Foursquare, GetGlue, Nike+, Badgeville: From reading news to fulfilling your hearts' desires, more and more "gameified" applications and "gamification" vendors doll out points and badges to users, promising anything from increased user engagement ...

JavaScript is a language with more than its share of bad parts. It went from non-existence to global adoption in an alarmingly short period of time. It never had an interval in the lab when it could be tried out and polished. JavaScript has some e...

It is well known that event loops rather than threads are required for high-performance servers. Javascript is a language unencumbered of threads and designed specifically to be used with synchronous evented I/O, making it an attractive means of p...

There are many professional game engines out there for consoles, PCs, and mobile handhelds. However, there is one big empty gap, even in 2010: Not a single game engine targets desktop and mobile browsers natively without the use of plugins. In ...

Gamification is fundamentally rewriting the rules of engagement for product design and marketing. From Foursquare to Farmville and from Nike to the Navy, game mechanics like points, badges, levels, challenges, rewards and leaderboards are being us...

*Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Functional Software* In this session, we'll review the psychology and system thinking behind game design, and learn how to use game mechanics to create an experience that's fun, compell...