ia play

Play is a pretty complicated word, the sort of word that causes those of us who struggle with automatic indexing no end of trouble. Dictionary.com lists 94 definitions.
The first, a dramatic composition or piece, is not really the sort of ‘play’ that I’m talking about – although it does make you wonder what an information architecture-themed drama would be like. If comics, why not plays?

I’m more interested in “exercise or activity for amusement or recreation”. Pretty broad, huh?

Game is a bit more specific – only 10 definitions – with the most useful definition being “a competitive activity involving skill, chance, or endurance on the part of two or more persons who play according to a set of rules, usually for their own amusement or for that of spectators”.

The rules distinguish ‘games’ from just any old ‘play’. Games are also considered more goal orientated. I started getting interested in this area by considering how games could help in our work environment. This goal orientation means you can make a clear case for how the games will help you professionally. What is much more complicated is justifying plain-old undirected play…

Still on the subject of trading cards, I’ve long been the proud owner of a pack of David Gauntlett’s social theorists trading cards.

David is also responsible for two fully poseable action figures of Anthony Giddens and Michel Foucault. The cards might have more practical uses but these would go very nicely with the Librarian action figure (if they were real that is).

Is there a serious point to this? What can you actually do with the cards, other than use them as very basic exam crib-sheets? Perhaps it is in framing a discussion? You could literally play your cards so that whoever you are talking to knows that you are starting from a Marxist position with a bit of bell hooks thrown in, and that their Neo-Con argument is going to get them nowhere.

Which may sound a bit silly and pointless and that was the reaction of some health professionals to Red’s Diabetes Agenda Cards . Red argue the cards ” allow patients to set the agenda for their consultation; getting to the heart of the problem in the first few minutes of a typical diabetes check-up and freeing up valuable consultation time to work on solutions”. And that is using models from play to solve some very serious problems indeed.

o I just loved the trading card game that Jess McMullin came up with for the IA Summit. It wasn’t just because I won something.

The concept was “Every Summit attendee gets a starter pack of trading cards when they register. You’ll get 16 identical cards, and need to trade to get the complete set of 16 cards. People new to the Summit can also use a Wildcard to complete their set. When you get the entire set, you can go to the prize desk and enter your name in our fabulous prize draw.”

It works on so many levels. It is educational. If you didn’t know what a Page Description Diagram was, well now you had a handy pocket-sized description. There’s competition to motivate you, both in the form of the prizes and just in wanting to beat the smug guy at lunch to the full set. The cards are pretty and tactile. You can shuffle them randomly in boring conference sessions. There are tactics to challenge your brain. Moral choices to be made when you don’t need the card from the girl sitting next to you but she still has 15 wire-frames.

It was a great ice-breaker. It provided an easy way to start conversations (you wouldn’t happen to have’Kano Analysis‘, would you?) and a reason to do so. That said, the social value of the cards deteriorated as people got more ruthless. On the final day I overheard a number of interactions that were pretty much limited to “I can trade you a 9 or a 5, for a 2. I don’t need a 7″. I don’t think those involved even got to the exchanging of names.

I got a pack of ‘Design the Box‘, which might not be on everyone’s list of UX methods but is another one of nForm’s babies. My room-mate and I immediately traded half our packs so I ended up half ‘Design the Box’ and half ‘Usability Testing‘. The advantage of teaching a pre-conference tutorial immediately became clear, as I had a class of 20 to trade with before the conference proper had even started. It still took me most of the conference to get my hands on ‘Swimlanes‘. Many others got stuck looking for their elusive final card and everyone was convinced that the one they were looking for was ‘Rare’. No-one ever conclusively proved that there were less of any particular card.

I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about information architecture and play. Not necessarily an obvious association. Information architects have a reputation for working in grey-scale. The community contains lots of ex-librarians. Content audits aren’t the most exhilarating of activities. Maybe one of these generalisations is where the thing about information architects and ‘seriousness’ came from. But play just keeps coming up as a theme in my professional life, and I’m pretty sure I’m an information architect.

The theme got my attention when we were looking for ways to stop web producers being bored to tears in content management tutorials. The resulting ‘metadata games’ got us to Vancouver, and into Jess McMullin’s presentation ‘Game Changing‘. Back in London at Digital Futures, Pat Kane presented the Play Ethic and a theme took hold.

At the IA Summit in Las Vegas last month the connection between IAs and playful behaviour started off looking weak. The intriguing tutorial ‘Learning Interaction Design from Las Vegas’ was cancelled due to ‘lack of interest’ and at the lunches all the IAs grumbled about being stuck in the gaming capital of the world. The theme was, however, saved by nForm’s masterful UX trading cards, the piece de resistance of both playful IA and of encouraging the shy to spontaneously and enthusiastically interact.

More on all this later…