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"…then, after destroying his nano-network, as an admonition to the audience, extended [Arthur C Clarke's metaphor]: 'Any truly advanced technology is indistinguishable from garbage.'" Excellent summary of what sounds like a wonderful GDC Austin keynote from Bruce Sterling.
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"'What we've done in MMOs and what we tend to lean toward is building an enviroment for the new player to explore that is essentially a safe environment… the newbie zone. For our explorative learners, we've given them safe zones to explore.' But that doesn't work for imitative learners." Excellent article on styles of learning, with particular attention to how MMOs teach players game mechanics.
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"Very recently an anonymous poster on /b/ claimed to have hacked Sarah Palin's Yahoo e-mail account." 4chan members get into Sarah Palin's barely-disguised Yahoo mail accounts which she used for business.
-
Oh boy.
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“I decided to create Flatshare fridge because there is nothing more disgusting than a dirty fridge in a shared flat,” he says. “At the time, I was living in such a flat!” Amazing.
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"It occurred to me that if I could somehow tether a DSLR to an instant-on device like an Arduino microcontroller I would have less weight to carry around and could get more work done. After mentally spec’ing out what I would need, I realized the solution was right in front of me - because I bring it with me for Mario Kart wireless races on long night jobs - (In the manner of John Lasseter’s slow epiphany voice): “Use-the-Nintendo-D-S.” Duh." Oh wow.
-
Soulja Boy reviews Braid. Oh dear. (Although: much as I want to mock it, he is correct that time-rewind mechanics are, usually, a lot of fun in and of themselves. But still.)
18
September
2008
September
2008
Links
Tagged as:
4chan, america, braid, brucesterling, camera, canon, computing, design, ds, entertainment, flatshare, fridge, futurism, games, gdc, gdcaustin, gender, hacking, homebrew, interaction, interactiondesign, intervalometer, learning, learningstyles, mmo, mmorpg, nintendods, pervasive, play, politics, product, remotecontrol, sarahpalin, souljaboy, stacking, tutorial, ubicomp, video, wow, xbox.
08
September
2008
September
2008
Links
Tagged as:
camera, eames, explanation, film, illustration, polaroid, sx70, technology, video.
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"[the film] presents the simple joy of photography and, without hyperbolizing or talking down to its audience, gives a comprehensive explanation of how the camera works." Lovely film explaining the way the SX-70 works, from the Eames brothers; the explanation of how the film itself works is beautiful.
28
August
2008
August
2008
Links
Tagged as:
advert, api, arcade, awesome, camera, cinematography, classic, commerical, design, doc, documentation, ds, education, engineering, film, filmmaking, game, games, gyrus, hd, hirokazuyasuhara, homebrew, interaction, layout, making, merge, music, nintendo, nintendods, omnigraffle, photography, play, prototyping, qix, rails, red, reference, rhythmaction, rspec, ruby, sketching, technology, tempest, template, timelapse, userexperience, ux, videogames, wired, wireframe.
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"I'm passionate about this because I'm building the camera I've always wanted to shoot with," he says. "When my grandkids and great-grandkids look back, they're going to say I was a camera builder. I did handgrips and then goggles and then sunglasses to prepare myself. But cameras are magic." Fantastic article about Jim Jannard and his Red digital movie-camera business.
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Brilliant, brilliant little advert.
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"VideoGamesHero brings you homebrew action at it's best - offering lasting fun and challenging action with over 65 Songs, 5 Game modes, Motion Card and Guitar Grip support, there is something for everyone!" Homebrew Harmonix-style rhythm action game for the ds. Awesome.
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"In this extensive interview, Yasuhara outlines his carefully constructed theories of fun and game design, including the differences between American and Japanese audiences, with illustrated documents." Lots of nice things in here, including a section on "tidying up".
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"APIdock is a web app that provides a rich and usable interface for searching, perusing and improving the documentation of projects that are included in the app." Handy.
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"I think the role of the architecture diagram, user flow, and wireframe belongs very much after the fact, after we’ve sketched and prototyped an experience. Those are tools to document what has been agreed through sketching and prototyping. They are not the best means for solving challenging design problems." That seems like a good way of putting it.
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"In this template you'll find shared layers (masters) for a title page, wireframe, wireframe/storyboard hybrid, simple storyboard, and storyboard with notes. Column guides and a regular grid make it easy to use and keep your layout tight." Nice .graffle templates for UX designers.
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Timelapse, merged photographs of videogames. Beautiful, especially Tempest.
18
November
2007
November
2007
design
Tagged as:
camera, deliberate, design, interface, slow.
Deliberance
Time for my second post about the Epson R-D1, which I was lucky enough to play with when my colleague Lars bought one recently.
Along the top surface of the camera is what looks like a film-advance lever: the winder you crank to move to the next shot on a film camera. Obviously, there’s no film to advance on the digital camera. But the lever still serves its other traditional purpose: it re-cocks the shutter for another shot.
I’ve marked it in the photograph below.
Initially, I thought this was another of the R-D1’s ersatz “retro” features. After all: there’s no real need for such functionality. Even the Leica M8 abandons the film-advance lever. But once I used the camera, the lever made sense to me.
Firstly: it’s somewhere to rest your thumb. That may sound like a silly thing to say, but if you’ve ever used a rangefinder, or an old SLR with a slim body and no moulded grip, the lever becomes a useful way to counterbalance the body in your hand. It’s nice to have that familiar anchor-point to rest on.
But far more importantly than that: it makes the act of taking a photograph more considered. It brings to mind one of my favourite quotations about photography, from Ansel Adams:
“…the machine-gun approach to photography is flawed… a photograph is not an accident; it is a concept.”
I love that. Photographs are not something that is taken; they’re something that is made. An image is considered, composed, and then captured. And the life of that image ends there. To take another, you must re-cock the shutter, and start again.
And so the shutter-cocking lever makes the very act of making a photograph with the Epson more deliberate. That “ersatz” retro touch is actually fundamental to the way the camera demands to be used. As a result, you end up taking fewer photographs with the Epson - there’s none of the mad “double-tapping” that sometimes becomes habit with a DSLR. It feels more genteel, more refined - and I think the pictures you end up making with it are all the better for that.
07
November
2007
November
2007
design
Tagged as:
analogue, camera, dial, interface, photography, rangefinder.
Swings and readouts
My colleague Lars has just bought an Epson R-D1. If you’re not aware of it, it’s a digital rangefinder (roughly modelled on a Voigtlander) that takes Leica M Bayonet lenses, is hard to find, and noticeable cheaper than a Leica M8.
It’s obviously a niche camera: M lenses aren’t common nor cheap, the rangefinder is hardly a mass-market camera paradigm these days, and it’s largely manual - aperture priority, manual focus.
One thing that really caught my eye - and that I initially dismissed as ersatz Japanese retro-fetishery - was the readout on the top. Which looks like this:
To explain: the largest hand, pointing straight up, indicates how many exposures are left on the current memory card. As you can see, the scale is logarithmic - 500+ is the maximum, and as it counts down, the number of remaining exposures is measured more accurately.
The E-F gauge at the bottom measures not fuel, but battery power.
The left-hand gauge indicates white balance - either auto or one of several presets.
Finally, the right-hand dial represents the image quality: Raw, High, or Normal.
Once you know what it means, it’s a wonderfully clear interface: your eye can scan it very quickly. It’s also hypnotic watching it update. To alter the image quality, for instance, you hold the image quality lever with your right hand and move the selection knob (positioned where the film-rewind would be on a Leica) with your left. As the quality alters (and the rightmost needle flicks to the appropriate setting), the exposures-remaining needle swings around to reflect the new maximum number of pictures.
You can’t always see the benefits of analogue readouts in still photographs; this one is a case in point. Once it starts moving - and you start having a reason to check that readout - their clarity becomes immediately obvious.
So whilst I may have thought this kitsch to start with… it turns out to be one of my favourite features on the camera.
(As for that manual “film advance” lever… I’ll write about that in another post. It’s something I found similarly kitschy to begin with, but understood in the end.)
Links & notes for this month
- "If I had but one backdrop to use for portraiture I would choose a simple roll of white seamless paper. With one roll of paper you can create many options. For the rest of the week I’m going to break it down for you. We are going to look at getting it to pop to pure white, making it various shades of grey, getting it to go black, gelling it to any color in the rainbow, and doing very easy and quick changes in post production to further the visual options available to us when using such a simple background." Fantastic tutorial.
- "Moon Stories, a collection of my latest three experiments, got selected to be presented at the Tokyo Game Show during the Sense of Wonder Night, the japanese version of the Experimental Gameplay Sessions." Beautiful, notably "I wish I were the Moon"
- "In a strange way then, the designer of a video game is himself present as an entity within the work: as the "computer"-- the sum of the mechanics with which the player interacts." Fantastic piece from Steve Gaynor, which touches on some notions of the death of the designer - namely, that the designer *is* inherently present in games; they embody themselves in mechanics, and games that downplay logical mechanics that players can reverse-engineer do themselves a disservice.
- I don't normally link to XKCD, simply because it would become repetitive... but "Height" is really lovely.
- This might come in handy sometime.
- "Restore harmony by clicking the tiles until no open end is left over."
- Excellent interview with Yoshi Ono on some of the design challenges and nuanaces of Street FIghter IV. The stuff about when to skip frames (and when not to) is particularly interesting.
- "Maybe it's the tusks, and the horns. Running with a dangerous crowd. You have to admit, dark elf boys are kind of wuss. And let's not even talk about gnomes. Or maybe it's part of the separation process. Getting away from your parents. For sure I can't ever visit her in the Undercity."
- "Marketing is a strategic function about delivering customers what they want. It isn’t a jazz hands and rubber chicken and t-shirts. It is the heart of successful companies..."
- A few notes on Flickr's queueing systems.
- Cultured Code do a large behind-the-scenes look at how they designed their Things iPhone UI. Lots of detail, lots of working shown. Even if you don't agree with the choices they made, it's excellent to see somebody sharing at this level of detail.
- "Still, it’s 110 days (or 2,663.18 hours) that I’m sort of responsible for taking from a girl’s life. Phileas Fog circumnavigated the globe in less time than that." A lovely piece of writing from Simon Parkin, tracking down a digital life he sold long ago.
- "...one final achievement, ‘Remember September ‘44′ rewards players with no less than 50 achievement points for simply playing the game at some point on September 17th, the anniversay of the events depictied in the game. As you have to be connected to Xbox Live at the time, there’s no way to cheat by fixing the time on your console’s clock, meaning that gamers who want the full 1000 points on offer will have to hang on to the game for close to a year from now..."
- "Turn photos of your designs into real life things." Fabbing based upon photographs or illustration. Blimey.
- "The rumblings you've been hearing in the criminal underground since July indeed are true: At long last, we are seeking new applicants to the League." Eeeeexcellent.
- "The Wireframe Graph Paper Notepad is made for visual designers, interaction designers, and information architects... These pages are great for sketching, but also work well when producing high fidelity drawings. The grid consists of 24 columns with gutters, so you can easily divide your canvas into common divisions..." Oh, yes please.
- "this portion of moby.com, 'film music', is for independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film, video, or short... the music is free as long as it's being used in a non-commercial or non-profit film, video, or short. if you want to use it in a commercial film or short then you can apply for an easy license, with any money that's generated being given to the humane society." Moby is smart when it comes to licensing his music. I think this is a really good move, and not something you'd expect from a major recording artist.
- "For one, there's an undercurrent of a siege mentality in journalism right now, with newsrooms cutting staff and print operations frozen stiff in the headlights of the internet. The focus on narrative and story gives a softer edge and an escape valve, though - this group is not primarily a tech-driven community, but they catch on to new developments quickly and bend them into the service of storytelling." Interesting round-up from Mike, particularly with respect to the NYT's election coverage.
- “You know what a sign of love is, in this family? It’s if you come home and the elevator is on the ground floor,” says Linda. “Because that means whoever came home before you walked up twelve flights of stairs.” Fantastic article about Jay Maisel's house.
- "When NASA's last scheduled Space Shuttle mission lands in June of 2010, the United States will not have the capability to get astronauts into space again until the scheduled launch of the new Orion spacecraft in 2015. Over those five years, the U.S. manned space program will be relying heavily on Russia and its Baikonur Cosmodrome facility in Kazakhstan." Wonderful pictures of spaceflight, Russian-style.
- "Journalist Kareem Shaheen was attending at GAMES 2008 convention in Dubai, and asked us if we fancied writing anything about gaming in the Middle East. And we said HELL YES, as we like capitals." A nice, if brief, piece from Shaheen about a sector of gaming I know nothing about.
- Make Iced Tea!
- "Now noisy makers can assemble and modify their own light controlled analog noise friend!" I want an analog noise friend.
- "Over the weekend, students from NYC's Parsons School worked for twenty four hours continuously with LittleBigPlanet. Their challenge? To create a level from scratch using early copies of the PS3-exclusive.. one level stood out as the single best level -- one created by Team Sportsmanship. We've lovingly dubbed the level "Shadow of the LittleBigColossus." Watch the video and see why." Amazing. Intensive, over-difficult, but still impressive.
- "People think the interface is the game, and I think that is kind of backwards. I think the game is the game, and we should be thinking what are the many interfaces to it... you touch Twitter in many ways, you touch Facebook in many ways." Raph Koster. But you guessed that, right?
- Wonderful.
- "There's a weird conceit in here, that the activities and practices of normal human beings will involve data processing and algorithms of some sort, which is an awfully big assumption. So big, in fact, that it has distilled down to a way of seeing the world as consisting of bits of data that can be processed into information that then will naturally yield some value to people... Design for people, practices and interaction rituals before the assumptions about computation, data structures and algorithms get bolted onto normal human interaction rituals."
- "Recently I had been wondering what the complete list of HTTP status code symbols was in Rails. Searching through Rails didn't yield any results for a symbol like :unprocessable_entity... Rails defines the symbol to status code mapping dynamically from the status message. The symbol used is an underscored version of the status message with no spaces." Quick list of clear textual shorthand for returning HTTP status.
- "Let’s no longer think in terms of selling them a game. Let’s instead think of selling them an experience." A nice article on the changing shape of game design, particularly when it comes to narrative and participatory hooks.
- "Every year on or around the same day ... at the same time of day and from the same position a photograph is taken at each of the twenty locations on this map which is based on a circle of half a mile radius drawn around the place where the project was devised. It is hoped that this process will be carried on into the future and beyond the deviser's death for as long as the possibility of continuing and the will to undertake the task persist." Tom Phillips project, as mentioned in Reading the Everyday.
- "Boxer is a DOS game emulator for OS X, built around the powerful DOSBox. Boxer aims to make it easy and painless to play your DOS games."
- "Microsoft may very well not be broken. The world needs reliable bureaucracies that mollify the needs of corporations and individuals in the center of the market. But if it is broken, advertising isn't going to fix it."
- "Some people believe that there's no correlation between quality and sales, and thus think that the way to make money is to make things that are easily marketable (read: licenses). Game developers themselves usually argue that sales above a certain level require a game to be sufficient quality. I decided to see which of these perspectives was correct for the Playstation 2 era." Datanalysismachinego!
- "Of course, to get the most points, your band needs a bassist. And nobody wants to play bass. So if you want to lead a full band, you're going to have to play bass yourself. And this is like life!" Lovely article from Torpex' Jamie Fristrom.
- "After replacing the old plist, you can use your Hori stick with MacMAME!" Fantastic. Six-button fighter action agogo.
- "A version of the match-three game is set to launch next Thursday within the World of Warcraft MMO (massively multiplayer online), letting players kill time with puzzles during raids and long stints farming rare items." Oh god no. Don't cross the time-sink streams!
- "And if there was a "prize" in this lottery, it was not so much the object itself, but the letter and the awesome mysteries of unfathomable spiritual connections, and the very gesture itself from this dear, dear person and the timing!" What a story.