found on the Web site for the Strong National Museum of Play^®

I'm curious to see how some of the Mental Notes cards might fit into this framework…

I got this email from ThinkFree this morning. Why do I even care? Answer = Loss Aversion.

A Visual Study Guide to Cognitive Biases

Many of these books are good sources of information for the Mental Notes cards...

Gaming has been all the rage lately. Between GDC and SxSWi, there have been several really good posts relating to gaming and influence. Here are a few of my favorites:

Thought Provoking:

• Add Some XBOX To Your UX (SxSW Presentation)
• Learning from game design: 11 gambits for influencing user behaviour
• “Fear and Loathing in Farmville”
• What core gamers should know about social games
• You Don’t Need Virtual Worlds When You Can Game Reality
• Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world

...and if you missed it, the DICE 2010 presentation from Jesse Schell: Design Outside the Box
 

Commentary:

• Why Everything Is Becoming a Game
• Employers: Look to gaming to motivate staff
• Investors look beyond games to the ‘game-ification’ of life
• How To Make Facebook, FedEx, And Amazon More Fun

These articles contain a ton of good (though repetitive) ideas to chew on. While the Mental Notes cards don't deal with game mechanics directly, I am very interested in the psychology behind these game mechanics-- why do things like leaderboards or badges matter to us? This slide from Rajat Paharia of Bunchball kind of sums that up:

(I really, really wish I had created this first!)

Do check out the rest of Rajat's presentation: Seminar on People, Computers, and Design. It'll give you a good indication of the kinds of principles you can expect to see in the Mental Notes card deck...

Remember "show and tell" from elementary school? Dribbble is a new site where designers, developers and other creatives can share sneak peeks (or "shots") of whatever it is you're working on. What's most impressive right now is the high quality of submissions that have been accumulated, easily attributed to the caliber of designers currently contributing to the site.

What I found interesting are their strategies for maintaining this quality, especially as more people begin using the site. Aside from using a rating system, they leverage two ideas included in the Mental Notes cards.

First, is the idea or reputation or status:

Regarding membership: Dribbble is only as good as its players. (So far, it's all-star quality - thank you!) That's why we're continuing to use the draft to recruit new talent. To maintain the level of play, we encourage you to do a little research before you draft (just like the pros :). We may even link the quality of a player's draftees to reputation at some point.

Second, Dribble is using scarcity to encourage high quality submissions:

In case it isn't obvious, the reason we throttle shots is to encourage players to post with care - we hope scarcity induces quality. (So far, so good.) We'll be introducing other ways to accrue shots for meritorious behavior, but we want everyone to know that you'll always have a base of 24 shots to work with each month.

These are things I've observed in other sites, but it's nice to see the conscious thought that is being put into place ahead of the potential quality problem. Using the Mental Notes cards, I could easily see the brainstorming session where people are asking:

"How can we use [ card/principle ] to maintain the high quality of submissions on our site?"