May 18: Applied Game Design Workshop, San Francisco CA
by ScottK on March 30th 2011
Level-up Your Product Design
Do you want to harness the power of games to create more engaging, compelling products and services? This dynamic, hands-on workshop will introduce you to the tools and techniques of Applied Game Design, and teach you how to apply insights and techniques from social gaming to your projects. We’ll reveal the process and techniques behind gaming’s biggest hits, and equip you with powertools for injecting smart game design into your product development process.
Best Practices and Hands-on Learning
During this Workshop, you’ll learn key insights from gaming psychology, techniques and best practices. We’ll reveal the best practices behind some of gaming’s biggest hits — including The Sims, Rock Band, Farmville, and Frontierville — and lead you through a series of hands-on design exercises for applying these ideas to your project. You’ll learn how to craft a gaming experience that drives lasting engagement and retention – and how to apply smart game thinking to your current project.
Key Takeaways
• 7 core concepts for applying game design to your product experience
• How dynamics, mechanics & aesthetics work together to drive engagement
• Design for Social: bringing Bartles 4 Player Types into the Facebook age
• Design for Progress: game mechanics that “light the way” towards mastery
• Design for Engagement: build fun/delight/satisfaction into your core activity loop
• Design for Retention: use Social Engagement Loops to drive Lifecycle engagement
Instructor
Amy Jo Kim, Ph.D. is social game designer who’s worked on Rock Band, The Sims, Ultima Online, eBay, Netflix, Lumosity, MetroGirl, family.com and there.com. Amy Jo is a world-renowned speaker and educator – currently adjunct professor of Game Design at USC’s Digital Media school, recently named top US-based game design school. She also wrote Community Building on the Web (2000), a design handbook for digital communities that’s used worldwide at game studios & universities