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Blog post on the wooden wall in the office of Connecta, where I’m spending quite some time lately. Pretty…
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Croft’s celebration of ‘subtlety’ in visual design makes me shudder. Is this the subtlety that gave us barely readable grey-on-white text? Very ‘professional’ indeed. Give me contrast any day.
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The new Jaiku client launches and gets some good press. Shame I don’t have 3rd edition S60 phone…
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GSW points to a series of discussions about the future of short-session gaming. They stress the importance of effortless delivery and mention two different small game genres (twitch and think).
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“The future of games, especially ones delivered over the internet, is providing not just a finished product, but a continued service.” Interesting thoughts on the future of casual game portals.
Month: August 2007
Mirroring mental models — games modelling players
Today I sent in the slides of my Euro IA Summit presentation for the proceedings. The rough outline of my talk is done, the most important thing now is to find the proper examples to illustrate all the fuzzy theoretical thinking. That means (at least for me) doing a lot of Flickr photo searches. This time I’ll also be experimenting with using some short video-clips. Games are better seen in motion after all (and best experienced through play of course). Chronicling my thinking on the subject of playful IAs on this blog has been very helpful in organising my thoughts by the way, I’ll definitely try it again the next time I need to do a talk.
On mental models
One idea I managed to squeeze into the presentation in addition to the stuff I’ve been blogging about so far is about mental models. I think it was Ben Cerveny who mentioned in his Reboot 7.0 talk (MP3) that some of the pleasure of playing games is derived from the gradual mental model building a player goes through. The player uses the visual layer of a game to learn about the underlying structures. When a player masters a game, the visual layer more or less fades away and becomes a symbolic landscape through which he manipulates a far richer model of the game in his mind.
From a UX perspective because usually when designing web sites and apps we try to adhere to existing mental models as much as possible to prevent confusion and frustration. This is a very valid approach of course. However, regardless of how well done the UX design, there will always be some mental modelling on the user’s part. Best make this as engaging as possible I guess. This, again, is where games come in.
Will Wright acknowledges the fact that players build models of a game but he proposes to take it one step further. In an old(ish) talk at Accelerating Change 2004 he proposed the idea that a game can construct a model of the player as well. Parallels with online recommendation engines are apparent here. As Wright points out, in games (as in web environments) everything can be measured. This way, the experience can be tailored to a player/user. He’s applying this principle in the upcoming Spore, where game content (created by other players) is dynamically included based on inferred player preferences.
It can be argued that certain web professionals are way ahead of the games industry in this field. Perhaps there are some interesting opportunities for collaboration or career moves here?
links for 2007-08-16
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Not sure I bookmarked this the first time around. I’ve hardly ever seen the joys of iterative processes been explained in such a concise and fun way. Good stuff.
links for 2007-08-15
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Drew McLellan leaves Yahoo!: “It seems that the people at the very bottom of the company really get the web, and honestly a lot of the execs right at the very top seem to get it. In the middle is a great swamp of middle management where good ideas go to d
links for 2007-08-14
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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.
links for 2007-08-11
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Another example of how the games and internet industries are converging. There’s just so many opportunities for social technologist in the games industry right now, they’re really only beginning to understand how to foster community.
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Everybody’s doing it: Ben Hammersley switches to an all web workspace (includes some links to people who’ve done the same.)
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Cabel of Panic gets a fabject Mii and a personalized Wii remote. Awesome geekery!
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These guys ‘3D print’ Miis and 2nd Life characters. Oh yes.
The experience of playful IAs
It’s time for a short update on my thinking about Playful IAs (the topic of my Euro IA Summit talk). One of the under-served aspects so far is the actual user experience of an architecture that is playful.
Brian Sutton-Smith describes a model describing the ways in which games are experienced in his book Toys as Culture. I first came across this book in (not surprisingly) Rules of Play. He lists five aspects:
- Visual scanning
- Auditory discrimination
- Motor responses
- Concentration
- Perceptual patterns of learning
Of most importance to my subject is the 5th one.
Game design, like the design of emergent IAs is a 2nd order design problem. You can only shape the user’s experience indirectly. One of the most important sources of pleasure for the user is the way you offer feedback on the ways he or she has explored and discovered the information space.
Obviously, I’m not saying you should make the use of your service deliberately hard. However, what I am saying is that if you’re interested in offering a playful experience on the level of IA, then Sutton-Smith’s perceptual patterns of learning is the best suited experiential dimension.
links for 2007-08-09
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Hans recommends a book on scale-free networks. Looks interesting, it’s on my to read list (together with a zillion other books I hope to read some day).
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Crazy Flash game with good art and a nice dose of violent humour.
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Very pretty point and click adventure game made in Flash.
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Ahhh this looks sweet. A CSS framework that includes a grid and typography but no bloat. Gonna use this on a next project.
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AquaBrowser is partnering with LibraryThing to seed their folksonomy product for libraries.
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Veen thinks the web can be made better when location is assumed.
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LibraryThing discover the joys of the Dutch web scene and cannot help but mentioning soft drugs. Sigh.
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MacManus proves he doesn’t get mobile at all. Better browsers on mobile devices are nice but no substitute for mobile services that are designed with the user’s context in mind.
links for 2007-08-08
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Effortlessly create Gilliam-esque animations. Very accessible animation tool. Via David.
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Short news article on some of the mechanics in Molyneux’s Fable 2 that try to find new ways of creating tension.
links for 2007-08-07
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A prototype of a dynamic visualization of an email inbox using a metaphor based on microbes. Looks funky. There’s also a thesis here. Via Floris.
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Post on a newish site that intends to catalogue the new shapes of games. The author should check out Path of the Warrior, which is a one-button RPG from Gamevil.
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“Simulation meets political cartoons.”
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Great presentation that introduces several game mechanics in a straightforward way and looks at how you can apply them to functional sites.
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Presentation very much along the lines of what I have been bouncing around in my brain: the obvious crosss-over and similarities between social software and games.
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Aesthetically pleasing Flash games.
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Quite possibly one of the most ambitious ARGs I’ve seen so far. Seems to be launching a new ‘season’ soon.