Joe Lamantia summarizes his talk at the Italian IA summit.
He worked as a consultant for the website of the PS3 game Killzone 2. And he discovered how much games and social media have in common.

From the functional to the psychological, it seems there really is an ‘architecture of fun’ for both games and social experiences. It is just another example of how architecture of any (and all) kinds is an enormous influencing factor on peoples’ experiences.

Some of the insigths on the slideshow come directly from Nicole Lazzaro’s job at Xeodesign, and are extremely useful when connected with concepts like flow and the magic circle.

I’m waiting to embed the talk here, since Joe promised a complete slidecast.

Web applications can be considered as virtual spaces. There’s no need to be Second Life to be a virtual space. And I will drop the “virtual” adjective too, because I think there’s nothing virtual about the relations and the experiences happening on those spaces.

I think I will call them “experiential spaces” (or maybe “possibility spaces” *wink*). The name is not important, though. Raph Koster has this great article about empowering social interactions inside a whatever space. And I think they should be kept in great consideration when designing a social web application in a playful way. Check it out.

Could a game be used as an instructive tool?
Well, a game is an instructive tool in itself. So, why not? It’s exactly what people at mtvU are thinking.
Check out the full story on the Guardian games blog.

Sometimes the design process can be playful in itself. Being a post-it junkie, I love playing with sticky notes when I’m designing. It helps to clear my mind and to see emerging patterns.
Long ago Adaptive Path published this post about methods, pointing to some different playful means to brainstorm and get new ideas.

Some of these system rely on cards, which you can use in different ways to let innovation emerge in a playful environment.
Play Factory, an Italian project exploring the process of better design through play, has recently joined forces with designer Isao Hosoe, Corraini and Loccioni to build Play40, which is exactly one of these card systems. And, that’s truly important for me, is the first one sold in Italy (and maybe in Europe, I haven’t checked it out).

So, I hope to give it a try soon. I’m pretty curious about this kind of design.

When I was at the university, I studied Amy Jo Kim’s points of view about communities and social psychology.

Today Amy Jo is co-founder of Shufflebrain, a company which builds “smart games for social networks”.
She gave this keynote about “putting the fun in functional”, which I think is a pretty good basis for playful design. Enjoy the slideshow, and note the sentence at the end: expect to see more “serious” applications that feel like games… …and games that incorporate communities.

It appears that we are at a turning point: a recent Pew research states that gamers are more than a half the adult population of USA. Don’t know how things are in Italy, where I live, but the point is clear:

More and more adults are playing.
Almost all teenagers are playing.

All these people are gamers. Their favourite entertainment medium is the videogame. Videogames are the medium which drives the digital age. Here’s why I think the web should learn from games.

So, this is a start.
If you wonder what this is about, you can start reading the introduction page and the manifesto. Here you will find ideas, links, comments and updates about everything related to playful design.

Just to start, my advice is to follow this speech by Kars Alfrink, which points out all the basic priciples of playful design.

See you in the wiki to discuss and build a theory!