{"id":464,"date":"2007-08-01T11:11:42","date_gmt":"2007-08-01T09:11:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/archives\/2007\/08\/01\/learning-about-emergence-from-games\/"},"modified":"2008-07-22T21:31:29","modified_gmt":"2008-07-22T19:31:29","slug":"learning-about-emergence-from-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/archives\/2007\/08\/01\/learning-about-emergence-from-games\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning about emergence from games"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A\n<\/a><\/p>\n

I’m still trying to get a grip on why I think games are such a good reference point for IA<\/abbr>s and IxD<\/abbr>s. I’ll try to take another stab at it in this post. Previously I wrote about how games might be a good way to ‘sell’ algorithmic architectures<\/a> to your client. Even if you’re not actively pushing your clients to adopt ideas such as on-the-fly creation of site navigation, sooner or later I’m convinced you’ll find yourself confronted with a project where you’re not asked to develop a definitive information architecture. Instead you’ll be charged with the task to come up with mechanisms to generate these procedurally. When this is this case, you’re truly facing a second-order design problem. How can games help here? <\/p>\n

One of the defining characteristics of games are their complexity. A few years ago Ben Cerveny gave a brilliant talk on play<\/a> (MP3<\/abbr>) at Reboot 7.0 and mentioned this specifically — that much of the pleasure derived from game-play is the result of the player coming to terms with complex patterns. This complexity is something different from pure randomness and most certainly different from a ‘mere’ state machine. In other words, games show emergence.<\/p>\n

There are many examples of emergent systems. The Game of Life<\/a> springs to mind. This system isn’t really a game but shows a remarkable richness in patterns, despite (or maybe because of) the fact that it is based on a set of deceptively simple rules (which apparently took its creator, John Conway, over 2 years to perfect!) The thing is though, The Game of Life is not interactive. <\/p>\n

A wonderful example of a complex emergent system that is<\/em> interactive is the real game Go<\/a>. It has a set of very simple rules, but playing it well takes a huge amount of practice. The joy of playing Go for me (an absolute beginner) is largely due to discovering the many different permutations play can go through. <\/p>\n

So getting back to my earlier remark: If you’re convinced you’ll need to get a better handle on solving the second-order design problems presented by the design of complex emergent systems, games are an excellent place to start learning. They are emergent<\/strong> first and interactive<\/strong> second, the perfect twin to the web environments we’ll be shaping in the future.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m still trying to get a grip on why I think games are such a good reference point for IAs and IxDs. I’ll try to take another stab at it in this post. Previously I wrote about how games might be a good way to ‘sell’ algorithmic architectures to your client. Even if you’re not … Continue reading Learning about emergence from games<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","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":[625],"tags":[367,403,14,10,404,53,402,19,401,407,267,259,46,13,11,405,168,406,54],"class_list":["post-464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-gd","tag-go","tag-ia","tag-ixd","tag-the-game-of-life","tag-ux","tag-complexity","tag-design","tag-emergence","tag-experience","tag-game-design","tag-games","tag-gaming","tag-information-architecture","tag-interaction-design","tag-interactivity","tag-play","tag-pleasure","tag-user-experience"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464","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=464"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":924,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464\/revisions\/924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}