Last year, during a project with Nokia and the EPFL Media and Design Lab, we “mapped” the structures of the “digital world” as represented in mobile devices (cell phones, iphones, ipods, portable consoles). The point was to graphically represent the information architecture so that we could understand how it evolves over time in different devices. Francesco Cara, design strategist at Nokia is talking about it in his LIFT08 presentation.

Anyhow, I was in charge of looking at mobile entertainment devices (such as the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP, among others) because one my research them is about the exploration of portable technologies to understand the implications in terms of mobility and new interactions. The underlying idea, consists in analysing the usage of the technologies to determine opportunities and constraints for design.

This type of quick graph is interesting at it represent different information architecture strategies (menus globally speaking) and to so in a quick glance how Nintendo simplifies interfaces with a limited depth unlike the PSP. This graph was a first step before other more evolved representations mostly focused on cell phones that I can’t show here (non disclosable yet).

Interesting discussion yesterday at the game studio around the holding of the wiimote. Surely one the topic that emerged from the usability tests of wii games we conducted, especially with people who’ve NEVER touch a video game console. The first picture represents the regular wiimote holding scheme whereas the two other shows how a novice user held it when playing different mini-games.

Some of the issues the tests raised: How do we design applications for the B button in the previous cases? What about the 1 and 2? Can we use them in the interaction? Should the A-button be important so that the thumb or the second finger? Is the “plus” button the right one to break scenes? What about the cross? What’s the role of the direction cross with these two ways of holding the wiimote?

Anyone interested in the relationship between technologies and contemporary cities followed the release of Grand Theft Auto IV. Tom Bramwell from Eurogamer recently interviewed Aaron Garbut from Rockstar. The following part sparked my interest:

“We never reproduce real world locations. We take interesting or representative elements and create something new from them. It’s about taking inspiration from real places and producing something that captures the essence of it. We’re trying to take our impression of New York and keep it as that, an impression, not a laboured reproduction. I think that gives it more flavour, more intensity and in an odd way makes it feel more real. I’ve seen it in other games that set out to rebuild a city street by street, not only do compromises get made that favour realism over fun but a lot of the life is lost and all that’s left is a hollow representation of a real place. I’d rather have the right vibe than an accurate roadmap.
(…)
The cities are never built specifically with missions in mind. We always build the cities first and fit the missions and stories into them. There are a few reasons for that. One of the main ones is practical and it’s more pronounced on a new engine. The basic rendering parts of an engine tend to come online a lot sooner. The mission designers need a scripting language, fairly evolved physics and vehicle handling, the weapon systems, AI etc before there is much they can play with. Whereas the artists have 3D software from day one and the game can start rendering that quickly so we can get on with building the city right from the start.

So we’ve always treated the cities like a real place. We build them, we pack them with interesting things and then we place the missions within them at a later date. Obviously once a mission is placed and working we will tweak the area to work better, but essentially the processes are fairly separate. That’s not to say there isn’t a deliberate intention to evoke emotional reaction as you say. It’s just that if there is one it’s happening during the placement and pacing of the missions. I think having this massive environment available first gives a lot of opportunity to play with the missions and find what works best.“

(Excerpt from a GTA IV map)

Why do I blog this I find extremely interesting to see the spatial thinking behind the level design of GTA IV as described here. There are good parallels to draw between the game designers and urbanists as both of them have to build/transform an “environment” where “things will happen”, filled with various sorts of agencies. The approach level designer take, as described by Garbut, is of course different. More specifically the purpose is not make a city efficient but instead about how to engage players in fun and free interactions. That said, I am sure that there are relevant ideas to pick up.

Recently, I’ve been involved in a research project about game controllers, comparing different peripheral (gestural or not). This led me to investigate the evolution of game controller over time, a topic already addressed by others.

For instance, Damien Lopez made this insightful mapping (.pdf) for both consoles and portable systems:

Lopez describes this map as a “a collection of small multiples of game controllers of the main gaming systems from the past 25 years (..,) normalized, and the hands are all approximately the same size as each other, and thus the controllers all to scale“. His point was “to show the progression of controller design throughout the last quarter-century. With the introduction of the Nintendo Entertainment System, no more number pads were used on game controllers from that point on“.

On Sock Master, there is also a tree-based representation that tries to connect all the current console controllers with their predecessors. What is interesting here is the notion of diachronic evolution as well as the connection between different “families”.

Why do I blog this? working on the user experience of game controller for different research projects, this kind of representation are important as they map the existing peripherals as well as show how the possibilities evolved over time. It’s overall interesting to note the relative stability in both portable and console shapes but the increasing complexity of controllers. Although sticks remains stable, the number of buttons increases. It would interesting to see how the user experience evolved over time too and see how it’s related with the interface. I need to dig more these graphics and draw some implications about what that means.

Last week, the NYT had an intriguing story about pinball machines, or - more specifically - the survivor of the pinball industry. Some excerpts I found interesting below:

About how it went downhill (”a painful fading”) that may be “turned around”:

““There are a lot of things I look at and scratch my head,” said Tim Arnold, who ran an arcade during a heyday of pinball in the 1970s and recently opened The Pinball Hall of Fame, a nonprofit museum in a Las Vegas strip mall. “Why are people playing games on their cellphones while they write e-mail? I don’t get it.”

“The thing that’s killing pinball,” Mr. Arnold added, “is not that people don’t like it. It’s that there’s nowhere to play it.”
(…)
Corner shops, pubs, arcades and bowling alleys stopped stocking pinball machines. A younger audience turned to video games. Men of a certain age, said Mr. Arnold, who is 52, became the reliable audience.
(…)
the pinball buyer is shifting. In the United States, Mr. Stern said, half of his new machines, which cost about $5,000 and are bought through distributors, now go directly into people’s homes and not a corner arcade “

About the design process per se:

“Some workers are required to spend 15 minutes a day in the “game room” playing the latest models or risk the wrath of Mr. Stern. “You work at a pinball company,” he explained, grumpily, “you’re going to play a lot of pinball.” (On a clipboard here, the professionals must jot their critiques, which, on a recent day, included “flipper feels soft” and “stupid display.”)

And in a testing laboratory devoted to the physics of all of this, silver balls bounce around alone in cases for hours to record how well certain kickers and flippers and bumpers hold up.“

Why do I blog this? cultural interest in how certain things work and then fade away for diverse reasons that are interesting to observe. Some lessons can be drawn here about innovation, especially about the role of contexts (or the absence of context of play).

iBand is a curious Nintendo DS+iphone band:

Check the YouTube video too.
Why do I blog this? although it is very basic, I found the minimalism appealing (small instrument, small band, minimal tunes). And I love Elektroplankton. Somehow related to device art.

Some random facts about how ebooks might be relevant for the Nintendo DS:

According to this press release:

“Darren Reid, author of the best selling Fantasy/Science Fictionfusion novel The Lord of Darkness and Shadow: The Chronicles of the Shadow Book One, today announces the release of a free ebooklibrary for Nintendo Wii, DS and Sony PS3. The free ebook librarycontains a collection of short stories, novels and novellas whichhave been optimized for use with the browsers in the Nintendo Wii and DS. “

An Francis Bonnin. It also seems that a french company is heading into that direction.

Notes from the person who described it:

“Actually reading the comic on my DS was a pleasent experience. With all of the display options, I had little-to-no trouble finding one that suited me. Everything worked as advertised, and I was enjoying an issue of The Books of Magic on my DS in no time. As expected, there’s a loss in “the experience,” due to the 256×192 resolution. Using anything that wasn’t the Dual Screen mode did not show enough of the page for me. Despite the limited screen space, text was legible, and the images appeared just as nicely as on the original pages.“

Further away, Toshiba released an interesting DS-like e-book, using the same affordance:

Why do I blog this? gathering some thoughts about the topic for a client project (not really a research project). As shown in this blogpost, some projects about using the DS as a way to convey textual content are starting off.

Some limits to have ebooks on the Nintendo DS:
- how to get the content: since Nintendo is less an less happy with homebrew developments/flash cards, what should be the best medium to convey texts? cartridges? download through the Internets/wifi?
- screen size and resolution are peculiar, what sort of content would be appropriate?
- the DS has incredible wifi capabilities (mostly in terms of practices and how people gather to play together), what would that mean for ebook applications? There might be great opportunities to design innovative applications based on ebook reading/educational applications.
- Same with annotation capabilities with the pen
- …

Gave a talk at the European GDC today in Lyon. It was called “5 lessons about tangible user interfaces” and addressed an overview of classic misconceptions concerning tangible user interfaces. It’s actually a modified version of an earlier talk I gave last year at Nokia Design in Los Angeles; I added few things I’ve done since then. It’s always interesting to give such a talk to different audiences; the way it it is received by industrial designers is totally different by game developers, fully different insights and discussions. The slides are here (.pdf, 9.8Mb):

Tangible interfaces hold lots of promises ranging from being more intuitive or realistic, being more appealing to users to enabling people to get some physical exercises in the process. User experience research about it shows that things are not so simple. This presentation discusses 5 misconceptions and why they are wrong. Each can be exemplified by arguments drawn from user studies, which are of importance for game designers:
1. Inert objects do not lead to tangible interactions or how non-gestural interfaces such as TV remote control can be gestural
2. Direct mapping between the physical movement and the interaction in the digital world is simple and intuitive or how direct mapping is not always efficient for players or accurately detected.
3. physical interfaces offer a larger variety of control than standard controllers, and are more realistic and intuitive”: depending on the task, tangible interfaces actually do not necessarily lead to intuitiveness and ease of control.
4. The starting point of designing TUI is to look at real-life counterparts… so let’s design guns for shooting games, a flute for musical games…: there are actually other alternative that are almost never investigated, taking the opposite direction of direct mapping.
5. Tangible interfaces are ubiquitous and allows mobile/seamless interactions or how tangible interactions do not appear in a vacuum and lots of problems due to the context can happen.

The description of why these ideas are misconceptions lead to important implications and design lessons about how to go beyond current implementations in video games.

The conference was interesting, sometimes a bit too techno-centric for me, I will try to write something about my notes from the sessions I found relevant.

Preparing my talk for the Game Design Conference about tangible/gestural interfaces, I ran across this very interesting Wario Ware Walkthrough guide by G. Louie (not only curious because of its ASCII layout).

What struck me as very pertinent here is the nomenclature (the naming) and the description of moves. See for example this intriguing list:

“The Form Baton - The Balance Stone - The Remote Control - The Umbrella - The Handlebar - The Sketch Artist - The Chauffeur - The Samurai- The Tug-of-War -The Waiter - The Elephant - The Thumb Wrestler - The Discard -The Big Cheese - The Janitor - The Dumbbell - The Mohawk - The Finger Food - The Boxer -The Mortar and Pestle - The Diner“

With descriptions such as:

“ The Handlebar
“Turn the Form Baton sideways and grasp the ends firmly in both hands. Like riding a bicyle, perfecting this stance requires grace, steadiness, and tightshorts.”

To do The Handlebar, turn the Wii Remote so that the 2 button is on the right. Place hands over the top so that palms are on the buttons. Uses for this form would be pumping and balancing.
*Does not use remote sensor bar*“

Why do I blog this? what I find relevant here is the way people try to refer to gestures meant to control specific game interactions. Things get more complicated when the interface is gestural: how to name them? how to describe them not only to the users but in game guide? A solution as we se here is to rely on existing metaphors: type of activities (boxer), postures or animal that makes think of posture (elephant), moments (diner) or jobs (chauffeur).

Reading the notes taken from Raph Koster’s thoughts at MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 2: Mobile Media, I ran across this:

“what’s kind of fascinating is seeing the wrestling with what the platform [mobile phone] actually is. (..) Broadcast? Input device? Truly interactive? Synchronous or asynchronous? (…) TV could have been far more interactive from an early stage, but it drifted into broadcast. The Internet could have been more about broadcast, but instead its DNA pushed it in a different direction. The reasons aren’t solely technological, I don’t think; some of it is network effects, some of it is about what businesses succeed early on.
(…)
Which makes me think that probably as we think of things like immersive gaming in the real world, ARGs, massively multiplayer geotagged environments, and virtual worlds on the phone, there may be a dedicated device that does it better. Most of these other examples have been of migrating capabilities to the devices. But the interesting stuff that will be the true core use of the devices will be the things that arise from the device — and it will be at its best when the other stuff isn’t there to serve as a distraction, in the way that the best GPSes don’t try to also be TVs but instead try to enhance the experience of geolocation.“

Why do I blog this? in a sense, he summarized one of the main mobile application/location-based services question: “what is the platform”.

A very curious patent from 1985 for a mobile self-contained video game system with instantaneously selectable game (by Robert J. Nikora).

“The system internally stores a plurality of standard video game cartridges simultaneously and provides instantaneous external user selection of any game cartridge without power sequencing of the console electronics or physical extraction/insertion of the cartridges. The system includes a video monitor for viewing either color or monochrome game images, a video game console electronics unit, a cartridge storage and switching apparatus, a plurality of video game cartridges, multiple hand-held game controllers for providing player control inputs to the console electronics, audio separator and amplification circuits, a choice of speaker or earphone audio devices, an externally activated and lockable power switch, an audio device selector to disable conventional speaker use in “quiet” environments. The system is enclosed in a mobile housing which includes a height adjustment mechanism and a power cord take-up apparatus.“

Why do I blog this? What I found funny here is the “mobile” feature of the apparatus (”the mobile base unit”). Obviously, mobility was a total different concept at that time. The range of movement in space were not the same (especially when you consider the presence of a power cord).

(Cross-posted at Terra Nova)

There is an insightful interview of Sulka Haro, the lead designer of Habbo Hotel by Brandon Sheffield on Gamasutra. The interview covers a broad range of issues and may be of interest for who-ever is intrigued by “gameless games” or the “social web” or the evolution of the game industry as a whole. It’s not all about MMOs but it shows how the topic overlaps with other themes such as social software, multiple on-line identity or scrum development etc.

It starts from the recurring question (at least for people in the game industry”) about Habbo is not a game “as games straight out, we probably should be expanding what our definition of game“. Haro answered by highlighting the importance of “play” as opposed to “game” in terms of the important metaphor. The discussion goes on and on about this and it reminds me of some people from the video game industry who still overlook Habbo at “some part of the industry”. The main reason they give comes both from the technology employed and the game mechanics.

(A screen capture of Habbo Hotel as shown on the Gamasutra website)

What is more interesting is the following:

“BS: It seems like you’ve added more of what we traditionally consider video game-like game elements to Habbo over time. What was the reasoning behind it?SH: I guess the initial couple of games we did were very small. (…) So these would be like the super minigames, which are really popping out more and more nowadays, but then we’ve been expanding into doing more complicated stuff, where the user is actually playing what you would identify as a game, like the snowboard game, and you have proper games, like throwing snowballs. I guess, partially, it’s good business. There are people who actually want to play, and they pay money for it. But also, at least in my view, if you’re looking at, like, a 13-year old guy, who is used to playing games, it’s easy to communicate that, “Hey, there’s this game-game here as well, and if you start off on playing that, maybe you’ll get used to talking to the other users and get excited to meet people and eventually do the other activities as well.” It broadens the scope a bit as well. The action in Habbo is really in the rooms themselves, so…
(…)
BS: I was wondering how it was that you came up with the idea to let users play around with stuff. It hadn’t really been done too much on a scale where it was easily accessible like that.

SH: As I said in the keynote, the people who founded Sulake — the first core group of people — they all had multimedia-slash-web backgrounds, and [were] not the games people. So we didn’t even have this notion of stuff not being done before. It’s kind of like really looking at all the websites that were already back then doing a lot of content — obviously not to the extent where it is now, but really just looking at the past experiences and knowing that people want to do it.“

Some elements about the users are also worth to note:

“The market penetration in some of the markets is incredible… I don’t know exactly, but almost every single teen in the whole country who is in that age group has actually been there. It’s kind of funny — if you go and look at like eighteen-year-olds, or people who are already past the teenage age, they still have this thing in common, that they actually have been to this service and have played out. It’s kind of funny, sometimes, to talk to people who are way beyond it already, but still remember the funky stuff that they did. (…) , the fact that we have the teenagers in there is a big turnoff for the older people.“

There are also interesting issues regarding the importance of localization (” The UI is always local. Especially with teenagers“), no plan to go on the console market (” the fundamental thing is really like text-based roleplaying, and with consoles, people don’t have keyboards. “) or UI issues.

Overall, it’s interesting to notice how this project came out form the blue and is now taking more and more respect in the game industry (although there is still doubt and skepticism). From the academic perspective, it’s a bit similar, I haven’t really found any research regarding Habbo and it’s often studied as part of the Web2.0/user-generated/social software artifacts. Anyhow, we can possibly think about Habbo Hotel as a boundary object, something interpreted differently by different communities. One can see it as a boundary objects both for the industries (web vs games) and the demographics (teenagers vs grownups). And as every boundary objects, it’s something worth to explore.

Last bit from Pic Nic: my notes form Ben Cerveny’s talk: “Gaming the System”

Ben started his talk by claiming his main hypothesis: game can be thought as a way into thinking how to approach not only entertainment but also computer-human interactions as a whole. Acknowledging the breakdown of the “operating system”: to him, “architecture” and underlying principles as a mean to organize context in culture has failed. What is interesting to him is what happen in the margin, not in the over-organized areas: this is where ‘play’ happens.

So what would be a space of play? According to Ben it’s a space of fragments and flows in which objects are interconnected, a dynamic environment that is evolving constantly (”we’re leaving behind linear constructs“). Another characteristic is the profusion of dimensions (”an aura of multidimensionality that surrounds everything”). Game design can be then seen as a description and tuning of the variables: the building of models to handle the domain of play (”depeche models”). Data visualization is a possible way to model phenomena (”maps for these territories“).

And games are meant to explore models. In the process of playing a game, people are not afraid to learn (as opposed to use applications). The mindset of play invokes the optimal experience: play invokes flow and brings you into the flow. Game design defines a vocabulary of moves that are internalized by players and this type of “literacy” is going to allow people to utilize complex applications. Video-game players have internalized how simulation works, as a new scientific approach. They can reclaim this knowledge to other fields: players are able to find patterns for example.

Games are instances of play, a way to understand the boundaries and to learn, they can be seen as a vehicle for understanding. Ben concluded that much of our future lies in literacy about dynamic systems such as the one designed in games: “play is about fluidity, work is about crystallization“, “play as the negative space of work that allows work to continue“.

To a person in the audience who asked whether this meant the end of traditional knowledge, Ben answered that “it doesn’t mean that books are over, it’s just that we build a more complex construct that takes into account games in the production of culture“.

Why do I blog this? I like the “meta” aspect of Ben’s talk. In this case, I found very interesting how he wrapped up all these aspects that makes a lot of sense considering past background in the field. This is the sort of elements I discussed for years with some game designers.

At a less meta level, the implication I see in this is not to think of games are a way to convey and directly put content in players’ brain but rather that the cognitive processes mobilized when playing games can create relevant routines that may possibly be transfered to other activities.

(cross-posted at Terra Nova)

Last month, I had the pleasure to co-organize a small event in Seoul about digital and physical space, and how technologies reshape them. One of the speaker, Jake Song gave an interesting talk about the evolution of “virtual space” in multi-player games. A South Korean programmer, regarded as one of the greatest game developers in Korea, Jake is one the of the creator of Lineage and is now CEO of XL Games.

He started by describing text MUDs (1978), in which 100 to 200 concurrent players wandered around virtual places in the form of interconnected rooms. He described to what extent today’s MMORPG inherits most of its design (chat, emote, social structure, etc) but more interestingly pointed out how MUD space was “not correct in 2D sense” using the following schema:

The next step corresponded to 2D MMORPG such as Lineage or Ultima Online, which involved 3000~5000 concurrent players per world. Due to the technical impossibility to have everyone in the same place, there are “parallel universes. As opposed to MUDs, space in geographically correct and as he showed with exampled, players approximately needed about 2 hours from end to end by walking. Through various examples, he showed how buildings are smaller than real world and the necessity to have fast transportation methods (horses, teleportation, etc.)

Then, with 3D MMORPG like EverQuest, Lineage II or WoW, game space is designed for 2000~3000 concurrent players. Compared to 2D MMORPG, the number of concurrent players are reduced somewhat because server has to handle more complex 3D data. The game space generally corresponds to 20 × 20 km in size and transportation methods are needed more than ever (mounts, flying mounts, teleportation). Level design included place utility buildings for players to access conveniently. Shops, banks, etc can be placed far from each other to make players feel the city big, but it will make players inconvenient (” Down time means idle time such like staying in town, moving to other place, etc.“). The virtual environment is large enough to feel like the real world and is similar enough to use common sense to navigate.

He concluded with the challenges: the difficulty to have larger game world, the possibility to have user-generated content (to populate worlds), the difficulty to have “one big world” and the ever-growing inclusion of environmental change (weather changing accordingly with weather feeds), evolution over time (deformable terrain
destructible building, changing forest, buildings turned into ruins, etc.

So, down the road, the main issues are:

• geographical correctness: should the system looks and behave like a real-life equivalent (which somehwat connects to the work of Harry Drew).
• given that geographical correctness is now common, time and transportation is an issue: it takes time to go from A to B and transportation systems must be designed (teleportation, flying in Second Life).
• presence of concurrent players.
• presence of “places” with functional capabilities (communication, trading).

Although this may look obvious to many reader, this description if interesting from the research point of view (as well as to have the developers’ opinion). In my case, this is important for my research about how location-awareness interfaces can convey information about people’s whereabouts in digital spaces. Given the differences to represent space, there are some implications in the way location-awareness tools can be designed. More about this topic later.

This morning, Julian Bleecker, Fabien Girardin, Dennis Crowley and myself participated in a panel called The Near Future of Pervasive Media Experience. Here is the annotated version of my slides from the PicNic talk (pdf, 9.5Mb):

The talk entitled “new interaction partners: perspectives on the pervasive media world for pets” was basically the proposition of bringing “new interaction partners” in the pervasive game model. A problem in that field is that designers actually took the technologies from ubicomp as well as the assumptions coming from that field: seamlessness, technology that is “pervasive” (everywhere, every moment)…
BUT, and yes there’s a “but”, the world is not like that. The reality is a bit more like a pig farm: it’s dirty, messy, accidents happened, technology sometimes fails, interoperability fails, etc. and above all: there are other beings that humans and technological artifacts. If we think about with whom we have most of our playful interactions, it’s simple: the environment (parks, sport areas, etc) and animals. My previous work has focused on the environment, I am now interested in animals as a way to renew the visions of pervasive gaming. What about having “new interaction partners”, i.e. including new beings such as pets?

I then presented various examples that I already blogged here such as Augmented Animals by Auger-Loizeau, Wim van Eck’s pacman with cockroaches, etc. as well as two projects I am doing with Julian Bleecker:

• we have a dwarf on World of Warcraft that is played by a dog (sensors track its physical activities). So this little character is running around and it has a very basic grammar of interactions in the game. What is interesting here is to study the implications for participants. There will be a new type of characters, which won’t be played by a human nor by and Artificial Intelligence (Non-Playable Character)
• A raddish toy meant to be employed by cats: when the cat touches the raddish, it sends a message on Twitter, when the owner sees it there, he/she ca reply and the toy would vibrate or glow. A two way relationship of some sort.

This talk was a little bit provocative and funny… meant to show that other sensations or desire could be mediated in a pervasive game. It’s not only about pets or even plants but also the weather, the environment, data feeds extracted from contextual events. The point is that to be rich and playful, pervasive gaming should benefit from other things than just human or computers actions.