Category: Links

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino’s topographical tableware gets featured in the NYT. Congrats!

Seen these around a lot but never realized they were a free set of icons. Very handy to have lying around when doing UI mockups.

Now that I have a widescreen Mac and Gmail IMAP I thought I’d give this bundle for horizontal layout of Mail.app a try. Seems to work fine (not available for Leopard yet though.)

Finally a Bioshock review that cuts through all the (admittedly impressive) dressing and embedded narrative to arrive at the conclusion that mechanically speaking, it isn’t such an amazing game at all.

Armitage on the newly announced S60 touch interface. I’m thoroughly underwhelmed by the video – music ripped from The Roots, horrible ‘acting’… All doesn’t help to sell me on this. The tagline “open to new features” is possibly the worst part.

Saffer on the importance of combining the making with the thinking in design. Of course the question becomes: What is ‘making’ in a multidisciplinary design context such as the one I find myself in as an IxD? Good stuff nonetheless.

“I see both advocates and detractors often use Richard [Bartle]’s paper in ways that conflicts with my own experience. Here are some of the ways I would suggest reconsidering how you use this important paper” Via Tom Armitage.

Disagree with point one, agree with point two. And like Mr Jones, I’m quite sure this also applies to web design.

A lot of statistics on past ARGs. Pretty thorough and interesting stuff. Via the IGDA ARG SIG mailing list.

“Computer games, architecture and urbanism: the next level” – An interesting looking book collecting essays, reviews and interviews from a wide range of luminaries.

I’m living in the 2nd most liveable city of Europe (according to Monocle.) I agree with most of the article, but think they are a bit mild on the Danes when it comes to tolerance. It’s easy to feign tolerance in a homogenous society as theirs after all…

Sterling roughly diagrams the ideas surrounding the spime concept. Perhaps most interestingly he discards the notion of panpsychism. Via Matt Jones.

“Roleplaying is increasingly the most socially threatening and personally dangerous leisure pastime in middle america.” Indie RPG designer Paul Czege’s dangerous gaming idea. (Old, from January 2006, but still an interesting notion.)

A new blog by Molly Wright Steenson: “Conceptual Device turns its lens to cultural ephemera like architecture, urbanism, design, music and literature, and so on.”

Thoughts from Merholz on the future of local content on the web. His last point, supporting decision making, is certainly an interesting IxD problem.

Bit of an indie classic this: Play around with string puppets in a wide range of game types.

Portfolio site with plenty of cool animation and character design.

Another reading list, this time by Dan Saffer, IxD at Adaptive Path. Some interesting picks here, particularly The Game Design Reader but no Rules of Play…

Ian Bogost interviewed on Comedy Central by Colbert. Some good sound-bites on persuasive games.

Fun: a rabbit and a snail used to label ‘faster’ and ‘slower’ on a physical interface.

“The universe tends toward maximum irony. Don’t push it.” A guide to backups. Via Tom Armitage.

Saffer’s presentation on the application of game structures to web apps. Good stuff. Via Armitage.

Unusually deep puzzle action platform game that won the 4th casual game-play competition at Jay is Games. Good fun.

Oliveira discusses Oink’s demise and what he thinks online music stores should learn from it: price, commodity and (most importantly) choice.

“Anybody thinking of social software as a special category of software design needs to wake up and smell the friends list.” — Hinton on the ubiquity of sosowa.

Point and click adventures are far from dead. Blackwell Unbound is an indie game that makes me nostalgic for the good old days of obsessive Gabriel Knight play.

Upcoming ‘virtual world’ by Mind Candy. Nothing much yet here but the teaser trailer shows some high-quality character design and animation.

Game-play footage of a disturbing indie game in which you seem to be in semi-control of some Lovecraftian monster wreaking havoc on a forested hillside. Weird but wonderful.

Weird platform puzzle game where you play a black blob. Nice graphic style, fun music.

“innovative products come from companies with one important characteristic — willpower: The perseverance and committed resources to see a breakthrough product launched”

Impressive reading list for any user experience professional involved with the web. By my friends at FatDUX.

Finally Mr. Jones is publishing some posts on the design of Dopplr (which I think is nice by the way.) Here the mysteries behind Dopplr’s ‘SparkLogo’ are revealed. I wonder if they’ve considered the accessibility limitations of this approach though…