Death Maps and the Science of Fun

Awhile back, I wrote about how tricky it is to engineer a fun gameplay experience. It requires a careful combination of intuition and really careful data analysis. It's been on top of my mind lately, because we're about to start testing some big changes to the qtoro interface. I'm a bit nervous, but I've decided to let the data do the talking.

Looking for some inspiration, I came across a great article by Clive Thompson about the development and testing that went into Halo3. It describes the rigorous approach that the folks in Bungee Labs have taken to building and testing games. I was really inspired. From the article:

Because games were becoming a new focus for Microsoft, the company had built a dedicated usability lab for stress-testing its titles. Bungie tapped Pagulayan, a recent PhD graduate in experimental psychology from the University of Cincinnati, to refine Halo 2 in the facility. Pagulayan's team quickly went to work building tools for extracting gameplay data, including the location of each player and when and where they fired weapons, rode vehicles, killed aliens, and died. They ran weekly tests, analyzing 2,300 hours of play by 400 gamers in under two months. Over and over again, they found snags — a mutant alien that was far too powerful, a lava pit that too many players fell into.

First, I don't know what Pagulayan's PhD work looked like before, but I bet it didn't involve uncovering rogue lava pits. More importantly, though, it was just great to see game play elevated to true science. The Bungee guys aren't slaves to their data. They had intuition about what made a game fun, and that was baked into the backbone of Halo. But, they also trust the numbers to refine gameplay. We're starting to follow a similar approach for Qtoro, and in addition to your comments, we're eager to hear how it works.

(PS - the image shown is actually Half Life 2 data, not Halo data. It can be found here)

New Features In, Old Bugs Out!

We're happy to announce a bundle of new features on Qtoro today! Here are some things you might notice if you're not too busy racking up a high score:

• Hot Questions / Recent Comments: We thought it would be fun to share the questions that are getting attention across Qtoro. You can jump to questions that are generating lots of thumbs-up votes and sparking conversations. Like Altay's man Mims, we want everyone playing qtoro to know this is why I'm hot.
• Anonymous Comments: Yes, we know this might generate some spam, but we're willing to give us a shot. It might be naive, but we have a lot of faith in our users :)
• My Alerts: This was a frequently requested feature by all of our authors. In your profile, you can see who has recently made comments on your questions at a glance. So, smart guy, why not just call it 'my recent comments'? Well, we have some bigger plans for your alerts, so stay tuned!
  

It also seems like a good time to thank some of our early users who have been so supportive of Qtoro. I've been totally amazed by the thoughtful comments we get back, and by the brain-stumping questions people are coming up with! Keep the comments and questions coming, and we'll keep making Qtoro a little better every day.

Thanks!

Ben

Ken Jennings: Morman Badass

I think that Ken Jennings was probably the best thing to happen to Jeopardy. During Ken's epic 74 game winning streak, ratings jumped 22%. I couldn't stop watching the guy -- he knew everything and knew it INSTANTLY.

He was also the nicest merciless competitor I'd ever seen. This guy made the 07 Patriots look positively charitable. With that goofy grin, he'd happily double or triple his opponents' totals, and walked off the show with almost $3M dollars of winnings. Anyway, I saw Ken had a book out on trivia culture called Braniac, that I'm eagerly awaiting in the mail, and I decided it would be interesting to learn a bit more about him. Without further adeu, here a few things you might not have known about Ken:

• Ken always found new ways to write his name. I especially like the homage to web 2.0 and apple coverflow in the bottom row
  
• He grew up in Seoul, South Korea (1981–1992) and Singapore (1992–1996), where his father worked for an international law firm and then as Asia Pacific Division Counsel of Oracle Corporation
• Jennings identifies himself as an avid comic book and movie buff with a website listing his top 2,000 favorite movies.
• During his Jeopardy! winning streak, Jennings was a software engineer for a healthcare-placement firm in Salt Lake City, Utah.
• On Final Jeopardy and the Daily Doubles he almost always wagered an amount that could bring his total to an even multiple of $1,000
  
• Prior to his 30th game, Jennings did not want to beat the $52,000 single-day record of former five-day champion Brian Weikle just "for the sake of beating it," so he intentionally tied Weikle's record three

(by the way, all of these facts are from the 'trivia section' on Ken's profile. Trivia sections are 'strongly discouraged' according to wikipedia...oh, the irony).

Anyway, here's to you Ken. You are my hero.

Ben

Switching Directions: From Trivia to Interactive Conversations

I have fond memories of You Don't Know Jack. For those who have never heard of it, YDKJ was a trivia game made by Jellyvision. Up to 10 players could compete head-to-head, a big innovation at the time. Pitched as a place "where high culture and pop culture collide" what was really memorable about the game was the witty announcer who had a smartass retort depending on which answer you picked and where you were in the game.

Yesterday, I was wondering what had become of the franchise, and I looked up Jellyvision. This was the quote from the homepage.

Jellyvision has evolved its business to include not just virtual game show hosts, but virtual teachers, insurance agents, salespeople, you name it. Using Interactive Conversation, Jellyvision is helping to shift the focus of the web from "navigation" to "conversation."

From trivia to interactive conversation algorithms! It's amazing to see how startups can reinvent themselves, change focus, and find niches for themselves. I personally fear the day that a sassy online insurance agent reaches through cyberspace to start interactively pitching me, but knowing that the folks at Jellyvision were behind it will make me smile.

I hope to make Qtoro as engaging as YDKJ. Stay tuned for some fun gameplay features rolling out in the next few weeks.

Educational Games: Launch Ball

Altay and I were really excited to see that Qtoro was included in Larry Ferlazzo's list of the 'Best Educational Games of 2007.' Educational gaming is an area that I'm especially interested in, and I'm happy that Larry took the time to put a list togethor of his favorites. There are some gems -- from the ever-popular Free Rice, to an incredibly addictive game called "Launch Ball" hosted on sciencemusem.org.

Launchball has a simple premise: get a ball from a starting location to a 'goal point.' At your disposal are a wide array of simple machines -- from wind turbines, to ramps, and pulleys. The game gives lots of opportunities for deductive problem solving, and also gives kids a great tool to get a feel for basic physics. Games like LaunchBall do a terrific job taking advantage of 2 aspects of gaming that are an absolute god-send for learning: repetition and feedback.

Most students who master an academic discipline, whether math or literature or coding, do so by practicing. A LOT. Great game designers are experts at making repetition fun. How many times will a kid play the same song on Guitar Hero, just to beat the game. It's that sense of accomplishment combined with achieving discrete and measurable goals that makes games so addictive. Just imagine if kids applied that kind of diligence to arithmetic. Now, repetition alone, isn't always enough. To really accelerate learning, kids need feedback on what they've done. A challenge in traditional classrooms is tha the feedback loop on new work is slow. It can take a week to get a graded assignment back. Tutors are better - they can provide more real-time feedback, but of course, they are expensive. What makes games like Launch Ball so exciting is tha tthey break the tradeoff between fast feedback and scalability. I think as the casual gaming space continues to develop, we're going to see a lot more developing in this area.

Anyway, back to Launch Ball. Aside from being an addictive way to spend a few hours (there are 30 levels), Iaunch Ball lets people build and share their own levels. It's a ton of fun, and reminds me of building mini-minature golf holes back in elementary school to learn the basics of geometry and physics.

Good fun, and well worth a visit. Just be sure to set aside a few hours of time.

Ben

Eat Your Trivia

One of our big goals with Qtoro is to let people play trivia anywhere and on any topic. We think learning can be fun and trivia is a great way to get interested in new topics.

Somehow, though, even as a trivia enthusiast, I was a little weirded out a few years ago when P&G experimented with printing trivia on pringles chips. Somehow, this takes the fact under the snapple cap just a little bit too far.

That's not to say that food-printing is an all bad idea. I think the
idea of laser engraved fruit labels -- called 'Fruit Tattoos" is a nice way to replace those little stickers. The NY Times had a cool article about it here.