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“Foldit is a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research.” Another entry into the growing collection of games seeking to employ human computation for useful ends (I guess kicked off by Luis von Ahn’s ESP Game. Via Hessel.
Month: December 2008
links for 2008-12-30
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“The Lost Ring was a global, multi-lingual alternate reality game that united players in a quest to recover ancient Olympic secrets. It centered around Ariadne, a lost Olympic athlete from a parallel universe. Discreetly sponsored by McDonald’s, the experience engaged younger audiences who dislike overt marketing.” Something to dig into.
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“Phillips designed the machine to demonstrate in a visual way the circular flow of money within the economy.” Playing with complexity? You bet. Via Alexandra.
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Interesting social urban game: you play in teams, snap photos during an event that fit categories you are given beforehand, share them online.
Cities, systems, literacy, games
If you were asked to improve your own neighbourhood, what would you change? And how would you go about communicating those changes?
Cities are systems, or rather, many systems that interconnect. Like buildings, they can be thought of as having layers, each changing at its own pace. If those layers are loosely coupled, the city — like the building — can adapt.
Recently, new urban layers/systems have started to emerge. They are made up of rapidly proliferating computing power, carried by people and embedded in the environment, used to access vast amounts of data.
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At the same time, games have given rise to a new form of literacy — systemic literacy. However, to date, players have mostly inhabited the systems that make up games. They can read them. Writing, on the other hand, is another matter. True systemic literacy means being able to change the systems you inhabit.
True read/write systemic literacy can be used to craft games, yes. But it can also be used to see that many other problems and challenges in daily life are systemic ones.
To be sure, the real-time city will confront its inhabitants with many new problems. It is of the essence that the people shaping these new systems have a deep concern for their fellow humans. But it is also at least as important that people are taught the knowledge and skills — and given the tools — to change stuff about their surroundings as they see fit.
The wonderful thing is, we can shape systems, using the ‘new’ streets as a platform that transfer this knowledge and these skills to people. We can create ‘serious’ urban games that facilitate speculative modelling, so that people can improve their living environment, or at least express what they would change about it, in a playful way.
links for 2008-12-23
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Some interesting games in this end-of-the-year list. Shame most of them are Windows only.
links for 2008-12-22
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It’s a shame I can’t find the maps discussed in this article. They would be interesting study material.
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(Dutch) Ton en James hebben het ‘m geflikt; ze starten in het nieuwe jaar een project dat de eerste concrete stappen naar open overheidsdata zet. Als ik de kans krijg, stort ik me graag op wat eerste ‘speelse’ visualisaties van overheidsdata die dan als voorbeeld gebruikt kunnen worden.
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“Imagine telling senators in 1992 that soon every 13 year old would have a porn machine on his/her desk.” Found this post via a reaction by Chris Fahey on AG’s blog.
links for 2008-12-20
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A comic of Philip K. Dick’s VALIS experience, drawn by Robert Crumb.
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The first official trailer for Swords and Soldiers by Utrecht-based Ronimo Games. Looks like this side scrolling RTS could become a lot of fun.
links for 2008-12-17
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Bill Buxton corrects and adds to the history of touch screens as presented in Dan Saffer’s book. Some interesting bits on the iPhone’s precursor Simon here. We need more interaction design historians.
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“…an obsession with the new and original, without a deep literacy and appreciation for the past, leads to a path of missed opportunities.” Buxton comparing the Vanity Kodak with the iPod Mini.
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“Barcode Beats is a system that converts barcodes into music through an interpretation of the numbers on the barcodes.” Jonas Löwgren, — professor at K3 in Malmö — told me about this project. It was done as part of the master of interaction design. I really like the fact that this is a tool, it leaves meaning-making to the users. It is playful and encourages creative action.
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Interesting post by Dan on foundational concepts for a multi-touch OS. I’m surprised there’s nothing related to collaborative work on one screen, which I would say is a prime opportunity for this type of system.
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“RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown on the right – a self-replicating machine. This 3D printer builds the parts up in layers of plastic. This technology already exists, but the cheapest commercial machine would cost you about €30,000. And it isn’t even designed so that it can make itself. So what the RepRap team are doing is to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs are about €500).” Saw this at the fablab in Utrecht today. What a crazy idea, imagine how disruptive this will be once it hits the main stream?
links for 2008-12-16
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(Dutch) Verslag van een brainstorm die ik als expert heb bijgewoond en waarvoor ik één van de casussen mede heb opgesteld.
What I’ve been up to lately
You might be wondering what’s been going on at the Leapfrog studio lately, since I haven’t really posted anything substantial here in a while. Quite some stuff has happened — and I’ll hopefully get back into posting longer articles soon — but for now, here’s a list of more or less interesting things I have been doing:
This happened – Utrecht
We had our first This happened – Utrecht on November 3. I think we succeeded in creating an event that really looks at the craft of interaction design. I’m happy to say we’re planning to do three events next year — all at Theater Kikker in Utrecht — and we’ve got lots of cool speakers in mind. If you want to make sure you won’t miss them, subscribe to our newsletter (in Dutch).1
Teaching
My students are nearing the end of their project. They’ve been hard at work creating concepts for mobile social games with a musical component; they came up with 20 in total. Now they’re prototyping two of them, and I must say it’s looking good. They’ll have to present the games to the project’s commissioner — a major mobile phone manufacturer — somewhere the beginning of January 2009. I hope to be able to share some of the results here afterwards.
Office space
Since December 1 I am a resident of the Dutch Game Garden’s Business Club. That means I now have a nice office smack in the centre of Utrecht. The building’s home to lots of wonderful games companies, some, like me, operating on the fringes — like FourceLabs and Monobanda. If you’re curious and would like to drop by for a tour, a coffee and some conversation, let me know.
Brainstorm
I was invited do help compose one of the cases for the ‘Grote Amsterdamse Waterbrainwave’. A one-day brainstorm in which 45 students from various institutions were asked to come up with water-related innovations that would make the Netherlands a significant global player once again. It was organised by the Port of Amsterdam, Waternet and Verleden van Nederland2. I also attended the day itself as an outside expert on games and the creative industry in general. Read a report of the event at FD.nl (in Dutch).
Book
Dan Saffer’s book Designing Gestural Interfaces has been published by O’Reilly and is now available. Turn to page 109 and you’ll find a storyboard by yours truly used for illustration purposes. That’s the first time any work of mine is featured in print, so naturally I’m quite proud. I have yet to receive my copy, but got a sneak peek this weekend and I must say it looks promising. If you’re a designer needing to get up to speed with multi-touch, physical computing and such, this should be a good place to start.
That’s about it for now. There’s a lot of exciting stuff in the works, the outcomes of which I will hopefully be able to share with you in 2009.
- The creators of This happened in London have been nominated for a best of the year award by the Design Museum, by the way. Well-deserved, I would say! [↩]
- A cross-media campaign aimed at increasing awareness of Dutch national history. [↩]
links for 2008-12-12
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“Based on events like EIGF, this seems to be the case, at least amongst Molyneux’s generation of industry veterans. Bedroom-programmers-done-good, pioneers to be sure, but not able to form a critical appreciation of what they are doing or have done beyond the commercial impact.” Very similar to my experience attending Molyneux’s session at this year’s GDC. Underwhelming.
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My friends at User Intelligence, with the help of a worldwide network of UX consultancies, evaluated parking meter usability around the globe. Turns out the ones in Amsterdam are the worst offenders (and charge the highest fares). Hmmm…