SXSW 2010: I’m in!

Sunday, December 13, 2009

I learned a couple of weeks ago that my talk, Add Some XBOX To Your UX, has been accepted for SXSW 2010. I know a lot of people speak at SXSW (2010 will have, like, 220 panels), but I’m pretty excited. It’ll be the first lengthy solo presentation I’ve given since graduate school and, well, it’s just nice to have an excuse to cogitate and do some deeper research on a particular subject. It really does feel like a thesis project, though. In a very good way.

I haven’t settled on any specifics, of course, but the main thrust of the talk will be about how features that one might commonly associate with games — “game-like mechanics,” I tend to call them — can be applied to non-game social software to enhance the user experience and to guide users towards particular outcomes. And despite the “UX” in the title, the talk won’t be geared specifically towards people with “user experience designer” on their business cards — it should appeal to anyone interested in new ways of thinking about how we do things together online.

The talk will build on the idea that so much of what we do together online is done for fun. Services like Twitter and Facebook can pat themselves on the back about the importance of what they do — allowing people to organize in new ways, find old friends, take political action, and such — but the core of the most well-used social media sites today is all about, I feel, people using their services to have fun. Sharing information (photos, videos, bars I go to, etc.) with friends is fun. And Twitter would not have had the impact it had on the Iranian election if millions of people like me had not signed up in the first place because it looked like a fun way to chat with a circle of friends. So what can we learn if we look at Twitter (for example) through that “fun” lens? Can we think about what that piece of “fun” is and how we might use game design strategies to amplify it?

Another starting point will be the subject of sites that use game mechanics to achieve very particular non-game goals which would be otherwise difficult/impossible. Google Image Labeller is a good (though not very new) example of this sort of thing. Opening ourselves up to games can give us a whole new box of tools to use when designing user experiences to achieve a certain goal. The concepts of friending people and rating things with stars or thumbs up/down and leaving comments and such are reasonably well understood and used all over the place. What other ways can people interact socially online? What other effects can we achieve?

These are fairly hefty subjects and I’m talking about them rather clumsily here. I’m definitely still refining my ideas. But I’ve been reading books, doing research, and having conversations about it — and expect to continue up until the day of the talk. Really, this is the most fun of the whole thing. Although the talk itself is a great opportunity, of course, and I look forward to kicking ass.

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Working Conditions

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Sukie has developed a habit of crawling up on my shoulders while I’m trying to work…

I said what what, kitten butt.

(I took this with PhotoBooth — it’s me looking at my laptop screen.)

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Passage

Monday, November 2, 2009

A couple of years ago a simple game called Passage by Jason Rohrer made waves in the scene and got written up everywhere. An “art game,” it’s intended to poignantly depict the feeling of one’s passage through a life and the choices one might make using a very lo-fi Atari or NES-era aesthetic: blocky graphics, blippy 8-bit soundtrack. The game takes about five minutes to play through, so go check it out if you haven’t. (Also: it’s free.) It’s a valiant effort at communicating something a bit more poetic than usual via a video game.

One of the things that stuck with me the most about Passage is the depiction of one’s perception of time. At every moment in the game you can see the entirety of the “life” you’re constructing. The moments around you, though, are large and clear (relatively speaking) whereas both the moments far ahead and far in the past are compressed and difficult to make out the further away from you they are. And when you’re young at the beginning of the game you have no past, when you’re old you have no future. I enjoy the symmetry, the idea that we experience our pasts and future in similar ways — both are kind of possibility spaces of stories and interpretations that get foggier the further away from the present we get. I mostly know what I did yesterday. I mostly know what I’ll do tomorrow. Ten years back and forward, though, are more difficult to perceive. Jason Rohrer has a creator’s statement accompanying Passage, if you’d like to hear his take.

I suspect if you’re over a certain age (30s? 40s?) this might all seem sort of obvious. As I age I kind of see that getting older is really only something you can understand by doing. I’ve had a conversation on several occasions with Christin about my 92-year-old Grandmother, how it’s difficult for me to understand what’s going through my Grandmother’s mind sometimes because I live — and have only ever lived — a life where almost everything for me is in the future and she’s living a life, now, where everything is behind her and her future’s on very shaky ground (she’s quite healthy — but there are human limits at play). I wonder sometimes if certain religious feelings or perceptions of things like the afterlife become especially vivid at this point: If when people loose their actual “future” they sort of hallucinate it, like a phantom limb or what Oliver Sacks describes here. She talks about seeing my deceased Grandfather in heaven and about how she wants to spend as much time with the family as she can so she’ll have memories to take with her when she passes over — still planning for a future. It’s very, very hard for me to conceive of what I would even be like if I had no future to plan for and work towards. I suppose if I live a long and healthy life I’ll get to find out for myself someday…

Anyway, this wasn’t intended to be a morbid post. Just kind of free-associating, as I do.

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Critter Defense is Live!

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Alright! Finally! Our cute tower defense game called Critter Defense! has finally been released into the wild. You should check it out — Charles Pratt and I put a great deal of effort and love into this little game. We hope you’ll enjoy it. At the moment you can’t search for it in the App Store, but you can get to it via direct link.

Get it here: Mojito.

Mojito (our new little game development group) also has an awesome blog, if you’d like to keep up with Mojito- and Critter Defense-related activities in more detail.

Thanks, everybody, for the support! We’re excited to see where this leads.

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Just a Cloud

Friday, June 26, 2009

The odd cloud formation in the top photo are mammatus clouds, by the way.

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Game Design & Musical Play

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

So Christin and I travelled through dark and drizzle to the Eyebeam “Mixer: Version” party out in Chelsea last Saturday. Britta and Rebecca had invited us to come check out the public installation of their excellent Windowfarms project, a take on DIY urban gardening. Photo below.

A handful of other projects were installed at Eyebeam for the event. We played a quick round of David Jimison’s Mad Libs+karaoke thing (we needed more alcohol, honestly) and after doing a round of meet-and-greet with the (actually surprisingly small) contingency of former ITPers we settled in for a round of the very well put-together World Series of [You] ‘Tubing project. Check out the link for the details, but quickly: A player goes to a kiosk and picks out five of their favorite funny/absurd YouTube videos. Mind were mostly along the lines of hamsters having sex and cats acting weird. I know what I like. And then you go up onstage and “play” your videos alongside someone else’s video choice. And the audience decides who has the better video by pointing with green laser pointers. Hamster sex video? A winner! Cat swatting at a hammer? A loser. I lost. Overall. So my YouTube skills must be weak. But. Very fun game. Very nicely put together.

The pic at the top of this post (and the one below) are of Hans-Christoph Steiner’s hacked iPod musical performance project. Briefly: You pick an instrument. Each has an iPod stuck to it with custom sound-generating software that you kind of “scratch” (DJ-style) by touching the scroll interface on the iPod. I fiddled with the drums which apparently worked by pushing the four buttons above the wheel (on a third-gen iPod) — but it had crashed or something and I couldn’t seem to get it to work.

Now. I’m not trying to get on Hans’ case — I liked the project. It looked great — I loved the whiteness of everything. Plus, it was quite a technical achievement. And people had a lot of fun with it — I mean, check out the pics. Girls gone wild. But. The sound was wild cacophony. Wild cacophony can be good, at times. But this wild cacophony came from people having a rather limited perception of what sounds poking at the iPod would make. And if they knew that, then they seemed to have little idea about how to use the sounds (besides just poking furiously). And if they figured out something good to do, they had no way to coordinate with the three other people making random noises on stage. And this is a very common problem for projects which expect audience members to come up and participate in the creation of sound.

So. My graduate thesis for ITP (called “MMMI”) kind of sucked. I mean, it had its moments. The technology was kind of clever and I think I had a very polished visual design — but the resulting music wasn’t so hot. So, y’know, failure. It was a musical project, afterall. Specifically, a project that invited about twenty people to interact with the same musical interface at the same time with a specific goal of creating an intelligible piece of collaborative music. (The project also involved a bit of phone-to-screen technology which I’m not going to get into because it’s neither here nor there as far as this discussion. If you want to know more, go here.) Okay. I failed. But I think I was on the right track. Here’s why.

People need structure. People need to be told what to do. Or, at least, to be given a shove in a certain direction. Whole broad swaths of design are built upon this notion, from architecture to web design to game design. People need this because they want to have success with things they may not be experts at. I want to successfully use the bathroom in the Chrysler Building despite the fact that I have never stepped inside the building before in my life and don’t even know how many floors it has. I want to successfully buy a Hickory Farms beefstick party pack from their site despite not knowing intimately how payment authentication on the web works. I want to have fun with Call of Duty: World at War even though I don’t know each and every level inside out and don’t even really know how much damage the different weapons do to bad guys.

But in a creative environment people don’t want to be told exactly what to do. They want hints — signposts that can direct them, but be ignored if the user thinks of something better they’d like to do or try. And this is where I feel like applying “game-like” design strategies to musical instrument design is key — especially if you want several people who have never played your instrument to be able to collaborate in some meaningful way.

My grad thesis, MMMI, tried to solve this by giving players points by hitting the balls on the screen and making sounds. Everyone had the same score, so it was cooperative rather than competitive. I wanted players to keep the musical balls bouncing on the screen, so I rewarded them for doing that. How they bounced the balls around to make different sorts of sounds — that was where their creativity and freedom came in. But. In order to advance “levels” — to get to the next set of sounds and visuals — they had to reach certain points thresholds. So. If players liked where they were and didn’t care to advance, then the points could be ignored without any penalty. Good, right? I offered a structure, but also allowed players to ignore the structure without serious consequence. This is one of the reasons I call this sort of thing “game-like” design or “applying game-like mechanics” — it’s not a game in the usual “win-lose” sense.

So, yeah. My particular implementation wasn’t that awesome — this sort of design can be challenging, it turns out. (It also, just to note, probably alludes to the generative composition movement and possibly the sort of audience-performer breakdown of a “happening.” But who knows.) You have to provide a game-like structure but kind of modulate the punishment and reward systems to match what you, as “composer,” think would be a positive experience for your amateur performers.

Why not just have a musical score for your players? (Score like sheet music, not like points.) Well, that’s certainly another way to go about it. But I think that feels just less “fun” overall — maybe because I’m biased towards the term “game” over the term “score.” The latter feels like something you have to do. The former feels like some you explore and play with.

Anyway. Obviously this sort of application of “game-like” design for creative purposes interests me quite a bit. I feel like this has been touched upon, but we still haven’t seen it flourish. People credit games like Flower or Guitar Hero with being in this realm, but they’re not. Electroplankton kind of is, but at this point it’s fairly dated and obviously incomplete. I might go so far as to say if you can lose at something, then it’s not what I’m talking about here. I mean, you can paint a shitty picture, but if you start painting the sky green and the grass red your canvas shouldn’t abruptly vaporize and tell you how much you suck. Because maybe that’s what you want to do. Maybe that’s what you want to explore. What if I want to play all of the wrong notes in Guitar Hero? The song shuts off and I hear booing sounds.

Okay. Don’t lie: You haven’t read this far. Okay. Maybe. Just in case, here’s a conclusion: I haven’t had the opportunity to work on a project with this theme in a while — since my thesis, really. But I want to. I’m currently exploring a few ideas for applying this sort of thought to iPhone games. And, actually, what’s neat about the iPhone is that there are a handful of apps which kind of do what I’m talking about. No, not “iFart.” (And not Brian Eno’s “Bloom,” either.) The Smule apps, I mean. “Ocarina” and “Leaf Trombone.” (Given the jillions of apps out there, I’m sure there are more.) Whereas my examples in the previous paragraph land a bit on the “this is just a game” side of the aisle, those two kind of land a bit too far on the “this is just a toy” side of the aisle. But it’s nice that they’re there. So, yeah. Hopefully I’ll come up with some clever notion and will get to write another windy blog post about it, here.

Onward!

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Thoughts on Google Wave

Friday, June 5, 2009

The peeps at Montauk last summer.

“What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?”

I’ve been watching the Google Wave video over the past couple of days. It’s a bit long, but they give a very complete overview of the service. Even though there are a million “tech du jour” blogs and I normally prefer to stay away from that kind of stuff on this blog, Wave struck me so I might as well toss out a few quick thoughts on the matter. So:

1. Yeah, e-mail certainly feels like it could use some modernizing — it hasn’t changed in any meaningful way in, like, forever. At least since I’ve been using it (circa 1994). It’s still “to,” “from,” “cc,” “subject” — and replies still stack inline, although now most e-mail clients will render replied-to text in different colors or something. Progress!

2. Wave is cool. It looks nice. I want to try it out. I like clever web interfaces. And I have a lot of respect for the team that put it together. As alluded to above, I wish more people would put thought into improving how e-mail works. Because doing so seems insanely challenging, especially given how deeply ingrained e-mail is into our concept of how the net works. Getting people to use a new service for the same task is difficult enough — cf. Firefox vs. Internet Explorer. For people my age and older, using e-mail is almost a reflex. Sending e-mails. Checking my e-mail. I do these almost subconsciously. They are cognitively low-overhead tasks for me. To get me to move to something conceptually different would require changing some rather deep wiring (although, yes — presumably parts of Wave will make their way into Gmail). (And I admit that younger generations may have a very different relationship to e-mail than my generation does. Maybe I’m already a crotchety old man. Sweet. Get off my lawn.)

3. There is almost nothing new to Wave. Except the cool presentation. (Which is, yes, a rather big exception.) You can do this now: if your e-mail client renders the web properly. I like the live collaboration inside Wave and I love that slider that lets you replay a Wave over time. But can’t dozens of websites do essentially what Wave is demoed as doing (minus some interface jazz)? Can’t I go set up a poll somewhere and link to it in the e-mail? Can’t I link to a map? Or photos? Or embed them? Widget-like? Why doesn’t e-mail support HTML well enough that I can send a frame that contains the contents of a live webpage that can be whatever I want? It could be a realtime Wave-like app. A Google map. Chess. A poll. A video. Whack-a-kitty. Etc.

Instead of creating this third paradigm between the web and e-mail, we need to realize that the web and e-mail are actually the same thing conceptually — they’re just displayed inside different windows (or, hell, the same window if you’re using webmail). And especially with all of this social API stuff floating around, the concept of e-mail being private communication and the web being public communication is breaking down. Or, rather, has broken down.

4. I don’t like Gmail. Personal preference, sure, but I prefer desktop apps to internet ones when given the option. I find Gmail to be visually cluttered and putting ads on my private e-mails — are you fucking kidding me? No. I prefer Apple Mail. So I’m predisposed to being very much not interested in web-based “e-mail-like” communications technologies. I only really use Google for maps, search, and ads (I use AdSense on some of my sites). I’m not a huge fan of their collaborative tools.

When I tweeted about this ^{[1] [2]} (sigh — “tweet” is the worst verb since “blog”), I asked “And where’s Apple on this?” I meant: Could Apple’s Mail team please get off of their cans and put some thought into Apple Mail so we could do things like this? I mean, I love being able to send e-mails of travel photos that look like they’ve been thumbtacked to bamboo — but let’s think bigger, here. Please. Screw Google, just use the existing e-mail protocol in some creative way to make embedding live web content into an e-mail simple. It’s a UI problem, mostly. And then to copy Google’s “Polly” poll tool, for example, you could whip up a polling widget (if one doesn’t exist that works well) in, like, an afternoon. With basic HTML and Javascript. And maybe a little social API or something to hook into address books. You have millions of developers who could make little widgety things and blow all of this Wave crap out of the water in no time.

5. I had a dream about ZZTop last night. Surely that’s not healthy.

Anyway. In a week this topic will seem quaint and all of my opinions will be wrong, I’m sure.

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