archive.Joe Lamantia.com

I’ve joined the Johnnies!  The good people at Johnny Holland Magazine just published Learning From Games: A Language For Designing Emotion.  This article is a introduction to the ideas I talk about under the heading ‘Architectures of Fun’, which is my perspective on the great research and design framework built by leading games consultant Nicole Lazzaro, of Xeo Design.  Check it out, and let the rest of the Johnny community know what you think about this powerful language for designing the emotional elements of experiences.

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.