance gameplay with sophisticated social dynamics, and provide an active community destination that is ‘synchronized’ with events in the game in real time. The hybrid Killzone environment allows active game players and community members to move back and forth between game and web experiences, with simultaneous awareness of and connection to people and events in both settings.

Leading games researcher and designer Nicole Lazzaro calls these hybrid experiences ‘Massively Social On-line Games’. In these types of interactive experiences, players build meaningful histories for individual characters and groups of all sizes through competitive and cooperative interactions that take place in the linked game and community contexts. Game mechanisms and social architecture elements are designed to encourage the accumulation of shared experiences, group identities, and collective histories. Over time, designers hope shared experiences will serve as the basis for a body of social memory.

This case study will follow the co-evolution of Killzone and Killzone.com, revisiting major business and design decisions in context, examining the changing nature of the community, and considering the lessons learned at each stage of the development of this early example of the next generation of massively social on-line game.