January 29th: Amy Jo Kim on The Psychology of Fun & Game Mechanics for Internet Startups

Our speaker for January will be Amy Jo Kim, co-founder/CEO at ShuffleBrain, a startup building smart games for social networks.  Amy Jo will be speaking about why certain games and social networks have a “fun” and engaging user experience, and how to apply these concepts in building consumer internet startups & applications.

Amy Jo Kim is an internationally recognized expert on community architecture and game mechanics.  She has been involved in the design of social architecture for numerous games and online communities, including Rock Band, Ultima Online, There.com, Family.com, eBay, Adobe, and Nokia.

Amy Jo is also the author of Community Building on the Web, a design handbook that has become required reading in game design studios and universities worldwide.  She holds a PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of Washington, and a BS in Experimental Psychology from UC San Diego.

Here is Amy’s presentation “Putting the Fun in Functional (2009)“:

Here are the video clips from Amy’s presentation at Startup2Startup:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Amy’s most recent fun creation is PhotoGrab, a photo puzzle game built on the Facebook Platform.  Go ahead & give it a try

You can read more about Amy & her work in a recent interview with Joshua Porter on Bokardo.com.