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Comment by mcantor | Hacker News Reader

I think it's kinda funny how the "Did you consider a woman player's perspective?" question at the end asks us to be mindful of women as a game-playing demographic while simultaneously forgetting that women are also a game-designing demographic who might be reading this very article.

Just sayin'!

The "Art of Game Design" book looks fascinating, too--I ordered a copy!

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(I am the author of the article) Uh.. yes you are right, thanks for the observation. AOGD is an amazing book.

:-> I hope I didn't come off as critical! I often hang out with a feminist-leaning crowd, so that sort of thing tends to stand out to me. (The running joke is "The hardest thing about being a straight white male is remembering that not everyone is a straight white male.")

I'm actually just now working through "Rules of Play" by Salen & Zimmerman; it's nice to see the field of game design slowly maturing and accruing "serious" texts. It would be nice if we didn't need academia's help to legitimize our pursuits, but ya can't win 'em all.

I liked the separation you drew here: "The idea here is to use techniques of game design in a way which is integrated in the functionality of an application not focused on gaming..." It's an interesting way to frame the goal of a "gamified application": rather than the "game" being played for its own sake, there is an overarching goal, and the path to that goal possesses game-like qualities as an (apparently) organic side-effect. In the same way that "real life" can distract you from a game, you don't want the "game" of the app to distract you from the "real life" or "goal" of the app.

Criticism welcome. I too have "Rules of play", but it is still standing there on my desk, unopened - no time now, writing a new game script :) On "legitimize our pursuits" you could check this writing by Hecker (always stimulating): http://chrishecker.com/Going_Against_The_Grain

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