links for 2008-05-09

Timo com­ments on the lat­est NFC enabled phone from Nokia. Good stuff on ges­tures, secu­ri­ty, dura­bil­i­ty, affor­dance and oth­er user expe­ri­ence aspects.

Migurs­ki dis­cuss­es the con­sid­er­a­tions that went into Oak­land Crimespot­ting. Inter­est­ing bits on emerg­ing pat­terns, and com­bin­ing tra­di­tion­al­ly dense dataviz with perma­link­ing of sep­a­rate datapoints.

Bogost looks at the use of hap­tic feed­back in games, not­ing that most of it is util­i­tar­i­an, not aesthetic—Rez being a notable exception.

Bogost responds to an Escapist arti­cle by Travis that asks if game stud­ies are doing any­thing of val­ue for gamers. The dis­cus­sion in the com­ments of this post between both is per­haps the most insight­ful part of what is dan­ger­ous­ly close to a flamewar.