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Trouble with his Nintendo Wii lead Cable of Panic to the discovery of the Wii Help Cat — contextual help you’ve got to catch.
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Entertaining interview with Chris Crawford. Too bad he’s turned his back on the games industry, I think there’s plenty of room for innovation there.
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Koster reacts to the Slate article on serious games and thinks the future is less bleak than they describe.
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Koster on how to design serious games: “… start with something that users care about, and just take care to select a goal that naturally offers up the sorts of challenges that we want to teach.”
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Slate article on the state of serious games — the author feels most of the current efforts start the wrong way around, they should first come up with something fun and then add educational elements.
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Ian Bogost describes his philosophy in creating ‘persuasive games’ — he wants to design games for non-gamers, people who have very different expectations of what a game experience can be.
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Great analysis of a freaky Wii feature called the Help Cat. Excellent example of merging game mechanics with interaction design.
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Another look at the serious games phenomenon. I like the example of PopCap building a zen mode into their games for casual players who just want to zone out.
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Line Rider is getting a release on the Wii and DS. Turns out the creator got its physics from a Gamasutra article.
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Powazek rightly criticizes Apple for competing by keeping certain product features to themselves.
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Short presentation that showcases some game mechanics used in an online user research tool.
Finally discovered the Wii Help Cat? ;-)
The Wii Help Cat is the best example I can think of of playful mastery driven interaction design, as danc puts it. I use it all the time to show to colleagues when I’m trying to make a point, but they don’t like it because you have to put in an effort to catch it. The entire concept of having to catch a cat to get help is so counter-intuitive to them that they write it off as … counter-intuitive. While in this context, it’s one of the best, most innovative design elements in a UI I’ve seen.
I wish I knew how to introduce these kinds of UI elements to others.
All credits for the help cat go to you Rahul. I’ll be sure to include you in the thank-you list on my presentation. :-) The reason I bookmark it now is that I only bookmark stuff I actually read/try/watch/whatever. It took me a while to catch up with this.
You’re right, it is a challenge to sell these kinds of designs. I haven’t tried it much yet either. I do think I’ve gathered a list of some persuasive arguments though, so who knows, maybe once I publish it, it’ll be of some help to you.
Oh and by the way: I tend not to listen to people using arguments like “inconsistent” and “counter-intuitive” without being able to provide proper definitions of the terms involved. ;-)