why is it hard to do just enough?
“We take on too much, because we are terrified of too little” from The Deadline by Tom DeMarco
Archive for quote
1st follow, then detach and finally gain fluency
ShuHaRi from Aikido, parallels Teach-Train-Coach cycle.
Shu
Following a process rigidly
“…the student follows the teachings of one master precisely. He concentrates on how to do the task, without worrying too much about the underlying theory.”
Ha
Breaking away from rigidly applied process as understanding grows
“…the student begins to branch out. With the basic practices working he now starts to learn the underlying principles and theory behind the technique.“
Ri
Fluency and flexibility of process
“…the student isn’t learning from other people, but from his own practice. He creates his own approaches and adapts what he’s learned to his own particular circumstances.”
that’s what management is all about
The Deadline - Tom DeMarco
“Get the right people. Then, no matter what else you may do wrong after that, the people will save you. That’s what management is all about.”
propaganda 123
1. Name-calling
“…use of words to connect a person or idea to a negative concept. The aim is to make a person reject something without examining the evidence because of the negative associations attached to it.”
2. Attractive Generalities
“The opposite of name-calling, this involves the use of highly valued concepts and beliefs which attract general approval and acclaim. These are vague, emotionally attractive words like ‘freedom‘, ‘honor‘ and ‘love‘.”
3. Transfer
“…to carry over the authority and approval of something you respect and revere to something the propagandist would have you accept. One does this by projecting the qualities of an entity, person or symbol to another through visual or mental association.”
4. Testimonial
“…leverage the experience, authority and respect of a person and use it to endorse a product or cause.”
5. Plain Folks
“…propagandist positions him or herself as an average person just like the target audience, thereby demonstrating the ability to empathize and understand the concerns/feelings of the masses.”
6. Card Stacking
“…manipulating audience perceptions by emphasizing one side of an argument which reinforces your position … compare and contrast the best possible scenarios with the worse examples.”
7. Bandwagon
“…to suggest that ’since everyone is doing it, you should too’.”
http://www.doshdosh.com/the-art-of-propaganda-seven-common-techniques/
games & mathematics
“Playing four 15-minute sessions of board games such as snakes and ladders can improve a child’s mathematical abilities significantly, according to a study of four and five-year-olds. And the improvement in numerical tests is still measurable nine weeks later.”
http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2267895,00.html
more or less… on simplicity
“Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done - is essential”
graphic design principals of good design
Chuck Green Ideabook.com on commercial ‘graphic’ designers, with many parallels for game design.
http://www.ideabook.com/tutorials/1_view/5_principles_of_good_design.html
edited with comments;
“Design is more than meets the eye … The purpose of design is to communicate an idea. It is as much, if not more, about function as it is about looks. It is as much intellectual and visceral as it is visual. If you don’t have a clear, well designed message, you don’t have a design. Design is marketing, marketing is design”
The purpose of game design is to provide an enjoyable experience. Focus on a clear defined core experience as a base.
“Design is about communicating benefits… No matter what you’re selling or giving away, if I am your prospect, I want to know what’s in it for me. I have hard-earned money or time to invest and I rarely part with either without the promise of some return. Are you going to entertain me? Educate me? Inspire me? Solve my problems?”
Is the core experience something that players want, will identify and enjoy?
“Design is not about designers … The good designer pleads “Create a design that answers your client’s needs.” The bad designer commands “Don’t be an idiot—design something that’ll look good in your portfolio.”
You are rarely, if ever the target audience. Understand what the experience your audience will appreciate.
“Design is not an ocean it’s a fishbowl … Design and marketing ideas are not always interchangeable—be careful about the principles you apply and how you apply them.
High concepts and designs are not the same thing.
“Design is creating something you believe in … The saying goes something like this: “great advertising will kill a poor product faster than no advertising at all.” The same is true with design—good design will attract an audience faster than poor design. …Step away rather than compromise your values.”
Form over function leads to shallow experiences, function without engaging form is a dry game. Good function is the bedrock of game design.
you have 10 minutes
Ten minutes to grab the player, teach them and reward them or let them get something back from the game before their attention wanders off.
perfection, when there is nothing left to take away
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
Antoine de Saint Exupéry
can you do more than one thing at once?
“If you want to get more done, be mindful
If you want to have more time, be mindful.
Mindful means one thing at a time.
It’s how the brain works, no matter how you try to convince yourself you can do it (although there is evidence that fast media/video-gamer kids are a little faster at switching. Not because they have a younger brain, but because their brains were more wired for this pace at a younger age).”
“In the flow state, Csikszentmihalyi found, people engage so completely in what they are doing that they lose track of time. Hours pass in minutes. All sense of self recedes. At the same time, they are pushing beyond their limits and developing new abilities. Indeed, the best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to capacity. People emerge from each flow experience more complex, Csikszentmihalyi found.”
The Art of Work [Fast Company] via Find your flow [lifehacker.com]
“The human brain, with its hundred billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections, is a cognitive powerhouse in many ways. “But a core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two things at once,” said René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University.”
under promise, over deliver
“…a law client who was promised something in two weeks but received it in one was vastly happier than a client who was promised something in one day but received it in four. ‘Under-promise, over-deliver’ became her mantra.”
the right time is just before you forget
“…the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?
Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It’s too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.”
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak?currentPage=all
the 50-50 nature of communication
Osmo Wiio’s laws of communication;
- If communication can fail, it will.
- If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm.
- There is always somebody who knows better than you what you meant by your message.
- The more communication there is, the more difficult it is for communication to succeed.
(http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/986-osmo-wiio-communication-usually-fails-except-by-accident)
General Patton’s ‘goals not tasks’ quote
“Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.”
“A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.”
it’s social
Make it social and face to face for more fun.
“…hang out with other gamers all the time, but it’s mostly in multiplayer online play, using headsets. It’s social, sure. But as any psychologist will tell you, hanging out in real life allows for even richer styles of communication to emerge. In face-to-face mode, we’re better at picking up the little nuances — frustration, glee, sarcasm, subvocalized ranting, body language — that build team cohesion, and allow us to game with a positively Vulcan level of mind meld.”
Anthropomorphize everything
“People respond to people. Faces and stick-figures, however crudely drawn, immediatelyelicit attention, understanding, and reaction. Whether to show relationships and quantities,emphasize a point, or just provide a sense of scale, draw people in by drawing in people.”
listen for what they need?
“We don’t ask consumers what they want. They don’t know. Instead we apply our brainpower to what they need, and will want, and make sure we’re there, ready.”
Akio Morita, Founder of Sony
sell addiction
Achieving flow, consistent rewards and progression should create an addictive experience.
“MMORPGs, tobacco, alcohol, credit. Addictive endeavours. Games=fun/escapism, drugs=euphoria/escapism, credit=”success”. Inescapable products make customers slaves. Could even add security to list, guns/SUV’s/RFID/taxes=”security”, but it’s tangential and political. A new Monopoly board recently released eliminates paper money favor of digitized credit system. Brainwash em young, get em hooked on credit and indebted forever!”
design language: satisfying death
In hard fun games, dying can be a release and crafted to be a good, satisfying experience.
“Ravaja reaches an amazingly counter-intuitive conclusion: Gamers don’t like shooting their opponents, but they’re suffused with pleasure when they themselves are shot dead… Dying was, in some way, fun.”
“His much weirder experimental result, though, is our thrill at dying. Ravajas thinks this might occur because getting killed is “transient relief from engagement”: A first-person shooter is so incredibly stressful that we’re happy to get any respite, even if it requires being blown to pieces.”
“…in a shooter like Call of Duty 4, the emotional current flows like this: I’ll be racing through a war-torn building, hunted down by cackling terrorists, and watching as the blood leaches into the periphery of my vision. My stomach’s in knots, and I’m frantically looking for cover when boom — I’ll stumble into a room full of guys with shotguns and get a face full of pain.
As I watch my corpse crumple to the ground, sure, I feel annoyed. But my annoyance isn’t as powerful as my sense of release: I can feel my whole body unwind. Indeed, I’m often so wrapped up in the game that I don’t even realize how badly I’m clenched up. I may not want to die; but for the sake of my mental health, I probably need to.
Yet, not all deaths are equal. This sounds strange to say, but there are games I enjoy getting killed in more than others, because some designers have a much better sense of how to craft an aesthetically — and ludologically — satisfying death. ““You could think of it as “the architecture of death,” and game designers ought to pay more attention to it.”
http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/commentary/games/2008/03/gamesfrontiers_0310
