Studies LOL

I just noticed that I had completely forgotten about one course I was supposed to do this semester - Database Design!

The course finished more than a month ago. Too bad, because this topic is interesting. Maybe I'll dive into the books and just take the exam for it at a later time.

Here's the description of the course contents, just in case someone is interested (which I have strong doubts about):
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/sippu/tisu/course06.html

Goal Derived Design

Aww s@#t. I feel like a course failing... and to add insult to the injury, it is the only really interesting course of this whole semester.

What's this course about then? Goal-derived user interface design (GDD), a hugely promising pen-and-paper method for designing software user interfaces. Other hot topic at the course are user interface design patterns, something that, from my view, feels perhaps even more interesting and applicable than design pattern thinking applied to software architecture does.

GDD, in short, means that UI specialist formulates various user goals and designs a paper prototype of the optimal user interface by means of an iterative process where the developing prototype is tested against and refactored to support a growing collection of supported goal-based tasks. The testing is done by the designer by repeatedly simulating optimal use of the prototype by an imaginary user. Design is complete when all goal-based use cases are supported to the best of the designer's ability.

GDD's strength lies in finding the right features to implement and optimising the efficacy of the user interface. Learnability issues are not addressed, and must be fixed using other methods such as cognitive walkthrough by an expert or usability reviews with end users.

If you want to take a peek at GDD and the GUIDe software process that utilises it, the best english-speaking introduction I have manged to found has to be Sari A. Laakso's paper Ensuring quality of the user interface with the GUIDe project model.

Impulse-buying some Rails hosting.

I just purchased a two year hosting plan from Bluehost.com for Space Victory.

Apart from that, I have two or three other Rails projects coming up: Lifesaver Records web store, online gallery Flyermania.org and perhaps mixoftheweek.com (which is now published using Python script to generate static html and manually FTP'd over to the server) coz I want to offer a Chinese translation of mixoftheweek.com. :D

Let's hope the Bluehost doesn't turn out to be shabby. At least on paper it looks good!

Interactive Storytelling

Chris Crawford was lecturing at the Helsinki University of Arts and Design the other day about a coming new paradigm of computer games.

He outlined the current paradigm of gaming as consisting of three main points:

• games have to be fun (*duh*... obviously)
  
• games have to have spectacle (graphics, sound effects etc.)
  
• games have to have action (what's your body count per minute?)
  

Not too far from the truth? In the action part I interrupted Chris to ask about Animal Crossing, and in the post-lecture Q&A someone commented on The Sims, but these two are obviously (despite huge sales figures of both titles) exceptions that confirm the rule: by overwhelming majority, MOST video games are about fun, spectacle and action.

What more? As a direct consequence of being a fun action spectacle, games are a failure as a mass media. No matter what the industry-sponsored studies tell you, 50+% of grown up women and men are NOT gamers, just look around to see it's a fact. Games don't outsell Hollywood, games are MOSTLY played by young men and kids.

How to fix this failure? Chris Crawford's answer is the new paradigm of gaming that he calls either interactive storytelling or entertainment software about people. Not GAMES and not GAMES 2.0, mind you.

What are the properties of this new medium then?

• Spatial reasoning is totally irrelevant in this new medium. Think of a game with no map.
• Personality model replaces physics model as the key part of the game engine.
• Selection of personality attributes in the model affects the focus and theme of the interactive story.
• Linguistic user interface (LUI) replaces the graphical user interface (GUI).
• Selection of verbs available affects the focus and theme of the interactive story.
• A toy language for a toy universe - there is NO WAY anyone can implement the language of real world in an interactive story, because that would require modeling the complete world where we live in.
• The toy language and the toy universe have to be developed hand-to-hand, not one first and the other after.
• Modeling human behaviour in a believable way is very difficult to implement. The needed algorithms do not exist yet.
  
• Does not care about current paradigm. No need for fun, spectacle or action. Like in a good movie, there can be some but it is not the main focus.
  
• Is to games what cuisine is to candy: candy sells a lot, but proper food sells even more. Cartoons sell a lot (to kids). Films sell much more (to adults). Interactive storytelling will outsell gaming 4 to 1.
  
• No evolution from games to interactive storytelling - interactive stories will happen and it will happen independently from games.

Okay. There were a bunch of interesting sidelines and fleshings-out in that master class of a lecture, but I guess the above sums the key points.

I walked away with a lot of new insight on how to kludge some storytelling aspects to my game designs (one of his key points that I didn't mention, btw, was that story in a game is always a kludge - it can be good, but it is essentially unessential), and a mental note to check cout how Mr. Crawford's storytelling engine, to be released next year, turns out.

Hello folkers.

I therefore create this blog as a way to shield fellow human beings from my outbursts related to spacevictory.com, game design, software engineering and miscellaneous side topics.

As my thoughts are now stored in one location for easy avoidance, feel free to run away.