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Some interesting ideas on how to combine contract work with bootstrapping an indie game company.
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Last.fm are bootstrapping a new service that will be able to offer clean metadata for music based on audio fingerprints. They’ve beta’d an app that allows for seeding their database. Am downloading it now.
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“Protoscript is a simplified scripting language for creating Ajax style prototypes for the Web.” More or less created by Bill Scott of Yahoo! Interesting approach to prototyping that might come in handy some time.
Month: September 2007
links for 2007-09-14
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Ah yes, this looks interesting. Some game-play footage from World of Goo, where you play with, well, black goo. Gotta love those indie games. Coming “soon”.
links for 2007-09-12
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Leisa Reichelt re-explains a few of her key points on how to unify Agile with UCD. I think her suggestions make a lot of sense and are quite valuable. If I had a proper office, I would hang the slide she includes in this post on the wall!
links for 2007-09-11
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Old footage of the great game The Neverhood. They don’t make them like this anymore. TenNapel also created Earthworm Jim and the comic GEAR. Good stuff.
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“VastPark is a virtual content platform featuring free tools, revolutionary distributed content syndication and enables you to deploy your own virtual world or online game within seconds royalty free.”
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Thoughts on using social networks to find suitable playmates in MMOs. I wonder wether the open social graph crowd have given this any thought – moving beyond the well-known social web into gaming territory.
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Post that links to the slides of Koster’s talk at AGDC07. Scary amount of overlap in premise with my planned talk at the Euro IA Summit. Lots of very useful stuff on the gramar of games.
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At this year’s Game Developer Conference, Raph explained web 2.0 to game designers and developers. This resulted in a very entertaining set of slides at least.
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Very easy to follow along, even though it’s just the slides. Inspiring.
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Matt Webb re-explains his concept of the experience stack, which he presented at dConstruct 2007. I for one loved the confusing nature of the talk (I don’t mind a little hard work as audience) but think this is useful nonetheless.
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Fun – Ziade mocks up the interface the iPod touch *should* show when walking into a Starbucks.
links for 2007-09-10
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Hell yes. A video of a guy
splaying around with Processing and a Wii Remote on his Mac. Cool stuff. -
Links to resources on using the Wii Remote with Processing and Max/MSP.
links for 2007-09-09
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More playful stuff! This is from Simon Oliver and looks great (will try this once I get my new MacBook up and running) interactive snow simulation that uses the Mac’s iSight. Kind of like EyeToy, bu
rt artier.
Finding playful patterns at dConstruct 2007
I didn’t announce it on this blog, but if you’re following me on Twitter or Jaiku, took a look at the Upcoming event page or share trips with me on Dopplr you’re probably aware that I attended dConstruct 2007 in Brighton.
By way of a short conference report I’d like to list some of the references to games and play that jumped out at me during the day. It might be that I’m slowly but surely going a little crazy or that have really discovered the secret order of the universe, but either way I was pleasantly surprised that most talks suggested that successful experience design benefits from an understanding of the dynamics of play. Here goes:
- Game design is a second order design problem, meaning you cannot directly design the experience of play but only the ‘stuff’ that facilitates it. Jared Spool pointed out that successful experience design is invisible, it’s only when it’s done wrong that we notice it. This makes good experience design hard to sell, and I would say the same goes for great game design.
- The practice of game design is very much a multidisciplinary one, with a lot of specialties on board. Similarly, there is no way you’ll be able to do good experience design when you use a relay-race-like proces. You need to have people from a lot of different backgrounds solving problems collaboratively (or a few people who can do a lot of different stuff really well.) Jared Spool briefly pointed this out, Leisa Reichelt gave a lot of good suggestions on how to facilitate this with washing-machine methodologies and Tom Coates finished his talk encouraging cross-disciplinary collaboration too.
- Because good experience design (like game design) is a second order design problem, and it can only be done multidisciplinary, you can only do it in an iterative and incremental way. Good games get play-tested to death to ensure they’re fun, good experiences (on the web or wherever) need the same treatment. Leisa Reichelt had some interesting ideas on how to actually pull this off: Introducing UX to Agile, by having design and development teams both working in the same rhythm, but handling different stuff in their own iterations, with a lot of hand-over and communication back and forth. Well worth trying out I think.
- More thoughts on the invisible nature of experience was provided by Peter Merholz, who used a quote from Tim O’Reilly: “Designing from the outside in”. Start with the UI and then figure out the data and logic. I wouldn’t equate user experience with user interface (because — again — the experience cannot be directly designed) but I think it’s a good quote nonetheless. I liked Merholz’s emphasis on the importance of an experience vision most of all.
- I was great to hear Denise Wilton and George Oates talk about B3ta and Flickr. A lot of people are probably aware of the gamey origins of Flickr but it was enlightening to finally see some of it on the big screen. It came as no surprise to hear that Ludicorp’s process in making Flickr was very much washing-machine style (although they did 0 user testing for a long time!)
- Matt Webb was perhaps the speaker who most explicitly drew parallels between game design and experience design. (He mentioned Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun, for instance.) He also pointed out that customisation is vital to any experience, that a product should be able to recombine with others in its ecosystem, as well as allow for personalisation. Both customisation and personalisation encourage play. Tom Coates later mentioned something very similar — that your product (which as he was eager to point out is more than just your website) should be re-combinable and extendable with and by others.
- One of the major themes in interaction and game design for me is behaviour, the way products encourage behaviour in their users and the kinds of behaviours they have embedded in themselves. Matt Webb also mentioned that people love to tell stories about the experiences they’ve had. This is very true of gaming, which is all about verbs, actions, doing stuff. Game design is not storytelling, the storytelling happens after the game.
- I had completely forgotten about Disco, the CD burning app with simulated smoke effects that serve no purpose besides play. So thanks to Matt Webb I now have an example to complement the Wii Help Cat! (Come to think of it, the discussions surrounding Stamen Design’s Twitter Blocks might be another good one.)
In conclusion, I think it’s great that Clearleft used this year’s edition to introduce the web development community to the wonderful world of experience design. I was also very happy to see a few people on stage I had not seen present before, but knew had a lot of good stuff to say. The pre- and after-party were both a lot of fun (thanks to Media Temple, Yahoo! Developer Network and the BBC for sponsoring those with free drink and food.) And if you’re curious, I understand there will be podcasts of all the sessions online soon, so keep an eye on the site.
links for 2007-09-07
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The new iPod is basically a stripped down iPhone. Interesting choice to include wifi though, and the tie-in with Starbucks sounds fun though limited.
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Migurski defends Twitter Blocks making the valuable point not all things need to be useful. I like the way he points out people criticizing it are already playing — they’re using Twitter for crying out loud!
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Entertaining interview with the guy who set up Best Cellars, a US wine merchant that categorizes their wines on taste. Reminds me of the Dutch Grape District chain. Good example of experience design applied to retail.
links for 2007-09-06
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A new site launched by Khoi Vinh of Subtraction that features 200 word design opinion pieces. Good idea, well executed. I like.
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A few hotshots have gotten together and drafted a very sensible list of rights every user of a social website should be entitled to. I don’t see anything I disagree with, but do wonder how easy it’s going to be to sell to clients. (Not that I won’t try.)
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A new journal dedicated to computer game culture. Some of the content looks interesting, like things on Shadow of the Colossus and Electroplankton.
links for 2007-09-05
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“Dopplr is like the iPod of social networks.” – Now that’s a great sound-bite. Congrats to the Dopplr team for getting funded.
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Habbo has paid close attention to machinima I guess. They have a tool with which you can make your own movies in game and are now running a contest.
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I love these cute playful plates that encourage adults and children alike to have some fun with their food. Via Pixelsumo.
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These abstract shooters make me want to own a PC again. Can’t wait to get my MacBook and try these.
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Have been using Reader for quite a while but somehow never found this great little bookmarklet that lets you skip through new items in their original form right in your browser. Have set this to command‑1 in Camino and am loving it. Via James.
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There’s a lot of discussion going on about Twitter Blocks. I don’t think interfaces have to be functionalist and utilitarian. Having a playful way of exploring data like Twitter’s (which is quite frivolous in and of itself) makes sense to me.
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“There are some things we’re just not good at and shouldn’t even attempt. A love story, for example!” GSW blogs Warren Spector’s questions to judge a game idea. Good stuff, but surprising he dismisses a whole genre as a bad idea!
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All the Bad Game Designer – No Twinkie! columns by Ernest W. Adams in one place, indexed on topic. Great resource for anti-patterns in game design.
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Interesting little casual Flash game that uses the concept of karma as its inspiration. Deceptively tricky to complete.