Category: Links

People illicitly cultivating neglected plots of land in the city.

“This page contains information about resources related to pattern languages for interaction design (of which user interface design is a subset), and a few links to more general papers that may be of use to interaction designers.”

Not a pattern library, because it lacks abstracted descriptions of the solutions presented. but an interesting collection of interface snapshots nonetheless.

“One of the ways in which we explore possible design directions is by building simple, playable prototypes that we can play around with to get a sense for a particular system.” Two prototypes from this design approach by the Spore team have been released.

Nicolas discusses privacy issues with Bluetooth scanning. I maintain that radical transparency is the only way to solve this. People need to be made aware of scanners, and have the choice of opting out. It’s a question of freedom versus control.

“One of the things about all of these is that they almost force a game grammar approach to things, in a way.” Having designed a more humble entrant in the game maker ‘market’ I can only confirm this.

The Endless Forest piqued my interest a while back – here’s an interview with its creators. Good bits on indie games, art and games and narrative environments.

“That’s still the mission plan.” Hear, hear!

Kevin Cheng is writing a book! On drawing comics! To communicate design! Happy days.

First in a thread about browser-based games engines. In the plug-in space, Unity is without a doubt the best option, but for those (like me) who want something that *only* requires a browser (think Weewar) there are few options if any.

Koster on Google’s entry into the virtual worlds space: “Not exactly the recipe one would expect from Google, barring the distributed nature of it, and in some ways, not the one you would expect for a move for the future of virtual worlds.”

Just finished an expert review. These heuristics would have come in handy as reference material besides Nielsen’s, Tognazzini’s and Krug’s…

“Two future forces, one mostly social, one mostly technological, are intersecting to transform how goods, services, and experiences—the “stuff” of our world—will be designed, manufactured, and distributed over the next decade.”

Posts like this make me think Matt Webb would make a kick-ass game designer. Solid explanation of reinforcement strategies. The best one is variable-interval, yes, but also positive – rewards work better than punishment. Any dog owner knows this.

Skarped’s presentation at the NLGD Festival of Games was easily one of the most interesting. This interview gives a good sense of her thinking, but sadly no impression of her award winning game.

Apart from confusing things by making a counterintuitive distinction between experience design and game design, this is a good example of how mechanics and ‘dressing’ interact in games.

My friend Tijs just launched Fresh.li – a platform for online portfolios.

There are quite a few pieces out there on game design heuristics, most of them pretty crap. Here, a small set of heuristics were verified to actually matter using play tests.

“SugarStats makes it simple to track, monitor and share your blood sugar levels and other key statistics to help you manage your diabetes online.”

Nova has posted his slides for a presentation on ambient informatics. Where he tangles with the issue of “how to make visible invisible techniques that aim at making visible the invisible“…

An interview with Noam Chomsky containing some fascinating comments on Israel, 9/11, the war on terror and more. Dutch subtitling but virtually the whole thing is in English.