D.I.C.E. Summit

The D.I.C.E. Summit is an annual conference for the video game industry, organised by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. One talk from it is recorded here: The Secret Mechanisms - Designing for pleasure, given by Jesse Schell in 2013.

The talk is filed under delight, video games, and habits and behavior change. Game designers have long studied what makes an experience pleasurable and what keeps people coming back, and many of those mechanisms now appear in apps and websites too. Several patterns in the UI-Patterns.com library, such as variable rewards and appropriate challenge, draw on the same ideas.