Unsalted (That's our clever name for our blog)
February 02: Lift: Matt Jones
One of the most interesting talks this morning was from Matt Jones. He works for Nokia, and has been doing some research into gaming, but not in the nerdy, boys-tucked-away-in-their-rooms sense of the word. The most profound point he made, in my opinion, was that anything where there's any kind of score is a game. Case in point: Kellogs giving away pedometers inside cereal packets. Because you have a score (the number of steps you've taken that day), it becomes a game. Mothers walking their kids to school might take a slightly longer route home in order to better their high score, and so on.
He gave us a sample of what this research has produced - Twitchr - a software application from Nokia which involves taking photos of cartoon birds. I was lucky enough to actually try out this game on a friend's phone a few weeks ago, and it's not, unfortunately, very inspiring. From all this fascinating research that they're doing, I'd have expected to see something better. But as he explained, they're not really in the business of creating the games themselves, more developing the technologies on which these games can sit - mobile phones.
I haven't read it yet, but Matt's blog may well be worth subscribing to.
Comments
Hiya Paul - sorry you didn't find the experience of Twitchr that inspiring... Hopefully if it moves beyond prototype you'll give it another chance. It's proven to be an effective illustration of some of the stuff we were trying to explore, but I'd be the first to admit we didn't take it far enough. Glad you got something from the talk though, and good to meet you briefly at Lift!
cheers
/matt
Matt
February 3, 2006 3:14 PM
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