Social heroes: games as APIs for social interaction

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.

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INDEX TERMS

General Terms:
Design, Documentation, Experimentation, Human Factors, Performance, Theory

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