Category: Articles

Surprises in Animal Crossing: Wild World

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So I’ve been playing AC: WW for over a weeks now and I must say it has lived up to my expectations. It’s a cute and quirky game that does not follow conventional game design rules. There is no way to die, no (real) way to loose or even win. In a sense it’s more like a toy than a game; you can play with it endlessly, there is no goal to reach (apart from discovering all it’s little secrets).

Cockroaches

One of those secrets was particularly fun to discover. After a few days of play I convinced my girlfriend to give it a try. So she put the cartridge in her pink DS Lite. While I was cooking dinner, she went through the beginning stages (driving to the town in a taxi, getting a job with Tom Nook). A bit later, I picked it up again and went about my business (I think it was fishing, I still have a large loan to pay off after the first house expansion).

After a while I went back into the house and found (shock! horror!) a bunch of cockroaches running around my carefully kempt interior. “We have cockroaches!” I shouted to my girlfriend while running around the house trying to squash them. The apparent source was some apples lying around. “Didn’t the animals tell you don’t leave stuff lying around the house?” I asked her. They had, but where should she put them (the apples) otherwise? Good point.

We had a good laugh after that episode. Be careful who you play this game with; it might be a challenge living together in the real world – Animal Crossing is no different! But the real genius of the game is in these things. It’s a rules based world for sure (leave apples around the house, get cockroaches) but the mini-narratives that it allows you to build in this way is crazy.

Letters

Another example is the letters I find myself writing to the animals. I’m sure they’d be happy with any kind of letter, as long as I mention some specific words maybe (like ‘happy’ and ‘friend’). In stead, I’m writing fully formed sentences, and include little details that would be appreciated by real people. In that way, it’s allowing for subtle role-playing.

Charity

On the subject of role-playing (and there not being a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ way to play the game); I know I should be hard at work paying off the aforementioned loan (to progress to the next ‘level’). But in stead I find myself spending a lot of time and money on present for the animals, and donations to the museum. That might be role-playing (or that might be my real personality influencing what I find pleasurable in the game) but the coolest bit is that it doesn’t matter; any way of playing is valid.

Have any other people had similar experiences with the game? Are there ways to apply this logic (the patterns inherent in the game) to other domains?

Some closing links:

iPhone

iPhone playing The Office

There have been so many posts on the iPhone lately that I’ll try not to add to the noise with things that have already been said. Web designer Jeremy Keith and interaction designer Dan Saffer have both tried to gather all the worthwhile posts on the topic, from differing perspectives. I’m sure they’ll make for plenty of (more or less interesting) reading.

My own view is that Apple have proven once again that they’re great at integrating tech that was already out there in a package that offers a pleasing user experience. I’m curious about the multi-touch screen and the apparent gestural and tangible interaction it offers. I’m underwhelmed by their choice to have the device work only with Cingular (which apparently is kind of crap) and am curious if they’ll do the same when it’s introduced on this side of the ocean.

In short: I’ll have to actually use the thing to decide whether it’s as good as it seems; it’ll come down to not just the UI, but also the performance of the GSM, WiFi, camera, and on and on. For now, I’m having fun watching the online demos (at least that’s one thing Apple is very good at).

A few weeks of Jaiku fun

Jaiku's logo

I’ve been playing around with Jaiku for a bit now. I first downloaded the client and gave it a spin a while back (before the site was there). When they launched the site, I reinstalled the client, and after some initial screwing around with my N70, I got it to work. I should note, however that Jaiku has become great fun even if you don’t have a S60 phone.

Thanks to the enthusiastic use of colleagues Tom and Edgar I’ve gotten a taste of what the service would be like if all my (non-techie) friends would be online. Especially Edgar’s regular updates during his vacation in Australia were… interesting. I’m still not sure if I enjoy seeing his “having a cocktail here and there” updates while I’m posting a message that I’m hard at work. Oh well.

I first encountered (the concept of) Jaiku at last year’s Reboot thanks to Jyri’s talk. The talk was cool, and mainly focussed on how IM-like status messages integrated with your phone book would result in something Jyri and friends like to call ‘rich presence’. It seems that (as is so often the case) real use by real users, combined with the introduction of the web front-end is slowly but surely transforming it into something more like a personal presence publishing channel.

I find myself regularly updating my status message, be it through the S60 client, their text messaging interface or the web site. I’ve also hooked up most of the RSS feeds that track my activity on a number of social web services. This might just be my obsessive urge to cache all my (on- and offline) activity somewhere in an effortless way, but I can imagine more people would enjoy using it once tying together the loose ends becomes more intuitive.

I would also like to thank the Jaiku guys for being very helpful, supporting me with all the N70 woes.

For those interested in more, check out the following links:

  • An article on Jaiku in the Herald Tribune
  • The Jaiku FAQ
  • Reboot adept Peter Rukavina’s Jaiku PHP class, Mac OS X GUI for updating your presence and Adium integration script
  • Mika’s Merkitys-Meaning (the cooles Flickr uploader for S60) is unofficially included in Jaiku

Finally, if you happen to be using the service and would like to hook up, my nick is ‘kaeru’. Let me know yours!

I’ve been blog tagged

First of all: happy new year to those I haven’t yet met in person! I’ll kick off the year with a post (thanks Peter). Never one to pass up a meme1, I’ll tell you five things you might not know about me (this could get embarrassing).

  1. I enjoy playing roleplaying games (the old school pen & paper variety) and have been doing it on and off since puberty. Like many I started out with D&D, CoC and Vampire. The past few year’s I’ve been playing a lot of indie RPGs. Playing these games (and some SNES classics) might have gotten me interested in interaction and game design… The best indie game I’ve played so far? Dogs in the Vineyard.
  2. In my graduation year at the Utrecht School of Arts I spent three months doing research, writing a thesis and teaching at a media lab in Costa Rica. Not only did that fire my appetite for travelling to tropical locales, but it also made me determined to start working in the internet industry. One of the research prototypes I came up with was a Flickr-like prototype. I might throw that back up on-line sometime this year.
  3. I like to cook (although my old-style electrical stove is giving me headaches, gotta get that kitchen refitted). My favourite foods are Italian (my parent’s fault), Japanese (got started on that because of the martial art I practice) and Indonesian (although my girlfriend is best at cooking that).
  4. I’m a horror aficionado, watching scary horror films is a guilty pleasure of mine. The best horror flick I saw last year? That must have been The Descent.
  5. Recently I’ve started having an interest in wine, this must be the definite turning point for me becoming a snob. I have yet to develop any real taste and have a hard time describing what my mouth tells me (does that sound obscene?) I do seem to prefer heavy Italian wines (such as Nero d’Avola). Matt Skinner has been a good help.

Now to tag five others… I guess I’ll bother Edgar, Tom, Iskander, Alper and Almar with this silly meme. Sorry guys!

1 Even though it’s been raging since January last year and reached two peaks: first around July and second in December (thanks Technorati)!

I’ve submitted an XTech 2007 proposal

Together with Edgar, I’ve submitted a proposal for the upcoming XTech 2007 in Paris, France. The talk we’re aiming for would basically be a largely war stories from our work designing and developing large scale websites that adhere to web standards and accessibility guidelines and are published and managed using an enterprise CMS‘s (such as Tridion, GX, IBM LWWCM or what have you). Not the sexiest of subjects, but one we’re well versed in and can give plenty of practical advice on. Feedback from the review committee is due February 2007. Wish us luck!

On presentations

One of the most enjoyable things about attending conferences is seeing a lot of people presenting in various ways. A while ago I challenged my own presenting skills by doing a Pecha Kucha. Today, I attended a class (part of a didactics course) on giving lectures. Two prominent lecturers (Giep Hagoort and Jeroen van Mastrigt) from within the Utrecht School of Arts gave us a taste of their own unique presentation format and the way they prepared for a talk.

This triggered some things in my head, such as stuff I’d seen before on the web and that could be helpful to the people attending the class. A lot of them didn’t seem to be too familiar with it, so I’ve decided to collect them here. Maybe they’ll come in handy to those who pass by here:

X-Men 3 mini-review

Poster from X-Men 3 set reading 'Mutant Rights Now' After a nice weekend in Barcelona I sat down together with my better half to watch X-Men 3, which was finally released on DVD. My overall impression: another kick-ass superhero movie and a worthy series finale (I do hope they really stop). Some minor gripes: there were quite a few new characters (which is good) but they didn’t get enough time to build into full-fledged personalities. Most notably Archangel. I also felt the movie started to buckle under the weight of the huge epic action sequences by the end. I prefer smaller scale battles like we had in the first two movies, where you can clearly see the individual mutants use their powers (a huge part of the fun of these kinds of movies). All in all: recommended.

Off to Barcelona

Well, I’m off to Barcelona for a long weekend. It’s been quiet around here for a while (apart from the automated bookmark posts). Perhaps when I get back I’ll be able to get back into the habit of posting more frequently. Back in 4.

My Mobile Game Directions Pecha Kucha

Yesterday I presented my talk on mobile gaming at the 6th Pecha Kucha Night in Rotterdam’s Off_Corso. I was programmed as the first speaker, which was exciting (and also allowed me to benefit from the primacy effect, as my girlfriend pointed out). Colleague Iskander was kind enough to record the whole thing on his N70 (fittingly) and I present it here for your enjoyment or aggravation, whichever you prefer (please take note that the talk is in Dutch). The slides I used are over at SlideShare.

I’m still not sure the subject matter was appropriate for the event, considering the majority of speakers were either graphic designers, autonomous artists or architects. The crowd might’ve been a bit underwhelmed by my commercial and pop cultural references. Oh well, I had fun, I guess that’s the most important thing.

Many thanks to Nadine and Bart of Hunk Design for letting me loose on stage. ‘Nuff respect to all the presenters for taking the trouble of preparing a presentation. There were plenty of cool and inspiring ideas on show. Finally, thanks to the creators of all the images I used, you can find the credits in the SlideShare show.

Update: I’ve deleted my YouTube account so here’s an embed of the video on Vimeo:

Accessibility (a Euro IA theme)

It’s been a while, but here’s my final post on the Euro IA Summit. Usability has been a design value long championed by HCI professionals from which IA has partly developed. Naturally, they’ve often been responsible for ensuring usability in projects. There have been developments that force IAs to take a broader view and see usability as one of many values that go into a successful user experience on the web. Morville realised this quite a while ago and reminded us in his keynote of his user experience honeycomb.

Accessibility is one of those other values, and quite a few talks discussed it in some way.

For instance Fredy Oré’s talk on the project he did for Digital UK (the independent, non-profit organisation leading the UK’s move to digital television) contained quite a few examples of how he as an IA was faced with accessibility problems. From figuring out how to create a site structure that would support both English as well as Welsh to working around the limitations of a legacy CMS, there were many accessibility-related decisions to make.

Bogo Vatovec summarized the results from a test he did with several content adaptation solutions (mobile web browsing applications). The state of affairs in this area appeared to be quite sordid. Opera’s mobile web browser came out as the best option currently available. However, smart software will never be the silver bullet to solve all mobile web-browsing woes. We’ll need to build sites to be accessible for a broad range of devices. I feel we need to go even one step further and create alternative architectures specifically tailored for the mobile context.

Finally Steven Pemberton flexed his W3C muscles and overwhelmed the poor non-techy IAs with a deluge of information on new web standards such as XHTML 2 and XForms. The key takeaways for me were that the W3C is still pushing for a true Semantic Web (yes, uppercase). Example: Pemberton said XHTML 2 is “microformats done right”. Also, XForms promise to be a real alternative for other RIA technology, with the main benefit that it won’t need third party technology to be installed on the client.

So again, I expect IAs to be involved in more and more accessibility-related discussions. Accessibility is one of many design values that go in a user experience. These values should be prioritised for each project. Some might even put accessibility above usability. IAs could do worse than educate themselves on some accessibility basics.

This is the fifth and final post on themes spotted during the Euro IA Summit 2006. The first post was on strategy, the second on social search, the third on process & deliverables and the fourth on involving the client. My first post-summit post can be found here.