Here’s the talk I did at Playful on 31.10.08. It’s basically about the changing nature of scores in games and how scores are starting to infect everything.
Iain Tait – High Scores Talk at Playful London 31.10.08 from Iain Tait on Vimeo.
Sorry it’s taken me so long to get it up online, but I had to get the video off the guys, and then it turned out to have been shot from a strange angle where you’ve got no idea what’s going on. So I did a bit of jiggery-pokery and combined the video with the Keynote presentation and synched it up as best I could. And the audio is a bit muffled, but hopefully you can make out what’s going on…
“get it up” pfff
Being a gamer nerd who loves stats this is one of the best talks I’ve seen in a while.
It also touches on something I love to do and people seem to be doing more and thats visualizing their life. usually through numbers but other things.
http://www.bannerblog.com.au/news/2008/08/visualizing_your_life_the_non_new_age_way.php
Again great talk and thanks for formatting it so well. Very slick.
Iain this is really interesting. I’m doing a PhD studying creative processes in advertising, have been looking recently at measurement of digital etc with a couple of companies, and scores is a well interesting topic area.
The shift you highlight from ‘In-game’ scores to ‘real-life’ scores is spot on…having recently started posting bits from my research at my blog I see how ‘important’ all this is eg who reads, who comments, give me a score etc…makes me think back to an idea I had as a (overly competitive) child, that when we died there’d be some god like character who was a guide and you could go back over everything you did in your life, loads of stats; how many cups of tea you drank, how many times you said grapefruit, literally anything you wanted….maps of where you’d been, like a trail – and then you could map someone else’s physical trail on top of it showing where you met and nearly met.. You could also review your dreams, go back through your thoughts, your conscious, your subconscious…and just get scores, stats, replays, for everything.
And lastly, yes to Ashley too: visualize your life. Keeping score doesn’t have to be petty, immature or competitive, it can just be interesting.
Night, good blog, good Poke, well done.
Hey this is really interesting.
I watched this a while ago and was reminded of it when I read about Lady Greenfield’s attack on digital in the House of Lords in today’s Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/24/social-networking-site-changing-childrens-brains?commentpage=1
I do think that largely what she’s said about social networks is wrong and I talk about that more in a post I’ve written on my site.
But in light of this presentation I was wondering what you think about it. Do you think that we are breeding a new generation who are going to increasingly transfer games and all of the structures and rules that they contain (of which scores are one part) into real life?
@steve_cable scores are really important http://tinyurl.com/9wa4pw