Articles by Thomas N. Burg

Kars Alfrink, an interaction designer and consultant, did an interesting talk at GDC on the underlying basics of the Playyoo system. Please refer to his transcript for further details. Enclosed you’ll find his slides.

So we are now at the conclusion of our first major contest on Playyoo! Between the launch of the preview site last October, and the cut off date of 15 Feb, 356 user games had been created and uploaded by Playyoo members from all over the world, making this easily the largest collection of free Flash Lite games online. There are some really fantastic games within Playyoo, and some of them perhaps have had less attention than they deserve. Other great games were uploaded too late to build enough popularity to win.We’d very much like to thank all who expressed their passion and trust by becoming a member of our community and contributed games. You’ve all played a key part in getting our vision for a mobile casual games community off the ground.We would particularly like to thank Samir Dash for his generous gesture in declining multiple prizes, thus allowing us to extend prizes to the top 12.

About the results
The results are based only on community activity. From various measures, we derive a “game popularity index”. The algorithm for this has been enhanced over time to improve the fairness and balance. Clearly, game quality is a big factor in winning, but so is engagement with the community, and finding ways to promote games. The game popularity index will be also used in forthcoming new and improved game selection features.

The Winners are:

1. Match the Blocks a game by Samir won $10,000
2. The Empty Space a game by Loomand won $7,000
3. Panic Mechanic a game by marc won $3,000
4. qTile a game by ptm won $1,500
5. Ludo Cells a game by Samir (Samir generously declined his prize for this game)
6. Mr. Shooti a game by Roozbeh won $1,000
7. Think Fast a game by izam won $500
8. Bog Frog a game by Ekleptica won $500
9. Fill Board a game by Samir (Samir generously declined his prize for this game)
10. SokoLite a game by ptm won $500
11. Orang Bunian a game by Faisal Arbain won $500
12. Sketch Mini a game by santoki won $500
13. Sushi Mushi Mania a game by marc
14. Mondo Under a game by bitacora13
15. The Bee Game a game by lfons
16. UFO Catcher: Barnyard Abduction a game by Naz
17. Sea Combat a game by Mariam Dholkawala
18. Trop Tris a game by CreativeSource
19. Mr. Cease Fire a game by HungamaMobile
20. Shark-Thrasher a game by digitallamb

For further info please go to the contest page.

Portraying the Winners and other high quality game creators
During the next days we will profile to the community the fine people that created the winning games. Short podcasts or transcripts will be made available on Playyoo blog.

And it’s not quite over yet!
Further prizes will be awarded under the banner of the 2007 Flash Lite game contest. A panel of judges including representatives from Adobe’s Flash Lite team is currently evaluating entries. Results will be announced soon.We hope that everybody has enjoyed participating in this contest as much as we did running it. Remember, these are just the first steps. We want to make Playyoo a key resource for Flash Lite developers for many reasons, and we hope you will all help and support us in reaching this goal.Keep your games coming!

Playyoo is all about playing on mobile phones. You can only rate a game when you play it on your phone. You can also add comments directly from the phone, although comments can also be made through the web site. We’re aware that at the moment how to do this may not be entirely obvious, so this short video shows you how it’s done (note: it’s not exactly Hollywood quality!).

By the way, we assign a default rating of “3″ to new games. So a game rated 3 is average, 1 is poor, and 5 is excellent. You can change you rating of a game at any time: we only retain your latest rating.

As you might know our contest will end in roughly a week. I was curious and had a look on the leaderboard and I took a snapshot to figure out if anything is going to change within the next days.Here is the intermediate result:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Thanks again to Samir for your generosity. That move from Samir explains the strange annotations on the snapshot.

I sat down with Kars Alfrink, interaction designer, teacher, and consultant for Playyoo, to get a behind-the-scenes look at the Game Creator, and see if he’d indulge me in revealing what’s next. For those of you attending the upcoming GDC conference in San Francisco next week, be sure to check out Kars’ talk on Feb 18: Designing a Casual Social Gaming Experience for Generation C.

[photo courtesy of Ram Yoga]

So, the Game Creator has been released for over a month now. What has it been like to see it in use? Any surprises?
First off, it’s been a lot of fun to watch how people are using the Game Creator and see their creations. Sure, there have been some pleasant surprises – for instance, I’ve seen some really cool snake levels, where people just went crazy with the layout of the levels. The Game Creator is about personal expression. And the games seem to fall into two categories. The first group of games uses graphics with a broad appeal – for example, a famous character, a scantily clad model, or a known politician. And then there are the games that are entirely personal. They make no sense to you or me, only to the person who created it and their friends. For example, I saw one variation of Lunar Lander where you need to land a crab on someone’s, let’s say Debbie’s, head. Now, I have no idea who Debbie is, but I can imagine Debbie is a friend or sister of the game’s creator. And it must have been a lot of fun for them to include the picture, and then have an easy way to distribute it to their friends.

At its initial release, the Game Creator has 6 game types: Lunar Lander, Pairs, Revenge, Snake, Tic Tac Toe, and Ping Pong. Why these six?
In the early planning stages, we created a long list of potential games. We picked these six for various reasons: familiarity, opportunity for customization, and suitability for the mobile platform. Sticking with well-known games is key. With known games, there’s no learning curve. People already know how to play the game, and can instantly start thinking of ways to change it.

So, will we see some other games from the list?
Sure. From day one, we always knew we were going to add more game types to the mix, and give people even more choices. I’m not going to give anything away right now, but we are working on some other game types, and definitely want to strike a good balance between classic arcade types and puzzle games.

Let’s talk a little about the social aspect of Playyoo, and in particular the interaction between the Game Creator and the larger Playyoo community.
For game designers, the social aspect is a fun thing to watch. They can see who’s playing their game, who’s getting the high scores, and various comments from players. With the Game Creator, most of the fun comes from creating games for your friends. From that standpoint, the games themselves become “social objects”, to use a term from the social media circle. The games essentially become an ‘excuse’ to have conversations with people.

And do you see different conversations forming around original games and those made with the Game Creator?
If you look at the conversations around original games, they tend to focus on the specifics of game play – does the game work, did it take too long to complete, was it too large. So here, designers can get instant feedback from players. It’s a little different with Game Creator games. The discussions center around the underlying message – like the silly picture someone put in, or the political figure that was used. But, the key here is that both conversations can coexist on the same site. I see a lot of parallels with Flickr. I post photos that I captured on my camera phone. The comments on my photos aren’t focused on my photography skills, or the lighting, or any of that, but more the story behind the photo. On the other hand, my friend is an avid photographer with a professional-grade SLR camera. His photos generate comments on composition, technique, lighting, and more.So, in some ways, the Game Creator is like the camera phone for the mobile gaming world. It might not be a perfect comparison, but it’s all about breaking down the barriers to creation and self-expression.