Hey folks,

Our next meetup is on:

Date: Wednesday, 4th August 2010
Time: 7:30pm (we’ve booked the room from 7pm, so feel free to come by early)
Place: Seminar Room 4.1 @ School of Economics & Social Sciences, SMU (it’s the building nearer the National Museum)

Speakers and Topics

1. Andy Croll, who along with Arun has recently launched the amazing online sports organiser Gameplan will be handing out tips on how to run a web business without going certifiably bonkers.
2. Kevin (Doctor Kevin Lim, my apologies), will be delving into the more psychological topic of game mechanics — probably most easily explained by the question: “can we make productive work fun?” The abstract of his presentation:

   Traditional mass media has typically portrayed video games in a negative light for generating social undesirable or unproductive behavior. However, by harnessing the addictive elements of video games and embedding these game mechanics into traditional labor, can we make work fun? How about steering users towards socially beneficial ends?

   In the everyday, we are subconsciously performing micro-tasks as part of larger systems, as observed on social networking services such as Facebook and LinkedIn. On either of these services, you’ll see the number of friends implicitly considered as a scoreboard, while the profile completion progress meter would look like feedback in the leveling process, all of which are game mechanics that tease our psychological urges.

   Kevin Lim has been experimenting with the concept of productive games in the classroom environment, by using Amy Jo Kim’s game mechanics as a means of steering user motivations. His experience would be useful for fellow web developers.

3. To round off the night, Yuhui will be demonstrating some of his adventures with the HTML5 <canvas>. When I saw that he was combining DC comics with HTML5, I knew I had to get him to share his experience with it. He’s intending to make it a hands-on session, so if you guys should bring your laptops to try out the stuff on the spot. Would have been great to pair it with a SVG head-to-head, but flying Divya back was a little cost-prohibitive.

So there, 3 great presentations, 1 night.

Registration

As places are limited, would appreciate it if you could leave a comment here if you’re coming.

Thanks, and see you guys there!