I sat in on two excellent and highly engaging panels. (Much better than the staged 15 minute ‘keynotes’ this morning.

Amy Jo Kim of Shufflebrain did an excellent analysis of why games and sites are engaging vs. dull. Why they enduce heavey repeat, continued usage vs boredom. Nothing was revolutionary, but I think when considered from a broad perspective offered many ‘of course’ moments. So I’ll just bullet point them. Dogster/Catster are entertainment sites at heart and we’ve encountered many of these points, and had much to gain from adding more fun to our sites.

• Men (on the whole) prefer games of contest, they get bored when there aren’t physical challenges. Women prefer games that involve gaining points (think green stamps) and are often bored by playing against anyone
• Levels are very engaging to people. She expects moving up thru levels to be part of online networks. The higher you get the more rights you have in the community
• Lots of positive feedback make it hard to walk away from a gaem/site. Help people learn how to play along better … give them hints … step them along
• Human life is full of sociological exchanges. A simple example is “thank you … you’re welcome.” Add tit-for-tat events in your game. Respond to users and seek them to respond back. Keep that back and forth going as it build trust and bonds.
• User customization of their environment increases investment

The other excellent session was Matt Webb, co-author of MindHacks and Ben Cerveny, ex-Flickr, and director of the Playground Foundation presented on something they call playsh aka The Playful Shell. Shells, in geek land, are command line interfaces to a UNIX computer. These two clever gents have construted a very rudimentary command line interface to interact with all open APIs and online data source, and output that data has a combined result. It’s barely working code, but conceptually it’s a brilliant step forward. Instead of one-off access to a movie database, the playsh will allow for connecting a movie database, google maps and amazon.com all in one command. If you want to check the weather, a google search result, and flickr photos, you just write that command.

Here are some direct notes I took

• all that is mashable recombines
• every API can connect with every API, how do we frame them in a way that makes sens to us personally.
• we need to control our experience in regards to ourselves.
• people in state of play are much more likely to explore new options
• flow calcifies into artefact