Category: Links

Interesting analysis of AR’s current shortcomings from Joe.

“But the idea of competition and point-scoring – of seeing everything as a game – becoming an overriding metaphor for everything (with its tendency towards individualism and acquisition) is limiting at best.” Hill reports on the 2010 Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium. I love the photos and notes that give a sense of the local color. With regards to the quote, I think Dan (or the people he’s seen talking about games) need to take a broader view of what games are about.

Fun piece by Fry that puts most tech writing to shame.

“If you work somewhere that struggles to make a half-decent product, with the morale of a prison, why are you talking about innovation? You have to get the training wheels off before entering the Daytona 500.” So true.

A deep and comprehensive discussion of a Bluetooth sensing project aimed at measuring the use of urban space. Provides a good feel for the current state of the art.

“The challenge for us here in Europe as designers in the cultural as well as the technological sphere, is to design things that support the rich variation of European cultures rather than imposing a global techno-culture, the same from Seoul to San Francisco to Sienna.” A talk by Gillian Crampton Smith on design research that you really must read.

“Who can forget the mass MRT stabbings of 2016? The result of a carriage full of trainee chefs on route to a carve-off and an advertiser trying out happy slapping in an AR game show format. Whoops.” Indeed.

“Tweak is a tool we’ve built to modify variables in Processing while your code is running.” Gosh that’s useful. Via Alper.

“My main interest here is to extract the design techniques as very simple design patterns or ‘gambits’* that can be applied in other design situations outside games themselves, where designers would like to influence user behaviour. So these are (at least at present) presented simply as provocations: a “What if…?” question plus an example.” This is a nice check list of sorts, with some good examples. The gambits are of very different levels of abstraction though, “rewards” and “levels” sit uneasily next to “playfulness” and “storytelling”. The gambit descriptions also do not address the experiential dimension, so you’d have a hard time determining which ones to use if you’re concerned with creating a suitable or even coherent user experience from these.

“What I really want to do is to use the machine to complete the Sagrada Familia. And to build on the moon.” Mindboggling stuff about new 3D printing technology.

A long but worthwhile post (with skippable parts clearly marked) by Sirlin about the striking contrast between the virtual items summit and its indie counterpart at GDC 2010.