I just finished playing Braid, Jonathan Blow’s critically acclaimed indie game. Get on Steam and play it! Now. Really. It’s that good.
More than enough has been said about Braid, so I’ll just focus on three things that blew me away.
1) Exploring every aspect of a gameplay space.
Braid is one of those games (much like Portal), that takes a gameplay concept and explores every corner of it. The basic mechanic is simple – you can reverse time – but every level brings with it a new twist.
2) Absolutely no filler.
Blow has crafted a very compact experience which you takes just a few hours to complete, and as his walkthrough pointedly points out, massively rewards you for doing so. Because each puzzle is different, the feeling of satisfaction from getting that puzzle piece at the end is intense. This maintains the beautiful balance between the pleasure of unravelling its delightfully mind-bending mechanics and the manual dexterity to actually execute (reminds me of my first love, rock climbing).
3) The theme, ending and overall storytelling.
The story is told through obscure fragments that don’t inform as much as they set up a mood. You’re introduced to this Princess you are seeking in these strange worlds, but it’s never obvious who you or this character is.
This aspect is arguably where Braid pushes the boundaries of games the furthest. The main theme of this game is regret (if you don’t mind massive spoilers you can see just how much here) and this is supported by the time reversal mechanic, the painterly, ethereal art style, the nostalgic locations, the distorted pop culture references. If you’ve played Sanitarium, you’ll have some idea what I mean.
Most games justify their mechanics through storytelling, aesthetics or simply because they are fun. This isn’t bad in itself, but what a huge achievement to set up gameplay that in itself reinforces the very theme of the game (in the same way that the Munch’s brush style enhances The Scream). Another argument for the idea of game mechanics as art.
The final level (scene?) is a masterpiece in itself, because it wrenches all the game mechanics together in a way that immediately makes you go through the gut-wrenching sense of realization, hopelessness and regret (normal computer game topics, right?) that Braid is ultimately about.
The game industry is undermining itself by focusing on epic adventures that take millions to produce and dozens of hours to play. Games like Red Dead Redemption and Mass Effect are brilliant big budget experiences, but their core gameplay is often repetitive. Your gun might get nicer over the course of the (admittedly awesome) story, but you’re still shooting things in much the same way. Their length also serves to make them inaccessible. Imagine if you could only see one or two films a year because each took 40 hours.
It is just as valuable to create a highly focused game that fully explores its space, avoids repetition and most importantly delivers a lasting emotional impact.
Amongst the most fundamental storytelling techniques is to tread the path less travelled. That’s why you don’t see many scenes in movies where characters are carrying out mundane tasks – going to the the bathroom or having breakfast – except when those actions have unusual significance and move the story forwards. A good storyteller doesn’t waste our time with characters who make sensible, conservative decisions. Instead, the characters get put in situations where they do things that we would never do.
Spike Jonze’s new short, “I’m Here”, apart from being a truly wonderful short, is a wonderful illustration of this principle. If there was no limit to what you could do to save your true love, how far would you go?
So sit back, open your mind and your heart, and watch it here.
PS – The idea of a virtual screening with limited places and where you can connect to the other watchers is very interesting. Is it pretentious? Is it charming? Is it necessary?
Jane McGonigal from the Institute of the Future at TED. Millions of gamers have a fully fledged education in skills that could help save the real world… if it was more like a game.
10,000 hours
“The average young person today in a country with a strong gamer culture will have spent 10,000 hours playing online games, by the age of 21. For children in the United States 10,080 hours is the exact amount of time you will spend in school from fifth grade to high school graduation if you have perfect attendance.”
“So, we have an entire parallel track of education going on where young people are learning as much about what it takes to be a good gamer as they are learning about everything else in school. And some of you have probably read Malcom Gladwell’s new book Outliers. So, you would have heard of his theory of success, the 10,000 hour theory of success. It’s based on this great cognitive science research that if we can master 10,000 hours at effortful study, at anything by the age of 21, we will be virtuosos at it. We will be as good at whatever we do as the greatest people in the world. And so, now what we’re looking at is an entire generation of young people who are virtuoso gamers.”
What are they getting good at?
1) Urgent optimism
They believe that they are capable of changing the world – and ready to take action at a moment’s notice.
2) Weaving a tight social fabric
Gamers are masters at rapidly creating strong social bonds. Also, it’s interesting to note that we like people more after we’ve played with them.
3) Blissful productivity
Gaming exemplifies that we are happier working hard than relaxing if the work is structured right.
4) Epic meaning
Gamers love (and are used to) being attached to world changing stories.
Right now, we are using games to escape into virtual worlds, but it doesn’t have to be that way. These skills could apply to the real world if the real world was redesigned to work more like a game. Just one example: World Without Oil
“We made this game in 2007. This is an online game in which you try to survive an oil shortage. The oil shortage is fictional, but we put enough online content out there for you to believe that it’s real, and to live your real life as if we’ve run out of oil. So, when you come to the game you sign up, you tell us where you live. And then we give you real-time news videos data feeds that show you exactly how much oil costs, what’s not available, how food supply is being affected, how transportation is being affected, if schools are closed, if their is rioting. And you have to figure out how you would live your real life as if this were true. And then we ask you to blog about it, to post videos, to post photos. ”
“Nobody wants to change how they live just because it’s good for the world, or because we are supposed to. But if you immerse them in an epic adventure and tell them, “We’ve run out of oil.” This is an amazing story and adventure for you to go on. Challenge yourself to see how you would survive. Most of our players have kept up the habits that they learned in this game.”
She also talks about two others: Superstruct which asks gamers to come up with smart ideas to solve the world’s problems (she’s got 5,000 and counting) and Evoke, a crash course in social innovation.
Great stuff, and if you’re wondering what that might feel like on a more everyday level, watch this genius talk by Jesse Schell from Carnegie Mellon University.
In Canabalt, your pixelated running man runs for his life through a dystopian world reminiscent of the Matrix, jumping from rooftop to collapsing rooftop and getting steadily faster until he either plummets into the ground, runs into the debris that’s been left lying around or is bombed into a fine mist from the sky. It’s all controlled with one button: all you have to do is jump at the right time to keep accelerating. Best of all, the game was developed in only five days.
The game nails the sense of speed and control, making it a perfect example of flow. How?
Sense of control
The one button controls make it easy to feel in control, but only because they enable you to successfuly tackle every challenge thrown at you (within the limits of your skill, that is). It seems that one of the basic principles of flow in games is that it is enhanced when controls become more sensitive, i.e. as you have to do less to meet the challenges thrown at you. Think of the kung fu master blocking punches and kicks with one arm with a look of thinly disguised boredom on his face. As a bonus, the simplicity of the execution means there are no extraneous elements to pull you out of flow
Sense of speed
There is a limit to the brain’s reaction speed, but you can increase the perceived speed of the character through a few tricks, improving the sense of flow because you make the player feel that they’re going even more awesomely fast. Canabalt uses a bunch of tricks:
Four layers of parallax with giant shadowy machines stomping around the background create an epic scale
The occasional jet flying in the opposite direction adds an extra layer in front
The repetition of the windows/bricks in the buildings adds extra speed
The character animation is spot on
Sense of impact
This is related to the sense of control. Here, the buildings that collapse as you jump on them and the physics of the broken glass bouncing around you and birds taking off as you run through their midst amplify your involvement in the action. The more of an impact your actions have on the world, the greater the resulting sense of flow when you successfuly keep things moving at the edge of your ability.
Synaesthesia
The music is a perfect complement to the action. It could do even more: synchronizing the visuals and the sound effects (as Audiosurf does), would increase the sense of involvement even further.
Overall, Canabalt is a pretty brilliant case study in how to generate flow.
This a really wonderful promotion by Colle+McVoy for Erbert and Gerbert, a sandwich chain: the CandleCannon!
Erbert & Gerbert’s has been making Subs Worth Discovering for 20 years. To help them celebrate, we decided to have more than just a party. So we built the world’s largest and most powerful air vortex cannon and had ourselves a Blowout.
It’s a great ad, but that’s not what I wanted to point out. Just look how delighted and excited the people in the video are! Although the video is planned, the reactions are genuine.
The CandleCannon is probably in large part a reflection of the ad agency’s culture, and I don’t know if Erbert and Gerbert is the kind of place where that would happen naturally. Nevertheless, companies should aspire to be places where employees can do things like the CandleCannon, and where there is enough soul and humour to create reactions like overjoyed jumping and hugging once in a while.
The corporate culture that can create a better world feels like this video. Wouldn’t you want to be somewhere with that kind of spirit?
An recent article from the Economist made me think about how companies could learn from the distributed innovation of open source to find the great ideas within. The article is about InnoCentive, which helps connect problems with solutions:
[Innocentive] is based on a simple idea: if a firm cannot solve a problem on its own, why not use the reach of the internet to see if someone else can come up with the answer? Companies, which InnoCentive calls “seekers”, post their challenges on the firm’s website. “Solvers”, who number almost 180,000, compete to win cash “prizes” offered by the seekers. Around 900 challenges have been posted so far by some 150 firms including big multinationals such as Procter & Gamble and Dow Chemicals. More than 400 have been solved. InnoCentive reckons the approach can work for innovations in all sorts of fields, from chemistry to business processes and even economic development. It has formed a partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation, a charity, to help solve problems posted by non-profits working in poor countries, with some initial success.
InnoCentive is now looking inwards with a new service called Innocentive @Work which “replicates the solver network inside a firm”:
Challenges are first offered to “seeker” companies’ own employees. Only if they cannot help is the outside network brought into play. “Companies often don’t know how much they already know,” says Dwayne Spradlin, InnoCentive’s chief. An early challenge at one firm was to find a source of some data, which, it turned out, had already been acquired by another division.
This is particularly interesting given that InnoCentive began in 2000 as e.Lilly, a place for pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly to put out the problems it was failing to solve internally.
Right under their noses
The fact that InnoCentive is successfully being used to solve problems shows the power of setting up a structured framework for innovation. Why is this important? Let’s take a look at the open source software community and ask this: how can thousands of individual coders collaborate on something as huge as Linux or Android?
A large part is the framework in which contributors operate. Much of the coding that needs to be done is well defined and there is a solid framework for executing the solutions. Want to fix a bug? Go into the source code repository, download the project, work on your bit, test it and then upload it for community approval. All your contributions are tracked, and you can see who’s working on what and resolve conflicts. Because of this, a lone coder can quickly change just a single line of code (that’s what most do), while at the same time huge companies can put thousands of their people to task (for example, IBM has contributed 6.3% of Linux, and Sun is mostly responsible for Java).
What would happen if the strengths of this model were applied to business problems, which are a whole lot fuzzier? By what framework could a salesperson easily fix a bug in a large marketing campaign? Or an engineer contribute to an ethnographic study for a new vacuum cleaner? To be fair, programming has the particular advantage of being a granular, text based medium, but tools like Innocentive@Work could make problems visible within an organisation and give solutions a place to go (and the solvers to be rewarded).
InnoCentive is not the only service to link problems and solvers. In the same space are Hypios, InnovationXchange, NineSigma and Tekscout in US, PRESANS in France, Innoget in Spain, and Fellowforce. Moreover, this approach is not only for research and development in the traditional sense: just look at the success of Threadless in generating t-shirt designs, Fold.it for science (see NYT article) or the several dozen sites like TopCoder and ODesk which allow you to outsource self contained business problems, from coding to marketing.
As web based applications, these companies are essentially a testing ground for highly automated processes which allow people to contribute innovative solutions (or even just good work). Organisations should therefore keep a close on eye on the fittest of these services to see exactly what they do to make it easy to specify problems, maintain relationships with solvers and to communicate clearly.
Too often, innovation is forced to squeeze through bureaucracy. Implemented correctly, such automated frameworks could make it look a lot more meritocratic.
October’s DISCOVER magazine has a nice article about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the colossal particle accelerator which amongst many other things may reveal the Higgs Boson and the secret of gravity. The LHC is 27km long and requires a frankly ridiculous amount of power to fulfill its single goal of making particles crash at high speeds. But how much is “a frankly ridiculous amount”? What exactly is a “high speed crash” in particle physics?
‘Just the facts’ is only enough if your audience can put them in context without your help
Wikipedia’s entry, likely updated by and for professionals with more than a passing knowledge of the field puts it as follows:
The collider tunnel contains two adjacent parallel beam pipes that intersect at four points, each containing a proton beam, which travel in opposite directions around the ring. Some 1,232 dipole magnets keep the beams on their circular path, while an additional 392 quadrupole magnets are used to keep the beams focused, in order to maximize the chances of interaction between the particles in the four intersection points, where the two beams will cross. In total, over 1,600 superconducting magnets are installed, with most weighing over 27 tonnes. Approximately 96 tonnes of liquid helium is needed to keep the magnets at their operating temperature of 1.9 K, making the LHC the largest cryogenic facility in the world at liquid helium temperature. Superconducting quadrupole electromagnets are used to direct the beams to four intersection points, where interactions between accelerated protons will take place.
Once or twice a day, as the protons are accelerated from 450 GeV to 7 TeV, the field of the superconducting dipole magnets will be increased from 0.54 to 8.3 teslas (T). The protons will each have an energy of 7 TeV, giving a total collision energy of 14 TeV (2.2 ?J). At this energy the protons have a Lorentz factor of about 7,500 and move at about 99.9999991% of the speed of light. It will take less than 90 microseconds (?s) for a proton to travel once around the main ring – a speed of about 11,000 revolutions per second. Rather than continuous beams, the protons will be bunched together, into 2,808 bunches, so that interactions between the two beams will take place at discrete intervals never shorter than 25 nanoseconds (ns) apart. However it will be operated with fewer bunches when it is first commissioned, giving it a bunch crossing interval of 75 ns.
[...] While operating, the total energy stored in the magnets is 10GJ (equivalent to 2.4 tons of TNT) and the total energy carried by the two beams reaches 724 MJ (173 kilograms of TNT).
Technical, yes. Informative? Maybe, but only if you know enough about the field to make sense of the units of measurement presented. This is probably enough for a particle physicist. It likely doesn’t generate understanding in a layman.
If you need to, give useful contexts to the facts
DISCOVER’s Lisa Randall goes one step further in an attempt to translate for the reader:
“I learned more about the backstory [of the Large Hadron Collider] during my visit. Keep in mind that the ultimate goal for collisions is a center of mass energy of 14 TeV, or trillion electron volts. I realise these might be unfamiliar units, so to give some perspective, it is seven times the energy of the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab in Illinois, which is presently the highest-energy machine, and 15,000 times the energy contained in the mass of a single proton at rest” Lisa Randall, ‘The Heart of the Matter’
The effort is laudable, but it falls short of really communicating what 14 trillion electron volts because it uses examples that are only meaningful to the kind of reader who most likely already understands that unit of measurement. The problem is that electron volts, Fermilaband the energy of a stationary proton are all part of the same language.
Know what language your audience is speaking
Description is not communication. You can’t deposit knowledge in a person’s head, just as you can’t stick new leaves directly onto a plant. Successful communication is about feeding your audience the right blend of facts, stories, examples and experiences so that their understanding of a topic can grow within what they already know.
In both cases, the comparisons given (“largest cryogenic facility”, “99.9999991% of the speed of light”, “seven times Fermilab”, “mass of a singe proton”) will not mean much without similar facts in their mind acting as ‘hooks’. But what if you put it in terms that made comparison easier?
At their top speed, these protons will travel the 27km circuit (about 10 laps of a Nascar oval, or two thirds of a marathon), 3,500 in the time it takes to blink an eye
Each of the 1,600 superconducting magnets arranged around the track (one every fifty feet on average) weighs about the same as two fully laden container trucks
This kind of translation isn’t always necessary, but always make sure to speak the same language as your audience. It’s not what you say that matters, it’s what they understand.
Last week’s post about the Tokyo’s National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Miraikan) showed just one of the many cool exhibits they had running this summer. Here’s a few more.
Paro, the Therapeutic Robot
First up, a robot created entirely to create an emotional bond with its owner. Paro the robotic seal has been around since 2003, there are now about 1,000 of them in use in Japan, and you can get one at Japan Trend Shop for just under $6,000. In the words of its creator, Takanori Shibata, (well, his organisation’s website)
Unlike industrial robots, “Mental Commitment Robots” are developed to interact with human beings and to make them feel emotional attachment to the robots. Rather than using objective measures, these robots trigger more subjective evaluations, evoking psychological impressions such as “cuteness” and comfort. Mental Commitment Robots are designed to provide 3 types of effects: psychological, such as relaxation and motivation, physiological, such as improvement in vital signs, and social effects such as instigating communication among inpatients and caregivers.
The striking thing about Paro is what its designers have done to make it feel… alive. It weighs the same as a baby, is warm (because of the machinery inside) and fuzzy. It responds to your voice and touch and its power cord looks like a pacifier. It makes plaintive noises, which instantly make you want to comfort it.
And yet, you know that it’s a robot, so it’s kinda creepy. The reactions of the girl in the video are a fine lesson on the effects of the uncanny valley .
Even so, it’s fascinating as it addresses the emotive aspect of technology, which will become more and more important as smart machines continue to become ubiquitous. It may also be directly helpful to improve the brain function of elderly dementia patients, for example, and the principle of animal therapy – creating an emotional connection to empower the sick and needy – seems sound. It’s an interesting way of introducing this relationship into animal un-friendly environments like hospitals.
A mechanical model of the internet. Each ball is a ‘bit’, and kids can send messages between five terminals in ‘packets’ of 16 balls. Fun, accurate and impressive in its scale. Video and pics below.
Interfaces
Just for the interaction designers reading this, this was a display where you could drive a virtual vehicle around using a steering wheel (of course), but also with a joystick, by tilting a mug (!), a keyboard or even with reins. Cute, and hopefully inspiring at least one kid a day to a future in the field.
Human body
The components of the human body. Nuff said.
The Story of Dark Matter
Another comic book visualisation of a complex topic: the genesis of the universe and whatever happened to those poor antimatter particles.
Ryota Kuwakubo’s Media Art
Ryota Kuwakubo creates pieces of interactive art that get you to think about how we interact with technology, and also how technology makes us interact with each other. Case in point the pixel videophones that change their expression based on the tone of your voice, the beach ball that makes a sound when you bounce it, the robotic eyes that suddenly give mundane objects a face and a personality, and most awesomely the strap-on tail that tries to help balance you. Mind-expanding.
Some pictures below, though as I didn’t get a chance to fully document his exhibits at the Miraikan it’s worth checking out the many other places which have reported on him.
The first exhibit I’ll mention is particularly relevant for readers of this blog. It’s dedicated to five types of innovation:
Alternative: “New ideas unconstrained by traditional values give us the ability to create new things”
Serendipity: “Unexpected developments give us the ability to make fortunate discoveries”
Integration: “Combining and integrating things with different properties for a single purpose gives us the ability to generate new things”
Associative: “Identifying qualities shared between things that seem at first to be unrelated can by association give us the ability to generate new perspectives”
Mimic(ry): Mimicking existing solutions from the world and reproducing them in new ways
“The Spring of Wishes” Stunningly for a museum populated with both adults and children, each form of innovation is explained in detail. But first you should decide what you want at the spring of wishes, as the museum calls it. What do you want innovation to help you with? Out in the real world, this may well be the hardest step.
“The River of Creativity” Choose a path to follow, and you first get a small example (e.g. Le Corbusier’s domino system of supporting a structure with a framework of columns, an alternative to using the walls).
Then a bigger example (e.g. an electronic tree mimicking photosynthesis):
Then a (sometimes frighteningly) detailed explanation of the bigger example. Check out this cutesy book describing photosynthesis, and look carefully at the text. Quote: “Outside the village the skilled chef Rubisco traps carbon dioxide, mixes it with RuBP fruit and then adds the special ingredient NADPH. Simmering this concotion over the ATP flame, he makes his delicious GAP jam.”
Finally, a parting shot with three more examples of products generated through this process. Take the serendipitously discovered post-it notes, velcro or, of course (ahem), the large-scale synthesis of carbon nanotubes.
“The Sea of Fertility”. But wait! That’s not it. At the end of each curving paths through innovation takes you to a magnetic blackboard wall where visitors are invited to use the technologies they’ve just discovered to solve the world’s tortuous problems. Each blue disc has a technology (solar power, biocompatible materials, fuel cells, etc…). Can you connect them in a useful way?
As with most of the other exhibits in this museum, this one is almost shockingly in-depth, which is both its strength and its weakness. I was blown away by what I learned (I’d never quite got what a lab-on-a-chip was before it was introduced in the segment on integrative creativity), but I wonder if it got through to children. They had plenty of toys to play with, and while I was there I saw a bunch of them scribbling furiously on the wall of innovation, but how much did they get out of it?
Kids are smart, and adults are part of the audience too. What’s the right balance between condescending simplicity and depth you can really learn from?
I saw this today in Walgreens’ pharmacy section – a magnifying lens to help customers read text on drug packaging. It was right by products aimed at elderly people, so fading eyesight would definitely be an issue.
Helpful, right? Yes and no.
On one hand, this tool magnifies the problem of designs which squash instructions together in hard to read text. On the other hand, it helps the minority of people who literally cannot read the packaging but otherwise doesn’t get in the way. It’s not obvious whether this is satisfactory. How clearly does packaging need to be designed? What is the tradeoff between information and marketing?
Is it enough to help the user deal with a design problem, or should you attack the problem directly?
One company to have gone a step further is Target, which adopted the thesis project of a designer called Deborah Adler. According to her research, 60% of Americans don’t take their medication correctly, and she decided to do something about it when the same error put her grandmother in hospital.
Here is her design, which addressed the problems of the standard brown plastic tubes we’ve all come to know and, well, know. The main issues: inconsistent labeling, brand names taking priority over drug names, confusing numbers, poor color combinations, hard to read curved shape and tiny type. The redesign is covered in detail on the New York Magazine website.
“I’m guessing that it’s not just the design patents that have kept other pharmacies from mimicking the Target pill bottle. The pill bottle isn’t just a new SKU in a retail environment or just a piece of packaging that can be swapped out for the old design. The bottle is just the visible tip of a much deeper system of drug delivery that would take significant time and investment to emulate.
All this comes down to the fundamental question: what problem are we here to fix? Deborah Adler chose a much broader framing (“Making sure that people take the right drugs at the right time”) than Walgreens (“Helping some people to read the packaging”). Balancing the frame of action against the resources available is one of the most important tasks of a designer. Tricky.
Jane McGonigal from the Institute of the Future at TED. Millions of gamers have a fully fledged education in skills that could help save the real world… if it was more like a game. 10,000 hours “The average young person today in a country with a strong gamer culture will have spent 10,000 hours playing [...]
Tokyo’s National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Miraikan) doesn’t pull its punches. While many museums seek to entertain, this one hits you with beautifully presented information that rewards your attention with real teaching. The first exhibit I’ll mention is particularly relevant for readers of this blog. It’s dedicated to five types of innovation: Alternative: [...]
In their heyday, the existence of Native American Indians revolved around the buffalo. They used every part: “The buffalo gave us everything we needed. Without it we were nothing. Our tipis were made of his skin. His hide was our bed, our blanket, our winter coat. It was our drum, throbbing through the night, alive, [...]
