Category: play

I’m sorry Dave, I can’t let you build that.

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Nebbish

Via Dav/AkuAku, this from the Bunchball website:

“You have an idea for a multi-user networked application. Maybe it’s a game, maybe it’s a new way to share music or photos, maybe it’s something nobody’s ever thought of. A beautiful little jewel of an application, you know that you can make something fantastic. But then you realize that in order to build your application, you need to figure out user signup, and group creation, and invitations, and permissions, and chat, and presence, and how to save changes in the application, and how to figure out who to send those changes to, and the list goes on. And oh yeah, don’t forget that you need to setup a server, write server-side code, deal with a database somewhere, worry about uptime and bandwidth and online file storage, and that list goes on as well. All of a sudden you realize that your beautiful little jewel is just the tip of a very large iceberg. You’re going to spend 90% of your time implementing what’s below the water, out of the user’s sight, and 10% of your time building a great application.

Bunchball gives you the iceberg. You just provide the tip. So now you can spend your time doing what you wanted to do in the first place, which is to create a great application.”

Along with Ning.com, Dav has termed these services (or ‘playgrounds’ as Ning would have it) as ‘Blank White Servers’, which are potentially game-changing things, beyond the bubble of hype around Web X.X.

The point the Bunchball site makes – that providing the common building blocks and infrastructure allows developers to concentrate on delivering extra value to the end-user -makes me wonder whether this will be the case.

Will developers, freed from the burden of recreating back-end systems, invest their energy into creating a great user-experience?

Possibly.

Certainly, Web X.X’s real successes so far have been built on great UI design (Flickr, Gmail) and paying attention to the details in the user-experience – hopefully this will serve as inspiration to those who follow.

In my experience at least, it takes a great deal of effort and will on the behalf of the developers to go the extra (several) miles to create a great user-experience on top of getting something to “just work” – especially if there is a pre-established framework or library of things that they are using to create a service or application.

Also, there is the problem of trying to reconcile the design choices you think necessary for the specific service, aplication, user or activity at hand with the design choices predetermined in the platform by those that came up with it.

This building block approach of Bunchball, et al, of course begs the same question of what design choices are encoded in the building blocks themselves?

The following ramble I will have to revisit once I’ve explored and understood Ning and Bunchball more fully from actually playing with them both, but…

Architecture is destiny*: someone elses playground, architecture, landscape, physics will inevitably shape the end design noticeably. What are the combinations it forces? What are the affordances that are built in, and what patterns are most favourable as a result?

As they are aimed at providing infra and building blocks for social applications, would perhaps some of the forced combinations, or affordances of the infrastructure be default-biased towards safety and privacy?

Productivity or (/and?) play?

As playful platforms made by smart people I’m sure that the possibility spaces they afford will sustain 99% of the self-centred or small-group-centred software that people will want to construct right now – which is just fantastic.

But…

Just what politics are encoded at the molecular level of these playgrounds?

As soon as I get my accounts I’m going to start playing and see.

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See also: The Otwell on Ning
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* Who said this originally? I can’t seem to find the source.

Space is the place

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Swordplay, revolution-style, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

The Nintendo Revolution controller has been revealed, and I am predictably overexcited.

It’s made me more convinced that embodied and tangible interaction has a big, juicy, interesting mainstream future.

The video of it in action [via Russell Beattie] is wonderful, especially the way that a wide-range of genres of gaming and play can be inferred just from watching people’s movements and hearing a bit of soundtrack.

Who needs HiDef?

Or as Gillen puts it:

“Either you want more polygons or you want the Future.

Choose a side.

“Revolution! Revolution! Revolution! Revolution!”

Also, go read Andy Losowsky’s imaginings of where the Revolution could take us:

“if it’s that depth sensitive, if you’ll be able to use it to draw outlines around things in the room? Or people?”

He also has some great ideas about possible other nunchuk-plug-in peripherals.

And I was just calming down again, too.

Cheating, play, trangression and art

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Other players: narrative subversion 
Originally uploaded by salvital.

Joystiq reports that people who introduce "3rd party programs" hack and ‘cheat’ in World of Warcraft (which I’ve not played yet, but peer pressure is building…) will be "permanently removed".

This made me think back to some of the people I met during my work on Play I did last year, and some ‘grief-play’ fun I had with them at a games theory conference…

Read More »

The tennis ball hack

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Tnfb

Think back to the 80’s…

Konami’s Track and Field performance-enhancing hack using a tennis ball to pummel the buttons faster than any unaided human would find possible.

Often talked about this in the pub with wistful tones, but can’t find any evidence on the web. Do you have an action-shot of someone playing Track and Field with a tennis ball?

Thanks!

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See also: from 2002, Anders Hansson on Track and Field Game Mechanics at Gamasutra (reg. reqd.)

"I wanted to keep the original button mashing control method of earlier  track and field games. Some games have, in a misdirected attempt to evolve the genre, abandoned the classical brutal control method in favor for more sophisticated (in a superficial sense) methods. In my opinion the physical quality of the original control method involves the player to a much higher degree and is much closer to the spirit of the sport that it tries to simulate."

The game always-ending

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Clive Thomson wonders if there is an Anti-Carsian conspiracy theory in the games industry…

"In my more cynical moments, I think this whole pursuit of narrative is
the industry’s sneaky way of forcing gamers to buy more products. When
a game has a story that "ends" after 40 hours of play, you have to
throw it away—and go spend another $50 on the next title. That’s
movie-industry logic, not game logic. Chess doesn’t "end." Neither do
hockey, bridge, football, Go, playing with dolls, or even Tetris.
Worse, by selling "narratives," game publishers can cover up the fact
that they rarely create truly new forms of play. In any given year,
I’ll play a dozen first-person shooters with different stories—Save the
world from Martian devils! Penetrate an island full of genetic freaks!—
that are all, at heart, exactly the same game."

From his Slate article, and more at his blog, including his pick of the narratologist backlash against the piece.

Our playful materials

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I’m lifting this quote direct from Foe’s blog: Phillip Pullman on play and creativity [my emboldening]:

"…when we do this foolish, time-consuming, romantic, quixotic,
childlike thing called play that we are most practical, most useful,
and most firmly grounded in reality, because the world itself is the
most unlikely of places, and it works in the oddest of ways, and we
won’t make any sense of it by doing what everybody else has done before
us. It’s when we fool about with the stuff the world is made of that we
make the most valuable discoveries, we create the most lasting beauty,
we discover the most profound truths. The youngest children can do it,
and the greatest artists, the greatest scientists do it all the time.
Everything else is proofreading."

Fantastic.

» The Guardian: Common sense has much to learn from moonshine

Prof. Henry Jenkins in Helsinki

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From Marko:

"Professor Henry Jenkins, the Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is visiting Helsinki and has agreed to give a talk on “Serious Play” as part of the Aula klubi series.

Professor Jenkins will speak on Wednesday 19 January at 6:00 PM at Korjaamo, Töölönkatu 51 b in Helsinki. The event will be held in English and is free and open to the public, so once again, please spread the word!"

The announcement is here from Aula themselves.

Not to be missed if you’re a Helsinki player…