Having a driving question helps me find interesting, less-mainstream content that can help shape my thinking. One question I am exploring is how game-design can drive app-design (not via gamification). The presentation, Building a Princess Saving App, describes it perfectly.

This talk is about building learning and fun into your applications. If you’ve ever wondered how games work and how they can help you build better apps, this is the talk for you. Along the way, we’ll discuss a new philosophy of interaction design that is already creating a major competitive advantage for innovative application developers.

The slides describe how typical enterprise and Web 2.0 application designers might approach the problem of saving a princess vs. how Super Mario Brothers does it.

Along the way you learn the language of game-design and the STARS model. Well worth a read if you are interested in this topic.