Tag Archives: Games

Notes from "Add Some Xbox to Your UX"

Presenter is Josh Knowles, a freelance designer who has worked on both game designs and other application design (http://auscillate.com).

Abstract: Tricks and techniques from the game design world can be applied to non-games — social apps, creative tools, etc. — to improve user experience, user enjoyment, and results. We’ll look at traditional UX in a new light: from the perspective of games and gamers (and zombies, aliens, and goombas).

Notes:

  • How to get people to sign up for something or participate in something?
    • Often, approaches to UX for these things tends to be a bit dry
    • The idea is to create passion in users to get them to want to participate
  • Game design is starting to work its way into other things now
    • American Idol
    • Million’s Poet
    • Toyota Prius efficiency leaves in the dashboard
    • Target checkout terminals – grades/scores
  • Game design can be a big part of interaction design, but right now it’s often a novelty and not something core to design
  • Games take a task and apply rules to give the participants enjoyment and satisfaction
    • Classic arcade games are this boiled down to essentials – basic tasks with applied rules and risk/reward structures
    • Galaxy Zoo; Solar Stormwatch – astronomical phenomena turned into a game
    • Google Image Labeler – the timed tagging and matching tags from two random strangers
    • Faux stock markets
    • (my note) Formspring.me is kind of game-ish
    • Slashdot comment moderation and granting mod points to random users to help improve comment displays to random users (and Karma)
    • StackOverflow applies this to Q/A (10 points to rate up, 100 points to rate down, 200 points to see fewer ads on site, 1k points to delete questions)
    • thesixtyone – music filtering system
    • Foursquare, Gowalla, and MyTown (duh)
  • Basic concepts
    • Points (especially public points and high scores)
      • Number of friends
      • Percentage completion of participation (Shelfari, LinkedIn)
    • Badges and Achievements (specific defined activities)
    • Unlockables (site or application features you receive as a reward for participation)
      • Individual unlockables versus global unlockables
    • Game boards
      • Visual representations of what’s available or what you can do
  • You can learn from:
    • Classic video games
    • Board games
    • Sports
  • Basic game concepts have universal appeal and people can recognize them quickly
  • Education (games are excellent teachers)
  • Invitation (give users an explicit invitation to participate – these are ways to nudge users towards certain actions)
  • Pitfalls
    • Don’t use points in a way that will distract users from what’s most important on the site
    • Don’t put a number on a bad behavior
    • Don’t oversimplify what’s important to your service
    • Don’t let people game the system – avoid anything that can be automated to success (challenging to avoid)
    • Avoid blocking people in to the point where they can’t build on top of your service or innovate new ways to use it (Twitter)
  • Reasons to do this stuff
    • Educates your users and makes them better users
    • Creates better differentiation for users
    • Users are more willing to collaborate

MLB 10: The Show: First Impressions

I haven’t bought a baseball game in a few years—not since the 2K Sports series was still on top. But this year, after reading some fantastic reviews and seeing that last year’s game was well-loved by a lot of people, I decided to take a shot and grab MLB 10. I played a couple of innings tonight and here’s what I think so far:

  • The computer is a jerk of a pitcher, which is a good thing. It pitches around you, it mixes up pitch types, and it generally does what it can to keep you behind in the count. I like this. Even though I can’t currently hit very well, it’s a good challenge.
  • The animations and the environments are pretty good-looking. Busch looks pretty much like Busch. Fredbird looks pretty much like Fredbird. The players are as always hit or miss, but I think they look good more often than not.
  • The sound is incredible.
  • Umpires call different strike zones, and the game keeps a rotation of umpires, so you can “get used” to one umpire’s zone over another’s.
  • There are so many options here that I’m sure I’ll never even touch half of them. Custom crowd chants and heckles you can record yourself, custom walk-out music editing, league and player career options… a lot of stuff.
  • The built-in movie editor, while crappy in resolution, is a pretty neat way of showing people things you’ve done in-game. It even includes sound, which is better than the EA series. You can either export a specific play, or cut together a compilation of plays for a mini-highlight reel, which you can influence by setting camera change points and everything.

I didn’t play with the movie editor for very long, but here’s a couple of Carpenter strikeouts and a Holliday base hit:

Bonus tip: don’t keep the default camera angle. The “Offset” camera is much better for viewing the zone than the “Catcher” angle.

Ethan Mars

Last night, I started playing the beginning of Heavy Rain. Based on what I’d read about the game so far, what I had expected was a new type of experience in games, one leaning more toward what director David Cage calls “interactive drama.”

What I found was something more intense.

(Mild spoilers for the first 30 minutes of Heavy Rain follow.)

Ethan Mars is one of the four main characters in Heavy Rain, and his story is the first one you’re exposed to. The prologue of the game takes place in a rather ordinary setting. You’re taught how to manipulate the controls in the context of Ethan’s son’s birthday. You wake up, take a shower, get dressed, work a little bit, and play with Ethan’s two sons in his backyard.

A picture is painted—that of a successful architect, with a loving wife and two sons, who lives in suburbia, works out of a studio in his home, helps his wife with the groceries, and has trouble opening a cabinet in the living room. The scene is that of a sunny day. You can take a walk around the yard, look out the front door, and even lay down on the grass and enjoy the moment.

Between this opening scene and the dramatic turn that comes next—the shopping mall scene—the first teases you see of Ethan’s life and that of the game world of Heavy Rain are filled with light and color. The characters may have concerns, but things look generally optimistic and bright.

The moment that closes the prologue changes everything. After a sequence where he tries to find his son in a busy mall (and can’t), Ethan is forced to dive in front of an oncoming car in a desperate attempt to save his son’s life. As the prologue concludes, it is clear that he is unsuccessful. The closing scene is Ethan’s son’s bright red balloon floating into the air while the cries and pleas of his wife are heard over an astonished group of onlookers.

After the credits, you are reintroduced to Ethan two years later. He is unkempt: his hair is a mess, he hasn’t shaved in a while, and he has moved to a broken-down home in the city. His wife is nowhere to be seen. You spend your next moments picking up Ethan’s younger son from school, fixing him dinner, and helping him with his homework, but it’s clear he doesn’t want to be around Ethan—he barely responds when talked to.

And it’s not just the interactions that give you context. The city is a place where a heavy rain falls without pause. The sky is a foreboding grey, rumbles of thunder are heard in the distance, and the color (as you can see in the screen above) has been leeched out of Ethan’s world. It’s clear that either he has given up, or everyone else has given up on him.

It is not often that a game puts before us a protagonist who is so beaten, forlorn, and exasperated. It’s hard for people to associate themselves with a character who appears to be going nowhere. But in this case, in around 30 minutes of “play,” the prologue of Heavy Rain gives you a context for Ethan’s development (or regression, if you want to see it that way). Losing his son changed his life for the worse—as I imagine it might for a great many people.

As a father, this had an astonishing amount of impact. It makes you think. What would your life be like if it were you going through similar circumstances?

It is a refreshing change of pace that a game has triggered these feelings and thoughts. I also know from what I’ve read that things are only going to get worse for Ethan; I’m interested to see how far this experience pushes the bounds of storytelling.

It’s still as easy as ever to be snared …

It’s still as easy as ever to be snared by the ageless visuals, riddled with Euclidian trees and vector ravines (all brought to life by a colour scheme that has a hint of evangelical mania in its blooms and bruises), but beneath all that is a confident port. Despite the vestigial mouse pointer that perpetually hovers over the polygonal battlefield, this is a PC game that feels entirely at home on a console.

Edge’s Review of Darwinia+

N'Gai Croal: Memory Lane

(Edge Online)

[…] I’m at the end of my first full decade of gaming seriously. And, as such, it’s worth a nostalgic look back at my favourite videogame-related moments the last ten years.

A handful of these are definitely in my shared experience pool. Croal has more than his share of Q Entertainment memories in this list, which I think only goes to show how well-crafted their experiences tend to be.