In a recent post on the Edge blog – which, if you consider yourself a games designer, you absolutely must read – Matt Jones asks:
“Why should pocket calculators be put on a pedestal, and not Peggle?”
He writes about the need for games to be appreciated and critiqued as design objects. He points out [...]
There’s some movement over at the website for my new venture. I mentioned Hubbub before: it is a design studio I am setting up for physical, social games that are played in public places. We hope to address social issues and the like using these games.
Recently…
I’ve adjusted the temporary site to fit with the brand [...]
There’s a lot going on at the Leapfrog studio, which explains at least in part why things have gone quiet around here. However, I wanted to take the time to alert you to some upcoming events that might be of interest.
An urban game in the Rotterdam city center
On Sunday September 27 around 50 young people [...]
It’s been a few weeks since I presented at the Nijmegen Design Platform (NOP), but I thought it would still be useful to post a summary of what I talked about here.
Update: it took me a while, but the slides that accompanied this talk are now up at SlideShare.
A little context: The NOP run [...]
A while ago I was interviewed by Sam Warnaars. He’s researching people’s conference experiences; he asked me what my most favourite and least favourite conference of the past year was. I wish he’d asked me after my trip to Playful ‘08, because it has been by far the best conference experience to date. Why? Because [...]
I have a considerable amount of books with dog-eared pages lying around the office. One such book is The Game Design Reader, which contains a large and varied collection of essays on (yes) game design. This book probably has the largest number of dog-ears. Partly because it is quite thick, but also because it is [...]
Sketching is the defining activity of design writes Buxton and I tend to agree. The genius of his book is that he shows sketching can take on many forms. It is not limited to working with pencils and paper. You can sketch in 3D using wood or clay. You can sketch in time using video, [...]
“Play is the highest form of research.”
—Albert Einstein1
That’s what I always say when I’m playing games, too.
I really liked Bill Buxton’s book Sketching User Experiences. I like it because Buxton defends design as a legitimate profession separate from other disciplines—such as engineering—while at the same time showing that designers (no matter how [...]
Last sunday I sat down and coded a prototype of a casual game in Mobile Processing. I got the idea for it the evening before: You’re a bee who needs to collect as much honey as possible in his hive while at the same time keeping a flower-bed blooming by pollinating… Play it and let [...]
I’m still trying to get a grip on why I think games are such a good reference point for IAs and IxDs. I’ll try to take another stab at it in this post. Previously I wrote about how games might be a good way to ’sell’ algorithmic architectures to your client. Even if you’re not [...]
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