Nice, IMD student Ian Dallas is getting lots of internets buzz about his forthcoming game unfinished swan.

I'm always pretty interested by anecdotes or software that exposes the abject failure of social networks to replicate any real world human interaction. Not that I'm necessarily against them, I just think they fill a role that is much different than they propose. This story, by a NYT writer who invited 700 facebook friends to an event, only to have one show up, made me smile.

Playing around with Brain Eno's Bloom while I was walking today made me think about casual mobile experiences. Rightly so, there's been a lot of attention paid to casual games, a style that has come to dominate the iPhone app store, and was the primary style of mobile game in the pre-iPhone landscape.

But I hope that there's a new breed of "casual" coming, one that's more attached to time and attention, and less to the notion of a simple, addictive experience (and one that largely is oppositional to "hard core" games like halo, call of duty, or whatever the fuck). I think Bloom (and to a lesser extent some DS games like ElectroPlankton might count), is a pretty good example of this casual style of mobile game.

I left the house today and started "listening" to Bloom. Easy enough, I picked the generative music option, and started soft rocking out to some hyper chill sound patterns. But the great thing was, as those patterns became a little predictable or repetitive, I could fiddle with the application a bit and slightly change the course of the music in a subtle but meaningful way. This idea of "steering" a mobile experience is really interesting, and I think has the potential to define a new way that we think of casual experiences, particularly with mobile experiences.

an apt McCain Campaign comparison.

Reading Alan Dix's paperInteraction with and through the mobile presented at MobiKUI 2008 (via Nicholas), I'm reminded again why I think one of the reasons that there are so many possibilities for innovation in the mobile space.

As Dix points out, the number of constraints on mobile devices are numerous (small screen, variable context, interface/input limitations, interruptions, etc), but are are in some ways offset by the opportunities provided by the devices to deal with these limitations (sensors, wifi, cameras, gps, etc.).

This intersection between constraint and opportunity I think is why we're really on track to see a lot of innovation with mobile devices, both from the technology side (which will deal more with the opportunity/features side of things) as well as the product design/entertainment side of things, which will leverage both the technical opportunities as well as the product constraints, to build really cool, fun or useful new applications and services.

There has been quite a bit of discussion about how freaking hard the new Mega Man 9 for WiiWare is, and how Capcom wanted it that way. Certainly I've been had my rage-inducing moments with the game, but I think I'm nearing what seems to be a tipping point, where it's taking me less and less time to beat a stage.

Looking around the internet(s) and through some theory books, I've yet to come across much discussion about this difficulty tipping point. Maybe you can just write off the notion as simply a result of getting better or more skilled at a game's mechanics / quirks / control scheme / whatever. But with some games, and I think the Mega Man series is included, you can achieve a certain skill or even intense familiarity with a game and still be stuck, then suddenly something clicks and you start running downhill. This happens to me a lot playing multiplayer games. I would kick ass a Mario Kart in single player mode, for example, and then be rendered completely useless in an online race. Then, at some point, everything made sense in those online matches, and I was in the top 3 every race.

Anyone know if there is a general theory of tipping points applied to games or game design? I'd like to see a study that watched people play a difficult game and measured the following: a) skill level vs. success level - how successful people are versus how skilled they become and b) a visualization of time/success ratios, showing if there is some point at which the time/success ratio peaks and starts accelerating rapidly towards 1.

Everyone on the internet(s) is quoting buffet's line:

A simple rule dictates my buying: Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.

To me, something else he wrote is far more interesting, albeit less obvious and pithy.

Today people who hold cash equivalents feel comfortable. They shouldn’t. They have opted for a terrible long-term asset, one that pays virtually nothing and is certain to depreciate in value. Indeed, the policies that government will follow in its efforts to alleviate the current crisis will probably prove inflationary and therefore accelerate declines in the real value of cash accounts.

I love this mentality, as it makes clear the complete abstractness of money and it's value. To me, this speaks to the idea that there is no relative "safety" in holding 10 green pieces of paper vs. a receipt saying you own 10 pieces of some abstract collection of securities. You might be able to go buy things a little easier with a cash stockpile right now (which maybe is the whole point anyway), but you can't really fool yourself into believing that cash isn't susceptible to it's own market fluctuations.

Pretty fair amount of coverage of RJDJ lately, but worth mentioning quickly, that, despite my general feeling that none of the "tracks" are that compelling, it is a mobile application that attempts in some way to facilitate the kind of "where I am now" value. Sitting at a cafe this morning working, and listening to the busy street and the 2 different sets of architects around me through this weird PD filter... is pretty nice. The "Single" echolon is my favorite, in that it basically just takes what you would be hearing normally and amplifies it as an echo chamber. Simple, sure, but more effective I think as a mobile experience than the other tracks, which all seem to sound a bit like squarepusher or something, and I can make very few 1:1 matches between my environment and the music.

One of my routines is to take my dog out for a walk around 5 or 5:30 every day, which takes about 45 minutes to an hour. Recently I've noticed that the perceived time this activity takes varies drastically from day to day. On days that I'm in the mood to be outside, and don't have some pressing thing to do, the walk seems to take no time at all. On the other hand, when I'm antsy and want to *get it over with* that half hour seems at least twice as long.

This really shouldn't be surprising, but still important I think from the perspective of mobile design. How we perceive time in mobile situations, from being bored to being passively or actively engaged by some mobile experience should be of real importance of how we design any mobile experience.

Most mobile games are of the *time suck* variety, and tend to be casual (for example my fellow juror swinging his arm wildly around in the back of the courtroom the other day, engaged in a game of iGolf). Even just the process of messing around with my phone the other day during the walk, having it crash, restarting it, hard-restarting it, became a huge time-suck and by the time the phone was functioning again, I was back at home, almost completely unaware that I'd been walking.

I think one of the things that comes almost standard with mobile design is immersion, at least in a sense. Many of the prescribed applications for this medium are for "killing time." If time is killed successfully, you become so immersed in whatever you are doing, that you have that moment where you snap back into reality and all the sudden you are next in line at the DMV. So immersion, in a sense, is free if you design something that is relatively engaging. The question is then (as I'm stumbling towards some kind of point), how do you create mobile experiences that don't do this; how do you make stuff that asks us to engage *more* in a 1:1 ratio of real time vs. perceived time. With mobile design, it seems pretty easy to design for time-suck, but how do you design for the place where you actually are instead of the place you'd rather be?

DMV line image by flickr user charliereece

Posting here some first screen caps of a music-based rpg of sorts that I've been working on in my spare time the past few months. Looking to start a small test-run with some close friends the next 2 weeks or so, then try and open it up a little more. let me know if you'd be interested in trying it out.

Viewfinder is a collaboration with Michael Naimark and Erik Loyer, as well as with the Institute for Creative Technology. It was funded by a Google research grant. The basic premise is:

Viewfinder is a novel method for users to spatially situate, or “find the pose,” of their photographs, and then to view these photographs, along with others, as perfectly aligned overlays in a 3D world model such as Google Earth. Our objective is to provide a straightforward procedure for geo-locating photos of any kind, and our approach is to engage a community of users for a certain amount of human help. We specify that a 10-year-old should be able to find the pose of a photo in less than a minute, and we are convinced that this goal is achievable. While we are not entirely there yet, we are getting closer. This is our progress report.

My main role on the project was building out web and flash UIs that interacted with a google earth "server," which we built to fundamentally fake the idea of a google earth image api. Using the UIs we build, people could fine tune where their photos were taken in google earth. Think clicking on a map, then seeing a street level view from that spot within google earth.

Links

• New York Times writeup
• Youtube videos

Excited to see this happening.

Speculation points in the direction of Apple TV going for a casual games approach rather than the hardcore, but since Nintendo has been tremendously successful with the casual titles they have released for the Wii, it seems it may be a good direction to head in for Apple. The most interesting related comment of all in my opinion came from Greg Canessa of PopCap games, who mentioned Apple TV as a platform for casual gaming in the next five years.

This speculation is fueled by a patent filed by apple that would create a wii-mote style controller to be used with the TV. From my own personal experience, any different interfaces for these experiences are steps in the right direction. I love my AppleTV but I hate the remote control.

At the beginning of the year, I started working at a mobile services agency as their Director of Technology in the US.  I took the job pretty reluctantly, but did so mostly on the idea that I'd be able to steer the US technology division in a direction that was more in line with my interests than what was going on there at the time. Well, after 4 professionally frustrating months, I've left the company and am thankfully back in the slipstream, back to choosing my own adventures.  

Without detailing my exact frustrations, it goes without saying that it's hard to foster any innovation at a company that isn't welcome to it and works exclusively with clients that aren't willing to take risks.  Nothing inherently wrong with that scenario, but it just wasn't for me.  I spent longer than I would have there based on the fact that fundamentally the people there were really great, nice, hard working folks.  As it stands now, I'm going to help them close out a couple projects this month, working a few hours here and there as a freelancer.  

But the great thing is that releasing myself back into the wild has put me back into doing what I love doing: scheming up ideas from the near future and making them work in the present.  Hopefully this space will be chock full of transmissions from such endeavors in the coming months.

Great Dowd piece again today... her op eds on this campaign have been the only good part of the whole ordeal.

It’s hard to believe that this Hillary is the same Wellesley girl who said she yearned for a more “ecstatic and penetrating mode of living.” What would that young Hillary — who volunteered on Gene McCarthy’s anti-war campaign; who cried the day Martin Luther King Jr. was killed; who referred to some of her “smorgasbord of personalities” in a 1967 letter to a friend as an “alienated academic,” and an “involved pseudo-hippie”; who once returned a bottle of perfume after feeling guilty about the poverty around her — think of this shape-shifting, cynical Hillary? 

 

Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne has a nice piece about the just-opened Americana shopping/condo/ersatz/apocalyptical mall.  The project, developed by Rick Caruso of The Grove (in)fame, is a huge high end shopping complex that transitions between various las vegas like takes on "american" architecture, even though most of them are not really american at all (well, maybe only in their ostentation).  However, this shopping mall is also home to equally high end residential complexes, as well as a 2 acre park that is owned by the city of Glendale.  At Hawthorne notes, this creates an interesting question about public and private space.  

[This] makes the distinction between public and private in the final product almost impossible to untangle. At the Americana, the park is public space masquerading as private space that is masquerading as public.  

So will Caruso's security folks allow typically normal public behavior like skateboarding, walking dogs, etc?

According to Dave Williams, Caruso's executive vice president for archi- tecture, they will not. "The open spaces will be handled the same way they're handled at the Grove," he told me. "Operationally, we have a safety threshold we want to maintain." That means no bikes and no skateboards, no dogs heavier than 25 pounds, plus a slew of other restrictions.  

 Hawthorne raises a bunch of other interesting questions regarding these complexities.  The article is here. * also of note: Caruso's chef-d'oeuvre The Grove draws 3 more million visitors each year than Disneyland.  Unsurprising, maybe, but further proof of how the country's collective model of fantasy has shifted towards consumption narratives.

Found a nice writeup of the upcoming Lego Universe on rock, paper, shotgun, (via Mike Migurski).  From the descriptions given by the project lead, this sounds like they are headed in a really interesting direction.  The best quote:

The more a child plays, they collect more coins and more bricks. The more you play, the more you get to build things.

 That last bit- The more you play, the more you get to build things - seems to be a particularly fun and engaging play mechanic.  At the same time, it'll be interesting to see how well it plays, seeing that the whole idea behind legos themselves is that you get this blank canvas and you can do whatever you want.  In fact, my fondest experiences with legos were after I'd accumulated a number of different sets, and the mechanic really was more like the more you build things, the more you play.Nonetheless, the *effort* currency is certainly picking up steam these days.  In some ways, Warcraft always seemed to me primarily rewarding effort over any specific fine tuned skill.  At the same time, even with highly "skill" based games, effort and time are often still the main currency, even if it's not as explicit.

Rolling out a few changes to hauntedcastle in the next few days.  Wordpress is becoming increasingly frustrating to work with, but I guess I'll manage.  For now though, some links may be fracked up, or things otherwise may feel a bit unfinished.  Oh well.

Just got out of the Henry Jenkins keynote/conversation at SXSW, and am always amazed (slightly alarmed) how well Jenkins is able to speak articulately about complex issues in a way that makes them seem like such no brainers.  Lots of the stuff he's talking about is familiar to those of us who follow his blog, but of particular interest to me was hearing him speak about his stance on Obama, and how Obama speaks in language consistent with the idea of the Wisdom of Crowds.  I won't go too much deeper here, just point to this post on Jenkins' website, which contains a wealth of great thinking on these political issues.

Stumbled upon (the actual phrase, not StumbleUpon™) The Big Word Project today, and was immediately bummed out. There's something kind of cool and grandiose about the name.  Big Word Project.  Sounds important, meaningful, literary, new.  But, not unlike the Alan Parsons Project, like of left me with nothing after exploring for a bit. The idea is simple enough - charge people to attach their websites to a word, then if someone goes to the big word project and clicks "yoga" for instance, or "podcast," they get directed to whoever paid for that word. This is the stupidest, most annoying idea ever.  First of all, I mean - it's useless.  The people who are paying for these word links are most likely not the *best* place to be linked with the word.  For example, is Titlyhouse.com really *the* place you want to go if you're interested in podcasts?  Probably not - if it was, the operators probably wouldn't have much interest in paying for whatever minimal uptick in pageviews might result.  So as a search tool, it leaves little to be desired. But maybe it's not about search, maybe it's just browsing for stuff.  But if it's just that, aren't there a ton of other places that would be better to browse, with better features and more diverse content? But the part that upset me was not that it wasn't useful.  The problem here is that it's not fun or interesting, either.  I typically judge things by A: is it fun or interesting, B: is it useful.  A alone is great.  B alone is great, too.  A+B is most excellent.  But this is neither.  It's commerce without anything else wrapped in there.  It's trying to create a bogus *need* and solve that *need* with it's own dubious solution. To be honest, I'm not sure why I even really care about this, or am taking the time to write about it.  I guess I was hoping for one thing, and got this really lame thing instead.  It's not that I don't think there's some kind of idea there, it's just that the idea that's there strikes me as rather mercenary, and at odds with the general spirit of the interweb.

But I think it should reboot with a link to the new bionic commando game (for xbox live arcade.. not the new 3d one...).