Applying game design to building apps (and games!)

Dan Cook has posted the slides of his recent talk, “The Rescuing Princess Application“:

My talk was on building an application that rescued princesses. The goal was to give interaction designers some insight into how game design might be applied to the domain of more utilitarian applications.

The notes fields are heavily annotated with more details about each visual. For those of you who attended, this deck also includes a third section on game design patterns that I didn’t have time to cover in the time allotted.

This is a terrific presentation for product managers and designers, as well as for people building web games. Read it – it will take you about 10 minutes

Also, check out Dan’s list of recommended reading:

Dan’s blog
Chemistry of Game Design
What activities can be turned into games?
A Theory of Fun, Raph Koster
Shufflebrain: Putting the Fun in Functional

Dan particularly recommends the Shufflebrain presentation. The Shufflebrain team recently launched Photograb*, their first game of their own, that applies many of their principles of game design. Check it out on Facebook.

* Lightspeed provided the seed round of financing for Shufflebrain.