shawn rider dot com

Design research can come in many forms, from quantitative market research to personal interviews to experimental design explorations. But design research is more than a set of strategies and procedures. It also represents a particular attitude about design, a willingness to look beyond the immediate concerns of crafting a specific project, an openness to integrating ideas and insights from the outside world into the design process itself. Successful design research in a commercial firm requires a company culture that embraces research in concert with design.

Eric Zimmerman and Peter Lee Creating a Culture of Research

Eric Zimmerman and Peter Lee have an independent game dev company callled Gamelab. I was just revisiting their site to write a quick post on Alternative Games about Arcadia (which I highly recommend), and I came across this short piece about Design Research. I am really impressed with some of the points Zimmerman and Lee make about how they’ve set up their small development group to be a powerhouse, research-driven producer. A look at their portfolio shows clearly that they are doing something “right” here, and after reading the essay quoted above. I think managers, team leaders, and anyone working in group situations can take a lot away from the Gamelab example.

I especially love that Gamelab encourages their team to both PLAY and TEACH. I think these two activities go hand-in-hand, so it’s lovely to see them mentioned in such close proximity to each other. I also think that teaching is some of the most inspiring work I’ve ever done, and I can easily see how time spent in the classroom pushes and progresses time spent in research. At UB I’ve seen examples where I feel like some professors have not realized the value of their teaching time (for whatever reasons, some of which are very good, I’m sure), and they have missed out on key opportunities to grow their practice.

At any rate, Zimmerman and Lee are very interesting, and their games are fun to play.

I really enjoy sites that are collaborative, but in a way that isn’t just centered around ego. Instructables.com is a perfect example: Users sign up and can post how-to articles about projects. It’s a brilliant idea — another one I wish I’d thought of myself. I like this much better than sites like MySpace where it’s all about creating a weird value system of uploaded photos and linked-in friends.

Sites like Instructables (or GameFAQs, Good-Tutorials.com, etc.) encourage people to make useful things. The social rewards are still there, but the valuation is based on the quality of material submitted to the site: A really good tutorial writer is valued on a site like Good-Tutorials, or even on old sites like FlashKit. These software-based sites were some of the first to provide this kind of directed how-to information, but sites like Make: Blog and Threadless and Etsy have pushed things much further. It’s the collaborative CMS qualities of SlashDot and SlashDot-descendents like Digg mixed with the how-to software culture and the DIY ethos of the Web.

Here’s a sample from a project on Instructables that I thought was exceptionally clever: How to turn a $3 ball point pen into a $200 ball point pen.

Save $200 in 2 minutes and have the worlds best writing pen

Transform a $3 pen into a $200 pen in just seconds. Mont Blanc pens are the worlds finest writing pens but they make specialized refills so you must buy their $200 pens to use their amazing ink…until now. This is the easiest hack/adaptation to give anyone the king’s writing ink.

I wanted to toss up a couple links really fast. The first is to a two-part series about How to Start a Game Company (Part One and Part Two). These seem like good articles, outlining some very practical advice about gettings started in independent game development. For all the discussion about how the next-gen systems are going to put small developers out of business, there are constantly new devices (handhelds, PDAs, mobile phones) coming online as viable gaming solutions. Plus, we always have PC gaming, which tolerates, in general, a wider variety of games (don’t worry, PC gaming isn’t dying, and PC gamers tend to be more experimental and radical in what they’ll try; or at least it’s easier to get into free indy games when you’re just wasting the boss’ dime).

And while reading Part Two of the series mentioned above, I clicked into the Popcap Developer Program. It turns out that Popcap makes their game framework available to anyone to create their own games, and not just to submit to Popcap, although they hope the policy will earn them first-dibs on somee cool ideas. But obviously even an “indy” company like Popcap sees the benefit in sharing tools, and the Popcap engine is quite robust for a certain set of game types. This is definitely a place where I will be spending some time in the future, and I look forward to turning some students on to these resources.

I just started a new webzine called Alternative Games. You can view it at Alt-Games.com and I welcome you to be among the first to browse around and offer some feedback. It’s up and public, but we’re still getting going, so bear with us if there’s any oddness that crops up in these early weeks.

I created Alt-Games because I really want to read a publication focused on the non-conventional, experimental, fine arts, and indy / student games that are continually released online. It is very easy to find mainstream gaming coverage, and occasionally those outlets cover all kinds of things I’d personally classify as “alternative” (Katamari Damacy is an obvious example, as is Shadow of the Colossus, Seaman and any of the other “cult” mainstream games).

As a gamer, I feel a bit torn. On the one hand, the conventionalization of gaming genres and forms has really done a lot to solidify the form, providing a transparency of convention that allows certain elements to be explored. However, I also don’t think we’ve really scratched the surface of what is possible in the game medium, and I’d rather play a dozen “kinda-crappy” experimental student projects over a single “pretty good” sci-fi FPS any day. But give me excellence in either category and I’m very, very satisfied.

So here we have Alternative Games, founded in May 2006. We’re currently looking for writers. Several of the GamesFirst! staff have signed up to participate, so I know there will be a core of some very good writers. We’re pioneering a new idea in shared ad revenue: Each author directly earns a portion of the ad revenue generated by their articles.

I’m hoping this revenue-sharing proposition, along with a general love of games and interest in the less orthodox elements of game culture, will entice some great writers to step up and get published.

If you’re interested in writing for Alternative Games, contact me at feedback@alt-games.com or send a writing sample to submissions@alt-games.com

Google Web Toolkit - Build AJAX apps in the Java language
Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don’t speak browser quirks as a second language. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatabilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript’s lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.

The Google Web Toolkit is a resource for developers. I haven’t gotten to play with it much, but I’m very interested in some of the things it offers– it provides a framework for AJAX-based Web app development that is very robust. It not only helps make portable, reusable code, but also helps avoid AJAX-issues such as Back-button state management and whatnot. I’ve been using Paul Visco’s Surebert class for my AJAX needs, but this might be suitable for larger app projects. I’ll get to it as soon as I can…

All comic creators: Here is a super-useful tool. I was just talking to my friend David Hohusen, and he was looking for a good way to handle his comics on Wordpress. Dave has been making these awesome “gamics” that he generates using Garry’s Mod and Half-Life 2. He started playing with Mambo to manage his comics, but I think Wordpress and this ComicPress theme would be perfect. Here’s a bit from the ComicPress site:

ComicPress 1.5
This is a theme for WordPress that will help you publish your Webcomic. I wanted something very simple that would use WordPress the way it was without hacks, mods or a separate comic archiving system. This is just that.

Now, does anyone know of a Wordpress design customized for running a gaming website? I’m curious…

This video of a Spore demo comes from Joystiq, who are one of my fave newer gaming sites. They do a good job with the whole blog-as-respectable-news-source thing and lack the Drudge-like sensationalism of Crescente’s crew at Kotaku. I was glad to see a lot of the Joystiq crew at E3, so I know they are doing their work. I also managed to see writers from The Escapist, and of course the usual G4 monkeys. It blows my mind how that channel gets worse and worse — TechTV had finally worked into something halfway decent, and then G4 came along and added a whole lot of suck.

But back to the story at hand: This is one of the most successful celebrity appearances I’ve ever seen in a press conference. Robin Williams demonstrating Wil Wright’s Spore is absolutely hilarious. He’s exactly the kind of person you want to show off both how easy the Spore creation engine is, and how much fun it is to create new lifeforms. When the game brings his creation to life, Williams truly sounds surprised and excited. It’s an infectious clip, and I hope you enjoy it.

Well, I’m off to E3. This year there are nine of us from GF! heading out. It should be a great show, what with the Wii (whee!), PS3 and XB360. I’m very excited and optimistic about what we’ll see. We’ve got a really great crew heading down, too, including Jeremy K and Matt J, both of whom are old-school GF! staffers. I think it will be really interesting to see how their perception of the show differs, because I believe E3 has gone through some serious changes since three years ago. In general, it’s a much more restrained show, although it’s still a helluva spectacle.

I set up a moblog for the E3 experience on GamesFirst!. You can check that out here. I’ll be making image, vid and audio posts throughout my journey to Los Angeles. Poor Sarah is staying home this year, so she’ll be keeping the Xbox company. Fortunately, even the Xbox 360 has E3 coverage this year, which is pretty awesome: The only place for HD quality E3 videos. What a racket! And I’m such a sucker for it…

Have a great time at E3 if you’re going. Drop a comment here if you’ll be around the show and I’ll reply so we can hook up and put you on the GF! Moblog (or we can just play a few rounds). If you’re staying home, well, it’s not that bad, really. Most of the cool will be available instantaneously through sites like www.E3Insider.com and various outlets. I’m also liking GameTrailers.com a lot lately; videos in both WMV and MOV formats are nice, plus they have pretty much everything I look for when I go there.

Games 4 Girls 2006
Third Annual ChicTech Retreat (pronounced “Sheek-Tek”) was a huge success. With fun, awards, and honors, eight teams (27 college students) participated in the G4G competition; three teams were in attendance to present their games in person. The G4G entries were judged first by a team of three judges - two professional game designers and a member of the last year’s winning G4G team - on originality, artistic merit and technical quality. Then the TAC participants judged the games using just one criterion: how much fun they were to play.

I think the G4G comp is a really cool paradigm, blending expert judging with a user-feedback flair. I’m super proud because Erin Carroll and Andrea Paoletta received Honorable Mention (4th place) for their game, “Fluff,” a super-cool game that they created in my Video Game Design course last Fall. “Fluff” features a pointy protagonist living in a world of delicate, well-rounded fuzzballs. As the only Fluff able to defeat the evil dragon threatening the forest, you must guide the pointy little guy through cool forest levels without killing your fuzzy compatriots. Of course, in order to succeed, one must sacrifice a few for the greater good.

This is a really fun little platformer, and the folks at the Games 4 Girls competition are hosting it for download, so click the link above to check it out. It was created with Game Maker, which is an excellent game development tool. It’s not a super complex design tool, but it is very useful for experimenting with game design concepts, which is exactly what it’s built for.

I am so glad the contest was a success. I’m downloading all the winners now, just to see how good they are. (I mean, I’ve played “Fluff,” so I have a decently high level of expectation.) Once I work my way through the winners, I’ll download the others, too. I always love seeing student experiments.

So at the bottom of the front page on my site you can see the latest post from my Xbox 360 on its personal blog. The blog is powered by 360Voice.com, which is pretty much really great. I have been enjoying it a lot so far, and I look forward to seeing what they are able to do with the service. I also love the idea of having my blog feature the post on my Xbox’s blog. How meta is that?

So what does my 360 say so far? Well, it’s only had a couple day to post, but here’s an example:

GamesFirst’s Xbox - 05/04/06

GamesFirst hit the switch and fired me up yesterday. His total gamer score is 3940. He played Perfect Dark Zero, EA SPORTS FN 3, Feeding Frenzy, Oblivion, Geometry Wars Evolved, and after that, called it a day.

GamesFirst’s Xbox - 05/03/06

Where is GamesFirst at? I want to disown him. I am putting myself up on eBay ASAP.

I was impressed enough with the site to write up an article for GamesFirst, in which I detail more of the origin of the concept. I think this is a quite brilliant implementation of Julian Bleeker’s concepts, and the creators (Trapper Markelz and Stephen Sopp) were admittedly influenced by Bruce Sterling’s keynote address at the 2006 O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference. Beeker and Sterling both discuss “blogjects,” things that emit a steady stream of data about their use and status in the world.

The concept is very intriguing, and it’s not difficult to see many interesting applications for networked items. In fact it seems a lot like notions of the Personal Area Network, extrapolated and automated to the larger world of commercial goods.

I see 360Voice.com as an artistic piece, and a literary piece. The postings are not yet reaching the level of being truly compelling, or adding anything significant to the information, but I do believe in the potential. I would love to see the service integrate notions of friends lists and/or even comments and messaging to make the 360’s blog more “real.” I think the point of this service has to push the envelope into the uncanny valley to show us what can be done. Development continues, so hopes are high.

I also think that the initial realization that the Xbox 360 is one of these blogjects is a really cool revelation, and I wish I had thought of it. So kudos to you Mssrs. Markelz and Sopp.