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Oh man I love this. Code Academy turns the Javascript (for now) console into a game, giving you bite size challenges organized into courses, tracking your progress and giving you badges/achievements as you progress. It’s a slick gamification of learning to code, or to use the term I prefer, an effective choice architecture around it.

Why is it good?

Code Academy recognizes and focuses on a tight basic unit of gameplay: the console.

Much like JsFiddle or jsdo.it, Code Academy blows away the usual barriers to coding (the text editor, file system, and for server-side languages… well, where do I start) and just lets you go.

Click “Get Started”:

…and you stay on the same page. You start by… starting.

Code Academy creates a tight feedback loop

Focusing on the console creates a tight loop between coding and feedback, and Code Academy does a great job of exploiting this. Your progress is always visible, even in small ways (all I did was start typing in the 8th lesson, and the ’8′ chevron was highlighted).

It’s very easy to see where you are at any given point, too. There are two courses, I’m 12% through one, and have 0 achievements. Yay.

Achievements are nothing new of course, but they get to an important consideration, and one which differentiates a game from mere pointsification. Well designed achievements or badges take the raw data of your activity and give it meaning.

You coded 10,000 lines – you’re now a Hacker!

These do a great job of calling out what players have achieved. Others see your Hacker badge and have a clue to your skill level. That helps them know to ask you for help.

You helped others code 50,000 lines – you’re now a Teacher! You can now create new exercises.

The next step is to use that data not just to give names to the attributes of the players, but to use those names to personalize the game. In real life, if I’m badged fireman, I have access to certain tools that make it possible for me to fight a blaze in ways that a normal person can’t. If society awards me the badge of tenured professor, I get other privileges (e.g. an army of grad students, the Unobtainium of the academic world). In Stack Overflow, your reputation on the site gives you new privileges (e.g. editing the community wiki). These are meaningful consequences of badging because they create new affordances for you to interact with the world.

I think an essential part of the frustration many have (myself included) with mainstreaming gamification is how many implementations focus on just giving people points for their activity. This creates this highly visible reward, but it only pulls you so far because it’s extrinsic, not intrinsic.

Take running. You might do it to increase your points score (miles run? calories burned? running that marathon?), but what sticks is realizing that your improved fitness allows you to do other things, and the feeling of mastery from learning how your body works, knowing how to navigate the technicalities of running equipment, experiencing the naches of teaching others.

The Daft Punk model of gamification, or how Code Academy could eventually support meaningful progression.

What I think pulls games out of the pit of pointsification is using those points and badges not as an end in themselves, but as data to determine when the game should unlock the meaningful consequences of the player’s actions. The ideal system rewards you by giving you new ways to play it harder, better, stronger, faster.

I can see the start of this in Code Academy. As you progress you gain new mechanics for your console, going from this simple text box…

…to a richer one. Note the a) hint, b) line numbers, c) ability to save different tries.

These are weapons that help you code, and you can easily imagine the vector from those features to those of a fully fledged, beautiful text editor like Sublime Text.

Level 10! You just unlocked the minimap. Level 15! Intellisense!

Coding already gives you a ton of feedback as you get better – you create things and get the satisfaction of watching them immediately pop to life. I find it magical, still.

What I hope Code Academy will do is keep finding ways to reinforce that sense of progression by progressively introducing those tangential things that aren’t pure coding technique but are key to making you better. Design patterns. Debugging tricks. Text editor shortcuts. Resources to help you learn. The right blogs to read so you can keep teaching yourself. Server configuration (yerch). Basic computer science ideas. Places to submit open source code, so you can integrate with the wider community. Those are equally important weapons in making you a good hacker and meaningful structures that Code Academy can help build.

Big O Badge: You learnt Big O notation. Javascript Profiler now unlocked. Your next mission: optimize these ‘for’ loops, and teach Big O to someone else!

These are also the kind of things that might make those badges truly rich and meaningful.

But this is the future. Code Academy is obviously in its early days, and it’s already awesome. Go check it out and tell your friends! I can’t wait to see where it goes.

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ZOMBIES, RUN! is a mashup of Nike+ and Left 4 Dead:

…an ultra-immersive game for the iPhone and iPod Touch where you help rebuild civilisation after a zombie apocalypse. By going out and running in the real world, you can collect medicine, ammo, batteries, and spare parts that you can use to build up and expand your base – all while getting orders, clues, and story through your headphones.

I wonder how zombie survival meshes with people’s motivations for running. Will it be motivating, or distracting?

I love the idea of a story that only advances when I run. It’s a fantastic twist away from simply pushing stats, and seems to target a different type of motivation. The secondary rewards of collecting items and building your base are also pleasantly different, though I wouldn’t call them a game yet. They’re a sound implementation of pointsification, but it doesn’t seem like the player has very meaningful choices to make.

My main worry: will gurgling zombies, screaming survivors and static filled messages create an exciting fantasy, or will they leave runners mildly traumatized after every outing? ZOMBIES, RUN! feels like it would inherently ruin the experience for people who already enjoy running. But the target isn’t them, it’s those people who abhor running enough that they’d prefer a post-apocalyptic wasteland (I’m one of them). Even then, we won’t bite unless the stories are absolutely bang on.

Finally, I’m curious about the lack of a social element, which is so often a driving factor in long term motivation. But then again I prefer Oblivion to WoW. So we’ll see.

I’m really looking forward to this one. They’re fundraising on Kickstarter and halfway to their $12,500 goal. Go help ‘em out!

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Choice architecture is usually trotted out to talk about behavior change – for good or for evil. But what if you just want to create a certain emotion?

(Ultimately, the goal is to architect greater happiness into the system, right? Jen ratio and all that)

You can architect choices that make you feel pretty uncomfortable, like the terrifying and massively successful indie game Amnesia, the Dark Descent. Indiegames.com neatly summarizes Thomas Grip’s Games Summit talk at GDC Europe where he discusses Amnesia’s “focus on evoking emotion.”

1. No Weapons

In the company’s earlier game Penumbra: Overture, there was a clumsy, impractical inventory of ‘tools,’ including a hammer and a broom, that could be used as ineffective weapons. It was trying to replicate the scary, clumsy defenses that power many horror game interactions.

But the developers found that, if the player is armed with something, they will try to kill enemies. Either they’ll find a way to abuse the system and kill the enemy easily, making it less scary. Or they will use it as a normal FPS weapon system and die a lot, believing the system to be flawed. That wasn’t the original idea.

But for the second Penumbra game, they decided to cut out weapons altogether, and it made the game extremely scary – a concept they brought forward for Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

They also stripped out the idea of death and strong difficulty mechanics.

Concluding, Grip said that by stripping down what was expected in the game, they found something very unexpected, and it all came about because they asked a simple question: “What is the real intent of our game?”

Also a really cool example of how orthodoxies get wiped out when you know why you’re making.

(Via Indiegames.com)

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Bill Barol, via Daring Fireball:

Advertising takes place in half-worlds of its own devising, and this one is carefully crafted by Sandwich Video, which Lisagor runs out of his Los Angeles apartment. It has quietly, dryly become the premier producer of online product videos for web services and tech gadgets, cultivating a tone that perfectly reflects a generation of creators who are more interested in (or at least, more comfortable with) invention than hype.

Really good reminder that the idea might as well not exist if people don’t understand it.

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Edmund McMillen, maker of Super Meat Boy, on piracy:

People pirate things that are digital because it’s easy. There are many effective ways to fix this problem, but crazy DRM and trying to fine or put people in jail for piracy isn’t at all an effective solution.

Things like lowering the price of digital games, Steam sales, Humble Bundle, online achievements and other exclusive Steam related content are huge factors in getting someone who pirated something to purchase it legitimately or not pirate it at all. Places like Steam, Netflix and Hulu are fighting piracy in extremely realistic ways.

Times have changed, piracy isn’t shop lifting and shouldn’t be treated as such. This is a digital age and we are just now learning how things work, I personally believe with time the vast majority of piracy issues will be fixed, not by fighting it but by innovating around it like the companies I’ve mentioned.

It’s like when you teach your kid about safe sex, you don’t say “Don’t ever have sex or you’ll die and go to hell”. That’s not effective way. Kids are going to have sex and people are going to pirate shit, telling them not to do it isn’t going to fix anything, it’s simply time people understood that this stuff is happening and it’s not going to away by telling people to stop and/or not talking about it.

Via IGN

With behavior change, it helps to pragmatically work with actual behavior instead of immediately vilifying it. Not that pirates should forfeit responsibility: the trick is to make it the path of least resistance to act responsibly, using as many different approaches as there are reasons to pirate.

Homework: what if Weight Watchers dealt with the overweight in the same way that the music and games industry deals with pirates?

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Hyperreality tricks consciousness into detaching from any real emotional engagement, instead opting for artificial simulation, and endless reproductions of fundamentally empty appearance. Essentially, (although Baudrillard himself may balk at the use of this word) fulfillment or happiness is found through simulation and imitation of a transient simulacrum of reality, rather than any interaction with any “real” reality.

Interacting in a hyperreal place like a casino gives the subject the impression that one is walking through a fantasy world where everyone is playing along. The decor isn’t authentic, everything is a copy, and the whole thing feels like a dream. A specific analogy that Baudrillard uses is a fable derived from On Exactitude in Science by Jorge Luis Borges. In it, a great Empire created a map that was so detailed it was as large as the Empire itself. The actual map grew and evolved as the Empire itself conquered or lost territory. When the Empire crumbled, all that was left was the map. In Baudrillard’s rendition, it is the map that people live in, the simulation of reality, and it is reality that is crumbling away from disuse.

via Wikipedia

Key is impression of a “fantasy world where everyone is playing along”. The casino turns everyone in it into actors supporting the hyperreal illusion.

By that token, are Twitter/Facebook/Google+ hyperreal too, to different extents? In Facebook, Farmville manufactures a world of interactions, while photo albums and highly edited profiles create an idealized caricature. Perhaps Twitter is more ‘real’ because its 140 character limit and loose structure keeps that constructed world lo-fi.

Are some services more map, and others more reality?

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