Amy Jo Kim's Google Tech Talk

I've been pretty busy, which is a good thing, since I apparently forgot about my learning journal for a little while. This post got so long that I ended up dividing it up into several smaller posts.

I loved Amy Jo Kim's Google Tech talk. I think she hit the nail right on the head when she mentioned that women don't play games because it feels like wasted time. It's not that they don't find gaming fun. But when they're earning something, coupons or points or whatever, it's easier to justify as time well spent. I let myself play games online like Lexulous (aka black market Scrabble) and word scrambles because I enjoy challenging myself mentally. Keeps the old brain sharp! And if I were ever to purchase a gaming system, I think the Wii would be the way to go, precisely because it's so not a video game.

Toward the middle/end of Amy Jo's talk, she mentioned Photograb, a visual/social photo sharing game from her company, Brain Shuffle. She asked how many in the audience had ever had a chance to play, and after she surveyed the raised hands, she said "Well, you can take a look at it later." And I realized that I could look at it now! So the rest of the lecture only had half of my attention as I played a few rounds of Photograb in another window. Seems like the perfect example of how social media is influencing gaming. Incorporating personal photos is a sure way to get women involved in more aspects of both gaming and social media.

I had a couple vocabulary words to learn from her talk:

Reinforcement schedule- Has to do with the learning process. There are different types (continuous and partial, variable and fixed) and each style is used in different situations. The easiest way for me to remember this is to relate it to training my dog.

Open API- I had heard of this before, but wasn't quite sure what it meant. Wikipedia defines it as "a word used to describe sets of technologies that enable websites to interact with each other by using SOAP, Javascript and other web technologies... API stands for Application Programming Interface."