Nov 012017
 

A while back I gave a keynote at the Game UX Summit in Toronto. Video of the talk is now up, so I’ve gone ahead and posted up a whole page for the talk that has the slideshow as well as the video.

The talk was similar to some of my other talks on game grammar, but with a focus on user experience: the way in which we can see each UI button as a “game,” each high-level experience as a “game,” and that therefore there are huge commonalities between UX design and game design and narrative design… but there are also big differences when we dig into looking at them granularly. In some ways it therefore draws on the same stuff (and many of the same slides!) as my talk on Game Grammar from PaxDEV, and also from my blog post about UX vs game design.

If all you want is the video, though, the organizers have you covered. And if you watch to the end, you’ll get to see some stuff about some of the tabletop games that I have been working on for the last few years:

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 Comments Off on My GameUX Summit keynote: (Dis)Assembling Games

Simple Maps improvements

 Posted by (Visited 3419 times)  Misc  Tagged with:
Aug 112017
 

Map software drives me nuts, because it’s clearly designed only by engineers. I think all of these could be done with current data sets:

If current road segment is blue or yellow and next road segment is red: “Watch out, traffic is getting heavy ahead.”

If current road segment is red and next few road segments are clear: “Traffic is clearing up ahead.”

If past road segment is red, current one isn’t, but the one after is, “Don’t get your hopes up, traffic is still bad ahead.”

If current speed is significantly above average for cars in the next road segment: “Slow down, you’re about to hit traffic!” Continue reading »

Game design vs UX design

 Posted by (Visited 40188 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Jun 292015
 

Short form: UX design is about removing problems from the user. Game design is about giving problems to the user.

In both cases you look at users’ cognitive reasoning and process capacity. And these days, we have UX designers on game teams, and they are incredibly valuable. But they are in a different discipline from game design.

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What UX can (and cannot) learn from games

 Posted by (Visited 16051 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Jun 032010
 

Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games is a great presentation by Sebastian Deterding examining the currently popular fallacy that adding points to a system is enough to make it into a game or enough to transform a website or service into something fun (something that has spawned some argument lately on Twitter, in fact).

I do think there is much for UX design to learn from games — and vice versa — but I also very much agree with the core thought here, which is that the two disciplines are different, and thinking that you can get by with a superficial understanding of one or the other is a mistake — they are not small disciplines!