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.
Walls are a nice invention but if there were no holes in them there would be no way to get in or out –they would be mausoleums or tombs. The problem is that if you make holes in the walls, anything and anyyone can get in and out (cows, visitors, dusts, rats, noise.. cold..). So architects invented this hybrid: a hole-wall, often called a door, which although common enough has always struck me as a miracle of technology. The cleverness of the invention hinges upon the hinge-pin: instead of driving a hole through the walls with a sledgehammer on a pick, you must simply gently push the door …; furthermore—and here is the real trick—once you have passed through the door, you do not have to find trowel and cement to rebuild the wall you have just destroyed: you simply push the door gently back.
Chiba is where she’s from. William Gibson’s Neuromancer also took place here. It’s the eastern sleeperside of Tokyo and I currently call it home. Its kanji mean thousand leaves and so, of course, the mille-feuille is the official cake. Japanese make a great deal of its shape and 2 animal logos based on it are in current use. Isn’t the yellow one captivating in its deformity?
The rest of the year will be as exciting as always! As I said just a post ago, I’m now in London and for a week more I’ll stay here, culturally my favorite city in the world. The next week I’ll move to Oxford—I’ve often fantasized about living in a university town, this is the university town. In both cities I’ll stay in great rented rooms (cheaper and better than hostels, of which I’ve seen more than my life’s share already)!
By late August I’ll fly to Hong Kong for a few days, the world’s first Special Economic Zone, Friedman’s miracle of capitalism. Then off to Singapore for a month, where I’ll meet her and we’ll stay in a beautiful rented room better than most hotels, a great find. In 1960 S’pore was as wealthy per person as Mexico, 3 decades later it was 4 times wealthier and still is—it’ll be fascinating to witness one of the world’s most succesful countries. Then off to Bangkok for a month, living cheaply, coding lots, and eating delicious Thai food every single meal!
Then 1.5 months to Chiba: Japan again! To live with her, finally learn Japanese (I can’t say I lived in Japan for 7.5 months and still suck so much at it), and perhaps try my hand at the Japanese job market once more. I’ve missed her far too much.
This may just be the coolest interface ever. I thought it was a joke when I first read about it: interact with computers through scratching your fingernail on surfaces. Simply amazing.
From the prolific interface genius that is Chris Harrison. Jump to 3:14 for the best concrete example of the technology in use: controlling your phone with gestures on a normal table with nothing but a stethoscope on it.
Computation at its root is distilled physics, interacting with our everyday physics it can produce pure magic. Think of accelerometers as well, or the now commonplace touch displays.
This Intel ad is so great.Thomas Friedman must be proud. Imagine its impact in India.
I must say, though, that if I were to meet Mr. Bhatt, after swooning I would promptly take him to task for not making USB connections symmetrical (Why is there a side of the connectors that must go up? Why can’t sides be interchangeable? The global amount of annoyance this has caused is not trivial.).
As part of our music startup, I’ve been listening to all sorts of music and music apps all day long. I’ve stumbled on somegreat apps, somegreatmusic, and some interesting parallels. Like these 2 wonderful songs about scorned women, very similar to me and yet coming from drastically different cultures:
I’m fascinated by meaningful compound words, the more elegant the better.
Esperanto is full of them, based on them really. Chinese writing is like that too, at times—I’m particularly impressed by things like 大小, literally “big”-”small”, used occasionally to mean “size”.
One problem that comes up is is that no matter how small the root words, compounds eventually get unwieldy, even to express simple ideas. In Esperanto, for instance, supr- is the root for “up” and you attach the -en directional root to make supren = “upwards”. Using the inverting root, mal, you get malsupren = “downwards”. So you end up having to say the clunky malsupreniri to express the simple “to go down” verb (iri = “go”).
One very elegant solution mentioned in Claude Piron’s wonderful La Bona Lingvo(“The Good Language”) is to take a different, simpler track altogether. The same idea of “going down” can be more elegantly expressed as desupri, literally “to from-top” (and the corresponding alsupri, literally “to to-top”). This, to me, is the stuff of beauty.
I recently learned 2 new Japanese words, fascinating to me because they used an entirely different conceptual track to the one I knew. You see, the Yamanote line is Tokyo’s most important train line and, remarkably, a loop. Japanese refer to trains travelling the loop clockwise as 外回り, literally "out"-"go around", and counter-clockwise as 内回り, literally "in"-"go-around". In Japan, trains, like all traffic, travels on the left and so these words make wonderfully creative, precise descriptions. (This is done, though rarely, in Western countries too, I later learned.)
The problem with these words is that they’re specific to Japan’s traffic regulations—they would confusingly mean the opposite in much of the right-driving rest of the world.
So, inspired by the Japanese track, I decided to create more universal words for clockwise and counter-clockwise, words which always confused me as a child and which aren’t particularly wieldy (in Spanish, the equivalents truly weigh you down: clockwise = “en el sentido de las manecillas del reloj, counter-clockwise = “en el sentido opuesto de las manecillas del reloj”). Fun historical note: clock hands move the way they do because that’s the way clocks’ predecessor, sundials, advance—sunwise that is (in the Northern hemisphere).
Thus I present to you rightcenter, meaning clockwise, as in “clock hands move rightcenter”, with the center to the right, in a right center way. As well as leftcenter, meaning counterclockwise, as in “screws are usually loosened leftcenter”, circling with the center to the left, in a left center way. Their derivation, I hope, is made even more obvious by the following diagram:
In Spanish, they can be translated into the much wieldier alternatives to the local counterparts: “con el centro a la derecha” and “con el centro a la izquierda”, respectively.
Now, I make no illusions that these terms are immediately or intuitively graspable—spatial direction is hard, most of us still have to consciously think about telling right from left. These words are just an alternative, fun way to label (and thus think) about the concepts of circular direction—and to think about language itself.
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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.
