Stories in Urban Spaces

"Walking around I sometimes become aware of men in straw boaters and women in crinoline with parasols walking down the same street as the girl with a pierced navel. A man in knee breeches yells out to man in a fedora carrying a trumpet case."

A lovely little fragment of writing from Paul Ford at Ftrain.com. His is a blog that rarely pops into my RSS reader, but when it does his work is choice and delicate.

The concept of the temporal permeability of space in a city is something I've been thinking about recently. Strangely enough, this comes from hanging about on the backstage.bbc.co.uk mailing list.

Now, as this is a mailing list mostly concerned with APIs and feed hacking, that's quite an unlikely source of inspiration.

The conversations that go on there, though, are primarily about 'Look - here's a cool thing I've done! I've made a prototype that does this cool thing' - at which we all look at the prototype, and agree that it is indeed cool, and full of geek-fu, and give constructive suggestions.

However, the prototypes - because, after all, they are just proofs of concept - tend to be... well, not pointless. But they're things made for the sake of making them - to expose a bit of data, to scratch that tiny geek itch. They're useful for news, and factual services, but few of them have the user-focused thinking that would make them useful to the average joe in the street. A couple even have slightly sinister implications.

One in particular is an absolutely brilliant idea, but doesn't bear thinking about in an editorial way; it's a filter that automatically classifies news as 'Good', 'Bad' or 'Neutral'. cool, smart, neatly done. But... a user option that lets you turn off all 'Bad' news? That's deeply sinister.

The problem being, that - as with all interactive ideas - it's much easier to make interactive products based around objective facts. Making entertainment products seems to be harder; the element of play or fiction is much more elusive, and the entertainment urge is much more difficult to satisfy than the need to seek out (or browse for) information.

The point, I think, where there may be some cross-over lies in real space.

One of the most distinctive advances in special effects over the last few years has been 'Bullet Time' - the frozen moments used in the Matrix. This wasn't originally invented by the Wachowskis, believe it or not; it originated with an english artist, Tim Macmillan, who developed it in the early eighties.

Now, his breakthrough was to realise that film is basically a series of still photographs, arranged sequentially through time, giving the illusion of movement in space. All he did was change that to keep the time aspect constant: take a sequence of photographs at the same time, but with space as a variable. When composited back together, lo and behold you have a 'moving' image of a single moment in time.

So... I have been thinking about entertainment, and specifically interactive narrative. Conventional narrative is (roughly speaking) a series of fictional events occuring in a temporal sequence. In traditional stories you start at time point A, and the plot moves you to time point B in a linear fashion. Some clever types realised that the reader doesn't need to move from point A to point B in the same sequence that the events happen to characters - film picked up on this one too.

Then games came along. Suddenly, the 'reader' was uncovering the plot both by moving from point A to point B in game-time, but also by 'triggering' events in game space. So narrative exposition C would only occur once player had moved to point D, no matter if they'd already uncovered narrative expositions E and F by moving spatially through their trigger locations first. Some really good games - Knights of the Old Republic springs to mind - manage this brilliantly, with alternate storythreads uncovered depending on your virtual movement, and 'narrative zones' (planets) allowing a little more control over the consumption order of the narrative.

What happens, then, if you take the subtle paradigm shift of Time Slicing, and apply it to storytelling in the real world? How can you expose the stories of a city, and tell them throughout the fabric of that city? What happens when you hold up your PDA/Mobile/Tiny exciting video widget on a streetcorner, and it becomes a window into a Victorian melodrama? Or Chaucer's pilgrims suddenly walk across your screen? Or you get a phonecall from a paniced WWII spy? Or a text message from a dystopian future?

How can you follow those threads around the space of a city?

How can you string together temporal cuts of space to tell a story?

What happens when you overlay the works of Dickens on to London?

What might happen if you overlaid the fictional London of Neverwhere on to a tube map?

How are you alerted to the presence of a story in your physical location?

A few tiny glimmers of these located stories are begginning to appear on the web; today's Los Angeles from an Auto historical pictures/map mashup offers a start, as does the Grafeidia project, or the Hand Held History blue plaques project

Anyway. This is the stuff I'm thinking about. And hopefully, my new job will give me the space to be able to develop these in to some kind of practical ideas... Or perhaps I can just rely on Gavin Bell to get there first with the project he's thinking about, and wave that in front of management here...

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | TV and Radio | Star Trek's Scotty dies aged 85

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | TV and Radio | Star Trek's Scotty dies aged 85

Aw, noo.

Scotty's beamed up.

Sad.

Consumer Egg Thesaurus - Thesaurus Instructions

Consumer Egg Thesaurus - Thesaurus Instructions: "This is Module 1A of the Consumer Egg Thesaurus, a prototype of the full thesaurus to be completed in the future. Its eventual goal is to provide a set of terms to index and organize information for a commercial chicken egg consumer library with a significant part of its collection open to the public. In the meanwhile, employees of the Nov Ovolando Egg Marketing Board will use the thesaurus for their information organization and retrieval (particularly for constructing search phrases). As well, the thesaurus will provide a conceptual framework to understanding the consumer perspective of commercial chicken eggs."

Uh....

BBC - Comedy - The Mighty Boosh

BBC - Comedy - The Mighty Boosh

I'm weirdly proud of Vicky, a co-worker and friend. She took over the BBc comedy site when I moved on to my current project, and has done absolutely amazing things with it.

And the most recent amazing thing: the ability to watch 'The Mighty Boosh' on broadband. A WEEK BEFORE IT GOES OUT ON THE TELLY.

This is amazing. Really. The rights situation alone must have been a killer to sort out.

So, yay Vicky. You are better than I could ever have hoped to be.

Burning the black ICE

You'll all have heard about the ICE scheme. If you're someone on a lot of people's email lists, you'll have heard about it twenty or thirty times now.

Predictably, the first bulk email hoaxes are now doing the rounds - about mobile viruses that allegedly exploit your ICE contacts to promulgate themselves. These are Lies.

What gets me is that otherwise intelligent people forward these warnings on, without bothering to check or verify the contents first. I'm finding this particularly galling because:

1. I work in a department full of on-line journalists, who should really know better. Checking your sources, anyone? Hmn?

2. I'm working from home, and retriving six emails about whether it's a hoax or not wastes my time.

Is it just my longtime net-user status that means I'm familiar and jaded enough with these scams to spot them? Or bother to take a minute to slap a couple of keywords into google?

But anyway - I long ago gave up sending on firm remonstrations about forwarding hoax warnings. The things are designed just to propagate through the email of idiots, so even my firm and reasoned (and admittedly slightly grumpy) rebuttals are adding to the problem.

Which is why the idea behind this site is... maybe a little misguided. Spam harvesting, anyone?


The Hoaxkill service: Let's get rid of hoaxes now!

...and Gents

...oh, alright then.

It'll be a dreadful disappointment to you all, I know.

But it's just been pointed out to me that my profile blurb should be ammended to include the fact that I've fallen from the sacred path of Sappho, and happen to be getting my freak on with a big, hairy boy. Among others.

Anyway. A change is as good as a rest.

And, just to head this off at the pass, here are a few choice phrases for you to sprinkle in to your liberal teasing.

Hasbian
Bi For Now
Yestergay
Moved from Automatic to Stickshift
From Bean to Baloney
Using The Other Menu
LUG

... you get the idea.

Shirts for Alice

Combo Clothing

A lovely console tee, that's right up Alice's alley. She's the one that suggested I get the Webmistress shirt, so I feel I should find some kind of excellent sarky comment to make in return.

Pffff. I can't be bothered. Too tired today.

In praise of the stiff upper lip.

A certain man has called us, "of all peoples the wisest in action," but he added, "the stupidest in speech." - Carlyle

So... we knew it was going to happen. It was no surprise.

I have an odd sort of affection for my fellow countrymen in situations like yesterday's bomb attacks. There's a charming national character trait that seems to turn us all into a mix of slightly panicy fishwives 'Oooh, I know, ooh, another one's just gone off... ooh, it'll be *hell* getting home, and what about that Mr Blair? ooh, no, I haven't heard from my friend, and they work right in it...' and the most wonderful, tremendously stoic Matter-of-Life-and-Death heroes.

The thing that I'm left thinking after yesterday, though, was actually, that the attacks were no big deal - a tiny blip on history. This is not to belittle the real suffering that those caught up in events are going through, and my best wishes go to them, and their loved ones.

But... we're used to bombs in this city. Not quite on the scale of Jerusalem, or Bagdhad, but nonetheless there has been a slow and deadly thudding heartbeat to London for as long as I can remember. The Soho Bomb, the Brixton Bomb, the Canary Wharf bomb, an IRA bomb at Victoria in a litterbin I missed by 10 minutes, a bomb in a baracks, police horses dismembered by a nailbomb... and the still-within-living-memory events of the Blitz and V2 bombardment - 168 killed by one bomb on New Cross Woolworths.

We're used to these extraordinary events. We have a shaky moment, check on our loved ones, shrug, and move on. If we're particularly shaken, we have a cuppa, or go for a pint.

If someone we know is directly affected, we rally round, offer more selfless and tender and non-intrusive support than you could imagine - simple kindnesses like tea, blankets, lifts. The 'English reserve' is dropped instantly, making those moments of kindness so much more significant. We try not to make the situation worse, we behave sensibly, and we let the professionals get on with their jobs, pitching in if extra pairs of hands are needed. This is a marvellous, marvellous way to deal with a crisis, however big or small.

I spent yesteday pretty much watching the news - there was no way I could get to work; I was on a bus to Vauxhall when they pulled all busses over and 'checked for suspect packages' - something that involved our driver listlessly walking round the outside of the bus, having a quick peer underneath, shrugging and driving on. I got to Vauxhall; no-one really knew what was going on, no transport was running, so I turned home. You see, that's a dull and unremarkable story; like the six or seven million other Londoners who were only aware of the problems through the media, whose days were just as dull and unremarkable as usual.

But, something about witnessing the events through those news reports is beginning to change the way we behave. It started with Diana's death - only the second time I have seen my father cry, incidentally. Then, having been glued to the 9/11 reports, we all know the media routine of people in deep, deep shock being interviewed by camera crews (for SHAME, camera crews. Can you not see that those people need care and help, not grilling?). We see the same snippets of video repeated again and again - the man being led from an ambulance at St Marys, the phonecam footage of the tunnel, the incident tent being erected at Aldgate, the bus, the bus, the bus, the bloodstained wall at tavistock square. And we absorb these images, and they send us further from our wonderful, calm, brickishness and into a fluttery hen-like panic. We wallow in it, indulging our emotions publicly. We reinforce the stress of events in a shared, bonding experience, because we're starting to enjoy the newly-sanctioned pleasures of public displays of sentimentality.

Once we've absorbed those images, we start to create ourselves as victims; as put upon innocents. We forget that we've been waiting for terrorist attacks forever - since we divided ireland, since we joined an illegal war, since we rolled over to a foreign power. Since we stopped questioning our government too closely, and became content with their construction of the world as a dangerous place, full of imaginary threats from 'others', from which they are protecting us. We fall into jingoism.

The biggest contrast was flicking from BBC reports to ITV reports. The reporting style was so different - the new BBC guidelines emphasise accuracy over speed, and it shows. The news was stately, calm, and focused. The ITV news was breathless, over excited, wildly speculative; sensationalist tabloid disaster porn, feeding the rubbernecking carcrash fetishist in all of us. Channel Four had a Richard and Judy Terrorism special, for christs sake.

Indeed, the stupidest in speech.

Anyway. A very long post on something I was meaning to ignore. And, just in case you were wondering why I feel this is an insignificant event, have a look at these other Deathtolls, and remember that sixty years ago the glorious RAF was responsible for a hundred thousand dead in 14 hours in Dresden.

Yesterday was not a big deal.

Tiny Little Men - Climbing the Teton?

baker01

Erm, not really worksafe. But made me giggle.

del.icio.us direc.tor

del.icio.us direc.tor: Delivering A High-Performance AJAX Web Service Broker :: Johnvey

I'm in awe of the kind of techies who actually build stuff for the web. Stuff that works, and is useful, elegant and clever.

I've never really got past HTML and a smattering of CSS, which is something that makes me sad.

Anyway - this is a very beautiful piece of AJAX work, that scrapes del.icio.us and turns its dry interface into a beautiful card-sorting type system. It lets you drill down through your tags to return bookmarks at tag confluences.

Damn, it's lovely.

Someone should make one that combines del.icio.us, technorati and flickr. And any other tag soup sites out there.

Pip Pip, what?

The Greenwich Time Signal

A lovely little history of the Pips.

It makes me sad that they aren't synchronised in these DAB days. And I'm sure I once read that in some cases - such as local radio - they get played out from minidisk.

Shameful.

Japanoiserie

Kissui.net: Harajuku Girls by Gwen Stefani and Tokyo Girls by Hellen van Meene - originally from Salon.com, but reproduced without bug-me-ware on that site.

An interesting article about the exploitation of Japanese youth culture, and the way that 'Japanese' is becoming a signifier for 'hip', whilst still being overlaid with pre-existing cultural assumptions and stereotypes.

I'm sort of guilty of the offhanded reduction-to-stereotypes the article describes. Yes, I'm fascinated by Japanese design, and have an over-romanticised idea about how cool the place must be, gleaned from a weird mishmash of bizarro adverts, Lost in Translation, and gaming magazines. So it's good to read a reminder that actually, you're romanticisng an entire culture; one that is not your own, and that you therefore have no pregiven access to the (um, there is a word for this, but I've forgotten it) 'framework-of-assumptions' that actually governs the workings of the culture. You're always an outsider.

Humn, anyway, this isn't particularly focused, but it's sort of a reminder to myself to actually do some background reading about traditional crafts culture in Japan, so at least I have some background knowledge to my Japanophilia. And also, to watch Topsy Turvy again, as it's gentle mockery of the splendidly patronising colonialist obsession with the mysterious orient that so excited the edwardians is a good grounder...

Just in from department of no surprises...

Anesthesia can give rise to sex illusion | www.azstarnet.com ®

I've never experienced them...

But I know folk who buy chloroform from the internet, for shits and giggles of an... adult play variety.

Still, looks like more excuses to sue the medical profession. There were some shameful figures doing the rounds this week about the cost of litigation to the NHS; it's risen from c. £1million in 1995, to c£280million in the last year.

Shameful.

Bad Alice

Alice - from that Wonderland place - found a T-Shirt she thinks would be just perfect for me.

Oh, dearie me.

She's going to be in so much trouble. I might even have to start keeping a list.

Player-Centred Game Design

Ages ago, I went to GDCE. And I attended a really interesting talk about user-centred design in game mechanics.

User centred design has been adopted by the web industry for a while, so it was a strange experience hearing someone evangelising it to an assembled room full of 'puter game designers. To me, it all seemed obvious, but the tone of the questions at the end indicated that some folk had a Damascene Conversion during the talk.

Anyway - why am I posting my notes now? Well, they've been sitting on an internal wiki at work for ages, unread. I've been having all sorts of discussions about the model for playing styles, with all sorts of folk recently; it's been spurred on by sticking my toes in the water of the MMORPG world, and some chats I've been listening to about humour in games, and how that differs when you have real life people interacting within a game space.

I'll sign off by saying the interesting thing about the social aspects of MMORPGs is that they leak into RL. I greeted someone I've been playing WoW with in the street by doing a little Tauren lady-dance; exactly as I'd greet them in the game. And now, without further ado, I give you:


Player Centric Game Design


Talk given by International Hobo: Ernest Adams and Chris Bateman http://www.ihobo.com/
2004-09-01
EA teaches game design at university and has written a book - Andrew Rawling and Ernest Adam on game design


Types of game

Design Driven

Tend to be the work of an Auteur - in the cinematic sense; someone with a vision who wants to create a whole.
Quality is entireldependentnt on the talent of the Auteur. Good auteur, good game. Bad auteur… well.
Analogous to film director, running a different crew each time - the game designer oversees the crew. The vision to make a game and the talent to oversee the management of the crew is a rare coupling in one person.
This is a good model for art house games, but a poor one for commercial propositions.

Technically Driven Games

Very expensive. ItÂ’s a way of making a game to highlight a cool new piece of tech development.
These games tend not to be big sellers - they make their money by selling on the technology created in the making of the game - e.g. the Quake engine.

Artwork Driven

Rare - the result of the visual design driving the game - an example is myst.
Rarely succeed as artists generally have little game design experience. They tend not to be fun’ to play – the gameplay takes second position.
Myst was at an advantage due to its tech timing -– it took advantage of CD rom tech.
Many Hollywood tie ins tend towards this type. A non interactive medium comes to game designers saying '‘here,– we've got cool stuff -– lets make a game'. They have problems when they'’re asked what the player should _do_.

Cloning

This is hit duplication - this is a good game that is selling, lets make one the same.
This works very well with short development cycles. E.g. is Halo -– a clone of FPS, but tweaked to make it very good.
These tend to be bad when they're licensed products - just attach a licence to a game model with no thought as to whether that ties in with the licence *world*’.
Publishers are often a force in making games like this - they're risk averse.
It's not necessarily bad - borrow what works where you find it!
Kamasutra (www.gamasutra.com) online magazine talks about this - it'’s acceptable to reuse code, but not 'game abstractions'’ such as key assignment screens.

Currently each game reinvents the wheel -– it'’s a pre-Cambrian explosion of design solutions. E.g. each new game has a different controller configuration, a different way of organising your inventory, a different way of saving...
This is because medium is young - no accepted tropes in place, yet.


A better way of designing games could be...
Player centred design
Which puts the needs of the player at the centre of the design process

Problem is, you don'’t know what their needs are. And there'’s a huge variety in the audience so it'’s hard to get a representative sample. This could be considered anti commercial - but ultimately youÂ’re making something that people will want to be playing -– so should sell well.

How do you define players needs?

Listening.

However, be aware that players assumptions are often wrong. Example is Resident Evil - where players asked to be able to drop items anywhere - which was done in a sequel, and really messed up gameplay. It went back to how it was.
You can'’t accurately predict player needs
Madden NFL -– 3 people complaining on a message board was taken as everyone hating it. Complainers often make disproportionate amounts of noise, and you'’re not hearing from those who are happy. Also audience often not aware of issues and decisions behind game design. Everyone wanted to be able to design their own plays in nfl madden -– but it was too easy to design an unstoppable play, hence breaking the game.

Psychology

Look at theory - Flow, personality models, anthropology, game theory, game studies,
Game theory - is mathematical theorem. Bit heavy lifting;
Flow - concept that people are happiest at the level of their challenge -– too easy and they get bored, too hard they get anxious. In the middle is the flow state of complete absorption. Too much challenge is bad -– you'’re making people stressed when they'’re participating in a leisure activity. Some people actively enjoy such hard challenges...…
Using tools to look for behavioural trends can be very useful in game design - but using the models as gospel can be bad.
These models do give you new ways of looking at problems though. Use the models to test your designs after you'’ve created them -– not to design from the ground up.
These give you sets of tools for understanding the results of play testing and– analysing problems. They'’re a guide through the process.

Blind Testing

Videoing people playing games, and talking about what they'’re doing.
Their responses frequently don'’t correspond to their verbal reports afterwards, as people create their own narratives around their experience in the game. Games with steep learning curves particularly prone to this -… player is very frustrated at difficulty at start -– but huge sense of achievement when they master and do well blots out the anger and frustration at the start. (Catalysis model)

Its expensive. 3-5 blind tests at a late stage (when problems are still solvable) is a good idea. You need to harness a wide type of playing styles, and take testers from outside the group of people involved.
Focus groups - tend to be run (and hijacked) by marketing concerns. Frequently the people involved with focus groups tend to be hardcore gamers. And they skew the results accordingly.

Egotism

'I represent the audience'’. The odds that you do match the audience are extremely thin, Too many people are in game development for the love of games. You are atypical of your audience. Many people also work on the 'I wont make anything I wouldn'’t play' But someone has to make Barbie games...
Don't be in a commercial environment if you want to approach this way -– you have to sell your product, or you.ll put yourself out of a job. If you want to make games this way, join the mod community -– but this isn.’t a business model. Some mods may have taken off, but...

How do you grow yourself into unreached markets?
You have to think like people who don't play.

Balancing player needs with business needs


Choice of genre

Market stability - if I like platform games, I'’ll buy more of them. It'’s a formula that works,.
A genre game that'’s Rubbish? It'’s a mark against people making the game not the genre itself
Defined functionality. Player know the tropes and genre conventions -– they understand what they'’re getting
Craft vs. Market
Genre - defined by a particular set of challenges -– e.g. driving, rpg -– some users donÂ't enjoy some types of challenge.

Designing with Licensed IP

Bad software is bad software,– even if it has IP licence.
Player advantage -– familiar setting, a world they know, an experience they'’ll want to extend.
Licence implies thereÂ’s a group of people who already understand and enjoy that license setting
Must connect the game model with the license IP setting -– for appropriateness. E.g. the Barbie big tanks game wont sell heaps.
Licence IP - risks limitations for business
Manufacturing mentality among publishers. Must remember this is media, not a factory
Appreciate the IP
Original IP is often just a tweaked version of licensed IP anyway - Lara Croft = Indiana Jones with tits.


Mass Market vs. Niche market

Large cost of development = large audience to reap large profit
Nice markets - smaller costs -– smaller audience
Playing to a niche market on a small budget is ok. But playing to a niche market on a big budget is commercial suicide - you'’re putting your company at risk.
However - likely to be explosive growth in niche games -– over the next 15 years -– as move into under served markets.

Bear In mind all of these models and their limitations

Models used in the industry

EA Games Model

|- Hardcore gamer -|

(reads press, plays demos, buys 25+ games / year)

|------- Cool Gamer -------|

(gets info from hardcore mate, buys maybe top 10 games each year)

|------------ Mass Market ------------|

(Picks up on games when they'’re being talked about widely - maybe buys only top 3 games each year)




|-- [size of market] --|

This is a simplification, but is primarily a marketing model - it doesn'’t tell you anything about the types of games that make it to mass market. You have to be making your game accessible or it will never reach the mass market

Audience Model -– DGD1

Demographic Game Design Model 1 - the 1 reminds you that it will be replaced by something better! Based on Myers Briggs Typology. I've posted a diagram over at flickr.


Type 1 Conqueror

Strategic/logistical play
Finds winning pattern and repeats indefinitely
Appeal is Challenge and Fiero (triumph over adversity)
(Fail, repeat, fail, repeat, fail, repeat model)

Type 2 Manager

Strategic Tactical
Likes strategic puzzles and mastery
Enjoys a bit more stress, and feeling of resistance rising to meet them
Likes sim games, strategy games
(Small numbers -– no longer a mass market audience)

Type 3 Wanderer

Diplomatic tactical
Enjoys contact with other characters
Needs an emotional context to their goal
Not a high degree of challenge
Experience and finesse are drivers
Want to do it well, satisfyingly correctly
Involvement and role - will play multiplayer, but not to win

Type 4 Participant
Diplomatic Logistical
Likes creating -– e.g. design of character. Spends a lot of time here
Sims - Photo albums, and stories
Creative aspect is not about gameplay - it'’s about using the game as a creative tool outside its internal mechanics -– is expression in game
Likes customisation
Star wars galaxies - play with character creator for hours and hours


Audience model in MMORPGS

Casual players versus hardcore.
Only high degree of game literacy to be playing them, but allows all playing styles
Conquerors -– finishing quests
Managers -– resources
Wander -– joins conqueror parties, is led
Participant -– is the glue in the internal community

It'’s a limited but lucrative market. If you loose a key player to another game, their entire social network tends to move with them.

(Wikinote: See also the Bartle types - http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm - lots about this in 'Designing Virtual Worlds' IMcD).

Meeting Player Needs

Player's Role

What do they want out of a game? How do they interact with it?
Picking up box in shop, and able to understand the tasks involved in the game -– Who am I going to be?
If the player doesn'’t get it, marketing certainly wont get it.
You're Selling experiences.

Setting

Allows suspension of disbelief
Allows game world abstractions
Doesn'’t break the 4th wall (pulls the player out of the game world)
Simplifies reality to make modelling it manageable-– and learning it's rules manageable
Abstraction of world (Gta vs. The Getaway)
Realism isn'’t a goal in itself -– you'’ll always have abstraction
Internal consistency - not jolted out of world (e.g. encountering walking battle tanks in a WWII game that had been historically consistent until the last level)
Harmony

Gameplay vs. Toyplay

Toyplay - the kind of game that is low stress, where the player sets their own goals e.g. the Sims, animal crossing. High emotional investment - toyplay is its own reward. Creating your own narrative about your experience
Gameplay - Has performance measures and standards to reach. Is goal oriented, with goals being external to the player

Mechanics

Part of game -– e.g. a strategy game where you understand that there are values attached to your character, you build up their stats
Or invisible -– e.g. halo -– just enough to support a fully immersive world
RPGs are schizophrenic,
AD&D -– lots of pencil and paper players who enjoy the manipulation of stats and want that maintained in computerised version
Computer allowed these people to play AD&D without a group of players -– it removed the logistical problems and allowed them to revel in mechanics.
Enjoyment of mechanics is dependant on playstyle
Do you enjoy running rules in your head?
Or do you enjoy story and plot more?

Storytelling

Does it need a story? Cut scenes just get in the way of some games - their only purpose is to give you a breather e.g. Bishi Bashi
RPG with no story would be pointless, though
Again -– depends on player type -– do they need a framework for their activities,
Tetris - no story
Super monkey ball -– shouldn'’t have a story
Could just be abstract weirdness

Aesthetics and style

Form and Function and beauty
Can it be functional, but not beautiful?
Better looking sells better - it piques the interest of the casual viewer more.
Look at things outside the world of games -– e.g., making a game looked at artefacts and craft traditions of tribal cultures from around the world
Learn about real world style and borrow it -– e.g. Grim Fandango
A challenge makes an artist happy
Provide them a framework then let them do something excellent within that framework
Need a strong director
Same visual style in setup screens as in gameplay


Questions

HCI design

Similar problems
Overcoming energy barriers in learning the use -– e.g. a paperclip in an email programme means attach something to your post.
These are also culturally based -– may not translate well.

Field studies -– are very expensive to do, with a reasonable sample size
Game design is one aspect of HCI
Differences -– prototyping -– can't get feedback as early on in the system as you'’d like -– particularly in immersive games, as so much more needs to be finished

Kids

Need stories more in games
Probably not
What happens if you get their motivation wrong?

Pick your primary market. If it happens to export elsewhere, that'’s great
US and UK market - share broadly the same set of cultural assumptions
As they share the same media base.
Is possible to make horrible mistakes -– e.g. the reversed Arabic chants in a Microsoft game
Needs to be sanity checked - are we making inappropriate assumptions

How does a game designer influence the IP owner

Arguments about your specialisation are a risk of working within IP Licence area
Just '‘merchandising' top them
Befriend them. Explain
Detailed communication, early

Mobile devices – does their constrained nature make them more appealing to certain types of gamer?

For the games literate -– don'’t want to play on a mobile as is a step down from usual experience
Majority market - impulse buys when bored on the bus.
Supermarket buying style -– sweets at the checkout
Is predominantly casual. Hardcore gamers need hardcore hardware

Not game literate - tend to be wanderers and participants
Conqueror -– is a console fiend
Manager -– PC based

Growths in niche market

1965 -– 3 networks in US TV
direct Competition
All programming was pitched at the lowest common denominator

Cable arrives -– increased bandwidth -– can super serve that niche audience through narrowcasting

Retail shop shelves are the bandwidth limiter of the games world - just have a few big distributors
Once you have piracy proof high speed distribution you'll be able to do cheap distribution and serve niche audiences better
Also -– put games in front of the casual market in alternate forms -– e.g. as a bundled package with your new TV...

Every object tells a story

Every object tells a story is a great idea for a project - a user generated site designed to capture the social setting of objects.

It's been made by the marvellous Rachel of Own office Joey, who is a marvellous lady. I was - and still am - sickly jealous of the project.

Go Rachel! Go Objects! Rar!

Bona Emo Vidiot

The OED Online has published a list of new inclusions in the internet version of the OED.

It's a fascinating slice of zeitgeist - emo gets in, as does FOAF, versioning, caipirinha... and strangely, polari - surely that's been in regular use since the fifties?

It feels oddly like a slice of my head.

There's a search under way for the earliest usage of some common words, too - which made me wonder about the ease of tracing usage in the age of the internet and complete searchability. Once google finishes digitising every book ever, and search engines get stupidly fast, hunting down that rare first attribution will be laughably easy...

Open House, Arrive at Four, Tea Will be Served

How marvelous. I've made science.

This is a rather interesting little survey - mostly based around the demographics of social groups that coalesce in the bl*******re (filthy word, but is there a better one?).

From what I could tell of the questions (I didn't read the background, sorry) they're looking at the degrees of social closeness implied by various communication methods, and then the degrees of cross-class/demographic connectivity of online and offline friends. Does anyone else read those foldout questionnaires from magazines, and forensically recreate the dumb questions the marketing arses are trying to answer, by the way? It's a marvelous game.

The realisation for me is that I just don't use the phone any more - maybe one contact in the hundreds I make a day is a phonecall. Usually, I let my phone go to voicemail and pick up messages. Email is my primary conduit, and emailing regularly actually makes me feel closer to those people - they become a constant non-obtrusive presence in my life. Mind you, I'm particularly bad - at any one time I'll have two email clients open (work and social) and I send probably 30 social emails a day - fifty percent of which are idle tittletattle on lists.

The other strange thing is the broad amount of jobtypes I know. I'll admit I start to drop off when you hit unskilled labourers, but I was able to hit most jobtitles across most social demographics. The strange thing is that most of those people I met offline - and many of those through one person, whilst clubbing.

Until this last year, I would never have classed myself as a social animal, but it seems I am, and very acclimatised to that evolutionary niche, too.

I'd hope that this detailed understanding of the sociology of online interaction will help to illuminate the ways that new social contracts are developing around online communication. I've certainly noticed that spam, phishing, IM spam (hello, AOL!) and so forth tend to decrease the politeness and social acceptability boundaries over time; has no-one heard of netiquette these days? But some newer social softwares - Flickr and blogs among those - seem to be actively improving the quality and respect of interaction online. And as a n00b on MMORPGs, the low-level interaction is brilliant - no grief, lots of dancing.

Anyway, as a sign off, I'll point you to Ben Hammersley's marvelous presentation on politeness on t'internets, and again make the plea that someone extends the metaphor of folding down the corner of one's card to imply one is virtually home for visits...

Because I really didn't want a salacious comment on my photos from that boy I viciously took advantage of on the night of my nineteenth birthday. Good lord, has he not got the message by now? One. Night. Stand. Honey. Give. It. Up.

Star

CosPlay.

What a magnificent costume.

Ian, Cherie

Ian, Cherie,
originally uploaded by Claire.

Awww, look at them.

What a pair of cuties.