In this panel, Demetri Detsaridis (General Manager, Zynga New York), Michael Fergusson (CEO, Ayogo) and Nicole Lazzaro (CEO, XEODesign) discussed the overlap between behavioral psychology and game design and development, as well as the possibilities of better employing psychological insights in the creation of games. As dramatic as the impact of statistical analysis and behavioral economics has been on gaming and the games industry, applied psychology has largely remained the province of player research departments at AAA console developers…or been overlooked entirely. Bringing this field to the fore could be another sea change for the industry, pushing gaming even further into the mass market or (depending on your perspective) pulling games one more step away from becoming art. What can we learn from psychology, how can we use it to understand what we’re already doing, and can it help us build better games in the future?

As always, if you have any questions or comments, you can contact Michael Fergusson at Michael[at]ayogo.com

Hiccups, Canada’s most-watched new Canadian comedy series returns to CTV with the Season 2 premiere on Monday, May 30 at 8 p.m. ET. In the lead up to the show’s premiere, Ayogo’s design, tech and social media teams have launched a multimedia campaign. Our engagement-centric strategy includes the creation of a Twitter channel and a content-rich Facebook fan page, which features sneak peek trailers, an integrated YouTube channel, exclusive webisodes, interviews, behind the scenes footage and a Facebook game called “What would Millie do?” Ayogo’s social media team has also been busy in the Twitterverse and Facebook world engaging with fans and building a Hiccups community around the show.

Ayogo will launch the Facebook game on June1st and will release a new game weekly for the duration of the show’s run.

For more information about Hiccups, check out their website.

The Health Nutz Facebook Game launches March 8th, four weeks before the official TV launch on APTN on Tuesday, March 29th (the show launches on HD APTN on Tuesday March 22) and Ayogo will release a new game each week until the end of the show’s series run in May.

Check out the Health Nutz Facebook game here or find the behind-the-scenes videos on the Heath Nutz YouTube Channel. The Health Nutz website will tell you all about the show and its cast, crew and creators.

Courtesy of Flickr's NontrivialMatt

Early last week, Zynga announced the release of their newest social game called Cityville. It’s one of a growing number of city-building games on Facebook. Others include Tiny Town, My Town, Towner, Social City, YoVille, Bubble Island and Tiki Resort.

Cityville resembles the classic city building game SimCity, at first glance anyway. However doesn’t require you to build and connect power lines. It lets you create and manage a city from scratch by building roads, homes, schools, parks, restaurants and other businesses. There are no taxes in the game, but you’ll make money by trading goods with other cities and collecting rent.

For almost a year, Ayogo has been kicking around the idea of a city building game that took the whole genre more seriously. We think that a collaborative, social, city simulation is the perfect environment in which to stimulate and educate about the relationship between urban living and ecology, between density and energy and, most of all, between responsibility and hedonism. We know that Zynga won’t be interested in having that conversation, but we sure are.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we have many exciting news to tell you about. The first bit of news had to do with us going (hopefully) to SXSW. Our panel topic was selected for the community voting process and the voting opens tomorrow! Make sure to visit the SXSW Panelpicker to sign up so you can vote.  In other news…

The game was designed with the goal of helping adults with specific lifestyle and nutritional challenges, in particular those people living with diabetes or who are at the risk of developing diabetes. The great thing is that anyone on Facebook can play the game and benefit from it.

What else?

We think the game is just one example of how social media and social games are transforming the way people learn through innovative education. It’s designed to use in-game incentives and socialization to modify real-world behaviours, helping people improve their lifestyles.  While there are educational games that improve learning skills and games geared towards “solving” social issues, we think that what we’re doing with incremental rewards in our games and how they’re used to positively motivate change in behaviour is really unique. We also think there’s a lot of potential in using our gaming techniques to motivate positive behaviour in other socially beneficial ways (environment, philanthropy, health).

You can watch the video to learn more about the game or just visit www.healthseekergame.org.

Here is the link to the official press release and links to a few spots in Vancouver’s tech-blog community and in the U.S. diabetes community that have already covered the game. You can leave a comment or email me victoria@ayogo.com, if you have a question.

Courtesy of Flickr's kenjonbro

To our loyal Ayogo blog readers, thanks for all your recent comments and re-tweets. It’s good to know what you’ve been up to — we really appreciate it! In terms of what we’ve been up to, we’re getting ready for a huge summer.

To start, Pet Pupz, a community-based virtual pet  app (originally a Facebook game launched on Facebook awhile back) is now available in the Apple AppStore – and therefore your smartphone and the iPad! You can download it here.

As for coming attractions…

We have an exciting announcement to share with you on June 14th and then one more later on in the month. The first announcement involves a topic on serious games and health, and coincidentally, it was also the topic of a panel Michael was recently a part of. Terry Lavender from the Vancouver Observer covered the panel at last week’s Vancouver Digital Week. I also attended the event and I was excited to see the enthusiasm for “serious games.”

On the panel, Michael spoke about game design for casual social games, and in particular about game design in games that aren’t just played for fun, but also may encourage and incentivize certain “serious” behaviours. Here is an excerpt from Terry Lavender’s post,

Why do kids willingly do chores in FarmVille (a Facebook-based game) and World of Warcraft, but not in real life, asked Michael Fergusson, CEO of local casual game company Ayogo. The answer, he said, is the appeal of competition and challenge. Ayogo is working with a large health research institute to see whether a health-based videogame can actually motivate people to develop a healthy lifestyle. But in order to work, the game has to be fun first, with the health benefits strictly secondary, according to Fergusson.

As for some cool statistics that I picked up from the conference, did you know that….

* 1 billion people see a Google page every day
* 55% of people online are women
* Social media users are more positive about brands than non-users
* There are 5 billion mobile phones in the world, compared to 1 billion personal computers and 1.1 billion televisions
* 75% of Canadians have mobile phones
* Canadians send 100 million text messages every day

Oh, catch us at Launch Party 9 on June 17th in Vancouver. Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington is just one of the celebrity judges at the event. In the meantime, please show us some love and VOTE for our video!

Courtesy of jasoneppink

Can social game designers learn something from child’s play? You be the judge. I came across an interesting social game design article from Mike Sellers and his blog, Online Alchemy, and I thought I’d share the link with you.  Sellers’ blog post examines the close relationship between the emergence of gameplay in popular social games and the path of individual psychological development of play.  Why is this so interesting from a game design and business perspective?

If you’ve been following my blog, then you know how interested I am in the meaning of play and its fundamental role in human behavior. It’s not just for fun, but it’s a biologically based, evolutionary contribution to human survival and development, a crucial vehicle for cultural learning and cultural transmission. Seller’s blog post discusses a 1930′s study published by Mildred Parten looking at the development of play in children. Simply put, there are 6 stages of play that correspond to a child’s physical, cognitive and social development. Here are some the developmental stages of individual play:

* Solitary play: Playing by yourself (ignoring others around you)

* Onlooker play: Noticing others around you, but not playing with them

* Parallel play: Implicitly recognizing the play of others around you, doing some of the same things and playing in the same cognitive space, without open social interaction. (Think of two kids building sand castles near each other that resemble each other, even though they never said a word or joined together at all.)

* Associative play: Light social interaction with others nearby, but without involving play as a topic or structure

* Cooperative play: socially interacting and organizing using play as a structure on which to build these interactions.  Note that this implicitly includes competitive play, as the social structures involved necessarily require in-group (our team) and out-group (the other team) interactions.

According to Parten, as we develop as humans our forms of play become more social and common. We tend to play less alone and want to cooperate and compete during gameplay. As Sellers points out, if we examine the emergence of social games, we can see similarities in this regard:

* Solitary play: Bejeweled, tower defense, most early casual games. The game design and moving parts were simple and easy.

* Onlooker play: the addition of leaderboards, “who’s playing now”, and other features that, while they don’t give you the opportunity to be “playing” with others, or even observing their actual gameplay, at least give you some indication that there are other people out there playing at the same time.

* Parallel play: current social games such as Farmville, Pet Pupz and Mob Wars, where you may have “neighbors” but the game play is largely solitary. While you’re able to associate with other people and even observe their play, in terms of the gameplay you’re almost entirely working on your own.  These games do however start to edge up into Associative play.

* Associative play: your play involves interacting with other people directly, and their play is one of several factors that effects yours. Foursquare would be an example, as well as higher levels in Mob Wars and Farmville.

* Cooperative play: think of people forming teams for the purpose of playing the game and these interactions enabling the formation of communities. Think of games where complementary roles —as well as shared goals and complex in-group/out-group interactions are part of gameplay.

As you can see, there’s plenty here for game designers to consider! What about games where the play within the game evolves through the various levels of sociality as you progress? What about games where individual players can decide independently how deeply they want other players to effect their play? What are your thoughts? Email me at michael@ayogo.com.

References:

http://psychology.about.com/od/developmentalpsychology/a/childdevtheory.htm
http://ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/ehyun/10041/culture_and_development_in.htm
http://onlinealchemy.wordpress.com/2010/04/01/the-psychological-development-of-social-games/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parten%27s_stages_of_play

Courtesy of Flickr's C-Ali

I attended the Inside Social Apps Conference a few weeks ago. You can see the notes from each of the presentations to get a better feel for what went down. For me, I thought it was a good conference to get insight into the future of social apps and to meet some amazing people. The panel on monetizing games really struck me. Unfortunately, it’s the one thing that I couldn’t find in the notes, so I thought I would tell you about it.

The main idea is that right now monetization through “offers” is through a complete separate “offerwall.”  An offerwall, like Superewards and OfferPal, is a separate page in the app that shows offers. The user decides which offer to complete and then eventually they will be awarded the offer currency.

This is very convenient and easy to integrate, which is why it was adopted so widely, so quickly. The problem with the offerwall? It lacks context. It’s a daunting wall of random offers, many of which are not interesting and the user has seen before. A simple solution is to use context-awareness improve both the usability and overall effectiveness of the offerwall:

• Amount of offer currency: For example, if I have 4 favor points and I need 16 to get the 20 point platinum hunting rifle, I should be presented with offers in the 10-20 range, not a wall of offers from 1 to 200 pts.
• Timing of the offers: If the game popped up an offer for just the right amount, right at the moment when the user desire for the item is most acute.
• Look and feel: The offerwalls use the offer providers chrome (or “look and feel”). So game designers don’t have a way of  customizing the look and feel of the offers presented. As a result, we quarantine the offerwall off in a corner of our application, so we don’t break the overall aesthetic feel of our games.

To do these things, the offer providers need to give us an API into their offer system. Then we can decide which offers to present to a user at which times. If we can have an offer presented in our apps look and feel, that is timely and relevant to the user, we’ll look for opportunities to show the offers more often, and our players will get offers they’re more likely to accept. Seems like a win for everybody.

Courtesy of Flickr's kohtzy

I had the opportunity to attend Facebook’s f8 Conference and I was simply blown away by what they are doing. The tone of the conference felt very much like the 2nd JavaOne conference: a hugely growing platform with many eager super sharp companies and developers using it to change the world. I’ve known Bret Taylor since he started FriendFeed and he was simply amazing as the second keynote speaker. It’s clear that he has had huge impact on Facebook and I could easily see him becoming CTO. It’s taken a while for me to gather my thoughts together on all the different aspects of what they announced, but here it is.

I think the biggest announcement is a combination of announcements, so let’s start with the top-down view. What Facebook can now do is be the gatekeeper for all aspects of personal information. If you like a movie, song, restaurant, article, person…whatever…on a 3rd party site like imdb.com or yelp.com, that site will notify Facebook. Then Facebook will update your profile in real-time! That itself is simply amazing, that the profile you statically filled out on sign-up and never revisited is now real-time with you. But wait, there’s more. Applications that you have added can subscribe to your profile and changes, and will be notified, typically in less than a minute. In fact, they will try up to 5 times and keep the callback for up to 24 hours.

Now, Facebook will be the place that every web site will publish information to. Move over Google, no need for a search engine for user data all over the web as it will be centrally stored on Facebook, conveniently (mostly) hidden from the public including Google. And if you want to find out information about a user, you’ll need to talk to an app that the user has installed. What does this mean for big game companies like Zynga? They’re just about to be worth even more, as they will have the real-time updates on hundreds of millions of people, and that’s worth a lot. Another interesting take away was that many noteworthy issues were barely talked about. For example, Docs.com is Microsoft Office online for Facebook users. Move over Google Docs, 400 million Facebook users can now use Office, however there wasn’t (barely) any mention of this in the press.

Now I’ll get into a bit of the technical details. They announced three main technology developments: 1) the Graph API, which is a much simpler interface to all Facebook user data; 2) the open graph protocol, a mechanism that allows web sites to publish information of users interests to Facebook; 3) Social Plugins, simple one line additions additions to web sites that allow use the open graph protocol.

Graph API
The Graph API is the heavyweight of the announcements in terms of technical change. The main part is that all Facebook “things” are now first class objects with their own URLs. I and all of my “things” like friends, comments, wall posts, pictures, likes, have their own URL. My public information is at “http://graph.facebook.com/david.orchard“. Now you can find out all the information about the thing represented by the URLs by attaching ?metadata=1. http://graph.facebook.com/david.orchard?metadata=1 returns a lengthy structure with links to everything that I connect to, like “friends”: “http://graph.facebook.com/david.orchard/friends“. If you then try to see who my friends are, you are then led to another part of the announcements. Facebook is standardizing on the OAuth 2.0 specification for security. Thus you’ll need OAuth 2.0 credentials from Facebook to access my information. This guarantees that I have authorized you and specifically your application to see my data. Which also leads us to the Yet Another Facebook Privacy Furor (YAFPF).

Privacy Settings
By default, all apps you have installed can see all of your data. In fact, if you go to a 3rd party site, by default they can see your data to customize your view. You may go to a 3rd party site and see information about you much to your surprise! You have to specifically disallow the applications AND there is no “select all” to make it easy for you to not share your data. Further, if you disallow the app from your data but your friends don’t, the app can still see your data.  This is shown in http://news.cnet.com/8301-31322_3-20003185-256.html. One (not-so) funny site has shown CEO Mark Zuckberg’s personal calender including where/when he’s at functions you’d think were private, like birthday parties and baby showers: http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2010/04/want_to_meet_mark_zuckerberg_h.php. Moving back to the graph API, because the profile information is now changing in real-time, they have provided a mechanism for web sites to receive real-time updates to the profile information. I think this is simply amazing. I asked a question about errors in the update callback, and they said they will try up to 5 times over a 24 hour period. I am boggled by the amount of data that they may end up storing. Imagine 10s of millions of people liking a particular movie and dozens of applications per user have subscribed to the users. And that’s just one piece of data that Facebook is now collecting.

Social Plugins
Social Plugins are a very simple way that a web site can communicate with Facebook about a user’s actions. The best known will be the Like plugin. It’s a single line of code into an HTML document, though it has to be used in conjunction with the Open Graph Protocol.

Open Graph Protocol
The Open Graph Protocol is a specification for how to add Meta tags to web pages to describe them. An example is a page about a movie will have the title, the movie type, image, the canonical URL for the movie. Then if the user uses the Like Social Plugin, that information is sent to Facebook and your information is updated in real time. The specification is being developed on opengraphprotocol.org and it is licensed under the Open Web Foundation’s license. That is a very good thing. However, it seems that whenever something has “open” in it, it doesn’t mean what they think it means. It appears that Facebook will decide exactly what is in or out of the specification. Personally, I’d call this a “Freely Usable” specification rather than “Open”.

The Semantic Web community appears quite excited about this specification. Much of it is based upon the RDFa specification, which is how to put Semantic Web information in HTML documents. However, the specification runs into all of the known and expected problems with it’s design. If I like a movie on the movies web site and imdb.com, how are these treated by facebook? There is two likes, of two different URLs on different web sites. What exactly is identified when I say I like a movie? It could be the movie in general, but what if I like the director’s cut but not the theater version? In fact, there is no way of saying I don’t like something. The lack of a no is a typical design in these kind of assertion systems fwiw. There is also no way of undoing a Like from the web site, though you can update your information in facebook. I don’t think that Facebook cares too much about these issues because acquiring the coarsest of data is a big win for them. Also interesting was how underwhelming some of the announcements were.

Mobile
There was almost no mention of Mobile at the conference. I didn’t go to the one Mobile talk and much of the tweets about it were about people leaving the talk because of lack of content. That’s very disappointing to a company like us that wants to extend Facebook apps into mobile devices.

Credits
As a company, we care a lot of about virtual currencies. Facebook Credits are still an invite only program. The credits announcement was pretty much a non-announcement. As in, here’s what we’re doing, send us some feedback. I did like that they are providing many payment mechanisms, but they have only one offer provider. We saw no screen shots that would show that using Credits is as easy as Apple’s in-app purchases. And finally, there was no mobile mention of Credits. Personally, I don’t think that Credits will ever be usable on the iPhone because Apple won’t want to give up their 30% vig.

Location

Facebook had previously announced they working working on Location.  The lack of mention of Location at F8 has given Foursquare, Gowalla and other apps at least 6 months reprieve.  Unlike the poor guy I met from feedback.com or the folks from Twitter…

Insights
Insights is the Facebook analytics tool that was announced. Many of us were hoping for something similar to Google Analytics. Daily users, new users, time on site, exit pages, entry pages. Very little of that was introduced. And that’s not even counting the very useful Google custom events. Another interesting perspective on http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/04/23/facebook-insights-not-scary-and-not-effective-yet/.

Summary

Facebook has done an amazing job of setting itself up to be the conduit for personal information.  They’ve deprioritized everything else in order to roll out their amazing platform changes.