Excellent presentation I found on SlideShare

Titled "Meaningful Play. Getting Gamification Right". Lots of good stuff here.

Three key attributes:

• Make believe, Rules, challenges
• Goals, Feedback
• Free, safe play space, Shared toy objects

Time for me to wake up and get back into this. I've been sponsoring/supporting projects on KickStarter and thinking about the possibilities of defining a project and seeking funding through that mechanism.

Where to start

This weekend, Shawn and I went for a walk and talk and took a bunch of photographs in downtown Austin. One of the main topics of conversation was Mastery Quest, and how we get started.

As you probably know, I have a strong emotional connection to the area of software development, and am committed to helping to improve the learning and recognition in that space. I've been wondering, though, whether that area is the right one for us to start in.  It's large, complex, has many nuances, lots of languages and environments and platforms. Is that too big for us to bite off right out of the gate?

Shawn, not being a techie, and sharing my love of photography, posed the question "How about if we start with photography?" While it's got no less nuances and richness than software development, it does seem to me to allow for a much easier start. It's an art, a craft, a science, an avocation, a career choice...

And as with software development, there are also many sites out there that already contain some part (even in some cases LARGE parts) of what we'd like to see as part of Mastery Quest.

Consider the Digital Photography School. It offers/they offer tips, challenges, a community. And the Photography Forum, which offers many of the same things. At this point in time, I would readily recommend either to someone who wants to learn about photography. What I feel they lack, however, is the combination of fun and structure that we want to create. There's no shortage of information or challenge. However, if I come along and say "I want to improve a bit every week, and I want to focus on certain areas," it's entirely up to me.

That's not a bad thing. Don't misunderstand me. I think it's important for each of us to take responsibility for our own growth and development and learning. But I also think it's important to integrate the lessons from gaming.

What I'd like to see us do is partner with these sites and figure out how to incorporate the lessons and tips and challenges they've created into a larger framework/structure. A lot of it is already there. Now let's add the fun, and the "experience points", and the recognitions.  Not prizes and awards, but recognition of things accomplished through avatars and badges and such.

What do you think? 

Learning and Networking

I love the Mastery Quest idea, but I have little experience with World of Warcraft or other online games. My teammates play Quake every day, but I've only watched and listened to their girlish screams and giggles.

So I was interested to read an article in today's New York Times about couples who met playing WoW. The article says that WoW is not only a game where monsters are meant to be vanquished, it is also "a social networking experience." Players "meet and gab via the game's instant message feature, or through voice communication software."

This got me thinking. One of my most important sources of learning is my professional network. If I'm getting an error I can't figure out from some tool, or need to learn a particular new skill, I often ask one of the user groups I'm in or ping my tweeps. I've gotten a huge amount of help this way over the years. It's also how I find out about important blog posts, articles or books. Conversely, I try to pay this forward and help others learn.

Could Mastery Quest provide a professional network opportunity as well as a way to build and measure skills?

Certifications? Hah!

One of the things that spurs me on is the number of different kinds of certifications out there, and how meaningless so many of them are.  Maybe that's only true in the IT / software development space.  Regardless, there are some prime examples of what's wrong with the concept.

• "Certified Scrum Master": attend the course, and you're a CSM. Ridiculous.
• ICAgile certified classes: ditto
• PMP (PMI certification): might have a little more meat, but it's out of date, incredibly cumbersome, and doesn't really show whether you are a project manager, just that you have the knowledge about what a project manager does.

And so on.

One of my goals for Mastery Quest is to create community-driven, community-recognized, and employer-accepted status as people start to achieve and "level up".

Lessons from Jane McGonigal

Her web site.

Quotes from the book

"Reality is Broken"

"The truth is this: in today’s society, computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy. Games are providing rewards that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is not. They are bringing us together in ways that reality is not."

"Why would we want to waste the power of games on escapist entertainment? Why would we want to waste the power of games by trying to squelch the phenomenon altogether? Perhaps we should consider a third idea. Instead of teetering on the tipping point between games and reality, what if we threw ourselves off the scale and tried something else entirely?"

"When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation."

"Teasingly trash-talking allows us to provoke each other’s negative emotions in a very mild way—we stimulate a very small amount of anger or hurt or embarrassment. This tiny provocation has two powerful effects. First, it confirms trust: the person doing the teasing is demonstrating the capacity to hurt, but simultaneously showing that the intention is not to hurt. Just like a dog might play-bite another dog to show that it wants to be friends, we bare our teeth to each other in order to remind each other that we could, but never really would, hurt each other. Conversely, by allowing someone else to tease us, we confirm our willingness to be in a vulnerable position. We are actively demonstrating our trust in the other person’s regard for our emotional well-being."

"By letting someone tease us, we’re also helping them feel powerful. We’re giving them a moment to enjoy higher status in our social relationship—and humans are intensely attuned to shifts in social status. By letting someone else experience higher status, we intensify their positive feelings for us. Why? Because we naturally like people more when they enhance our own social status."

"Happiness hacking is the experimental design practice of translating positive-psychology research findings into game mechanics. It’s a way to make happiness activities feel significantly less hokey, and to put them in a bigger social context. Game mechanics also allow you to escalate the difficulty of happiness activities and inject them with novelty, so they stay challenging and fresh."

FIX # 1 : UNNECESSARY OBSTACLES Compared with games, reality is too easy. Games challenge us with voluntary obstacles and help us put our personal strengths to better use.

FIX # 2 : EMOTIONAL ACTIVATION Compared with games, reality is depressing. Games focus our energy, with relentless optimism, on something we’re good at and enjoy. We are finally perfectly poised to harness the potential of games to make us happy and improve our everyday quality of life.

FIX # 3 : MORE SATISFYING WORK Compared with games, reality is unproductive. Games give us clearer missions and more satisfying, hands-on work.

FIX #4: BETTER HOPE OF SUCCESS Compared with games, reality is hopeless. Games eliminate our fear of failure and improve our chances for success.

FIX #5: STRONGER SOCIAL CONNECTIVITY Compared with games, reality is disconnected. Games build stronger social bonds and lead to more active social networks. The more time we spend interacting within our social networks, the more likely we are to generate a subset of positive emotions known as “prosocial emotions.”

FIX #6: EPIC SCALE Compared with games, reality is trivial. Games make us a part of something bigger and give epic meaning to our actions.

FIX # 7 : WHOLEHEARTED PARTICIPATION Compared with games, reality is hard to get into. Games motivate us to participate more fully in whatever we’re doing.

FIX # 8 : MEANINGFUL REWARDS WHEN WE NEED THEM MOST Compared with games, reality is pointless and unrewarding. Games help us feel more rewarded for making our best effort.

FIX # 9 : MORE FUN WITH STRANGERS Compared with games, reality is lonely and isolating. Games help us band together and create powerful communities from scratch.

FIX #10: HAPPINESS HACKS Compared with games, reality is hard to swallow. Games make it easier to take good advice and try out happier habits.

FIX # 11 : A SUSTAINABLE ENGAGEMENT ECONOMY Compared with games, reality is unsustainable. The gratifications we get from playing games are an infinitely renewable resource.

FIX # 12 : MORE EPIC WINS Compared with games, reality is unambitious. Games help us define awe-inspiring goals and tackle seemingly impossible social missions together.

FIX # 13: TEN THOUSAND HOURS COLLABORATING Compared with games, reality is disorganized and divided. Games help us make a more concerted effort—and over time, they give us collaboration superpowers.

FIX # 14 : MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER FORESIGHT Reality is stuck in the present. Games help us imagine and invent the future together.

Here's part of it! SkillShare

The idea of members of the global community teaching each other is a part of what I envision for what I'm calling "Mastery Quest".  I think that SkillShare is powerful and exciting.

http://www.skillshare.com/site/about