It’s taken a long while to put together, mainly because I wanted to write up my very sketch notes into something approximating what I said, and also because I wanted to experiment with a more representative way of publishing presentations online.

Anyhow, I’m very pleased to share Playing Together: What Games Can Learn From Social Software with you.

It went down pretty well at both NLGD and Develop, and I really enjoyed some of the thinking that went into it. I’m working out what to do about that, obviously, but in the meantime, I thought it deserved a wider audience. Do enjoy, and I’d love to hear your feedback on it.

4 comments on this entry.

  • Alex | 22 Aug 2008

    Great stuff, Tom. Wish I’d seen it.
    And that’s actually your arse, isn’t it?

  • James | 23 Aug 2008

    I’m surprised you didn’t note that Flickr itself grew out of a game that involved sharing photos.

  • Tom | 23 Aug 2008

    James – I could have done, but I didn’t really have time to go into the complexities of GNE. GNE itself wasn’t really a game about sharing photos – sharing photos was just a thing people ended up doing on it, and Flickr grew out of a tool for GNE players to stop using the game to do that, iirc. But it’s a valid point of comparison, nontheless.

  • Emmet | 4 Sep 2008

    Hi Tom. I think there’s an interesting line of thought that is tangental to the Flickr and Nike+ stuff, about how play and online stuff are both leaking into real life — the things that you would have normally have done anyway (taking snaps, exercising) are somehow infused with an added element of fun or specialness by being part of a wider “game”. Perhaps that’s where the meeting point is going to be?

    I’ve sort of felt that the ARG type stuff held more promise than it has actually managed to deliver so far, but I also think that if these activites can be less explicitly about playing a game and more about low-barrier ways of turning everyday proceedings into fun… then something really interesting can happen. And I wouldn’t normally say we should wait for hardware to enable things like that to happen, but in this case it seems true (the Nike pedometer thing, cheap digital cameras).

    Incidentally, I like the format you’ve used to present the slides and notes.