Aleks Krotoski
Playing the Web: How Gaming Makes the Internet (and the World) a Better Place
2008
About this talk
The games industry has cracked it: the holy grail of stickiness. Games’ inherent playfulness has built Pong from a bedroom coder’s conundrum into a multi-billion dollar industry. But ask a game designer about the human-computer interaction or the user interface design in their AAA title, and they’ll think you’ve gone mad.
Is successful playful design a magic art kept within game development studio cabals, or is it something that people on the outside can apply - to great returns - to their social media?
About Aleks Krotoski
Aleks Krotoski is an academic and journalist who writes about and studies technology, interactivity and play. In addition to writing a column for The Guardian’s Technology section and presenting the Guardian’s weekly technology podcast, she blogs on Guardian Unlimited. She received a PhD in Social Psychology at the University of Surrey, examining the social networks of cyberspace.
Aleks writes about the social dimensions of games, communities in virtual worlds and other playful aspects of social software. She also writes policy, government and industry reports covering media regulation, technological forecasting, demographics, age ratings, education and game industry regulation; she regularly speaks about interpersonal processes in online communities with financial, telecommunications and governmental organisations.
