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Simon Carless signals the rise of free (casual) games and asks what the impact might be on the ‘mainstream’ games biz.
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A great manifesto from Kjerulf on how to be(come) happy at work. He certainly seems to be. :-)
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An old Wired piece on the alternate reality game launched for Spielberg’s A.I. Contains some nice descriptions of game-play.
Month: July 2007
links for 2007-07-28
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Interesting perspective on recent troubles with SL financial markets.
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A review of GameTap’s Mac client. It allows you to play old arcade games. Gonna give this a try soon. Update: Only works on Intel Macs. Booo.
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Interesting analysis of The World This Week from Business Week. Could we mash this up with some more interactivity to get something really good?
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Another great game concept by area/code. This time they created it for Discovery and it involves live sharks. ‘Nuff said.
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Ultima Online’s Lord British encourages MMO developers to be more creative.
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Great interview with Richard Bartle of MUD fame. The comments thread also contains some interesting remarks on his approach to design of MMOs.
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Blog of a Swedish game design student who seems to be able to whip up Flash games in an impressive short amount of time.
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A massively multiplayer word association ‘game’.
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Interesting atmospheric point and click adventure game made by an indie developer.
UX and the aesthetics of interactivity
I’ve been trying to regularly post some thoughts on the topic of playful IA here. Previously I blogged about how games could be a useful frame for thinking about complex algorithmic architectures. Last week I posted some thoughts on the application of game mechanics in web apps. There, Rahul was kind enough to point me to the fascinating blog of ‘Danc’ Daniel Cook, titled Lost Garden, where there is one post in particular that resonates with my own pre-occupations lately.
In ‘Short thoughts on games and interaction design‘ (which honestly isn’t that short) Danc Cook looks at some of the ways game design techniques can be applied to the interaction design of web apps. In summary, according to Danc Cook game design techniques allow you to:
- Create an engaging experience that goes beyond simply completing a task efficiently.
- Support free and deep exploration and introduce and teach new interactions that violate conventions.
Some things you shouldn’t borrow from games without giving it a lot of thought are:
- Spatial metaphors
- Visual themes
These are some of the things most people think of first as characteristic of games but really, they are only surface, superficial, not determinant of the actual interactivity of the system.
I think one of the greatest arguments for a deeper understanding of games by interaction designers, information architects and other user experience specialists is that they are the medium that is all about the aesthetics of interactivity. It is true that they have no utilitarian character, they aim to create a pleasurable experience through systems of risks and rewards, restraints and freedoms, nested feedback loops and on and on. As a UX practitioner, it can never hurt to have a deep appreciation of the aesthetics of the medium you work in daily (beyond simply supporting user goals, or selling product, or whatever).
links for 2007-07-27
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A round-up of some of the most notable games and events at this year’s E3.
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Weinberger’s view on the YouTube debates (which I did not see). Thoughtful as ever.
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Weinberger describes an interesting new folksonomic technique they call ‘tagmashes’. Basically a saved search for more than one tag that is accessible through a persistent URL.
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Did not bookmark this before but might be useful sometime. A talk on mobile IA by Christian Crumlish I attended at this year’s IA Summit.
links for 2007-07-26
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Commercial for a game released in Japan that comes with a hardware add-on that turns your Nintendo DS Lite into a slide controller. Long live experimental game interfaces.
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Yes WoW is hugely popular (or so it seems). I wonder how many people are actually pathologically addicted to it though. Is suspect this is still marginal. The DEA can hold its horses in this case.
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Interesting social casual game concept which basically comes across as a butterfly sim. Expect to see some beautiful graphics (on the Xbox 360 at least) and hopefully some cool social interactions.
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Richard Ziade has started blogging recorded whiteboard sketches that include audio. He calls it sketchcasting. I call it an interesting idea. I wonder what tools he uses to pull this off.
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Almar with some interesting thoughts on attacking the myth of the fold in webdesign.
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SlideShare promises to make it easy to mash up your slideshow with an audio track Might give this a try with the next presentation I do. Not one but two new *casting techniques launched in one day. Oh my!
links for 2007-07-25
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This has been around for a while but still a handy resource when doing some web typography. I especially like the bit on ‘special characters’. I could use an Elements of Typographic Style for the Dutch language though.
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Thomas announces a new project that hopes to address the question: “how do we as humans keep up to date with what’s happening in the world and make sense of it all”
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‘”Megaphone3000″ is an exciting big screen game where your cell phone becomes your controller!’
links for 2007-07-24
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The Tarquin Engine is a tool for the creation and delivery of zooming infinite canvas webcomics. Might come in handy when delivering conceptual comics.
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Awesome little indie game: “Kumoon is a hybrid of a third person shooter and a puzzle game. Player controls a chick that tries to knock down boxes in various rooms by shooting them with a revolver, shotgun or a bazooka.”
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Interesting thoughts on the value of sketching in the design process. I liked the comparison of sketches to prototypes most.
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A thorough analysis of the problems Facebook ran into when introducing a new feature a while ago. It seems they still haven’t learnt though, ’cause I read something on a new user revolt recently.
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Nice little interview giving some insights on how Cheng uses comics at Yahoo! Includes some useful links to resources for comics creators.
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Interesting presentation from Nova on the directions mobile entertainment is headed.
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Shirky’s thoughtful reply to the much derided book Cult of the Amateur.
links for 2007-07-21
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Some really great information graphics here.
Game mechanics in web apps
A while ago there was a discussion on the IAI members list about game mechanics on web sites. Andrew Hinton pointed to the Google Image Labeler and LinkedIn‘s ‘profile completeness’ status bar and asked: “Can anyone else think of a use of a game mechanic like this to jump-start this kind of activity?” (Where “this kind of activity” is basically defined as something people wouldn’t normally do for its own sake, like say tagging images.)
I was thinking about this for a while the past week and seem to have ended up at the following:
On LinkedIn, having a (more or less complete) profile presumably serves some extrinsic goal. I mean, by doing so you maybe hope you’ll land a new job more easily. By slapping a status bar onto the profile that gives feedback on its completeness, the assumption is that this will stimulate you to fill it out. In other words, LinkedIn seems unsure about the presence of extrinsic motivations and is introducing an intrinsic one: getting a 100% ‘complete’ profile and as such making a game (in a very loose sense of the term) out of its professional network service. A good idea? I’m not sure…
On Google Image Labeler, the starting point for its design was to come up with a way to have people add meta-data to images. Google actually ‘bought’ the game (originally called The ESP Game) from CAPTCHA inventor Luis von Ahn, who before that did reCAPTCHA and after went on to create Peekaboom and Phetch. Anyway, in the case of the Image Labeler (contrary to LinkedIn) there was no real extrinsic goal to begin with so a game had to be created. Simply having fun is the only reason people have when labelling images.
Note that Flickr for instance has found other ways to get people to tag images. What happened there is (I think) a very nice way of aligning extrinsic goals with intrinsic (fun, game-like) ones.
‘Pure’ games by their very nature have only intrinsic goals, they are artificial and non-utilitarian. When you consider introducing game-like mechanics into your web site or application (which presumably serves some external purpose, like sharing photos) think carefully about the extrinsic motivations your users will have and come up with game-like intrinsic ones that reinforce these.
Update: Alper finished the LinkedIn profile completeness game and was disappointed to find there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, mirroring the experience many players of real games have when finishing a game.
links for 2007-07-20
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Hadn’t bookmarked these first time around, might as well do it now. Excellent talk on the dynamics of social software with a particularly interesting part on driving user behaviour through rewards.