Author: Kars Alfrink

Designer turned design researcher. Postdoc at TU Delft. Exploring contestable AI.

Week 136

On a train to Amsterdam again, extra early so that I am on time for the second day of a workshop we’re running at Layar.1 It’s being facilitated by BERG‘s Schulze and Jones, which is a real treat. Without giving too much away: we’re working on new product concepts. Can’t wait to see what results from this session, since it looks like I might be developing them further in the months to come.

I was doing some work this weekend, mostly planning the upcoming months since there’s so much interesting stuff on the horizon. I also popped over to Hilversum for a look at the games created during the local Global Game Jam.2 Some 170 people participated and I think around 40 games were created. The general quality was quite high. Some of my favorites included:

  • So It Floats, which features gorgeous watercolor art and a biblical theme. You’re a monkey trying to get Adam and Eve to leave paradise. The gameplay resembles […]()’s games.
  • SSSSSOS, where you control a tiny space ship trying to survive a massive battle between two armies consisting of swarming space ships. You can get them to engage each other in stead of you by attracting and repelling them. It’s all driven by nicely tuned Newtonian physics and is accompanied by adaptive music.
  • Resonance, which was strikingly well-rounded for a 48-hour game. I’m not a huge fan of puzzle games, but this had a good learning curve spread across 14 levels. The musical theme was a nice touch too.
  • Save Your Souls, a frustrating experimental game you control with two mice, each tied to one character running down a track. From playing I’ve decided bimanual input devices are not for me.
  • What The Faql?, which I liked for its interesting social mechanic. Four players collaborate to get a cart from one end of a mine to the other, but one of them is a ‘mole’ whose goal is to sabotage the whole operation. This player gets a small jolt of force feedback from his controller at the game’s start.

All the games created in NL and across the world can be found at the international Global Game Jam website. Have a look.

Most of the conversations with project Tako participants are now finished. I had one more this monday, with the people who organize the International Franz Liszt Piano Competition.3 Not much else will be done this week, but I’ll need to start processing all the notes in the coming period.

Now that the EMMA group projects have finished the next phase for graduate students at KMT has started. They have four weeks to develop their graduation project proposals, which includes a research component. This phase was kicked off with a symposium on monday about creative processes in multidisciplinary teams. On friday, I’ll meet with the group of students I’m coaching (together with Irene van Peer) and review their plans for a short field study, which they’ll need to complete the next week. The results from this will feed into their final proposals. Can’t wait to see what they come up with.

  1. Getting to a train on time is not without its hazards these days, snow and ice make biking to the station extra interesting. [↩]
  2. GGJ NL is organized by my friends at the Dutch Game Garden. [↩]
  3. Where, incidentally, I finally learned the meaning of Lisztomania. [↩]

Week 135

I managed to squeeze in a visit to the HKU KMT faculty’s project market in Hilversum on thursday last week. It’s an annual presentation of work done for external clients by graduate students. I coached one of those projects, which was done for the Nokia Research Center. They did a good job of presenting a complicated concept, which revolves around encouraging office workers to commute in a greener manner by tracking their travels on a mobile and giving them a real live plant to take care of with the water they earn based on this collected data… You should see it. Other favorites of mine were:

  • Lumen; a series of urban projections in Utrecht which were executed with high polish
  • Homeostasis; a beautiful expressive interactive art piece created for Crossing Border festival
  • Paper Cakes; a cool game designed for Wacom’s Bamboo Minis platform, which thematically and mechanically makes excellent use of the target input device1

The project market always coincides with an alumni reception, which means reconnecting with a lot of old friends too.

Project Tako is in full swing now. I talked to two organizations on friday and will be seeing six more this week. It’s a privilege to meet all these people, who produce some of Utrecht’s finest cultural festivals. Lots of ideas for playful additions to their programs have already started to emerge. I’ll need to develop them further in the coming weeks. It’s also striking how each and every one of them keeps office in a beautiful building. Biking through my home town from meeting to meeting reminds me of how pretty it actually is.

One can never be too busy, so this monday we announced the next This happened – Utrecht. The line-up consists of Daan Roosegaarde on Liquid Space 6.0, Stella Boess & Stefan Gross on Love Hate Punch, Bas Teunisse & Lex van den Berg on Paper Cakes and Govert de Vries on Swinxs. The events is scheduled for monday 22 february. As usual I’ve been scrambling to get the website ready, send out the emails and make sure the venue is all set. Good thing I have Alexander and Ianus to take care of a lot of other stuff.

But for the most part this week, I’m continuing design at Layar. The first reviews of some initial bits have been scheduled so we’ll see how that goes.

  1. The HKU and Wacom first met at This happened – Utrecht #2. It’s also been nominated for an IGF student award, so we could not resist inviting this project to the next edition. [↩]

links for 2010-01-25

Week 134

I’m writing this in the morning on a train from Utrecht to Amsterdam. I’ll be making this trip more often the coming weeks, since I signed a contract with Layar on tuesday. I’ll be reinforcing their UX team, doing interaction design on existing and new parts of their service. As is often the case with these kinds of engagements, there’s not much more I can say at this time. I’m sure there will be interesting things to show and talk about later on though.

In the time that’s not being taken up by Layar this week I’m getting going with project Tako. I’ve been calling the organizations selected for the project and scheduling meetings. The first one – with the people behind Uitgekookt; a culinary festival – is set for this friday. It’s a rare opportunity to talk about how you can bring a playful perspective to (in this case) cooking and food, I’m really looking forward to it. More meetings will be happening next week.

Also on friday, I’ll attend an evaluation of the Mount Everest project, which was wrapped up last weekend. I went over to the faculty to see the pieces the students had created and was blown away by the creativity and talent on display.

If I had to pick one favorite it’ll have to be the group that set up a spoof shop – called Extremely Safe – where you could come in and have your picture taken at a hazardous location of your choice. It was a playful service – you really did get that photo, plus a sheet of helpful pointers for telling the tale of your travels to friends and relatives – but once you were in, an impromptu performance took place too, commenting on contemporary obsessions with breaking rules and pushing limits.

Good stuff.

links for 2010-01-18

links for 2010-01-15

Are games media or design objects?

In a recent post on the Edge blog – which, if you consider yourself a games designer, you absolutely must read – Matt Jones asks:

“Why should pocket calculators be put on a pedestal, and not Peggle?”

He writes about the need for games to be appreciated and critiqued as design objects. He points out that the creation of any successful game is “at least as complex and coordinated as that of a Jonathan Ive laptop”. He also speculates that reasons for games to be ignored is that they might be seen primarily as media, and that mainstream design critics lack literacy in games, which makes them blind to their design qualities.

Reading this, I recalled a discussion I had with Dave Malouf on Twitter a while back. It was sparked by a tweet from Matt, which reads:

“it’s the 3rd year in a row they’ve ignored my submission of a game… hmmph (L4D, fwiw) – should games be seen as design objects? or media?”

I promptly replied:

“@moleitau design objects, for sure. I’m with mr Lantz on the games aren’t media thing.”

For an idea of what I mean by “being with Mr. Lantz”, you could do worse that to read this interview with him at the Tale of Tales blog.

At this point, Dave Malouf joined the fray, posting:

“@kaeru can a game be used to convey a message? We know the answer is yes, so doesn’t that make it a form of media? @moleitau”

I could not resist answering that one, so I posted a series of four tweets:

“@daveixd let me clarify: 1. some games are bits of content that I consume, but not all are

“@daveixd 2. ultimately it is the player who creates meaning, game designers create contexts within which meaning emerges.

“@daveixd 3. thinking of games as media creates a blind spot for all forms of pre-videogames era play”

“@daveixd that’s about it really, 3 reasons why I think of games more as tools than media. Some more thoughts: http://is.gd/5m5xa @moleitau”

To which Dave replied:

“@kaeru re: #2 all meaning regardless of medium or media are derived at the human level.”

“@kaeru maybe this is semantics, but any channel that has an element of communicating a message, IMHO is media. Tag & tic-tac-toe also.”

“@kaeru wait, are you equating games to play to fun? But I’m limiting myself to games. I.e. role playing is play, but not always a game.”

At this point, I got frustrated by Twitter’s lack of support for a discussion of this kind. So I wrote:

“@daveixd Twitter is not the best place for this kind of discussion. I’ll try to get back to your points via my blog as soon as I can.”

And here we are. I’ll wrap up by addressing each of Dave’s points.

  1. Although I guess Dave’s right about all meaning being derived at the human level, what I think makes games different from, say, a book or a film is that the thing itself is a context within which this meaning making takes place. It is, in a sense, a tool for making meaning.
  2. Games can carry a message, and sometimes are consciously employed to do so. One interesting thing about this is on what level the message is carried – is it told through bits of linear media embedded in the game, or does it emerge from a player’s interaction with the game’s rules? However, I don’t think all games are made to convey a message, nor are they all played to receive one. Tic-Tac-Toe may be a very rough simulation of territorial warfare, and you could argue that it tells us something about the futility of such pursuits, but I don’t think it was created for this reason, nor is it commonly played to explore these themes.
  3. I wasn’t equating games to play (those two concepts have a tricky relationship, one can contain the other, and vice-versa) but I do feel that thinking of games as media is a product of the recent video game era. By thinking of games as media, we risk forgetting about what came before video games, and what we can learn from these toys and games, which are sometimes nothing more than a set of socially negotiated rules and improvised attributes (Kick the can, anyone?)

I think I’ll leave it at that.