Page 111 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

certain activities with trophies or best player rankings using a competitive model to motivate participants. The Foursquare application, founded in 2009, had participants notify when they were arriving at a speci c place; the user with the most noti cations would become the “mayor” of the place until 2014. Gamifying each user’s every- day route turned into a relatively simple game, while users revealed their daily coordinates and provided data on the places they frequented. This information could be used in turn to create pro les of spending habits, as well as posing privacy problems, which is why the gami ed part was split o and developed into the application Swarm (2014).Video games have developed sophisticated strategies for understanding and prompting participatory and interactive conduct, as well as learning over the decades to make the most of digital technology to create new experiences.The use of a trophy system is precisely whatled many of us who design games to feel uncomfortable with the term, primarily because it assumes that games can exert long-term in uence on their players, and also because this strategy views games as competitive activities, even though, as Caillois described, there is a broad variety of activities that can be considered ludic. Putting emphasis on competition between participants can also have negative e ects,as not everyone is motivated by competing.The use of trophies can be counterproductive because it provides incentives based on extrinsic motivations – which are super cial and di cult to continue for a long period of time – instead of creating systems and activities that motivate and challenge the participant intrinsically, stimulating players personally (Deci 1999).As Hamari et al. argue (2014), the various studies conducted on gami cation usually report positive e ects on their participants, but they are partial and their methods often lack thoroughness; indeed, no study to datehas managed to prove the e ects beyond the context of the experiment. Although Hamari et al. make it clear that gami cation is a promising discipline, they also draw attention to the need for better methods for designing and assessing the activities that use game design and its possible e ects.The bene ts of applying elements of game design to other areas, according to this author, go beyond its supposed e ects. Video games have developed sophisticated strategies for understanding and prompting participatory and interactive conduct, as well as learning over the decades to make the most of digital technology to create new experiences.An example of how video games have developed certain areas of knowledge which the digital media are now attempting to make use of is the need to create joint activities for large groups, for the purpose of education or advertising, or in the workplace. Video games have played a pioneering role in creating activities in which hundreds or thousands of people take part, such as massively multiplayer online games, which originate from university computer networksof the late 1970s and have been gaining popu- larity since the early 2000s, with titles such as Everquest (1999-present) or World of Warcraft (2004-present) (Bartle 2010). The designers of games of this kind are much more experienced at creating large-scale participatory activities, as they understand the di erent types of players (Bartle 2006) and their motivations (Yee 2006), and at providing a variety of activities depending on who the player is. There is no need to have worked on massively multiplayer online games to understand these factors, as game design focuses on creating human activities within certain limits. The result of the game design process is intangible but observable; it is called performance, a term that refers to the actions themselves and participation as the intended aim. Game design goes further than creating entertainment: what we do is orchestrate and facilitate human conduct.AC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 2017111Smart culture. Analysis of digital trends