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Game Design for Social Networks is a one-day workshop where the participants will learn about creating and designing game concepts for online social networking platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. The workshop is built around my work on researching social game design drivers and frameworks, and putting them into practice.

The workshop will debut in an academic setting in the MindTrek Conference in Tampere, Finland, later in the year, but I'm happy to receive requests for running the workshop already earlier. For that, please use the contact form.

Workshop Description

Game Design for Social Networks is a one-day workshop where the participants will learn about creating and designing game concepts for online social networking platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. The workshop is built around my work on researching social game design drivers and frameworks, and putting them into practice.

The workshop will consist of two parts, bridging research, theory, and practice: First, there will be an introduction to a design framework, which establishes useful constraints for designing games for particular motivations that characterize social network use.

Second, the framework will be taken into practice through a number of design exercises. The exercises will enable participants to come up with new game concepts. Participants will also be able to bring existing ideas to the workshop, and have a chance to refine them through the analytical design approaches introduced throughout the day.

Agenda for the day:

• Introduction to workshop and participants

• Lecture: Game design for social networks

• Exercise: Establishing design drivers for networked play

• Lunch break

• Lecture: Introducing game mechanics & themes as design constraints

• Exercise: Brainstorming social network game mechanics

• Exercise debrief: Bridging mechanics into themes

• Coffee break

• Exercise: Preparing game concept presentations

• Concept presentations & Evaluations

• Workshop debrief & closing

The workshop package includes an evaluation report delivered afterwards by me. It will collect the concepts into a single report, and include an evaluation of each concept with suggestions for further development. The workshop can also be customized to run across two days - or, it can be had as an introductory, half-day version as well.

Again, I'm happy to receive requests for running the workshop. Please drop me a line, thanks!