The User Experience community is awfully curious about the games industry. How do games developers make products so darn sticky? How do they make them so darn fun?
Well, in a a free talk disarmingly similar to my talk at dConstruct coming up a week later, the team at Use 8 intend to tackle these questions at an event in Brighton next Friday.
From the blurb:
Unlike traditional software, where more traditional performance metrics can be applied, measuring experiential dimensions such as 'fun' and 'playability' becomes a daunting task. Games are a tremendously varied set of applications, defying a one-size-fits-all approach. Even a broad and relevant concept such as flow falls short of capturing all classes of game experience.
'Play' will go beyond simple usability issues exploring different dimensions of User Experience that make games enjoyable.
There is a surprising lack of cross-pollination between the games and the web industries (I've harped on about this before), yet the interest is clearly there, at least on the part of the web community. Games companies can surely learn from the web's ability to create solid and mainstream communities (MySpace? Facebook? LambdaMOO?), and we should see the outcome a game-web collaboration soon on the release of Little Big Planet on the PS3.
cheers Andy!
