Because I’ve been busy/lazy and off the blogging habit, here, at long last, is my thesis for ITP, almost a year late. Comments and such are still more than welcome, as many of the ideas are still being worked on in my current projects, and Social Heroes itself is likely to be revived later this year…

ABSTRACT

Social Heroes is a pervasive social game in which players trade points by tagging each other using Twitter. Through the accumulation of tags and points in defined combinations, they earn achievement awards and gain the ability to create their own tags and achievements. Taking the metaphor of APIs from software development and drawing parallels between the way we model game state, Social Heroes attempts to provide a ludic interface for our personal relationships. The result is a system for social play surrounding identity, relationships, and communication.

Keywords
games, social software, APIs, pervasive game, relational identity, cognitive modeling, game state modeling, ludic language

Here’s a video of my presentation:

Click through to read the whole paper, or download a PDF: Social Heroes: Games as APIs for Social Interaction
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