Courtesy of Flickr's kenjonbro

To our loyal Ayogo blog readers, thanks for all your recent comments and re-tweets. It’s good to know what you’ve been up to — we really appreciate it! In terms of what we’ve been up to, we’re getting ready for a huge summer.

To start, Pet Pupz, a community-based virtual pet  app (originally a Facebook game launched on Facebook awhile back) is now available in the Apple AppStore – and therefore your smartphone and the iPad! You can download it here.

As for coming attractions…

We have an exciting announcement to share with you on June 14th and then one more later on in the month. The first announcement involves a topic on serious games and health, and coincidentally, it was also the topic of a panel Michael was recently a part of. Terry Lavender from the Vancouver Observer covered the panel at last week’s Vancouver Digital Week. I also attended the event and I was excited to see the enthusiasm for “serious games.”

On the panel, Michael spoke about game design for casual social games, and in particular about game design in games that aren’t just played for fun, but also may encourage and incentivize certain “serious” behaviours. Here is an excerpt from Terry Lavender’s post,

Why do kids willingly do chores in FarmVille (a Facebook-based game) and World of Warcraft, but not in real life, asked Michael Fergusson, CEO of local casual game company Ayogo. The answer, he said, is the appeal of competition and challenge. Ayogo is working with a large health research institute to see whether a health-based videogame can actually motivate people to develop a healthy lifestyle. But in order to work, the game has to be fun first, with the health benefits strictly secondary, according to Fergusson.

As for some cool statistics that I picked up from the conference, did you know that….

* 1 billion people see a Google page every day
* 55% of people online are women
* Social media users are more positive about brands than non-users
* There are 5 billion mobile phones in the world, compared to 1 billion personal computers and 1.1 billion televisions
* 75% of Canadians have mobile phones
* Canadians send 100 million text messages every day

Oh, catch us at Launch Party 9 on June 17th in Vancouver. Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington is just one of the celebrity judges at the event. In the meantime, please show us some love and VOTE for our video!

Courtesy of Flickr's kohtzy

One of senior team members, VP of Engineering, Dave Orchard flew down to San Francisco last week to check out two conferences, f8 and Inside Social Apps. He has written a detailed blog post about the take away messages from f8, including some really cool technological announcements that were revealed. For a more detailed read, you can read his blog post on our tech blog.  I’ve cross-posted a sneak peek of the post below…

I think the biggest announcement is a combination of announcements, so let’s start with the top-down view. What Facebook can now do is be the gatekeeper for all aspects of personal information. If you like a movie, song, restaurant, article, person…whatever…on a 3rd party site like imdb.com or yelp.com, that site will notify Facebook. Then Facebook will update your profile in real-time! That itself is simply amazing, that the profile you statically filled out on sign-up and never revisited is now real-time with you. But wait, there’s more. Applications that you have added can subscribe to your profile and changes, and will be notified, typically in less than a minute. In fact, they will try up to 5 times and keep the callback for up to 24 hours.

Courtesy of Flickr's tomt6788

Hello and welcome to our corporate blog.. you’re probably here to find out more about how we can help you build your next social game, like a Facebook game or an iPhone game.

We think that some of the articles we’ve penned on the topic could be useful to demonstrate our expertise, feel free to check them out. We think this one about the secrets of engaging game design is an excellent read for game designers (and businesses), while the post about the psychological phenomenon called Hot Hands is also a fascinating look into the motivations behind gameplay.

Still have more questions for us or want more specific information about what we could help with in your next project? You can contact us by email or give us a call. You can also send us a tweet @ayogogames.  Thanks!

Courtesy of Flickr's clg20171

To recap the last few weeks, we have posted articles about the psychology behind gameplay, and how using engaging game mechanics can motivate people to play your games. Thanks for all you comments and follows on Twitter, we appreciate it!

One of the reasons we started this series was because we think that whether you are making games, funding the process or just playing them, games are a meaningful part of our everyday lives. So, let’s continue on…we think this next concept of “hot hands” is really fascinating and says something interesting about the relationship between play behaviour and evolutionary adaption.

Perceptions of Randomness

Some studies have found that when it comes to events that have randomness in them, like most games, rather than seeing them as such, people will impose patterns on the events by default. Why? According to evolutionary psychology, humans have an uncanny ability at predicting under conditions that are similar to environments that existed in our hunter-gatherer days, millions of years ago. The idea is that objects and events that ensured survival–natural resources like berries or hiding places–were clustered. Randomness was the exception. The conclusion? Our brains evolved to see patterns in most events even if there were none present.

Hot Hand Phenomenon

The hot hand phenomenon derives from this evolutionary kink that I described above, (our tendency to perceive patterns) and how this innate mechanism can be fooled in artificial environments. Hot hand refers to the expectation of “streaks” in sequences of hits and misses (when a person succeeds at something once, they’re more likely to do it again).

This concept was first presented in the journal of Cognitive Psychology in 1985. A few researchers, Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky used this research as evidence against a belief they noticed in basketball fans. The fans believed that a player had a better chance of making a basket after having made shots than after missing shots–hence the term “hot hands.” The problem? This was in fact, not true.

Implications for Game Design

So what does this have to do with social games and game design? Based on some recent studies, it was proven that “hot hands” existed even in contemporary events and artificial environments. For example, lotto games, stock markets, basketball games etc., and that this phenomenon was triggered when there were implied patterns associated with the events. As an example, we built a lottery game (a game of pure chance) and noticed how in the forums, the players were describing their “strategy” of predicting winning combinations to other players. In fact, their success could not have been influenced by strategy. For a game designer, (or a business) knowing the human brain’s tendency to see patterns is not a bad thing. You can build these implied patterns of uncertainty and chance to influence the meaning and the intensity of games.

PS. Some have suggested that the hot hand fallacy only applies to statistically independent probabilities, which might not apply to most games. It’d be great to recreate the 1985 study using data from popular Facebook games. Until then, what are your thoughts about hot hands? Contact us or leave a comment.