{"id":1843,"date":"2010-10-15T09:35:23","date_gmt":"2010-10-15T07:35:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/?p=1843"},"modified":"2010-10-15T09:43:25","modified_gmt":"2010-10-15T07:43:25","slug":"week-173-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/archives\/2010\/10\/15\/week-173-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Week 173"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the studio, coffee brewing in the french press, El Guincho<\/em> on the stereo. Last week<\/a> I felt overwhelmed, this week I just feel allergic. Literally. I have a head full of antihistamines, hope they kick in soon.<\/p>\n

One thing I decided to do about the overwhelming bit is block out more time in my calendar for work. Not saying how much, but I already had some time blocked for a while now, and I have doubled that. It just won’t do to have hardly any time to do actual design. I guess I’ll just need to to talk to fewer people. If you do not push back, it is easy to lose all your time to meet-ups. People are reckless in the ease with which they impose on other’s time. Myself included.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

We played a card game last night at the studio. An insight I’ve had after reviewing the past period with my interns. To become better designers, we need to make a lot of games, this is true.2<\/a><\/sup> But it also helps to play games, many games, of any kind. So we’ll set apart an hour or so each week and we’ll play a game that someone brings in. I kicked it off with Dominion<\/em>, which is interesting for the way it has built upon trading-card-game deck-building mechanics, like Magic the Gathering<\/em>. In stead of it being something that happens before a game it takes place in parallel to the game.<\/p>\n

What else is of note? Ah yes. I attended Design by Fire 2010<\/a> on Wednesday. It is still the best conference on interaction design in the Netherlands. And I really appreciate the fact that the organizers continue to take risks with who they put on stage. Too often do I feel like being part or at least spectator of some clique at events, with all speakers knowing each other and coming from more or less the same “school of thought”. Not so with Design by Fire<\/em>. Highlights included David McCandless<\/a>, Andrei Herasimchuk<\/a>, m’colleague Ianus<\/a> and of course Bill Buxton<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The latter also reminded me of some useful frames of thought for next Tuesday, when I will need to spend around half an hour talking about the future of games, from a design perspective, at an invitation-only think-tank like session organized by STT<\/a>.3<\/a><\/sup> The organizers asked me to set an ambition time frame, but as you may know I have a very hard time imagining any future<\/a> beyond say, the next year or two. (And sometimes I also have trouble being hopeful about it.) But as Mr. Buxton points out, ideas need a gestation period of around 20 years before they are ready for primetime, so I am planning to look back some ten years, see what occupied the games world back then, and use that as a jumping off point for whatever I’ll be talking about. Let’s get started on that now.<\/p>

  1. Mule Design had an interesting post<\/a> on this. Part of the problem is people, but part also software, according to them. Imagine a calendar you subtract time from in stead of add to. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  2. Tom wrote a wonderful post<\/a> on games literacy. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  3. The Netherlands Study Centre for Technology Trends. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    At the studio, coffee brewing in the french press, El Guincho on the stereo. Last week I felt overwhelmed, this week I just feel allergic. Literally. I have a head full of antihistamines, hope they kick in soon. One thing I decided to do about the overwhelming bit is block out more time in my … Continue reading Week 173<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[745],"tags":[584,861,247,865,864,633,259,244,863,168,313,866,862],"class_list":["post-1843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weeknotes","tag-bill-buxton","tag-calendars","tag-conferences","tag-design-by-fire-2010","tag-dominion","tag-futures","tag-games","tag-lectures","tag-planning","tag-play","tag-productivity","tag-stt","tag-time"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1843\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}