designcult

What I'm thinking about this week

1. Boots! In January 1996, I was in London briefly, following a semester at Glasgow University. I bought a pair of Dr. Marten's boots from the flagship store in . They were a sort of wingtip half boot, and I loved them. That's them up on the right there. I've owned various boots over the years, and these were worn more and over a longer period of time than any others. Only a pair of boots acquired from Stompers in the 90s came close. The latter have been relegated to "garden use only" for a while now, and the Docs are just thrashed. Neither model is still made (though there are some things that come close). So last week, we went over to the Haight St. and I picked up a pair of Langstons in burgundy. And I'm in love all over again ...
2. Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix. Despite being married to someone who knows a great deal about art history, I basically knew nothing about this painting or the painter (though I knew the image). I listen to the wonderful In Our Time BBC podcasts, so I got a thorough introduction from Melvyn Bragg's usual group of slightly dotty British academics. 
3. The history of finance, and investment theory. Not my usual area, but I'm being guided by Adam Nash's personal finance reading list and working my way through one by one. 
4. Visual (and to some extent audio) design in classic science-fiction movies. (And one newer one.) The ones with the white palettes, san serif typefaces and shininess.  Think 2001 and Saturn 3.  Also Tron Legacy, but the shiny white bits rather than the glowy black bits. Plus sinister computer voices like Hal and GladOS from Portal. The fun part is this relates to the previous item (at least in my head).
5. How most of the important developments & conflicts in online identity & authentication were predicted (sort of ) by Max Headroom. 
6. Occupy Wall Street. There's a lot to think about, but this post pointing out how strangely some of the OWS dynamic echoes Bruce Sterling's 1998 book Distractions I had to reread it. Sterling has a knack for predicting future socio-political events in ways SF doesn't usually quite do (see: drone assassinations in Islands in the Net). Distractions isn't nearly as good a book as Islands in the Net, but it has it's moments, and it certainly resonates today:
   
   

   “Why are there millions of nomads now? They don’t have jobs, man! You don’t care about ‘em! You don’t have any use for ‘em! You can’tmake any use for them! They’re just not necessary to you. Not at all. Okay? So, you’re not necessary to them, either. Okay? They got real tired of waiting for you to give them a life. So now, they just make their own life by themselves, out of stuff they find lying around. You think the government cares? The government can’t even pay their own Air Force.”

   “A country that was better organized would have a decent role for all its citizens.”

   “Man, that’s the creepy part — they’re a lot better organized than the government is. Organization is the only thing they’ve got! They don’t have money or jobs or a place to live, but organization, they sure got plenty of that stuff.”

San Francisco through other eyes

An indulgence: seeing my home, San Francisco, through other eyes. With music and video.

One. Mike Skinner visits briefly.

 

Two. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs bust out of the Warfield (presumably) and wander (with some magic geography jumps) through a rainy downtown.

 

The latter captures, perfectly, how magical this city can be, especially when it's damp and rainy and you're wandering downtown at night. (With your leather on.)

 

 

 

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" ...

"Don't blame me! I voted for blood."

Bruce Sterling just posted this transcript of a talk he gave in 2009. I read in on my phone on the BART this afternoon, cackling to myself like a crazy person. There's a lot of good in here, but this bit:

Why are Gen-X goths? Why are they goths rather than hippies, beatniks? Why do they like to dress up like dead people? That’s their temperament.

When you’re a young goth, you dress up like a dead person because that’s something grownups do. Dying.

But if you’re an adult Gen-Xer and you’re dressed up as a goth, it’s like “Don’t blame me — because I’m already dead! I’m not morally responsible, I’m not a political actor, it’s not my fault, look, I’m a vampire. Don’t blame me! I voted for blood.” Or, whatever. It’s gothic.

Ow. That hits home. Followed by:

Okay, I want to offer you a general principle here. For a Gothic generation like yours, this is going to be painful for you. I mean, really a cognitive upset.

“Stop acting dead.”

Now, you think that acting dead is a virtue. Because you’ve been trained to behave as is if you were dead for a long time, and it actually appeals to your temperament as a generation. It’s your default position.

But you have to stop it. Because Hair shirt Green, which is most of the things that you had on your action list there, Hairshirt Green just changes the polarity of the twentieth century.

It’s just the opposite of consumer culture. It’s like Satanism for a consumer culture. And all Satanists are actually Christians. It’s not really a different way to live. And it’s not something that’s going to fulfil you.

Now, how do you know if you’re acting dead? Well, there’s a test for this. It’s the Great-Grandfather Principle.

You’re saying: I’m going to do something morally worthwhile that’ll make me feel proud of myself. But does your dead great-grandfather do a better job of it than you?

For instance, saving water. Okay, water is indestructible, first of all. You cannot possible damage water unless you turn it into hydrogen and oxygen. Then it just spontaneously recombines.

But you’re trying to save water, because you’re told to save water. All right, your dead great-grandfather is saving more water than you. You cannot possibly save any more water than a dead guy. He’s greener than you in that regard.

Saving electrical power. Okay, you should be using less power, power’s bad, you need a lower footprint. Okay, your grandfather is not using any electrical power.

He’s much greener than you, you cannot compete with that. If you move into a smaller apartment, your grandfather is in a very, very small apartment. It’s underground, there’s no lighting, there’s no heating, he doesn’t have any broadband.

Recycling, okay, recycling is useful in some ways. Your grandfather is literally being recycled. You can’t actually out-recycle your dead grandfather.

And furthermore, in a pretty short amount of time compared to the length of the problems you’re tackling, you’re going to be dead, like your grandfather.

You’ll be saving everything at that point. You might be alive 70, 80, 90 years. You’re going to be dead for hundreds of millions of years. Billions of years of saving water, billions of years of having a light carbon footprint. It was carbon sequestration. You’re full of carbon, they buried you.

So you need to do things that you can do while alive. Do things you can do while alive. If your grandfather’s doing a better job at it, you can put that aside for later, when you’re dead, like him.

I'm so happy that I'm going to see him speak at SXSW this year -- the last time I went was one of the few years he didn't speak, and that seriously bummed me out.

 

Changing the audience

Still curious what the band was doing exactly during "Realize," and where all that melody came from, I press him about it. "There was no melody!," he exclaims. "Every melody everyone had  was in their head." The group played "all the strings on the bass at the same time and then me with this whammy pedal able to go two octaves lower and then bring it up and down like that. And then with various distortion pedals I could change the texture of the noise whenever I wanted so it wasn't just like one sound, it was just sort of moving along somehow. It was the best part of the night always and each night it was an experiment to see how long it would take for the audience to turn from like one state to another. A certain percentage of the audience would start sticking their fingers up at us or they would put their hands up in the air with their eyes closed, or do somethig physical. I pretty much would always go on as long as it took to change the audience."

"When it was clear that the audience was changed, totally--even if it was one person left with their fingers in the air or in their ears, we would wait for them to give into it, " Kevin explains. "Sometimes it would take forty minutes for that one individual to give up. When the audience was fully and utterly done, we had the signal process where I would look at Debbie and we'd go back to the final parts of the song."

-- from "33 1/2: Loveless", by Mike McGonigal, a book-long essay on the album Loveless by My Bloody Valentine

Kevin Shields (of My Bloody Valentine) goes on to explain that they had to stop "experiments" like this because of accumulated hearing damage. Although I'm pretty sure they did it when I saw them just a few years ago ...

That Sounds Right

Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.

-- Douglas Adams, from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Best email unsubscribe flow ever?

I've been on a binge of unsubscribing from various email marketing lists, as an attention cleanser. It makes me feel good. There's a hierarchy of experience to unsubscribe flows, from the good (clear link in the email, one click to unsubscribe) to the meh (have to hunt to find the link, unsubscribe not the default action on the resulting page) to the awful (you have to log in to unsubscribe, and you're not sure you even have an account). Some even have some charming copy, but I'd never run into one that was flat out AWESOME until I unsubbed from Etsy's newsletter.

(Don't worry, Etsy. I still love you. I just don't want the newsletter anymore.)

Screenshots below, but honestly, it's worth subscribing and unsubscribing for the full experience.

Screen 1:

Screen 2:

Bravo, Etsy!

ETA: Link to the video, because you want to now, don't you.

Lessons from designing role-playing game adventures

I was reading James Maliszewski's interview of Paul Jacquays*, and came across this bit:

10. Are there any lessons you've learned from working in the computer game field that you think ought to be applied to tabletop RPG design?

Provide more than one solution to encounters, if only to be willing to accept the other solutions that your players devise.

Take into consideration your players' (not their characters') skills and ability to understand 3D space when creating or choosing adventures. Don't throw new players into complex 3D settings. Mapping and understanding one's position inside 3D space can be challenging even for skilled players. Start "flat" and work them up to spaces with more complicated vertical relationships.

Create spaces that could work in the real world. Walls have thickness. Large open interior spaces have to be supported by columns to be believable. As a fantasy illustrator, I learned to engage the viewer's suspension of disbelief by creating realistic, believable environments which would in turn lend their reality and believability to the fantasy elements found within. Designers need to do the same thing ... engage the players' suspension of disbelief just long enough to convince them that game situations are grounded in things that could happen.

Give your players "save spots" in your gaming sessions, natural breaks in the adventure where they can pull back, regroup, return to base, etc.

Finally, don't overwork the game's backstory. Less can be more, so write as little as you can to convey it. I emphasize this to the content designers on my own project teams. Your players will appreciate that you are creating plot and character links, but could probably care less about detailed ancestries, hidden motivations, or involved descriptions of locations and events that they will never encounter. They just want to hit things and move on. Don't make success in your game depend on reading multiple paragraphs of stilted description or dialogue.

I don't think it's too crazy a stretch to apply these lessons to design outside of a game context altogether.

*James Maliszewski is a somewhat-old-school RPG designer and author of the old-school gaming blog Grognardia. Paul Jacquays is a really-old-school game designer.

"The age of surplus pixels"

I keep coming back to this short post by Russell Davies. (No, not that Russell Davies.)

By way of reexamining Being Digital and Pointcast, he says:

But we're about to enter an age of surplus pixels - screens sitting there, resting, not showing much, perhaps the odd slide show, screens that aren't the thing we're doing. In public spaces, in offices, in our homes. iPads and iPad-killers are going to be sitting around our living rooms, next to our desks, next our beds. And we'll soon want more on there than our picture libraries Ken Burnsing slowly away to themselves. But we're going to want less than most designers are inclined to design. We'll need a restful, slow, quiet sort of information/entertainment design. Stuff that's happy not to be looked at that much. That'll be interesting.

This makes a lot of sense to me, and triggers a bunch of reactions, not all well thought-out.

• I really, really like the idea of "restful, slow, quiet" design. I'd like to see more of it in the digital realm. I love garish and loud as much as the next person, but the eyeballs, they get tired.
• What are the print equivalents of restful/slow/quiet design? What are the architectural equivalents? Is this a call for the digital equivalents of the arts and crafts movement?
• (Is that why we're seeing so many fake wood-grain apps on iDevices? I'm not sure William Morris would approve: plopping wood imagery on silicon/glass/aluminum devices is hardly "truth to material".)
• Dragging this post back to the subject at hand, my fear is that instead of restful/slow/quiet, we'll get twitchy/fast/loud, particularly in the form of ads/ads/ads. We've already got extra screens at the grocery store (ADS!) and the gas station (ADS!) and there's talk of adding some to license plates (ADS!).
• The opposite of an arts and crafts approach to all the surplus pixels, then, is a cyberpunk-style dystopia where behaviorally-targeted ads follow you from screen to screen down the street jabbering at you incessantly until you go postal. So that wouldn't be good.
• Which in turn brings to mind projects like this LCD TV zapper kit as one possible response.
• A pretty safe prediction (based on our culture's track record so far) is that which types of screens you see will split on class lines. In the same ways it does already, money will buy peaceful and tranquil spaces for those that have the money, and the twitchy/fast/loud will dominate mass culture.

Inspirational Design: Francesca Lanzavecchia

I saw these on Haute Macabre, but it's turned up on all sorts of design blogs. It's a line of medical accessories (back braces, neck braces, canes, crutches), redesigned, called ProAesthetics Supports (note_slightly annoying design-ey nav). These are concept pieces for school, and the designer, Francesca Lanzavecchia, is playing with the intersection of body, skin, clothing, and medicine in a positively Ballardian way. Which is cool.

But I hope she takes these designs and finds a way to make them real. Because there are people -- particularly teenagers -- who are having to wear the ugly versions of these right now, for a short time or for a long time. And they're dealing with the discomfort, the inability to be 'normal', the reactions from peers that range from (at best) bafflement and repeated explanations to (at worst) mockery and humiliation. If they can hide the gear, they are, by avoiding -- or at least thinking about avoiding -- sports, and showers, and pools. And they're worrying about how to explain to a girlfriend or boyfriend what that stuff is they're wearing, and what reaction they'll get. If they even feel confident enough to snag a girlfriend or boyfriend.

How much better they'd have it if they could pick something out that rocked. That turned something to hide into something to flaunt. Hell, they'd probably get the mockery and weird looks anyway, but at least they'd look damn good. It would make a difference.