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A great initiative, many of these techniques are easy to achieve and have a big effect on making games playable by more people. http://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/basic
When I was growing up a dismissive term for the television was the Goggle Box – “wasting your time sitting infront of the goggle box”. It struck me that future parents will moan at their kids for sitting infront of the old Google Box.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGQo0z3XikI&feature=player_embedded#!]
A great piece of work, I’m not sure if the developers or the kids enjoyed the experience more. Valve, the people behind some lovely video games; Half Life and Portal took the building tool behind Portal 2 into a classroom. Pointed some teams of 12 year olds at the basics of level design and watched them play. Inspiring stuff.
The latest incarnation of the controls that governments and corporations are attempting to put in place is SOPA. This seems like another faltering step towards a Team America style policing of the World Wide Web. This takes me back to the mid nineties when I saw the first web browsers and the speed with which commercial interests scrabbled to work out how they could exploit it. I thought that eventually cyber space would reflect real space. In the way that towns have ‘safe’ centres packed with chain stores and advertising. The outer edges sometimes has the quirkier, left-field places. At the time I was studying interactive media and, rather than write an essay, decided to create an interactive story. It was called Infinet.
Infinet stores
I created Infinet with four fellow students. We mashed-up brands – the giant pink tower was for Glaxo-Welcome with a Coke style ribbon logo and jingle. We had a confessional, a bank and a store selling Nike Air – flavoured air in breathable capsules. A visitors’Â movement around this space was very limited to basic left and right panning and pre-rendered steps forward.
But there were cracks hacked into the veneer of Infinet. A visitor might stumble upon a bit of graffiti or lift a manhole cover. If they did they would find themselves in an endlessly spiraling vortex of unmediated spaghetti that represented the weird and wonderful, individual, quirky, sick and human web that we currently know. The way the visitor moved around this space was free-flowing. They could scroll, swoop and dive any which way they liked. I wanted to compare the narrow options of movement in Infinet which was like all the “interactive” options around at that time. It struck me as odd that a button that did something was referred as adding interactivity. For me all this did was react. The narrow corridor of pre-defined and pre-rendered “interaction” (Myst et al) also rang false. So the comparison between the way a visitor moved was part of my idea to begin to explore the notion of what interactive meant.
Some additionally playful elements we added was a Status bar that displayed your status using marketing (socio-economic) categorys such as B1 or D4. The project was successful and we won a place at the New Talent Pavilion at Milia ’97. I got to fly business class to Cannes and show Infinet to 1,500 of the good and the great of new media in the same hall that they present the film awards.
We built Infinet while studying for MA Design for Interactive Media (DIM) at Middlesex University. The project was assembled in Director 5, coded in Lingo with the models and fly-through in Strata 3D.
Halo mobile (cell phone) map example
A nice idea, why not use your phone to augment your console game. The ATLAS, in future releases, promises to track your movements during the game and show you the locations of useful items such as transport, health packs, weapons, etc. I wonder how long it will be until someone makes a harness to mount you ATLAS equipped phone onto your arm so that you can easily check it without looking away from the game.
“Along with weapon, vehicle, and health pack locations, ATLAS will also show the location of your teammates in team games. You will get visual indicators when your teammates are engaged in combat and when they are killed, and even when they positioning themselves to strike.” read more
I saw this “games based learning” initiative from up north. One of the contributors mentions how much ‘we’ learnt from playing hopscotch as children. I think this is missing the point about the both the IT, cognitive and creative skills that can be developed by well designed games.
An example of a successful 'learning through play' type of game. Developed at Endemol by myself and Matt Burton McFaul, for CBBC
A well explained and compelling presentation at http://wiki.darkpatterns.org/Home on how some organisation exploit UX in unethical ways. It is fascinating to see how incompetence and dumb luck in terms of web form design is evolving. As we gain understanding of the psychological and cognitive processes people are learning how to exploit misunderstanding and trust. The humble web form becomes a muggers paradise.
The line between encouraging people to do what you want and tricking them into doing things that they don’t want to is very grey. As DarkPatterns.org explain many companies will have a poor moral compass and without pressure from outside. For example shoddy tricks to make company websites appear higher up search engine results are only kept to a minimum because the search engine software is regularly updated to punish people that seek to ‘cheat’ their way to the top. There is no equivalent in terms of UX. I think the only that companies can be dissuaded from making ££££s with little effort is to publicly name and shame them. When the use of dark patterns is seen as the confidence trick that it is we have some hope of limiting there use to murkier areas of the interweb.
Just received my Arduino board and downloading the software. Really looking forward to playing with Adobe Flash and external devices. Triggering an electronic cat and motion sensors. I’ll post some pictures or video as it happens.
LED lights up
This video covers getting Flash and the Arduino board to talk to each other. I’ll let you know how easy it is to get up and running with an Arduino Uno board on a Mac OSX 10.6 and Adobe Flash CS5…
I came across this variation in the way you can test if the person interacting with your software is flesh rather than machine.
The standard Captcha mechanism is those distorted letter you often see. The idea is have something that humans can easily read and computers find very difficult.
BTW The term “CAPTCHA” was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper, and John Langford (all of Carnegie Mellon University). It is an acronym based on the word “capture” and standing for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart… from Wikipedia.