Fade to Play

A feature article by Sauli Laitinen for Gamasutra discusses why usability testing and evaluation during game development makes better games.

No one wants to play games that are either frustrating or difficult for the wrong reasons. The best way to make sure that unintended problems do not hinder enjoying the game is to take usability into account in game development. This article presents how this can be done and what kind of results to expect.

Usability is an integral part of software development and has been so for the past 20 years. For one reason or another, usability has not gained similar popularity in game development. This, however, is about to change. Ease of use and optimal user experience are already important in games and will become even more so in the future.

Relevance: As a first-time participant at DiGRA 2005 this year, I came away with ideas on how research in computer games and MMORPGs can be extended to other shared spaces and help me with my own research in location-based games and folksonomies.

I just found My Web 2.0 by Yahoo! I will try it out for a while and then provide a synopsis of what I think. It was released on Wednesday. TechCrunch provides a good summary on what it is and how to use it.

My Web2.0 is a social search engine “that complements web search by enabling users to search the knowledge and expertise of their friends and community in addition to the web.” We’ve used and abused it for a day, and in our opinion it’s good - a bit like regular yahoo plus furl

Information via You’re it and TechCrunch.

Relevance: Although this could be perceived as “just another social bookmarks tool”, Yahoo! has strong financial backing and knowledge of a successful folksonomy from acquiring flickr. It will be interesting to watch it grow.

[update] check out what Ross Mayfield is saying about My Web 2.0 on Many-to-Many.

This chart compares features between 14 different types of social bookmarks such as furl, del.icio.us and simpy. For example, are there recommended links? Can entries be marked as private?

found via roxomatic.

Relevance: As I am studying folksonomies for my thesis, it is useful to compare the differences between these social tools.

[update] The chart is can be downloaded here for those that don’t speak German.

I just completed the MIT Weblog Survey.

This is a general social survey of the greater weblog community being conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Our goal is to help understand the way that weblogs are affecting the way we communicate with each other. Specifically we are interested in issues of demographics, communication behaviors, experience with weblogs and other technology, and the meaning of various types of social links within the blogosphere.

Relevance: I think it is important to support other people especially grad students doing social software research, so please participate.

I found this commencement address by Steve Jobs given at Stanford earlier this month. It is a powerful speech and I’m especially glad I found it via ilabra.org.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Relevance: I recently changed my thesis topic. This was a very dramatic step. I changed because I realised that I wasn’t interested in the subject, nor did the topic excite me. I know that I made the right decision because I love what I’m doing and love talking to other people about it and sharing ideas. I can connect the dots from my past and see how that knowledge is relevant understanding my topic. I can also see how this topic can be extended in a variety of ways for my future PhD research as I begin to look for grad schools for Fall 2006.

This is from the One Letter group on flickr.

Thanks to ilabra.org for the link.

Relevance: This example illustrates the power of the collective in social software.

This article from the BBC News Technology section discusses a location-aware blogging tool called OneReach created by students which has won a UK innovation award.

The tool gives travellers access to blogs specific to the area they are in so they can find useful information and tips.
It also creates a map which allows family and friends to follow their exact progress while they are away from home.
The tool relies on GPS (Global Positioning System) and requires a smartphone.

Relevance: Has usefulness as a tool to help tourists better adapt to foreign surroundings using mobile technology (see Barry Brown tourism research here.

An article by Mario Sixtus in the German version of Technology Review entitled “Wir sind das Web [We are the Web]” discusses how social software in making the web less an anonymous space and more of a connected space.

“Zu den Heavy-Usern des Netzes gehören immer mehr ‘normale Menschen’, der Anteil der Computerfreaks wird permanent kleiner”, sagt Ito. Das Resultat dieser Entwicklung: “Es macht keinen Sinn mehr, zwischen Online- und Offline-Welt zu unterscheiden.”

(my translation from German)
["As more "normal people" become heavy Internet users, the portion of computer freaks becomes permanently smaller", says [Ito], The result of this trend: “It doesn’t make sense anymore to distinguish between the online and offline world.”]

Found via: del.icio.us/tag/cooperation

Relevance: Provides a German perspective on social software and an excellent summary of existing applications online.

del.icio.us has a new feature that Joshua, its creator reported here on his del.icio.us blog. Media files (video, audio, images, and document) are now tagged and can be rss or used in podcasting.

The tag “system:media:audio” includes

* *.mp3 tagged as “system:filetype:mp3″
* *.wav tagged as “system:filetype:wav”
The tag “system:media:document” includes:

* *.pdf as “system:filetype:pdf”
* *.doc as “system:filetype:doc”

Relevance
del.icio.us is evolving beyond urls into the tagging of digital artefacts (documents, pictures, and music). It is moving from a bookmarking tool to keep track of cool urls (which we used to use our internet browser for), to a system that used tagging to better organise and share information personally relevant.

This week’s Business Week magazine has an excellent cover story by Rob Hoff called “The Power of Us” that address social interaction and collaboration online and the economic power behind social computing such as the use of skype by businesses and Meetup Inc. which provides a space for forming local groups.

Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, sees a common thread in such disparate innovations as the Internet, mobile devices, and the feedback system on eBay, where buyers and sellers rate each other on each transaction. He thinks they’re the underpinnings of a new economic order. “These are like the stock companies and liability insurance that made capitalism possible,” suggests Rheingold, who’s also helping lead the Cooperation Project, a network of academics and businesses trying to map the new landscape. “They may make some new economic system possible.”

Thanks to Smart Mobs and Many2Many for drawing me to this article.

Relevance: related to idea of SuperGaming by Jane McGonigal that is build on the concept of “more is better” by Andrew Fluegelman, founding member of the 1970s New Games
movement, on the optimal number of players. She sees “a phenomenological pleasure in being part of a larger (much larger) whole.”