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It’s been a while since I made a quote collage. It’s been a while since I’ve been hit by an idea this good: reality is broken, it’s game (and interface!) designers responsibility to fix it.
I’m not here to rant about game designers. I’m mad, but I’m not mad at game designers. I think that compared to the rest of the world, game designers pretty much have it all figured out. We’ve invented a medium that kicks every other medium’s ass. As game designers, we own more emotional bandwidth, we occupy more brain cycles, and we make more people happy than any other platform or content in the world. And if you don’t already believe that, if you don’t realize that we’ve already won, then you’re not paying attention to the staggering amount of time, energy, money and passion that gamers all over the world pour into our games every single day.
So why why have we won? Because as an industry, we’ve spent the last 30 years learning how to optimize human experience. We know that our brains are made for playing games. Recently, some of us have remembered that our bodies are made for playing games. And we’ve always known that our hearts are made for playing games. So as an industry, we’ve spent three whole decades figuring out how to engineer systems that fully engage our brains, and our bodies, and our hearts. And we’ve pretty much solved that problem – or, at least, our solutions are working better than other designed experience on the planet. So our systems work better than anything anyone else is making to engage human beings. And as a result, the way I see it, right now, we basically rule the world.
That’s the good news. But the problem is, we don’t rule the real world. For the most part, we rule the virtual world, because it’s easier to optimize experience in a world entirely of our own making. The fact is the real world is too f’ed up, it’s too broken, we don’t want to deal with it. So right now, pretty much every one of our games works better than reality, because we are the best designers of human experience, and we’re applying all of our talent, all our insight to optimizing virtual experience. And you know what? That needs to end, starting today.
 My rant is about the fact that reality is fundamentally broken, and we have a responsibility as game designers to fix it, with better algorithms and better missions and better feedback and better stories and better community and everything else we know how to make. We have a responsibility as the smartest people in the world, the people who understand how to make systems that make people feel engaged, successful, happy, and completely alive, and we have the knowledge and the power to invent systems that make reality work better. We have the responsibility to take what we’ve learned as an industry over the past 30 years and start making everyday life more like our games.
Can we fix it? Yes. We have the technology and the knowledge. Should we fix it? Hell yes. We have the power AND the responsibility. That doesn’t mean we should stop making escapist games. We need to make escapist games, there will always be a need to escape, and frankly, that’s how we’re going to learn more about what works, about how to engage brains and bodies and hearts. But will we fix it? Honestly, I have no idea.
We can take what we’ve learned by making games and apply it to reality, to make real life work more like a game – not make our games more realistic and lifelike, but make our real life more game like – so that when people all over the world wake up every morning, they wake up with a mission, with allies, with a sense of being a part of a bigger story, part of a system that wants them to be happy. We can do it, we should do it, and I hope that we will do it.
I believe the Google-China faceoff a momentous occasion. A major fallout between 2 of the very most powerful organizations on Earth.
So I created this experimental summary to try to wrap my head around it. The idea is to aggregate all the developments of a major news story, linking even more aggressively than Wikipedia and straight to first sources as much as possible. The favicon bullets are links to that paragraph’s source. All emphases mine.
I’d rather be a maker than an employee.
I’d rather craft products than nurse a job.
And I’d rather be a customer than a boss.
Let us imagine that intelligence had resided, not in mankind, but in some vast solitary and isolated jelly-fish, buried deep in the depths of the Pacific Ocean. It would have no experience of individual objects, only with the surrounding water. Motion, temperature and pressure would provide its basic sensory data. In such a pure continuum the discrete would not arise and there would be nothing to count.
I loved this thought experiment because it’s the first instatiation I see of what a truly different kind of math would be like. Just imagine, a math without integers! As Jameson Graber elaborates here, we started with integers and only through calculus first started to truly grasp the continuous. What if there were other paths?
Having thought about this question a good deal, I believe that math is a human construct in that the Math that is possible is far Vaster than we imagine, and from that gnarly Vastness we choose only one thread. That’s what Atiyah’s quote illustrates to me.
Without beings to think it Math exists only in a combinatorial, potential form, just like all that we’ll ever write already exists in a latent form in the alphabet.
As to its universal truth, validity, applicability…, perhaps all that can be said is that empathic nonhumans might be able to get and accept some of it, just as exotic stories start to make sense to us only after we understand the exotic sensibilities that gave rise to it.
Math is not a special, magical kind of thought but simply the ever more sophisticated, ever more rigorous thought that we have. That it is, as it is famously said, “unreasonably effective”, is just an endorsement of thought itself.
Backbars on social link-sites is a GreaseMonkey script to turn the headlines and comments of social link-sites into ambient bar charts (of votes/diggs/views/users…) It works on Reddit, Delicious, Digg, Hacker News, and Stack Overflow (and MetaFilter now!).
The idea is to give you subtle non-verbal clues to improve your browsing experience almost subconsciously. The backbars don’t replace the count they represent, what they do is convey you its magnitude unobtrusively, and, crucially, compare that magnitude to those around it. So you can now see, almost without thinking, that, say, some comment is popular, but that there’s a comment around that’s twice as popular.
Once you have it, just start browsing at your favorite social link-site: Reddit, Delicious, Digg, Hacker News, and Stack Overflow.
 
 
 
It’s the first release but it’s very usable already, I hope.
I hope you enjoy and find it useful, please let me know what you think of it in the comments.
Something changed,...
..I’m starting to feel like…
..I’m getting the hang of how to live!
Intermittently through the past 6 months, more and more often, and all over the past week, I’ve been glimpsing a day to day life that fulfills me, that I look at and say, yes, this day, this is the life I want to live.
I’m talking about the little things not the Grand Scheme of Life, the micro not the macro, the structure and weave of daily life—what to eat, when to sleep, what to do, what to work on, what to buy, how to relate to other people, how to love, how to exercise, how to rest, how to organize your time, how to fail, how to recover, how to improve, how to find peace and keep it, how to make a routine, how to be stable, how to find flow, how to live.
Of course I’m only starting, and know next to nothing, and have been far too blessed all along, but for the first time I’ve set it all up and all systems seem to be running smoothly. Exhilarating. Like being able to control your non-training-wheels bike for the first time, the wind rushing by.
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches Rainer Maria Rilke
An experiment in improving the reading interface of the world’s best news magazine. Very early days. Check it out at elzr.com/reader.
Right now it’s just a glorified table of contents but even that I think helpful. It includes the abstract of every article or it’s first line —in my experience The Economist’s pithy, playful titles can be under-descriptive. And there are also backbars behind every title, giving you an ambient, non-verbal hint to the article’s size. Both features are there to fix something that got lost in the transition from print to web.
I’ve read The Economist for many years now, almost since the beginning from the web (I subscribed for a year when it was behind a paywall, the only time I’ve paid for content). And almost as long, I’ve been struggling with it’s interface. I guess it’s not that bad for casual readers, but for longtime junkies it can be much improved. Which is what I’ll try to do in the coming days.
Changelog:
.3 version, 16 June 2009: BIG changes. See http://elzr.com/posts/03-release-of-the-economist-reader for full details. Read the whole magazine in a single page, columns, much better design (sections separators!), and… flags!
.12 version, 14 June 2009: Fixed
.11 version, 13 June 2009: Prettier version.
.1 version, 8 June 2009: Kicking it off.
Wikipedia Backbars is a GreaseMonkey script to add histogram backgrounds to Wikipedia tables. It’s a great way to make tables more graphic, to visualize the patterns in the excellent, but usually very dry tables in Wikipedia.
It’s early days yet but it’s already usable enough to give it a spin.
To install it just download it from its UserScripts page. You need to have GreaseMonkey (version 0.8 or more), a Firefox extension, installed first.
From Greg Egan’s Reasons to be Cheerful, one of my favorite short stories ever, an exploration into the meaning of happiness and, tangentially, of romance.
Visions of Julia filled my head. I wanted to know what she was doing every second of the day; I wanted her to be happy, I wanted her to be safe. Why? Because I’d chosen her. But … why had I felt compelled to choose anyone? Because in the end, the one thing that most of the donors must have had in common was the fact that they’d desired, and cared about, one person above all others. Why? That came down to evolution. You could no more help and protect everyone in sight than you could fuck them, and a judicious combination of the two had obviously proved effective at passing down genes. So my emotions had the same ancestry as everyone else’s; what more could I ask?
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Mexicanos. Me gustaria fueran mas conocidas y aprovechadas, por lo que las comparto aqui desapasionadamente pues si creo en el consejo es cuando es 
Española con solo 2 años de residencia legal
Union Europea, un pasaporte Español permite agencia libre dentro del bloque economico mas grande del mundo, mas de 500 millones de almas.
