archive.Joe Lamantia.com

A quick rundown on my fall speaking schedule so far.

First up is BlogTalk 2009, in Jeju, Korea on September 15 and 16. There I’ll be talking about ‘The Architecture of Fun’ – sharing a new design language for emotion that’s been in use in the game design industry for quite a while.  [Disclosure: While it’s a privilege to be on the program with so many innovative and insightful social media figures, I’m also really looking forward to the food in Korea ]

Next up is EuroIA in Copenhagen, September 26 and 27.  For the latest edition of this largest gathering of the user experience community in Europe, I’ll reprise my Architecture of Fun talk.

Wrapping up the schedule so far is the Janus Boye conference in Aarhus, November 3 – 6.  Here  I’m presenting a half-day tutorial titled Designing Information Experiences.  This is an extensive, detailed tutorial that anyone working in information management will benefit from, as it combines two of my passions; designing for people, and using frameworks to enhance solution scope and effectiveness.

Here’s the description from the official program:

When designing for information retrieval experiences, the customer must always be right. This tutorial will give you the tools to uncover user needs and design the context for delivering information, whether that be through search, taxonomies or something entirely different.

What you will learn:
•    A broadly applicable method for understanding user needs in diverse information access contexts
•    A collection of information retrieval patterns relevant to multiple settings such as enterprise search and information access, service design, and product and platform management

We will also discuss the impact of organizational and cultural factors on design decisions and why it is essential, that you frame business and technology challenges in the right way.

The tutorial builds on lessons learned from a large customer project focusing on transforming user experience. The scope of this program included ~25 separate web-delivered products, a large document repository, integrated customer service and support processes, content management, taxonomy and ontology creation, and search and information retrieval solutions. Joe will share the innovate methods and surprising insight that emerged in the process.

Janus Boye gathers leading local and international practitioners, and is a new event for me, so I’m very much looking forward to it.

I hope to see some of you at one or more of these gatherings that altogether span half the world!

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.

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.