Tall Tales, Short Stories & Modest Musings

Shigeru Miyamoto on being a game designer

And what I’ve been doing in terms of developing or advising the making of Super Mario 3D Land, I think that hasn’t been largely changed ever since I started working on Donkey Kong many years ago. At first, of course, I need to know the … technological background of what can be done, what can’t be done, etc., etc. But at the same time, I never forget the viewpoint of the player. So sometimes I’m the developer, or engineer with the know-how and the knowledge of the technology. And sometimes I’m developing the game from the perspective of the game players. So I’ve never shifted my attention from that, anything at all like that. So what I’ve been trying to say to the other developers as well is just the same: Be … the developer who has technical background as well as the game players who are enjoying the videogame that you’re making.

From a Wired interview with Shigeru Miyamoto.

Saamlung gallery (web design + build)

Robin and I had been working together on various projects when he approached me about designing the website for his soon-to-be-launched art gallery. Aware that we both had quite a bit on our plates, we initially aimed at creating a quick-and-easy Indexhibit site for the launch and then collaborate on a more comprehensive solution in the future. So within the week I agreed to the project, I received a brief from him and set myself to work. Several thumbnail sketches and email exchanges later, I began to experiment with Indexhibit to figure out what sort of constraints it had.

It did not look good. The Indexhibit platform may be powerful in its simplicity, with many artists, designers and galleries as happy users, but it was too restrictive for our purposes. Its fixed, default structure did not suit our purposes. For example, it didn’t allow enough flexibility in how users navigated through the different levels of the website, not to mention its reliance on a fixed, left sidebar. We quickly went on a hunt for new platforms.

I’d worked with WordPress in the past and I knew that it wasn’t optimally suited for a gallery website. So I kept it in the back pocket as a backup. We turned our eye to other CMS solutions, some of which had been built specifically for art galleries or institutions. Unfortunately, they were either too simple or too complex, and in some cases, not worth the price. Remembering that I’d read about an Indexhibit alternative in swissmiss a while back, I went back to her site to dig for it and re-discovered Stacey.

Over the next two weekends, I began fleshing out Robin’s gallery website using Stacey, building on a boilerplate placeholder website we’d rolled out previously. It took some time to learn the nuances of this new CMS system, but I eventually managed to bend it to our needs, without needing to modify our original design in any way. (Some of the information hierarchy did change based on Stacey’s constraints, but it was more a matter of swapping “a” for “b” rather than cutting any sections or features.)

Using Stacey, I rapidly prototyped a version of the site, threw it up on the web and showed it to Robin. The design was iterated over the next few weeks through a series of IM, email and face-to-face discussions. Some sections were not covered in detail in the original brief, while other pages had to be re-arranged after we filled it with real information. Most of all though, we both had strong opinions on the visual design and the information architecture, and pushed many features back and forth until both of us were happy with the end result.

The site was launched on the 15th of November, three days ahead of the gallery’s first pre-opening exhibition, and we’re both extremely happy with the way it turned out. Almost every section of the site has a different layout to match their respective information requirements; the visual design is minimalistic and focuses on the works rather than itself; and it’s robust and extendable. Much to my surprise, people have mentioned the website, to Robin and to myself, and I’ve received compliments about its simplicity, accessibility and design.

See the results for yourself: http://www.saamlung.com

P.S. The work image shown above is Adrian Wong’s Kasper Hauser, Ramachandra, and Natascha the Dog Girl of Chita, 2011.

Unraveling the mystery behind slow-loading, word-by-word dialog boxes in games

Reposted from the 3D Avatar School Team Blog.

Last Saturday we had five fifth-graders over to our office for a session of testing and feedback. The session ran smoothly, we received lots of useful feedback directly and indirectly from the students and they enjoyed the experience.

One observation that vexed me to no end was that whenever our system served up a dialog box, to tell the story or to offer instructions, the students would click it away within a split second. In some cases the box hadn’t even finished loading. In some cases they gave it one look and clicked it off – even though they afterwards mentioned that there weren’t enough instructions. (“Well you clicked them away!” I was tempted to quip.)

What I realized was that students just didn’t like to read. It sounds pretty obvious in retrospect, but in the fray of a design session, we sometimes forget such basic facts. For their part, the students thought of our product as a game and played it as such – clicking monsters rapidly upon sight and batting away any extraneous dialog boxes ASAP. (I also attribute some of this behavior to the much-hated web browser pop-ups that plague poorly designed websites.)

Thinking about how we could circumvent this swatting behavior, I suddenly remembered the text/dialog boxes of the games of my childhood. The text box would appear, and then the words would appear (sometimes accompanied by small bleeps) one by one. I was never able to skip them with the touch of a button, and the best I could do was to speed them up a little bit by holding down a button. A seriously annoying feature for a devout nerd like me, who just wanted to read the text faster.

But on Saturday, I realized that most gamers are not me. Most gamers don’t like to read through long passages of narration or dialogue, and certainly pay little heed to text instructions. After this revelation, the annoying wait attached to the text boxes of my childhood suddenly became a brilliant feature, a tried and true way of making kids at least read a little bit of the text.

Staceyapp: Longer image titles from IPTC

A little hack I made as I’ve been using Stacey to build a gallery website for a client of mine.

Reposted from Stacey‘s Get Satisfaction:

This applies to a relatively esoteric use case of images having really long titles.

Currently there’s a 60 character limit on the titles captured from the IPTC data of an image. (This limit does not apply to the description.) I’m not sure if it’s a Stacey or PHP-iptcparse limitation.

Either way, the workaround is to use the IPTC “headline.” The only thing to do is go into image.inc.php under app/asset-types, and change lines 39-41 into:

# @title
if(isset($iptc["2#105"][0]))
$this->data['@title'] = $iptc["2#105"][0];

Basically what this does is pulls the data from IPTC headline rather than IPTC title.

Syncing DEVONthink

A quick pointer to a couple of resources for those of you looking to sync DEVONthink across multiple computers:

• Jason Schafer’s post is probably the most comprehensive, and includes a use case for databases so large they don’t fit well on Dropbox.
• Andreas’ MOSX Tumbelog post is probably the most useful for regular users.

Keep in mind:

• The former uses DevonSync (10 USD) only for the large-file use case. Both include options for simply using Dropbox (free).
• You still can’t open two instances of DEVONthink at the same time, and between closing it on one computer and opening another instance on another computer, you have to allow for upload/download time on Dropbox.

Debunking Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

From the Atlantic:

To find proof that Maslow’s theory translated into real life, Diener, a University of Illinois psychologist and senior scientist for the Gallup Organization, helped design the Gallup World Poll, a landmark survey on well-being with 60,865 participants from 123 countries that was conducted from 2005 to 2010. Respondents answered questions about six needs that closely resemble those in Maslow’s model: basic needs (food, shelter); safety; social needs (love, support); respect; mastery; and autonomy. They also rated their well-being across three discrete measures: life evaluation (a person’s view of his or her life as a whole), positive feelings (day-to-day instances of joy or pleasure), and negative feelings (everyday experiences of sorrow, anger, or stress). Finally, Diener analyzed the poll data with fellow University of Illinois psychology professor Louis Tay for a study in the current edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The results are mixed. Maslow rightly saw that there are human needs that apply regardless of culture, but his ordering of these needs was not right on target. “Although the most basic needs might get the most attention when you don’t have them,” Diener explains, “you don’t need to fulfill them in order to get benefits [from the others].” Even when we are hungry, for instance, we can be happy with our friends. “They’re like vitamins,” Diener says on how the needs work independently. “We need them all.”

The study’s methodical investigation of both day-to-day positive and negative feelings and overall life evaluation uncovered novel nuances as well. As it turns out, the needs that are most linked with everyday satisfaction are interpersonal ones, such as love and respect. Our troubles, conversely, relate most to lack of esteem, lack of freedom, and lack of nourishment. Only when we look back on the quality of our lives thus far do basic needs become significant indicators for well-being.

Original article by Hans Villarica.

The Stanley Parable paints the way forward for interactive narratives

Reposted with permission from World Wide Pop.

You play Stanley, the narrator declares, a content worker drone in a nondescript office. Sitting up from your desk at work one day, you realize that everyone is gone. The narrator shepherds you towards the cafeteria, to see where everyone’s gone. On your way there, you come across a set of two doors. The narrator tells to take the one on the left, which will lead you to the cafeteria. But do you continue to follow his instructions?

So begins the Stanley Parable, a remarkable work of interactive storytelling that’s been gathering steam across the Internet on sites big and small. Wired lauds it as being “brilliant” and warns that “will mess with your head”; Kotaku praises it for “turn[ing] video game storytelling on its head”; and Ars Technica quotes one of their readers who calls it “an art-game… a work of metafiction.” But don’t be fooled by the hype, the Stanley Parable is actually a very, very small game. The total playtime for getting all of the game’s six endings clocks to under an hour, and the controls are that of a first-person shooter without any shooting (you mostly walk). Everything about the game is deceptively simple. Yet this little demo has been so well received that a remake has already been penned a month after its release. It helps that, in its current form, the game is free for download for anyone with access to Valve’s Source SDK (basically you need to have Half Life 2 or one of its derivatives).

Surrounded by so much press, the Stanley Parable has become the sudden poster child for a rich and growing sub-genre of narrative games. Better known examples of this genre include Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain or Rockstar Games’ L.A. Noire. Lesser known examples include Tale of Tales’ the Graveyard and thechineseroom’s Dear Esther. All of these games are driven by their narratives, with the gameplay playing an obviously minor and supporting role. Of course, the degree to which these are “games” varies drastically. L.A. Noire plays like a story-heavy Grand Theft Auto, whereas Dear Esther sole interactions are walking, crawling and jumping (which thechineseroom puts to surprisingly good use).

The Stanley Parable employs a similar sparsity of controls (walk, climb, flip switch), but it excels by toying with the idea of the narrative, the narrator and the illusion of free will in a video game. The game puts you in the driver’s seat in the negotiation of the relationship between player and narrator, and inadvertently offers a spirited commentary on non-linear games. The Stanley Parable‘s most outstanding feature is its six endings, all of which complement one and another while remaining markedly different. While multiple endings in games is nothing new, the Stanley Parable really nails it by drastically changing the situation and story depending on your actions. It’s not merely about making clever choices to get the “good” or “bad” ending; the Stanley Parable digs much deeper than that.

I would love to say more, but I don’t want to spoil the plot. Try it for yourself. After all, it’s free. Download now from ModDB.

Rapidly prototyping a how-this-works video in an afternoon

I’m responsible for designing and maintaining our website at work (it’s not my primary duty but an important one nonetheless). One of the problems we’d been finding recently was that people still didn’t know how our company works; again and again, people showed up to our live chat service asking simple questions like, “So classes are online?” I decided that our diagram wasn’t doing the job and that a how-this-works video (a startup classic!) might be appropriate.

Having made a marketing video, my colleague and I knew we didn’t want to shoot another professional video – the production time involved was just too much to risk on my unproven hypothesis about our website. We both agreed we wanted to get the video done and up that afternoon. After all, we could always refine it later if it proved to be the critical element on our webpage.

For our video, we wavered between just recording the audio/video for a Photoshop drawing and using the ShowMe iPad app. We eventually went with the latter because we could draw directly on a touch screen, and because the app encourages quick, lo-fi takes. (ShowMe allows you to create Khan Academy-like videos on the fly on your iPad.)

My colleague suggested that we use the previous diagram as a starting point for our new video. Taking the photos from it, we hid in a quiet corner of our office and started recording! Starting from scratch, we managed to nail the script over multiple takes over the next half hour. For my last take, I almost had it down except for one segueway where I improvised over a blank screen. Fortunately, my colleague has quite a bit of video editing experience, so he managed to chop that segment out, and add in a light soundtrack.

It took me another hour or two to get it on the web (mostly to embed a local version that worked on browsers old and new). But all in all, it was an afternoon’s work and we didn’t have to pay anyone else for it. I’ve embedded the result below.

3 acts per story, 3 acts per chapter, 3 acts per scene

From the Atomic Robo blog, Brian Clevinger reveals part of his writing process:

Each story has three acts. Each chapter of that story has three acts. Each scene of each chapter has three acts. Each conversation of each scene of each chapter has three acts. In a sense, though at this magnification our definitions begin to blur, each line of dialog has three acts.

All you need is a set up, a conflict that follows from the set up, and a resolution that follows from the conflict. This’ll come naturally with practice. It might feel a little artificial to you, especially at first…

The precise end of a given act and the beginning of the next is less important than the fact that there is a set up, a conflict that arises from that set up, and a resolution that follows from that conflict.

And if you’re a Atomic Robo fanboy like myself, you might want to check out Brian’s breakdown of Atomic Robo Vol 5, Issue 1′s into three acts (for both scene and issue).

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore: A beautiful but disorienting experience

Behold! A truly beautiful interactive iPad book, with visuals on par with some of Pixar’s works.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (FFBMML) comes in two flavors: Interactive iPad app or 15-minute animation. Both are visually lush, tell a similar-but-not-quite-the-same story and have a great soundtrack. The latter is, as you’d expect a passive experience. The former is not, and that’s where the problems come in.

Contrary to what Fast Company says, I don’t think that FFBMML “is doing it very, very right.” I think it’s a spectacular app and storybook, and its shows many signs of promise, but the marriage between story, animation and interactivity is disorienting.

Experiencing it as an adult for single-person consumption, I found the interactivity disruptive. I had the narrator audio on, which means that the male voice would speak and I would either a) tap/swipe some area of the screen while he spoke, or b) wait patiently until he was done before playing around. I was never sure which I was supposed to do; doing the former felt more engaging but sometimes the sound effects would drown out his voice, and doing the latter felt a little too staged. Eventually I went with the latter, which meant the flow of the story became very staccato: Narrator leads it on (I’m watching), I interrupt the story to play around (I’m playing). Repeat for the next page. During play I sometimes continue the story, but sometimes I’m just clicking sound effects.

Imagining how I might read it to a child, I find the interactivity too much of an afterthought. When I’ve worked in pre-schools, I would read a page of a regular paper-bound storybook and then ask the children some questions about what they see to draw them in. Or I could even break it up a little and ask them before I started reading (or even mid-sentence), if I notice that one of them was already drifting away. In this case, even if I have the narrator audio turned off and am reading off the text, the animation starts playing without my consent. I can turn off the sound effects or music, but I can’t pause the animation, which doesn’t make it a very easy storybook to read from.

What about if it’s just kids playing with it? Kids can, and will, interact with the story to become more engaged with it. But I’m not certain kids are actually becoming more engaged with the story; the interactive elements may trigger the next part of the story, but rarely do kids get to partake in the story (though the piano scene is one exception). And if it’s not about the story, then they might as well be playing a game.

Despite all of my critique, FFBMML is still probably one of the best things out there in terms of interactive storybooks. I’ve played with the Dracula app earlier and found it similarly (actually more) disorienting. If you’re looking for examples of happier marriages between storytelling and interactivity, you’d probably have to play a game.

Of course these are simply my opinions and experiences. If anyone has real experiences sharing this app with a kid, I’d love to hear about them!

You can get the Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore here.