Design: February 2008 Archive Page

It probably only makes sense if you pay attention to Lego sets, but its made my kids and me all laugh.

Grand Text Auto introduced me to the excellent indie mini-game Passage.  Play it. It takes a few minutes to download and about 5 minutes to play. I'm misty-eyed.

Play it!

Retro Sabotage remixes Pac-Man.  Lots more where that came from.

Via MetaFilter.

Lisa Zyga, Physorg.com:

The basis of the 2x4-inch "Digital Tattoo Interface" is a Bluetooth device made of thin, flexible silicon and silicone. It´s inserted through a small incision as a tightly rolled tube, and then it unfurls beneath the skin to align between skin and muscle. Through the same incision, two small tubes on the device are attached to an artery and a vein to allow the blood to flow to a coin-sized blood fuel cell that converts glucose and oxygen to electricity. After blood flows in from the artery to the fuel cell, it flows out again through the vein.

On both the top and bottom surfaces of the display is a matching matrix of field-producing pixels. The top surface also enables touch-screen control through the skin.

Thanks for a very creepy link, Josh.

Aardvarchaeology has a fascinating piece on abandoned suburban treehouses.

These sites and their formation processes reflect children's psychological characteristics. Kids have little sense of order, short memories and strange rationality. They also have no idea that childhood is brief and transient. They will happily fill their treehouses with junk without any thought that they might one day stop coming there. When adolescence strikes and the hormones get going, old childish haunts like these suddenly become the last places they want to visit. So everything is left wherever it dropped the last time someone came to play in the house.

Grownups hardly ever leave their sites that way: we keep any useful stuff and tidy up the place before we leave. Often we will even tear the house down and bring the building materials to our next place of habitation. The grownup type of site most similar to abandoned treehouses is the homeless substance-abuser camp, which is also inhabited by people with thinking impairments. Such sites may be abruptly abandoned when their inhabitants die of overdoses, get thrown into jail or find someone with an apartment who's willing to take them in.

And the treehouse sites are hardly ever cleaned up. In fact, the children's parents often have only a vague notion of where the treehouse is. They may help to build it, but they don't feel responsible for it. It's out in the woods where only children and mushroom pickers see it: out of sight and out of mind. The mess there would never be tolerated in the back yard, just as most Westerners of today feel really uncomfortable in the stench and litter of Third World villages.

Interactive fiction author Emily Short offers a thoughtful analysis of the function of designing puzzles that permit the player to come up with original solutions. She refers to her game Metamorphoses, which includes a complex physical world model that includes such concepts as size, shape, weight, etc.  For instance, you can beat down a door by enlarging a needle so that it is the size of a battering ram, and you can turn your simple clothing into a suit of armor by converting the material from natural fibers to metal.  I wish I had the time today to give her thoughts the attention they deserve...

Metamorphoses includes several in-game processes (resizing objects, breaking objects, changing the material substances of objects, piercing objects with a needle), and it's possible to string these together -- change an item to glass and then break it, say, or change an item to something that isn't too hard, then pierce it, then resize it so that the hole is large, then change the item into a heavier substance... But I did anticipate most of these sequences, in part because there weren't that many problems available to be solved. Emergent solutions tend to happen more often when there are a large number of puzzles, so that the world model developed to account for problem A can also be leveraged, unexpectedly, against problem B. So such games also probably need to be of a reasonable size.

So I hypothesize that a game allowing emergent solutions needs all of the following:

• attributes common to most game objects that affect interaction
• processes, effective on many game items, that allow the player to change attributes (or produce an item with new attributes out of an old item, as in the case of breaking the tail off the rat)
• a selection of processes that can be used in combination (freeze rat then smash it); one way to think about this at the design phase might be to draw a chart of attributes and processes, showing which processes convert which attributes into which others; the more long chains are possible, the more complex the plans the player can execute
  
• sufficient number of puzzles that the solution space becomes too large for the author to anticipate at the design phase 

Once we have all those features, though, we run into some other serious design problems.

Boing Boing interviews Bjarne P. Tveskov, a Lego designer who created many of the classic Space sets from the 80s.  I still have all my space legos, and my kids and I regularly play with them.

My LEGO career started when I was 17 years old; I saw an ad in the Sunday newspaper, they were looking for designers for the Space product line. No formal qualifications were required so just for fun I applied. They sent me a big box of LEGO bricks and asked me to create a Space model from imagination. Still got the model I made back then. (image coming later). At the interview I realized that the job was a full-time position in Billund, initially I thought that maybe it could be a freelance gig, but no. So when suddenly I was offered the job I had to ask my parents if it was OK if I quit high-school to become a Spaceship designer. They said it was fine, thinking I could always return to school later when I was done with the toy adventure. (But it never happened)