Me

UX Designer who loves Video Games...

Photo by Olga Werner

I am Konstantinos Drachtidis, 35, User Experience Designer in the field of enterprise software at SAP SE who loves video games. While I am working on complex use cases handled by business applications, I am fascinated with how game design handles complex interactions and always comes up with creative and fresh ideas that keep players hooked for hours. My daily tasks deal with the pragmatic side of User Experience practices, such as prototyping, and code is my tool of choice.

Gameful and playful UX

Why are games important for UX Design?


Gamification was proved to be more of a buzzword than a real catalyst in enterprise software, that missed the distinction between play and game, misinterpreting the role of "motivation". Nevertheless, game experience and game research have a lot to teach us, as designers, in understanding the human behaviour and this is what I would like to share.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gameful but not gamified User Experience

Image
Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash Gamification The definition for gamification has been properly given by Sebastian Deterding, Dan Dixon, Rilla Khaled and Lennart Nacke in their paper with title From Game Design Elements to Gamefulness: Defining “Gamification” . That is: "… use of game design elements in non-game contexts." The term of gamification has been a bit of a buzz-word for the last few, maybe, years in the field of enterprise and consumer software. Apart from being used, it has been also clearly misused, bringing in mind mostly points, badges, top lists and attempts to motivation. Until someday, while searching for the term gameful, I came up to this really interesting quote by Jane McGonigal from her session with title We don’t need no stinkin’ badges: How to re-invent reality without gamification : "Within the video game and digital media industry, discontent with some interpretations have already led designers to coin different ter...
Read more

Research on gameful design

Image
Gamification: Toward a Definition Ref: Gamification: Toward a Definition ; Sebastian Deterding, Rilla Khaled, Lennart E. Nacke, Dan Dixon. Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash I was reading the above mentioned paper regarding the term of gamification and its definition. I found some really interesting lines that I would like to share as notes. "A working definition of the term gamification is the use of game design elements in non-game contexts." I find this sentence pretty laconic, with a clear meaning and really interesting the fact that there is not any clue or reference to the the term of play, which unfortunately is often misinterpreted! Actually, the writers mention it nicely and clearly while analyzing the definition few paragraphs below, that "…we are talking about elements of games, not of play." Moreover, I found also interesting the approach of the terms play and use in the following quote regarding the term of element within t...
Read more

Video games as an aspect of Visual Culture

Image
Are video games an aspect of Visual Culture studies? Definitely yes, but not only because Wikipedia says so. Photo by Ales Nesetril on Unsplash In the former years the video games constituted interactive sequences of images that were consumed by players, with a relatively low level of complexity in terms of user experience and user engagement. The very first game platforms offered straight forward gameplay including a controller with very few buttons as a physical interface. The multiplayer mode introduced a more sophisticated engagement involving two players, two physical interfaces as input peripherals and a single display. The pixels on the screen might had been very few in the very beginning, and might have been increasing later on indeed, but did have strong impact on this primitive game experience. In the latter years, the game experience has been advanced into a more sophisticated complex of multiple mediums. The gamer nowadays consumes real time visual information fro...
Read more