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A game that is a lot of fun for all the wrong reasons: zombie nuns, explosions and gore. An entry into the 4th Casual Gameplay Competition.
Month: October 2007
links for 2007-10-07
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Olly’s insightful and aesthetically pleasing presentation at Euro IA Summit 2007 on the apparent need for ethical design on the web.
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“The biggest challenge facing organisations is not so much coercing people into being more innovative as getting themselves out of the way when people try to innovate.” Too true.
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Well executed little diving game created for the Kokoromi Gamma 256 competition. Love the low rez pixel graphics and the minimalist interactions.
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Great alternative to QOOP for making nice photobooks out of your Flickr photos. They made the 24 Hours of Flickr book which is really nice.
links for 2007-10-06
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A musical instrument for the digital age designed to be beautiful. By the creator of Electroplankton.
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“Paladin, you have reached the 8th bracket of tax!” Via Peter.
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A short post on the collector’s spirit and how it’s catalyzed online. In the comments someone points out social bookmark sites play into this collecting urge. I’d say it’s play at work.
Play, story and recombination
“Dominant models in IA: space + story” was one of the notes I took while at this year’s Euro IA Summit. I’ll get into space some other time. Concerning story: Basically it strikes me that for a discipline involved with an interactive medium, so often designing is likened to storytelling. I’m not sure this is always the most productive way to approach design, I actually think it is very limiting. If you approach design not as embedding your story in the environment, but as creating an environment wherein users can create their own stories, then I’d say you’re on the right track. An example I tend to use is a game of poker: The design of the game poker was certainly not an act of storytelling, but a play session of poker is experienced as (and can be retold as) a story. Furthermore, the components of the game can be recombined to create different variations of the basic game, each creating different potentials for stories to arise. I’d like to see more designers approach interactive media (digital, physical or whatever) like this: Don’t tell a story to your user, enable them to create their own.1 Realize users will want to recombine your stuff with other stuff you might not know about (the notion of seamful design comes into play here). When you’ve done a proper job, you’ll find them retelling those stories to others, which I would say is the biggest compliment you can get.
1. Or to put this in Marc LeBlanc’s terms: Don’t embed narrative, let it emerge through play.
links for 2007-10-03
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“A mobile phone application for visualizing our urban familiar strangers.”
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An app written in Processing that offers different visualizations of a database containing indexed human emotions as found on blogs. Via Almar.
links for 2007-10-02
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“Officially launching in December, Playyoo will offer a sort of YouTube for a mobile gaming that offers free games for mobile phones, user-generated content, social interaction and personal expression.”
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Cool little intro video to Arduino with some pirate silliness thrown in for good measure. Makes me feel like buying some of that stuff and geeking out.
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Awesome talk on how the seemingly impossible is possible. With great insights into what the goals and means for welfare are and some sword-swallowing to boot.
links for 2007-10-01
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Fun little showcase of what Mobile Processing can do.