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An award winning Dutch serious game: “Sharkworld allows aspiring project managers to experiment and gain experience with key aspects of project management in a highly entertaining and motivating setting.”
Month: November 2008
links for 2008-11-24
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“Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player.” Handy. The demos cover a pretty broad range of displays.
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An urban infoviz installation. Certainly a relief from all those big screens, but it’s hard to tell the output from random noise. It would have been nice if a little bit more context was provided in the set-up.
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“Night of the Cephalopods is a survival horror game with old school pixel art graphics and an innovative fully voiced dynamic narrative system.” Must play this next time I launch Windows on my Mac.
links for 2008-11-22
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This post contains a video of Daniel Cook’s presentation at a recent IxDA event. This is a good introduction into the concept of exploratory learning, somtehing games do really well. Dan also explains his skill chain model, which he now dubs STARS – for Skills, Tools, Activities, Rules and Stimuli.
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More notes taken at Playful, these are by Elin. She writes: “To me, the most interesting talks revolved around the notion of “freeplay” — the bit of the user experience that can’t be designed or controlled by designers in advance.”
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A short piece by Gibson on the nature of science fiction. “I took it for granted that the present moment is always infinitely stranger and more complex than any “future” I could imagine. My craft would be (for a while, anyway) one of importing steamingly weird fragments of the ever-alien present into “worlds” (as we say in science fiction) that purported to be “the future”.”
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A wonderful image collection of old board games, with some interesting links to history articles at the end. Via Tom.
links for 2008-11-21
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Guess I’ll need to go and make one of these some time soon so I can use a Wiimote in a personal project.
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Extensive notes taken at Playful: Game Design London 2008 by Roo Reynolds.
links for 2008-11-18
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A nice collection of web interface sketches.
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“It shows a 2D plot of genetic similarity across Europe, colour-coded by country, alongside a political map of Europe using the same colours. A simply striking way to illustrate the complex process of reducing a multi-dimensional data set.”
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A product that employs active RFID and an accelerometer to essentially turn your pet dog into a proto-SPIME. I need this. But first, I need a dog. Also, apparently only available in the US at the moment. Sigh.
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“But look around the restaurant some time (discreetly) and see your fellow citizens in action — mostly minding their own business, enjoying privacy while seldom having to enforce it, needing no screens or vigilant authorities to protect them, or to make them behave. Privacy is good! And, guess what? It happens when we empower people to see.”
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“Ubiquitous surveillance programs that affect everyone without probable cause or warrant […] foster control. And no one is safer in a political system of control.”
links for 2008-11-17
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“…I think people will perform better when understanding the theoretical constructs in which they operate, so they can appreciate self-imposed arbitrary limits that may not have realized.” Not to mention the philosophical underpinnings of those theoretical constructs.
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“A laptop scans the room using the open source Roomware software. It connects to random visitors and searches the Last.fm database for similarity. It then shows the similarity on a big screen by showing the profiles. A percentage and five artists both have in common.”
A Playful Stance — my Game Design London 2008 talk
A while ago I was interviewed by Sam Warnaars. He’s researching people’s conference experiences; he asked me what my most favourite and least favourite conference of the past year was. I wish he’d asked me after my trip to Playful ’08, because it has been by far the best conference experience to date. Why? Because it was like Toby, Richard and the rest of the event’s producers had taken a peek inside my brain and came up with a program encompassing (almost) all my fascinations — games, interaction design, play, sociality, the web, products, physical interfaces, etc. Almost every speaker brought something interesting to the table. The audience was composed of people from many different backgrounds, and all seemed to, well, like each other. The venue was lovely and atmospheric (albeit a bit chilly). They had good tea. Drinks afterwards were tasty and fun, the tapas later on even more so. And the whiskey after that, well let’s just say I was glad to have a late flight the next day. Many thanks to my friends at Pixel-Lab for inviting me, and to Mr. Davies for the referral.
Below is a transcript plus slides of my contribution to the day. The slides are also on SlideShare. I have been told all talks have been recorded and will be published to the event’s Vimeo group.
Perhaps 1874 words is a bit too much for you? In that case, let me give you an executive summary of sorts:
- The role of design in rich forms of play, such as skateboarding, is facilitatory. Designers provide tools for people to play with.
- It is hard to predict what people will do exactly with your tools. This is OK. In fact it is best to leave room for unexpected uses.
- Underspecified, playful tools can be used for learning. People can use them to explore complex concepts on their own terms.
As always, I am interested in receiving constructive criticism, as well as good examples of the things I’ve discussed.
Continue reading A Playful Stance — my Game Design London 2008 talk
links for 2008-11-14
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Fun talk and demo by Jury Hahn of MegaPhone, who do “Phone Call Controlled, Realtime, Multiplayer Gaming on Big Screens”. Nice to see a gaming presentation where the audience actually gets to play.
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“Being playful means that some of the APIs we publish may not be useful to a large audience, but they will be fun. And, in the end, isn’t that what the web is all about?”
links for 2008-11-13
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“Voor een eerste This Happened Nederland was het een geslaagde avond met overwegend solide presentaties, […] die verder goed was georganiseerd.”
links for 2008-11-10
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“Concluderend kan ik zeggen dat ik met name hele inspirerende verhalen gehoord heb deze avond. Ook de afwisseling in onderwerpen was erg prettig. Het maakt niet uit welk type project het is — we gingen van games naar fysieke elektronica naar handmade crafts naar Mac applicaties — hetzelfde type issues komt bij allemaal terug.”