Beyond Game Design: Nine Steps Towards Creating Better Videogames Review

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Beyond Game Design: Nine Steps Towards Creating Better Videogames ReviewIt's been a pleasure reading Beyond Game Design. I've found this text to be the rare successful combination of new information and old information explored in new ways. Each chapter feels complete in and of itself, with ideas from previous sections seamlessly supporting the next. For those working as designers or developers, or those who hope to work in design someday, this is a text worth reading.Beyond Game Design: Nine Steps Towards Creating Better Videogames OverviewAs a game designer, you are always looking for new ways to make a game unique and interesting. Beyond Game Design:Nine Steps Toward Creating Better Videogames shows you how to make better video games by challenging you to think outside of conventional game design wisdom.Written as a series of essays by industry experts on different components of game theory and design, the book tackles the full spectrum of issues related to how and why players enjoy certain games. You'll explore player emotions, patterns of play, gender and cultural diversity, accessibility issues, and various types of player skills. Providing practical, hands-on design tips and advice, as well as the theory and psychology behind how and why people play games, Beyond Game Design will help you tap into new player types and new ways to engage players as you discover how to make better, more successful videogames.
Editor Introduction
More Than Design
Beyond Game Design began with my dream of creating a book that would offer more than the nuts and bolts of game design. I wanted to offer something that would look deeper--into the psychology of play--and also look further into the issues relating to making games in our modern diverse cultures.
It was a great privilege to work with the authors of the chapters in this book--Richard Bartle, Noah Falstein, Katherine Isbister and Nicole Lazzaro are some of the biggest names in game design and the psychology of play, and Michelle Hinn, Joe Saulter and Sheri Graner Ray are unparalleled in their work in game diversity.
The book offers "Nine Steps" toward creating better videogames, but this nine-step program actually has two distinct aspects: understanding what games do and including a larger audience for games. Both steps are about making videogames for the new marketplace, one that is very different from the market for games just five years ago. It's a survival guide for companies who make games in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
Here's a potted version of the nine step program that explains what it's all about:

Understand Emotions:Nicole Lazzaro is the leading researcher into game emotions, and explains why any game must be accessible and fun, and why "fun" means different things to different people. We don't all enjoy the same emotions of play; some players love failing a tough challenge and repeating it over and over again until they eventually win sweet victory, but for other players that's their idea of hell. Developers who understand the emotions of play are ready to compete in the new market for digital games; those who don't are living on borrowed time.
Understand Social Play:The explosion of Facebook and casual games has happened on the back of a newly recognised social aspect to play. Even traditional game forms, like First Person Shooters, are now dependent on social design for their success, as Modern Warfare amply demonstrates. Katherine Isbister describes the different social mechanisms available for game design, and why success in the wider market for games now requires designing for more than just a single player--even for single player games!
Understand Patterns of Play:I've been writing about Roger Caillois' patterns of play for many years, but with Beyond Game Design I took his work to a new level by tying each pattern to a specific neurobiological mechanism. The patterns of play are specific neurochemical responses that govern how and why games are fun--and understanding these is vital to commercially successful game design. This is your brain on games!
Understand the Limits of Theory:Richard Bartle's infamous "suits" model of Massively Multiplayer gamers was a seminal event in player studies, and remains widely read and used today. But a model can only take you so far. Bartle explains why every theory has limits and also why--despite those limits--it's still vital that commercial game design deploys theories.
Include Both Genders:Sheri Graner Ray has written extensively on gender distinctions in play, and makes a compelling argument that modern digital games that do not take into account issues of gender are leaving a lot of money on the table. Designing to include both genders means expanding the players who might enjoy your game--and that can make all the difference in commercial success.
Include Cultural Diversity:Joe Saulter is a jazz man turned game developer, and has a stark warning for players making games for a white male audience: that isn't the consumer base for digital entertainment anymore. If you're making games for just one ethnic group, you're already falling behind your competitors in the new marketplace for games.
Include Players with Accessibility Issues:When it comes to accessibility, it starts to look like diminishing returns... Is it really worth designing elements of games for players with specific disabilities? Michelle Hinn argues that many of the changes required to reach gamers with disabilities are trivial to implement, and that the number of affected players can be far larger than most developers and publishers usually think--especially when designing for a mass market audience of the kind Nintendo's Wii and DS target.
Include Players with Different Skills:My studies of the audience for games have thrown up a lot of interesting discoveries, but my most basic result still has the most to say to commercial game development: different players have different capabilities, and enjoy different things. If you are spending a lot of money developing a videogame you can't afford to be designing the game for a very small subset of the audience for games. The games that succeed support different ways of playing for different players.
Include Structures That Adapt to Player Needs:Finally, Noah Falstein brings it all together by exploring how games can be responsive to player needs. It's a cutting edge issue, and one that Noah has considerable experience with. By building games that work for many different players, you target a wider audience--and commercial success in the new market for digital games depends upon precisely that.

That's Beyond Game Design in a nutshell, but of course, the chapters of the book go into far more depth than I've described here. This book is an essential guide to creating commercial digital entertainment for the new audiences, the new marketplace and the new conditions in the videogames industry. Ignore it at your peril!

Chris BatemanEditor, Beyond Game Design


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Designing Gestural Interfaces: Touchscreens and Interactive Devices Review

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Designing Gestural Interfaces: Touchscreens and Interactive Devices ReviewIf you have been a designer for the past five years and have some experience with touchscreen or interactive surfaces of one kind or another, then Designing Gestural Interfaces is not for you. This book is best for the beginner as its content is very basic and superficial. There is no deep thinking or insights here. Unfortunately, the occassional good topic is glossed over and your left with only the beginning of an idea.
It's true that designing for gestural interfaces is a relatively new area, but the author presents the reader with general and basic design information that has been known and practiced for many years and not nearly enough useful information about gesture design. For example, in the chapter on Prototyping Interactive Gestures, the author talks about the purpose and value of low-fidelity prototyping, but offers nothing related to gestural UI design; no hints, tips, tricks, pitfalls, solutions, etc. In this regard, I found myself getting frustrated many times throughout the whole book.
In general, the book reads like an introductory design book, a primer of sorts, updated to include gestures. I suspect that within the next year or so, updated versions of this book or even other books / articles will come out that offer much deeper insights. If you're a veteran designer, save your money and spend your time wisely reading other more insightful books.Designing Gestural Interfaces: Touchscreens and Interactive Devices Overview
If you want to get ahead in this new era of interaction design, this is the reference you need. Nintendo's Wii and Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch have made gestural interfaces popular, but until now there's been no complete source of information about the technology.Designing Gestural Interfaces provides you with essential information about kinesiology, sensors, ergonomics, physical computing, touchscreen technology, and new interface patterns -- all you need to know to augment your existing skills in "traditional" web design, software, or product development. Packed with informative illustrations and photos, this book helps you:

Get an overview of technologies surrounding touchscreens and interactive environments
Learn the process of designing gestural interfaces, from documentation to prototyping to communicating to the audience what the product does
Examine current patterns and trends in touchscreen and gestural design
Learn about the techniques used by practicing designers and developers today
See how other designers have solved interface challenges in the past
Look at future trends in this rapidly evolving field

Only six years ago, the gestural interfaces introduced in the film Minority Report were science fiction. Now, because of technological, social, and market forces, we see similar interfaces deployed everywhere. Designing Gestural Interfaces will help you enter this new world of possibilities.


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Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience (Animal Guide) Review

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Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience (Animal Guide) ReviewMalone and Crumlish have done the user-experience design community an amazing service with this volume. It does the hard, rigorous work that most of us simply do not have time or dedication to do -- creating the first solid set of building blocks for designing socially driven digital platforms.
The book goes beyond the easy categories of things like "blogs & wikis" and breaks those and other compounds down into their essential elements, helping us make more informed and less platform-dependent decisions.
Design patterns are always challenging to produce, especially since designers inevitably nit-pick them to death. But these patterns are up to the challenge: they actually make sense, and I suspect will stand up handsomely to the persnickety-designer test. But even if you differ with some of their particulars, it's incredibly valuable to have the heavy lifting already done, so all you have to do is react, refine and "improve" for your own use.
More than a mere collection of patterns, the book doles out large helpings of hard-won wisdom from the authors and other veterans of the industry who have wrestled with the volatile, emergent nature of socially driven digital design.
If you're doing anything with social design, from being asked to create a corporate blog to enhancing the way employees share knowledge on your intranet, do yourself a favor and get familiar with Designing Social Interfaces.
Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience (Animal Guide) Overview
From the creators of Yahoo!'s Design Pattern Library, Designing Social Interfaces provides you with more than 100 patterns, principles, and best practices, along with salient advice for many of the common challenges you'll face when starting a social website. Designing sites that foster user interaction and community-building is a valuable skill for web developers and designers today, but it's not that easy to understand the nuances of the social web. Now you have help. Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone share hard-won insights into what works, what doesn't, and why. You'll learn how to balance opposing factions and grow healthy online communities by co-creating them with your users.



Understand the overarching principles you need to consider for every website you create
Learn basic design patterns for adding social components to an existing site
Rein in misbehaving users on an active community site
Build a social experience around a product or service and invite people to join
Develop a social utility without having to build an entirely new infrastructure
Enable users of your site's content to interact with one another
Offer your members the opportunity to connect in the real world
Learn to recognize and avoid antipatterns: emergent bad practices in the social network and social media space


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Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design Review

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Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design ReviewReview of Smart Things Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design
So, What's Up With the Chair?
Is it just me, or did anyone else wonder about the intriguing chair embossed on the front cover? I don't believe the author writes about chairs anywhere in the entire book. Indeed, there is scant mention of any kind of furniture aside from a 1 page sidebar.
I decided to review this book after previewing the section about Moore's Law. I was impressed with the author's insights and observations about this apparently misunderstood "law". Now that I've read the entire book, and taken some time to think about it, I must say I learned a few interesting things from it.
The book attempts to provide an introduction to ideas and techniques useful in ubiquitous computing user experience design. It does this by providing a little history, some design frameworks and methodologies, complimented by case studies of commercial products.
There are a some intellectual gems here, such as the author's observation that "design is as much a process of discovering constraints as creating within them". Or, the idea that most every industrially created product has an "information shadow", which is the digitally accessible information about it.
I especially like the concept of "smart garbage", in which objects self-disclose how to fix, disassemble and recycle them.
If you are a designer, some of the author's recommended techniques such as the "desire line method" (see where people are walking and making paths across the grass, then install your sidewalks there) are worth considering. Advice that a product "has to work for someone before it can work for anyone" is worth keeping in mind, and could prove to be a great persuading tool in heated design meetings.
I particularly liked the author's ideas about metaphors. They are "the tools of thought" and allow consumers of novel gadgets to comprehend them by relating them to concrete concepts.
I am thankful to the author for helping me understand why I so much dislike being present when a robot vacuum cleaner (Roomba) is operating: "they were designed to emulate insect behavior". (And I hate bugs.)
So, what's not like?
Well, a few things actually.
In addition to insects, I hate typo's. No author, and no book is perfect, and so I have developed the ability to ignore the existence of a reasonable number of typo's without undue discomfort. However this book has exceeded my pain threshold. Typo agony begins even before the first page of the book, in the third paragraph of the Preface ("user experience design from a different perspectives:"). And there are unfortunately more to follow, including footnotes in the sidebar, mixed up labels, and so on.
The writing is sometimes obscure, as if the reader is assumed to have prior detailed knowledge about what is being said (in that case, why read the book?). For example, on the last page of chapter 15 the author shows a photo of two wooden blocks, with mating wooden joints facing each other, and sliding doors opened to reveal circuit boards hidden within. His description is
"Cottram (2009) for example, used light-weight technology prototyping components to explore the heavyweight idea of 'a harmonious intersection between tradition and technology, between natural materials, high craft and digital functionality'"
Huh?
Perhaps I'm missing something, but that description tells me next to nothing about the two wooden blocks, what they are for, what they do, or why I should even care.
One of the author's design recommendations is "Focus On Core Functionality" (title of section 18.1.2 ). I fail to see how that is consistent with the idea of adding LCD picture frames (and other gadgets) to the exterior of a refrigerator, whose core functionality seems to me to be to keep food fresh and cold. Yet the author describes this appliance - the Whirlpool Centralpark - as a "successful user experience design".
In reading this book, I kept asking myself if perhaps this ubiquitous computing thing is going a bit too far. Although he ignores this idea until the final chapter, the author seems to be having his own doubts as well. He confides that in order to write the book he "had to escape pervasive digital technology", by composing it in an anti-digital coffee shop, with no networking or electrical outlets.
In conclusion, this is a book which would be of most interest to designers, and retired nerds (like myself). The author is very clever, with a breadth of knowledge about his subject area, and some interesting insights. I look forward to reading his future work, (especially if he reveals the secret of the cover chair).Disclosures:
I did not pay for my copy of this book. As a member of the Amazon Vine program I received it for free.
I have a long and varied background in software design, having worked on cell phones when the vast majority of the public did not know or care what they were (quite understandably, since at that time the handset was the size of a small lunch box). I moved on to other projects, until decades later, I found myself working again with these vastly improved gadgets (by then most everyone knew what they were, and indeed most everyone owned one). As a designer, I was drawn to this book after reading the preface which states it is primarily a tool for design practitioners.Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design OverviewThe world of smart shoes, appliances, and phones is already here, but the practice of user experience (UX) design for ubiquitous computing is still relatively new. Design companies like IDEO and frogdesign are regularly asked to design products that unify software interaction, device design and service design -- which are all the key components of ubiquitous computing UX -- and practicing designers need a way to tackle practical challenges of design. Theory is not enough for them -- luckily the industry is now mature enough to have tried and tested best practices and case studies from the field. Smart Things presents a problem-solving approach to addressing designers' needs and concentrates on process, rather than technological detail, to keep from being quickly outdated. It pays close attention to the capabilities and limitations of the medium in question and discusses the tradeoffs and challenges of design in a commercial environment. Divided into two sections, frameworks and techniques, the book discusses broad design methods and case studies that reflect key aspects of these approaches. The book then presents a set of techniques highly valuable to a practicing designer. It is intentionally not a comprehensive tutorial of user-centered design'as that is covered in many other books'but it is a handful of techniques useful when designing ubiquitous computing user experiences.In short, Smart Things gives its readers both the "why" of this kind of design and the "how," in well-defined chunks.* Tackles design of products in the post-Web world where computers no longer have to be monolithic, expensive general-purpose devices* Features broad frameworks and processes, practical advice to help approach specifics, and techniques for the unique design challenges* Presents case studies that describe, in detail, how others have solved problems, managed trade-offs, and met successes

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The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game Review

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The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game ReviewWhen I first heard about what Lee Sheldon was doing in his college course, by way of a viewing of Jesse Schell's DICE Convention talk (distributed by TED), I looked for more info. Using XP to grade? How would this work? My gut told me that it was worth investigating further, so I poked around...and discovered that this textbook was about to be published, a scant week from my investigation. TIMING!
Having placed my order for a copy, I scoured TED for relevant talks (and found several), and began some cursory plans for my classroom.
When the book arrived, I put all planning on hold and read it. It proved to be a quick read, in part, no doubt, because the author had been/is a writer (for TV shows, notably Star Trek: The Next Generation; and for some of the best computer games out there). He knew how to keep the info engaging. One small example: Instead of chapters, the book has levels.
The Multiplayer Classroom offers a sturdy skeleton for a rethinking of your classroom content delivery. It shares the youthful history of using a gaming overlay in education step by step, as it evolved, and unashamedly allows for the criticisms of such restructuring to be voiced as well as the praises. (The latter easily overshadow the former.) The book explains the mechanisms games use to engage and entertain the player, and suggests how to use those same mechanisms to facilitate learning. And, it shares concrete examples from real-life applications.
Now, I will tell you straight up: There is content in this book that feels like filler. There are several tentative case-studies, reports of initial experiments that teachers at various levels in various disciplines have attempted. Not all of these have solid, decisive conclusions to share.
But why would we expect otherwise? We are talking about a true paradigm shift here: An entirely new way to cast--and consider--the content in your classroom. Very few educators have even heard about this possibility. Even fewer have tried implementing it.
I used to tell students when they entered my classroom for the first time that they had a clean slate. The implication? An "A+" was there, waiting for them to maintain. Now, I plan to go into this coming school year with the opening line Lee used: "Good morning. Welcome. Everyone in this class is going to receive an F." To be followed, after a pause, with, "Unless...."
More importantly, I am now working to intertwine my content (in my case middle school English) with a compelling story line, with surprises and rewards for the player (ie, students) along the way.
And I'm changing the terminology that will be used in the classroom. Why "write a free-choice paper" when you can "adventure"? Why "do a project" when you can "go on a quest"? And who'd prefer to "take a quiz" when they might "be inspected by an official from another province" or "take a test" when they might "tame a beast"? Words are amazingly powerful, and the connotations that certain terms bring can instantaneously engage or disconnect a reader/listener. In my class, students will unlock achievements, discover treasures, and battle illiteracy....
There is no change in content. My curriculum maps are still my guide. State-mandated standards are intact. What's changing? My delivery. The way I FRAME the content.
That's what this book is all about. It's cutting edge, and largely untested. But it's based in logic, in common sense. Its premise, in a nutshell: Using, in a classroom, those strategies which make games compelling...will make the classroom experience more compelling.
I'm creating my plans for the coming school year with both a confidence and an excitement I have not felt in years.The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game Overview

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