My latest Game Design of Everyday Things column is now live at Kill Screen. It’s about games and the “everyday”:
This column is nominally about looking at the relationship between design and games. But, in its title that riffs on Don Norman’s most famous book, I’d argue that the “Everyday” is as important as the D-word. After all, design is not really something most people engage with actively, either as connoisseurs or as critics. Most often, it is something people engage with without knowing it’s there. “Design,” it turns out, is usually the answer to the question we so rarely ask of the products we use everyday: “What made this good?”
junu | 30 Aug 2011
Loved the article.
‘Design of Everyday Games’ might be a slimmer title. Alhough maybe you intentionally wanted to differentiate ‘things’ from ‘games’?
Tom | 30 Aug 2011
Junu – it’s a play on the title of a book by Don Norman. Hence the deliberate clumsiness.
junu | 31 Aug 2011
deliberate clumsiness. gotcha. I’m a big fan of norman as well :) Not sure if you’ve come across this talk by Kevin Slavin but definitely a good one:
http://www.psfk.com/2009/04/video-psfk-conference-nyc-kevin-slavins-this-platform-called-everyday-life.html
I wonder where ‘everyday games’ and ‘everyday things’ overlap?