Sift me!

February 13, 2009

This tech demo by MIT graduate David Merrill is really astounding. More, is a perfect example of playful interaction design. His Siftables are tiny blocks with a small screen aware of their position and surroundings, capable to communicate between them and with external devices. The result is a lovely user interface for Lego nostalgics, which [...]

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Design for social play

January 29, 2009

Web applications can be considered as virtual spaces. There’s no need to be Second Life to be a virtual space. And I will drop the “virtual” adjective too, because I think there’s nothing virtual about the relations and the experiences happening on those spaces. I think I will call them “experiential spaces” (or maybe “possibility [...]

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Where have you been last year?

January 26, 2009

Dopplr is a nice little internet service tracking your travels across the world. And, of course, is a really good example of playful interaction. The site, though simple, uses a lot of entertaining and cool features: color codes defining the places you visit, stats like your carbon footprint and so on. Recently they provide all [...]

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Global village

January 22, 2009

What if the world were a village by 100 people? I used to receive a lot of emails with a list of facts answering this question. A curious list, even striking. But nothing you would remember next morning. But what if these data are represented in a playful, explorative way? It immediately sticks, because visual [...]

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Playful president!

January 19, 2009

Here’s a good example showing how to convey information through play: the NYT inaugural words lets you explore the most important topic in each inaugural speech by all the US presidents. I guess Khoi Vinh has started looking at games.

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Amy Jo Kim on game mechanics

January 16, 2009

Joshua Porter has a really interesting interview with Amy Jo Kim. In the talk Amy Jo points out what game mechanics are and how to apply some of them in community and web design. By exploring this topic, I must agree with Amy Jo: game mechanics are not a panacea for web design. But I [...]

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A playful weblog

January 15, 2009

Jason Bradbury has this great blog full of surprises and easter eggs. There’s a playable flash version of Asteroids! (can you find it?)

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Are games crisis proof?

January 12, 2009

A lot of analysts are saying that the game industry is quite recession proof. Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo, is enjoying the very good results obtained by the new Nintendo DSi in Japan (500000 units in the first month). He seems to agree with the analysts: It seems more and more people are enjoying games [...]

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