Martyn Jones

Boys Building Games for Girls

IGN ran an article recently, “Girl Games and the Boys Who Make Them: Why men still dominate the video game business, and what it’s costing us.” The article addresses the issue of the growing number of female gamers, but the lack of female game makers.

Paul Gouge, President of Playdemic uses the term “binary satisfaction” to refer to the male often black and white differentiation of win and lose, or complete and incomplete. Instead of creating obvious win scenarios, Playdemic design for more sandbox experiences where the user has more freedom in deciding when to progress or finish. However, Gouge also warns that there’s a danger you may end generalising too much, pandering to the female player.

Jennifer Gee, Executive Producer on RockYou’s Zoo World suggest that men are more competitive in gaming where as woman are more social and favour opportunities for self-expression.

However, despite some subtle differences in game-play mechanics, both audiences seek high production quality throughout.

Microsoft’s Vision for the Future of Windows Live Games

Microsoft showed just how far they are behind with this stunning leaked video of the ‘future’.

• Social: My friends and I connect and share social experiences across social networks. Our gaming experiences are not limited to a single platform or property, but extend exclusively across the Internet.
• Identity: My Avatar is my online identity. It represents my style, attitude and character. I can see and personalise my character on the web, my PC or while playing a game.
• Search: New games and media are easy to discover and play. I can quickly search, find and play the games and view the media that are of interest to me.
• Transaction: From a 99 cent virtual item to a $49.99 game, I can spend my money as I see fit. Buying things enhances my gaming and entertainment experience.
• The future of PC gaming is upon us. The question is who will lead and who will follow? Are you ready to change the world? We are.

The comments on Reddit sum it up pretty well.

Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim’s GUI

A recent article at Game Informer outlines some GUI improvements for Skyrim over Obllivion. As well as helping all users build mental models more quickly, the new concept seems particularly accessible for console users.

There’s a central, easy access menu with 4 options:

1. Inventory: managing quest items, armour, weapons & equipment
2. Magic: managing magical items & spells
3. Map: managing quests & fast travel
4. Star map: star constellations map character progress and skill unlocks

Data Visualisations

Just found a collection of Data Visualisations collated by Mashable: The Social Media Guide. Whilst most of them are interesting and novel, I’m not sure how useful they are. From an Information Design point of view, it is not immediately clear what you are looking at, and I’m not sure if the spatial positioning, colour scheme and symbols help to derive meaning or to uncover correlations. Equally, from an Interaction Design point of view, often it is not immediately clear what you can do or interact with.

The Digg visualisations are quite interesting. A real-time data stream updates constantly moving, evolving graphics – helping to give a sense that the website and the community around the site are active and alive.

Surely user-interfaces which automatically adapt to a user’s search preferences, search history and search correlations with people and content in their network will become more sophisticated and commonplace.

The Eye Beguiled

The title of this post is taken from Bruno Ernst’s book, chronicling a series of optical illusions by the likes of M. C. Escher. To fully appreciate the image right, you’ll need to click to get a full view of the apparently moving serpent pattern. This image was produced by Akiyoshi Kitaoka who has an astonishing collection of optical illusions on his website.

Put simply, the explanation for this visual tricky is that we cannot wholly trust what we see. The retina in our eyes, the visual cortex and our brain all play a part in interpreting information and filling in gaps. The result is that perceived hue, saturation, contrast, luminance etc, often differs from the original image upon which we cast our gaze. Context has a considerable effect on perceived colours and patterns. This was already known by the end of the nineteenth century as artists such as Georges Seurat experimented with Pointillism and Divisionism. Seurat juxtaposed contrasting colours, causing vibrations of color to the viewer.

Kitaoka’s website demonstrates a number of techniques on how colours and patterns can be combined to create a variety of illusions. As designers we would want to be aware of these techniques so that we can exploit and avoid them:
Moving Patterns 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
(particularly noticeable when scrolling browser window)

Rotating Patterns 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Magnification & Contraction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Wave 1 2 3 4 5
(Move your eye around the image)