Joe Lamantia.com

Here’s my pre­sen­ta­tion from the Ital­ian IA Sum­mit on Killzone.com as a lead­ing exam­ple of the next gen­er­a­tion of Mas­sively Social On-line Games.
As usual, I try to share some of the best think­ing on these ideas; in this case I quote lib­er­ally from Nicole Lazarro. (I hope she takes this as a com­pli­ment.) Her insights into the emo­tional dri­vers for social and game expe­ri­ences and the nature of cross media are — no sur­prise — right on, and com­ing true years after first pub­li­ca­tion.
Some of the more eye-opening mate­r­ial I dis­cov­ered while look­ing into the design of this game / com­mu­nity hybrid con­cerns the direct con­nec­tion between game mechan­ics (a design ques­tion), the space of pos­si­ble choices for play­ers, the emo­tions these choices inspire and encour­age, and the result­ing expe­ri­ence of the game envi­ron­ment.
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.
This is the first of two parts — stay tuned for the follow-up, once we clear the dis­clo­sure ques­tion.
A slide­cast will fol­low shortly, now that my lap­top is back in work­ing order, and I can fire up ScreenFlow.