Saturday, December 10, 2011

Chemistry battle card game

Point 1: People evolved to commit a database of around 150 records to memory (among other things)[citation needed]. This was good for remembering local plants, or the people in your village, and now it's what makes it fun to collect baseball cards or play Pokemon.

Point 2: Supernormal stimuli drive evolved behavior to excessive extreme. Ask Zynga about this; gamification is the extraction of our community/economic stimuli to drive activities that aren't fun, but do pay Zynga.

Point 3: WildChord is harnessing gamification to teach you to play the guitar. And make them money, but I don't begrudge them that - the point is they're using supernormal stimuli and the mechanisms we're discovering lately to use them in order to reach goals set by the user, not just by the game maker.

Point 4: There are databases that are very useful to know.

Total: Chemistry battle cards for the win.

Now off to find out what I can about the design of battle card games. The name: 化学 (Kagaku). I'll bet you can even guess what that means.

(Elementeo is a competitor, kinda.)