designcult

Slides for Pig-faced Orcs: Can designers learn anything from old-school roleplaying games?

Someday I'm going to learn to write short titles.

This talk was ridiculously fun to put together, and even more fun to present. I was surprised (and pleased) to have a chance to play some D&D (4th edition Red Box intro rules) the night before—a perfect warmup.

Many thanks to the fine organizers and attendees of the 2011 IA Summit. It was lovely.

Thinking back over the talk, I think I followed my own advice inadvertantly. Give them something to manipulate—I handed out 20-sided dice to everyone who showed up. Leave gaps & messiness—I didn't have a software example for the last point. The audience supplied great ones, so that worked perfectly.

So, here are the orcs.

Pig-faced Orcs: What designers can learn from old-school role-playing games

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Event: Pig-Faced Orcs at IA Summit 2011

I'll be giving my newest talk, Pig-faced Orcs: Design lessons from old-school role-playing games at the 2011 IA Summit in Denver Colorado, on Sunday, April 3rd.

You know you want be at a 8:30 AM session to talk about Dungeons & Dragons!

Here's the spiel:

Pig-Faced Orcs: Design Lessons from Old-School Role-playing Games

Can designers learn anything from old-school role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and Traveller? Sure!

Designers of all kinds are getting comfortable applying principles of game design to non-game applications. Many of those principles date back to the early days of role-playing games, from Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson's first edition of D&D in 1974 to less well-known games like Runequest and Traveller. Game designers have been revisiting these early works and extracting wisdom from them, and I'd like to bring some of those lessons to the user experience community.

In this deliciously nerdy talk, I'll present user-experience lessons from old-school gaming, including the role of showmanship in constructing an experience, how imperfections and missing pieces can increase engagement, and the difference between sandbox and railroad designs.

I'll be handing out free 20-sided dice to all attendees.

Addendum: Yep, that's a real character sheet from when I was about 13. That campaign didn't have any thieves, but it did have "merchants" ...

Slides posted for Oauth, OpenID, Facebook Connect: Authentication Design Best Practices

I've posted slides (and notes) from the talk "Oauth, OpenID, Facebook Connect: Authentication Design Best Practices" I gave at SXSW Interactive 2011. I think it went well—I definitely had fun giving it.

(I'll try to never give a talk with a title that long and awkward again. I get tired just typing it out.)

Oauth, OpenID, Facebook Connect: Authentication Design Best Practices

View more presentations from James Reffell

Update on 3/22: Audio for the talk is also available.

Event: SXSW Interactive 2011

On March 14th, 2011 I'll be speaking at SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas. My talk is called OAuth, OpenID, Facebook Connect: Authentication Design Best Practices, but could probably also have been called "What To Do Now That Login Got All Weird."

Here's what I'm going to talk about:

Authentication on the web wasn't simple even when it was mostly usernames and passwords. Now, with 3rd-party authentication services like OAuth, OpenID, and Facebook Connect, creating good user experiences has gotten a little weirder and a little harder. I'll give some examples, and present a pragmatic approach to designing identity and authentication on the web.

Doesn't that sound awesome? If that's not enough, I have a really entertaining digression about the history of "log in". History is cool.

If you're going to SXSWi, please come!

Event: The Shifting Role of Design (LukeW edition)

LukeW will be talking about the "Shifting Role of Design" tomorrow night (Wednesday, Dec. 6th) at  the Yahoo campus:

http://www.baychi.org/calendar/20061206/

Should be a fun conversation, I'm going to try to make it.