July 28, 2006
Cornucopia of Links
The links have been piling up, time to unload… First, interactive narrative oriented links:
- Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames, the first reader on the topic of game writing, written by the IGDA Game Writers SIG
- Generating Comics Narrative to Summarize Wearable Computer Data, GaTech Masters thesis, Jason Alderman
- Script of Ernest Adams’ GDC05 talk on interactive narrative
- The End of Things: endings in interactive narrative, Jason Rhody
- Ron Gilbert on his disappointment with lack of good story in games
- Chris Crawford reacts to being the anti-Christ
- A list of first-timer foibles when playing IF
- “Blade Engine”, a free game engine and construction kit aimed at making Visual Novel easy to construct, that strive for a higher level of plot and character depth than Choose Your Own Adventure books
More really great links:
- Will Wright and Brian Eno in conversation on the joys and techniques of “generative” creation (I’ve yet to read/watch this, but it looks great)
- Walking out of the uncanny valley alive?
- Bumptop: enriching the desktop metaphor (awesome!)
- xBlocks: convergence between videogames and sculpture
- Seaman resurrected
- Why there are no indie videogames
- Raph Koster: everyone is a creator, the question is, “of what”?
- Alternative Games: contrarian game culture
- IGDA casual games analysis (pdf)
- Making of GTA3
- “Sims are, as a race, bipolar antisocial codependent freaks”
- Reboot: Vancouver International Game Summit
Live streams of this weekend’s Sandbox symposium:
for saturday, 29 july 06
for sunday, 30 july 06
July 29th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
Bumptop looks visually interesting, but it seems to fall into the same trap that has plagued desktop interfaces for a generation: Trying to recreate “natural” physical interfaces on a screen, manipulated by a mouse pointer, where they are much less natural. For intuitive learning this has some benefits, but that falls afoul of another trap: Designing for the learning curve. All else being equal, something with an easier learning curve is to be preferred, but an easier learning curve at the expense of a lower top-out usability is not.
For those of us who use the computer easily 8+ hours/day, the real issue is how usable it is once we’re good at it; learning curves aren’t really an issue at all. (Oh, it takes 100 hours to get used to? That’s one week of full-time use.)
I’m personally much happier and more productive since I ditched the “desktop” metaphor (see link for a manifesto of sorts), and no longer have the constant nagging annoyances of dragging overlapping windows over/above/below/next-to each other, constantly moving stuff around and alt-tabbing to try to find what I’m looking for. As a less radical change, I also like Apple’s way of addressing the issue with “Exposé”: Instead of abandoning the desktop metaphor entirely, they temporarily abandon it with the press of a keystroke (taking you into a graphical schematic view of sorts), and then rearrange the desktop as requested and put you back into it.
August 3rd, 2006 at 11:40 am
A game dev conference in Vancouver sounds interesting, but the website for the conference isn’t very informative. Have any keynote speakers been announced? At this point, the website basically just tells me, “Hi, we’re a company that makes money running conferences – and we’re holding a game development conference!” (s/and/so/ and suddenly it sounds less compelling.)
On the plus side, early registration runs until the month before, so at least I can let it sit until I hear more.