jacksonfox/ias12-html-transcript.html

## ias12-html-transcript.html
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<blockquote class="speaker_1_text">
	<cite class="speaker_1">Moderator:</cite> Good morning. Thank you all for coming up. This is James Reffell's talk on games. And the title, I'm going to read it because it's super long. "Pig-faced Orcs: Design Lessons from Old-school Role-playing Games".<br /><br />James is Director of User Experience at Webroot, and you can read the rest of his bio in your book. So James?

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<blockquote class="speaker_2_text">
	<cite class="speaker_2">James Reffell:</cite> All right, good morning everybody. First of all, I hope everybody has a 20-sided dice. You don't actually need it for the talk. But if not, Juliet at the door is handing them out.<br /><br />Second of all, hands up who was actually at Games Night last night? All right. Good crowd. [laughs]

</blockquote>

<blockquote class="speaker_3_text">
	<cite class="speaker_3">Yeah, I was with some of you. But, all right. So I'm James Reffell. Yeah, this is, "Pig-faced Orcs:</cite> Can designers learn anything from old-school role-playing games?" And I hope the answer is yes or this is going to be an exceedingly short talk.
</blockquote>

<blockquote class="non-speech">
	[laughter]
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<blockquote class="speaker_2_text">
	<cite class="speaker_2">James:</cite> This is not really a gamification talk. You may have been to gamification talks. I will be trying to avoid levels, points, leaderboards. I don't think I'm going to be talking about flow or the fellow with the long name that I can never pronounce.<br /><br />It is about games and it is about design, but it's taking a slightly different angle.
<br /><br />Just a little bit of a biography. Before I was a designer, I was a small person. And I didn't really like a lot of the games. Part of why is not a gamification talk is those were not my kind of games. I gravitated very early towards role-playing games and board games and things like that.
<br /><br />That's my first convention badge from somewhere in the late 80s. You can barely see my head because I was so short at the time. That's also some of the first design work I ever did.
<br /><br />I don't know if this is true of other people in the room, but I do think there's a continuity between my carefully tracing out elaborate maps on grid paper, grid methodology, at a very young age and what I do for a living now.
<br /><br />I wasn't really thinking about that continuity until very recently.
<br /><br />For a refresher for almost nobody in the room, I think at this point, I'm mostly going to be talking about pen-and-paper role-playing games. And specifically pen-and-paper role-playing games as they were played in the late 70s and early 80s when they first came on the scene.
<br /><br />I was not playing them in the late 70s, just for age reasons. But I was playing them in the early 80s. And so canned history in...This is going to be very abbreviated but more or less you had miniatures wargaming as well as a lot of other things going on.
<br /><br />And in the 70s, a bunch of folks, somewhat independently, somewhat together kind of took a couple of twists on miniature wargaming, where they had a bunch of miniatures and they represented forces of battle with some medieval battle, or Napoleonic, or whatever.
<br /><br />And they got a little bored, and they made a couple of changes, not all at the same time. They started rolling together.
<br /><br />A few folks started concentrating on individual characters rather than mass soldiers. The next thing they did is they started bringing in non-soldier characters, like maybe there's someone who can heal you or a village mayor, or something like that.
<br /><br />And then, they started to bring in fantasy elements, because why the hell not? Have a wizard in there. That'd just be awesome. That would make it more fun.
<br /><br />That got wrapped up into Chainmail, which is what that first slide should actually say, first label, and immediately turned into Dungeons and Dragons, a couple of different folks were involved.
<br /><br />Then just this immense flowering of different games of different types all over the country, all over the world. It really was I think incredibly quick that this became a mass phenomenon by the early 80s.
<br /><br />I mean ET had people playing Dungeons and Dragons in it. So there's something there. And games have evolved. Pen-and-paper role-playing games I think co-evolved with computer games.
<br /><br />There was almost no time in between some of the earliest computer games that we think of like Adventure. Adventure was influenced by D and D. It happened in the 70s.
<br /><br />I mean these things kind of happened at the same time. And to some extent, pen and paper has been replaced by things like World of Warcraft, now culturally.
<br /><br />I think if you talk about Orcs to somebody who did not grow up with gaming, they will be thinking you're talking about World of Warcraft or something similar.
<br /><br />But a bunch of folks have been, some of them old, who were there when it happened, some of them younger who were not, were thinking about what it was like to be playing in those early days. And as gamers, thinking maybe there was some stuff that we left behind as we've evolved games.
<br /><br />And to some extent folks have adopted the Pig-Faced Orc as their mascot. The story about this is basically this is somewhat apocryphal, but Gary Gygax, the co-inventor of Dungeons and Dragons seems to have miscommunicated with an artist at some point.
<br /><br />And they drew instead of sort of monstery Orc with tusks they ended up with an Orc with a pig face and tusks and a snout.
<br /><br />And this kind of replicated itself and people kind of liked it. And so that's been adopted as a mascot by folks who were going back to some of these early games and thinking what made these fun, what made them interesting, and what could we learn about them as gamers.
<br /><br />So what I'm going to try to do, because I was reading a lot of what these game theorists and game designers and just players who were talking online to each other were thinking.
<br /><br />And every time they said something, I was just mentally translating it. I was like, "That applies to my job sort of." This is a stretch in some cases, but that applies to my job. So maybe I can do a sort of pig-faced Orc thing here with interaction design and information architecture and other sort of online design disciplines.
<br /><br />It's not that farfetched. People are doing gamification over here with sort of classic videogames and board games, and that kind of thing. And frankly design and games have always coexisted.
<br /><br />So I'm going to try and come up with about eight points of I think interesting theories where we might be able to take something from pen-and-paper role-playing games and apply it to what most of us do in our daily lives that isn't gaming.
<br /><br />These are the eight points you could roll a D8 and get through them if you wanted, I think.
<br /><br />"Give them something to manipulate, embrace showmanship, use randomness to build story, create mini games, sandboxes and railroads, preserve inconsistencies and messiness..." It's one of my favorites. "Steal from everywhere," and, "enable risk taking."
<br /><br />And these sort of build from the very practical relatively speaking. They are pretty tangible stuff where I think you might be able to be able to start applying it immediately. And it moves rapidly off into fuzzy sort of theory stuff.

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<blockquote class="non-speech">
	[laughs]
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<blockquote class="speaker_2_text">
	<cite class="speaker_2">James:</cite> That's cool. You don't have to do it with the all the stuff on the table. Certainly some people don't.<br /><br />But it is often true, you have miniature, you have dice, you have little maps, you have maybe little game master screens. All of these things serve functional purposes. I'm not talking about the functional purposes right now.
<br /><br />They also serve another purpose, which is that while you are concentrating on the action, but maybe it's not your turn, so you're trying to pay attention to what's going on, but you don't have something to do, you are probably messing with those things.
<br /><br />Maybe you're a very calm person and you're not doing this, but I think you're probably kind of rolling the dice idly or stacking them up. Anybody made a dice tower? [laughs]
<br /><br />Yeah, a dice tower where you're playing with the miniatures where you're kind of...I think that as human beings we have this sort of need to physically manipulate things, especially things that have texture while we are trying to concentrate on something else.
<br /><br />And I was just playing with this idea and thinking about trying to apply it to software. Software often asks us to pay attention. We're reading something, or it's loading something, or something it's happening on screen, we are supposed to be paying attention to the software.
<br /><br />But it's not really giving us anything to do while we're paying attention. Not anything with our hands. There's a couple of exceptions and it's kind of strange.
<br /><br />I love this one, and it's actually more of a functional thing, but I think it gets to that fidgeting aspect of being human.
<br /><br />Creating random numbers is hard. So there's this open-source software to create nice cryptographic stuff. And the way to get the random number is you're supposed to twitch with your mouse.
<br /><br />They ask you to put your hand on the mouse and go [imitates the sound of the mouse] . And you keep doing it until that bar goes all the way to the right, and you have generated sufficient randomness for the algorithm to work. That's really fun actually.
<br /><br />And of course, now that we have mobile devices that can actually understand things like shaking and moving, and they have accelerometers and the rest. That's an iPad app. It's an iPad Etch-A-Sketch app. And in fact, you draw it by touching, and then when you want to erase you go shake, shake, shake.
<br /><br />So I think these are OK. It isn't quite all the way to what I'm getting at, because I think there's room for that idle time aspect. You're paying attention to something on the screen.
<br /><br />One group of people I would love to say are people who do animation work or video work, and are sitting there while something's trying to render. I want to give them something to do with their hands because they are just freaking out. I see that all the time online.
<br /><br />But there's another piece missing that won't be missing for very long. I think an opportunity is coming. And that is the feedback.
<br /><br />So when you're playing with something in your hands, your dice or your miniatures, or your pencil, or your paper, you can feel it. There is texture there. And I think that is incredibly important. And it's something that software has historically not been able to give us. But it can.
<br /><br />This is a prototype. And there's huge theories online that this stuff is going to come into your mobile device like yesterday, but it's not there yet. And it's basically using electric feedback to simulate physical texture.
<br /><br />So if you're running your hands over it, it feels like there are ridges and things. It's using...I'm not totally up on the science, but it's using electrical impulses to kind of give you that sensation.
<br /><br />And when this stuff becomes more commonly used, I think it will have all sorts of very practical benefits, like you may have a virtual keyboard that you can actually feel. That would be cool.
<br /><br />I also think that this sort of textural twitchiness like, "I can fiddle with something while I'm doing something else," aspect could be huge.
<br /><br />So point two, embrace showmanship. This is Gary Gygax, co-inventor of Dungeons and Dragons, saying...and, I'm sorry, this is another apocryphal quote that you can't track down the actual source of, but it's too good to pass up, "The Dungeon Master only rolls the dice because of the noise they make."
<br /><br />That's clearly not totally true, because he wrote all these rules where you're rolling the dice to create randomness and to resolve a situation.

</blockquote>

<blockquote class="speaker_4_text">
	<cite class="speaker_4">But it's totally true, because when the person who's running the game rolls those dice behind a screen and doesn't tell the players why they're rolling it that freaks them out. It builds tension:</cite> "What is it? What's going on? What is it? I don't know." It really adds to the drama of the situation.<br /><br />Similarly, this is getting back to the physical things, you've got your little miniatures around. You've got your dudes kind of fighting. And suddenly, the little monster that you were surrounding turns into a giant, winged, scary thing, because they plopped the other monster down.
<br /><br />You freak out. I mean, it's a little toy. But if you're in the moment and you're really looking at it, you freak out, especially if he's making scary noises at the same time.
<br /><br />So, there's a lot of good, serious theory, like Brenda Laurel talking about computers as theater. This is showmanship. It's the cheating part of theater. It's the part where you're using tricks to enhance drama, to enhance pathos, spooky music.
<br /><br />Let me just give you an example. This is my favorite software example.
<br /><br />So, I love unsubscribe flows. It's just a personal passion of mine. You get an email and you want to hit unsubscribe. And I found, recently, the best unsubscribe flow in the universe. It's Etsy. I felt bad unsubscribing to the newsletter, but I wanted to see what would happen.
<br /><br />I felt bad. Sad kitten [laughs] does not want me to unsubscribe. But I did it. I was heartless. I mean, it's also funny, but really, there's that, "Aw, sad kitten." So I hit unsubscribe, and then, really...Anyone from Etsy here? No? OK. They have no pity. [sighs]

</blockquote>

<blockquote class="non-speech">
	[laughter]
</blockquote>

<blockquote class="speaker_2_text">
	<cite class="speaker_2">James:</cite> This video plays. I'm forgetting the lyrics. It was in my notes. But yeah, "Every time you go away, yeah, you take a little piece of me with you." [laughs]<br /><br />This is cute. It's funny. And one of the points I would make about showmanship is I think that it's very important. I think it adds character to your design. You have to be unafraid to be cheesy in order to pull it off.
<br /><br />If you're afraid to be cheesy, if you're a little too serious, you would never be able to do something like this. But man, this was effective. I almost re-subscribed right there.
<br /><br />All right. So I talked about the secondary purpose of dice, but actually, they have a primary purpose, which is to create randomness.
<br /><br />And one of the nice things about dice, as opposed to doing something on a computer, is that they create randomness in a very visible way. You see what's going on, which is very fun and attractive.
<br /><br />But I think one of the things that got lost when we moved from pen and paper to computer games is computer games will do the roll behind the scenes, usually, and then you'll just see the result.
<br /><br />And I think that in a lot of ways, paying attention to the randomness builds story. It builds narrative. And I think narrative's very important for design.
<br /><br />So let me give you an example. This is an unfortunate and classic example from Dungeons and Dragons history. It's the Harlot Table, from AD&D. Very famous.
<br /><br />Let's say you're wandering through a city, and your DM hasn't created a plot. He's pre-forming it. You might have a roll to say, "OK, you wander across some townspeople," rather than a monster or the guards or something.
<br /><br />What kind of townspeople do I run across? You roll another dice. There's a table that says, "You run across a harlot." Well, the obvious question, at the time, was what kind of harlot?
<br /><br />And so you roll the dice from one to 100, and you might have a Brazen Strumpet or a Cheap Trollop or an Aged Madam or what have you.
<br /><br />So let's use a slightly less famous table. This is kind of hard to see. This is a Rumor Table from one of the earliest modules, Keep on the Borderlands.
<br /><br />And the idea is that the person who's running the game, the Dungeon Master, rolls this and, before your intrepid crew goes off to explore the wilderness, they pick up a rumor in a village.
<br /><br />And so you just roll and you say, "Well, which rumor does each person get?" Some of them are true. Some of them are false. You will get a different story, and, more importantly I think, you will get additional narrative based on the rumors that are out there.

</blockquote>

<blockquote class="speaker_5_text">
	<cite class="speaker_5">Now, you could've just had a scripted thing:</cite> "You get this one. You get this one. You get this one." But I think this allows for sort of a more free-form. The person who's running the game is surprised. The persons who are experiencing the game are surprised.<br /><br />And this is where the pen-and-paper game turns from a series of combat episodes to an epic adventure, because one of them got a rumor that turns out to be completely false that sends them down this whole sequence of actions, and it turns into a big thing.
<br /><br />So this is one. I don't have examples of this in software. I want to create one. I'll give you one-half example because it's a gaming context. The area to do this is in user-generated content.

</blockquote>

<blockquote class="speaker_6_text">
	<cite class="speaker_6">I think that one of the big issues with sites or services that rely on users coming up with stories and pictures and things to talk about is that sometimes the well runs a little dry. If you use LiveJournal, they often have prompts:</cite> "Here's the thing that everybody should talk about today." But, I don't know, I don't want to talk about what everybody else is talking about.<br /><br />So this fellow, he's a blogger, among other things, and he's talking to a bunch of other people who write about gaming. And he's like, "You know what you should do today? You should take a 20-sided dice," like many of you have in your hands--I guess this is a 10-sided--"and you should roll it, and you should write about that."
<br /><br />So he made up 10 things, and you should write about one of those things. I think that's a really interesting dynamic. I think we could do that in software. I think we could do that for people who are trying to get other people to communicate with each other in a lot of different contexts.
<br /><br />Not quite sure how to do it without the dice, because I think that having that visibility of the randomness is kind of important, but we can think about that.
<br /><br />All right. I'm going to speed through just a little bit. Create mini-games. Gaming is filled with mini-games. This happens in video games as well as pen-and-paper role-playing games, but I know who invented it.
<br /><br />It isn't one game. Building a character is a game. Collecting rumors is a game. Combat is a game. Trading is a game. All of these things are games.
<br /><br />And so, when you look through Traveler, which was an early science-fiction role-playing game, and still, I think, one of the best, it was a series of little books, and the little books each took it in a different direction that you could either use or not use.
<br /><br />You have sort of the basic stuff, building a character and fighting things. But then you have this whole other trading thing, which was, really, you had to love spreadsheets to do it, but if you loved spreadsheets and you thought spreadsheets were really part of your fun day, that was a great thing to do.
<br /><br />Ship combat, if you like moving little guys around planets and things. There was a game in there for everyone. I think we need to do this.
<br /><br />I have a cheesy-yet-awesome example from 37signals. When you install their mobile Highrise app, there's a little bit of a setup time.
<br /><br />And so they said, "We don't want to confront people with a loading screen. Let's have them play tic-tac-toe." They just put up, "Would you like to play tic-tac-toe?" And you can play tic-tac-toe while things are loading.
<br /><br />Now, I think we can do better, because it's not really related to the overall thing that you were doing. So one thing that I would say is think about software, think about what your users are doing, perhaps as mini-games. There are different kinds of games.
<br /><br />You could even be thinking gamification things with levels and points, but don't make it all one big mishmash. Break it up. Character generation is one of the most fun things of pen-and-paper role-playing games.
<br /><br />Filling out a profile on a social thing, putting your picture on, it can be, if you do it right, one of the most fun things you do with software. I think there's more opportunities like that.
<br /><br />All right. Sandboxes and railroads. This isn't a suggestion. This is an analytical framework you can use. Gamers of all kinds use this all the time. There are sandbox games and railroad games. In a sandbox game, you are given a world to explore.
<br /><br />With pen-and-paper, this is really open because you can just make stuff up on the fly, although usually there's some sort of map and guidelines and you figured some of it out, but your players can go tearing off in some direction you didn't expect and you can just make stuff up.
<br /><br />It's trickier with computer games. And so I think only recently have we started seeing true sandbox computer games, because only recently we've had the power to more or less randomly populate some world for your players to go off and explore.
<br /><br />And the thing about sandbox games is that the narrative emerges from what the players do. The players make choices and the narrative kind of builds up from that. You didn't necessarily know, as the person who is creating the game or creating the experience, where they were going to go.
<br /><br />Now, railroad games. And there's a lot of space in between, but railroad games are the opposite. There is a plot. The person who creates the game knows where you're going to go, and they're more or less going to march you through a sequence of things till you get there.
<br /><br />These can be done badly or they can be done well, but that's a railroad. Your players still make choices that affects the outcome, but basically, there is a trail or a small number of trails that they take.
<br /><br />So, obviously, this applies to e-commerce. Or maybe it was just obvious to me. If you are browsing...I think it applies to a lot of other things. I'm going to use e-commerce as an example.
<br /><br />If somebody comes to Amazon and they are looking for something to buy, but they're not really sure what, Amazon or any other e-commerce site worth their salt will give them hundreds of avenues to explore.
<br /><br />They're somewhat guided, have these algorithms that show things that you're likely to like. But there's just a whole page.
<br /><br />If you go through and you think about all the different things that somebody could click on to get to a different category or a different thing to buy or information or a review or a forum or whatever, you could just do that for ages.
<br /><br />They don't know where their users are going to go. They've given them a world to explore, and that is the right thing to do for somebody who is in a browsing mode. That is a great sandbox.
<br /><br />But the minute that you put something in your cart and you hit "checkout," that's a railroad game. Everybody knows where you're going to go. You know what the end of the plot is.
<br /><br />The end of the plot is you purchased it and you're happy because it's on the way. And that doesn't mean that there are no choices. You have to figure out where you're going to ship it.
<br /><br />You have to figure out what kind of payment, but it's a railroad. You are guiding people through, and suddenly, all of the choices you make as a designer are about getting them to the end point, efficiently, but not just efficiently, because there is a plot.
<br /><br />The plot is you're happy that you bought something and that's the emotion that you want your folks to have at the end. So, you still have to apply design, it's not just about sheer, sort of, click-through efficiency. But it's a railroad game. You know where it's going.
<br /><br />So, for this one, I would just, in your design, I would take a look at what you're doing and what you're trying to accomplish and what your user goals are, and say, "Is this a railroad situation? Or is this a sandbox situation?"
<br /><br />So, preserve inconsistencies and messiness. This is, I think, hard for us, as designers. But I think it's important. So, this is James Maliszewski. He's a game designer and blogger. "Every rough edge I pound smooth is one I can't use later in order to prick my imagination."
<br /><br />He's talking about leaving stuff undone, leaving things open, so that he can be a creative person later, as he extends the game.
<br /><br />Just translate that to design. Don't design the whole thing. Leave some things open. Give me a sketchy hodgepodge setting with lots of holes and unmapped areas and incoherence, and I will give you a campaign to remember.
<br /><br />It's a slightly different point, actually. That's leaving some holes open for the creativity of the players or if we were talking about software, the creativity of the people who are experiencing the software or the service.
<br /><br />A famous example of this is Twitter. They left a lot of stuff open, a lot of obvious features. I don't know, necessarily, that they did it on purpose. I suspect they did it because their servers were on fire, and they were thinking about other things.
<br /><br />But the effect was the same. People invented things like hashtags, like retweets, and then, they have the choice of integrating those into their design or not. Maybe they continue to leave it open.
<br /><br />So, I think sometimes as designers, and I know I do this, we get a little too perfectionist. We want to put everything in a box. We want the whole system to be perfect. We want everything to be smooth. We want to pound out those rough edges.
<br /><br />Don't do it. Pound the bad ones out, I mean, that's a judgment call. But leave some stuff open. Leave some messiness.
<br /><br />We're now getting into the fuzzy. But, it's not obvious now, you kind of have to go back into the time and think about it. A lot of this sort of fantasy mishmash that Dungeons and Dragons and related games came up with is now kind of part of our common cultural heritage, strangely enough.
<br /><br />More people probably alive now can tell you what an Orc is than at any point in history. But at the time, it was weird, because later games kind of had much more crafted, synthesized, like, we're going to have one clear world. They just threw everything in the pot.
<br /><br />They're like, "I'm going to take some stuff from Edgar Rice Burroughs, some stuff from Tolkien, some stuff from...", I don't know, medieval stuff that's actually real, like very detailed stuff about weapons, "and I'm going to take some stuff from this part of history, and I'm going to just throw it all in a pot and mix it up and I don't really care. It'll be interesting. I'm throwing in anything that's good."
<br /><br />And I think this goes back, this is very similar to my point about inconsistencies and messiness. But it's, instead of about leaving stuff open, it's about throwing stuff in.
<br /><br />Again, as designers and information architects and researchers, we can be a little perfectionist, and we can say that everything needs to be perfectly consistent. And even all of the things we throw in have to be consistent.
<br /><br />I'll give you an example. I hear a lot of complaints about Apple design when it comes to inconsistently applied real-world metaphors. So, you'll have, like, the calendar with the little frayed edge of the paper and this kind of thing. But some of the ways you manipulate with it are not exactly like the real world.
<br /><br />And this goes back to Brenda Laurel complaining that the desktop metaphor was weird. It didn't entirely work, because you were picking up some aspects of the desktop and leaving other ones on the ground.
<br /><br />I say, "I don't care." I think you should pick metaphors from the real world, you should pick metaphors from software, you should pick metaphors from games, you should pick metaphors and design ideas and all of those things from wherever works.
<br /><br />The work part is the important part. If it doesn't work, don't do it. But wherever it works, and throw it in, because I think that is how you create new things under the sun.
<br /><br />And I think this is most important when we have new technologies, mobile and persistent and ubiquitous computing are things that I think of.
<br /><br />We don't know enough to create totally consistent realized visions yet. Throw whatever works in, and test it, make sure it really does work. And I think that that's actually a good path.
<br /><br />And my last point, I don't even have any examples for. So, I'm going to throw it out to you guys. One of the things that makes pen-and-paper gaming fun, and most kinds of gaming, but pen-and-paper gaming in particular, is that you can die. Your character can die.
<br /><br />And in a good game, there is a risk of that, however small. That builds tension. That builds drama. That makes it fun. Now, if you died too often, that wouldn't be fun. But if you really were invulnerable and there were no risk, that wouldn't be fun.
<br /><br />So, how do we do this in software? I don't know. Some kinds of risk are clearly unacceptable. The risk of losing all of your data because we screwed up is not an acceptable risk. That would not make things more fun, when you're going through your life, using software.
<br /><br />The risk of having your personal data be revealed to a public you didn't want it revealed to would not be fun. That's not fun.
<br /><br />But I think, I theorize that there are fun kinds of risk out there. And so, that's something that I would put to you guys. What can we add in our software...? And I'm thinking, you know, this might be less appropriate for the workplace, but maybe not.
<br /><br />But certainly, for social software, for things that are optional, for shopping, for all the rest of it. What can we add that adds an element of risk, that the person who's using your software has a little bit of something to lose, and that engages them? Without having any of the un-fun kinds of risk, because that would be bad.
<br /><br />So, I'm going to leave you with that.
<br /><br />Here are the eight ideas you can, if you have a D8, just roll and start with one of them. Give them something to manipulate, embrace showmanship, use randomness to build story. Create mini-games. Use sandboxes and railroads and think about the difference. Preserve inconsistencies, steal from everywhere and enable risk taking.
<br /><br />And thank you all for coming. Thanks to Gary and all the other people who invented these things that I have gotten a lot of inspiration from.

</blockquote>

<blockquote class="non-speech">
	[applause]
</blockquote>

<blockquote class="speaker_2_text">
	<cite class="speaker_2">James:</cite> I believe we have a little time for questions.
</blockquote>

<blockquote class="speaker_7_text">
	<cite class="speaker_7">Man 1:</cite> Hi. A very nice presentation. Your last point about enabling risk taking. Would these be two examples and one just because it's on the front page of "USA Today" is the Daily Deals and the risk of losing out of a deal, because it's no longer available?
</blockquote>

<blockquote class="speaker_2_text">
	<cite class="speaker_2">James:</cite> Oh, man.
</blockquote>

<blockquote class="speaker_7_text">
	<cite class="speaker_7">Man 1:</cite> Or is it more risk taking, such as we very often set up meetings, right? And we invite people. Let's say I'm inviting four people to a critique. And I can say, "You know what? I want two random people."<br /><br />So, I get those four people and then, the system's going to invite two other people to that critique who are open on the schedule, but I don't know who they are, perhaps I just want one. Perhaps I want four, I want all random. Are those in different aspects?

</blockquote>

<blockquote class="speaker_2_text">
	<cite class="speaker_2">James:</cite> Those are perfect and I'm kicking myself because I worked at eBay for four years. And I wasn't thinking auctions. I'm sitting there, I'm like, of course, that's it. That's what made eBay fun and a lot of the deal sites that are working now in a similar way. Yeah, you might not get it.<br /><br />So, yes, that's a perfect example, and I love your second one, because I think that, used carefully, emphasizing the carefully, social risk, rather than, say, financial or material risk, in some ways, it's the most powerful fire you can play with.
<br /><br />Which is why, mostly, we're busy trying to have bad things not happen as designers and I think that's appropriate, but I like that example.

</blockquote>

<blockquote class="speaker_8_text">
	<cite class="speaker_8">Woman 1:</cite> Mine was kind of like his second one. It was that Chatroulette, I was kind of thinking, that's sort of a risk.
</blockquote>

<blockquote class="speaker_2_text">
	<cite class="speaker_2">James:</cite> Chatroulette is a perfect example. And I don't know if anyone actually tried it, but yes, it was risky. You were risking seeing things you could not un-see.
</blockquote>

<blockquote class="speaker_7_text">
	<cite class="speaker_7">Man 2:</cite> It seems kind of like your point on risk taking, your point on sandboxing versus railroad actually kind of converged real nicely. Sandboxing is about discoverability, right? The idea of going off and finding something completely random, something new. Risk taking is all about, "I don't know what's here, but what the hell, I'll click on it anyway."<br /><br />I'm thinking, like, a great example is the Apple App Store. I go off and I look at the applications that are there, I have no idea whether they're worth a damn or not, five stars mean nothing. But 99 cents, you can't pass that up. So, you click and you grab, and OK, yeah, great, this was awesome.

</blockquote>

<blockquote class="speaker_2_text">
	<cite class="speaker_2">James:</cite> And I think that's a great example because it actually illustrates the risks that you might want people to take versus the risks you don't want people to take.<br /><br />So, the risk you want people to take is that they might try a 99 cent app that may or may not work out for them.
<br /><br />The risk you don't want them to take is, they try a 99 cent app and that takes all their personal data from their phone and sends it to somebody in some scary place where they're going to do things with it. So, yes, I think that is it in a nutshell.

</blockquote>

<blockquote class="speaker_8_text">
	<cite class="speaker_8">Woman 2:</cite> I was thinking a little bit of a combination of randomness and perhaps some risk taking is like Urban Spoon, where you shake your phone and it tells you a restaurant.
</blockquote>

<blockquote class="speaker_2_text">
	<cite class="speaker_2">James:</cite> Oh, that's beautiful.
</blockquote>

<blockquote class="speaker_8_text">
	<cite class="speaker_8">Woman 2:</cite> So, maybe you'll try things that you didn't know were there.
</blockquote>

<blockquote class="speaker_2_text">
	<cite class="speaker_2">James:</cite> I mean, I think for a lot of these things, that the physicality, there are the conceptual things, but the physicality is really important. And I'm really happy that the technology has now come and we can bring that back in.<br /><br />We kind of had to ignore it for a while in software, it was like, pretend that other than the mouse thing you have no hands and feet and that you're not an embodied creature.
<br /><br />But I think we can bring that back in now, and that makes me really happy. I think we can do a lot more interesting things. Shaking to find restaurants is definitely one of them.
<br /><br />OK? If anyone did not get a 20-sided dice, please let me know and we'll get you one. And thank you all for coming.

</blockquote>

<blockquote class="non-speech">
	[applause]
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