An Evening with Jane McGonigal

Jane McGonigal spoke last night as part of the California Academy of Sciences lecture series in San Francisco, at the packed Herbst Theater. Come along on my journey of contempt and redemption.

Expectations

My expectations of this presentation were extremely low. I remember her GDC presentation several years ago on the top 10 findings in games that year that covered such breakthroughs as some players "playing to win" and how they actually seek an even playfield of fair competition rather than wanting to buy in-game advantages. Another involved a bunch of data showing that a huge percentage of players spend a huge percentage of time playing World of Warcraft alone. It even used the phrase "together alone" as opposed to the phrase "alone together" that I used in my infamous article. Since so much of that presentation was rehashes of my own articles from YEARS earlier, I had to wonder what Jane is really bringing to the table here.

The Format

Rather than a lecture, the format here was actually an informal interview, so the host and Dr. McGonigal sat on stage with a coffee table between them. I think this format is good, and allows information to flow more freely than in a prepared lecture. There is more room for adaptation, for tailoring answers to go with the flow the conversation, and for the speaker to let their personality come through a bit more.

The host opened by having Jane discuss her controversial statements that the world needs to spend more hours gaming. She said that currently the world spends 7 billion hours (per year? I forget) gaming, and that she thinks it should be more like 21 billion hours. This is a delicate subject because it's so easily taken out of context and misunderstood. I think Jane was only able to explain part of why she believed this in her actual answer to this question, and the rest of why she believes it wasn't clear until much later. The first clarification is that she doesn't mean people who play games now should play them more, but rather than more people should play games. She would like everyone on Earth to play an hour a day of something. She includes even playing a word game on your phone while on the bus, so this isn't all about sweating bullets in Starcraft matches, or whatever. Ok, but why should people play an hour a day?

A Waste of Time

What follows was painful and boring. There was some promise in the initial part of the answer to the above question. The answer is that gaming brings about all sorts of positive emotions. She then listed the 10 positive emotions that gaming has been shown to elicit, from gaming research. Joy, awe, wonder, love, satisfaction, and so on. At this point I would have expected some sort of support for this, like some examples so we know what she's talking about. Instead, a lot of time was spent on this terrible "massively multiplayer thumb wrestling game,"

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This Week in Flash Dueling!

I see the guys at Penny Arcade liked Flash Duel 2nd Edition. Gabe says "it's a rad game." Will Tycho redeem himself in a rematch though? Maybe Tycho should play as the Dragon or something, lol.

Also, Rodney at Watch It Played is doing a series on Flash Duel 2nd Edition. His first episode is up where he covers the game's Simple Mode (the tutorial mode before you get to the character abilities). He does an awesome job of covering several rules nuances and showing how it all works. Here's Episode 1:

I'm really looking forward to the rest of this! I also admire what Rodney is doing in general, by the way. Sometimes in games (both the video game kind and the board game kind) a "review" is so shallow (not the favorable reviews of my games though of course, those are well-researched and glorious!). A reviewer often doesn't have time to really get into the details and depth of a game. The Watch It Played series is going a different route, and it gives full explanations of exactly how a game works, then shows that game being played right in front of you. A "review" isn't really necessary because it becomes evident what is good about the game (or what is bad), and you'll see if those good points match your tastes. Check out other WatchItPlayed stuff on Youtube for other games, I found it very helpful personally. And I can't wait to see Flash Duel in 2v2 mode or against the Dragon on WatchItPlayed!

Oh yeah, if you wanted to comment on this on Boardgamegeek.com, here's the thread about it. And here's another thread about people's favorite characters in Flash Duel.

UI Design in Apple iBooks Author

Apple recently announced a big push into education, expanding iTunes U's already awesome selection of free online University classes, and adding K-12 as well. Adding a new textbook section, with a whole bunch of features specifically for text books, such as note taking, integrated quizes, and the ability to automatically create flash card tests for yourself. These textbooks have several interactive elements: such as pictures you can zoom to take up the whole page, or swipe across to see changes over time in a diagram, custom javascript widgets right inside the book, and so on.

The thing that interested me most is the authoring tool though. There's a new program called iBooks Author that lets anyone create these books, test them on your own iPad (wow!), and put them up on iTunes for free or for sale. (Note: there was some PR fumble where people though Apple owned your content, but they don't. You are free to publish your content anywhere else too.) Anyway, pretty sweet.

The iBooks Author program was immediately accessible/understandable to me because the UI is basically the same as iWork programs such as Pages. The same buttons for inserting shapes or tables, working with text, working with graphics and so on. It has a few extra buttons for inserting widgets and publishing.

The whole reason I'm writing this is actually specifically the portrait/landscape mode feature. This is the very FIRST thing that I thought of regarding this authoring tool. How the hell are they going to handle that? Doing a layout when you know a fixed screen size/ratio is one thing, but how the hell is this authoring tool going to handle when you turn the iPad sideways? All programs/books do handle that, but this seems like a big problem. All the iBooks I've read before were just plain text, so it's only Apple's own UI that changes when you rotate a book, then the author's text gets reflowed to fit the page, no big deal. These textbooks can have very complicated page layout though, with graphics and text that have to be just in the right place to make it look right.

What's worse is that if you rotated a layout sideways, it wouldn't even fit the same number of words anymore. It would be possible for some words to get cut off when rotating due to how all the images fit in portrait vs. landscape, and now it would mess up all the rest of the layouts in the entire book. You really need to layout the entire book twice, once for portrait and once for landscape. That is decidedly un-Apple, especially if it's going to be in a consumer-level tool. Imagine if your graphic is in on page 6 of one layout, but page 7 in another, and the annoyance and frustration of laying everything out twice. What the heck are they going to do here?

I watched the official Apple video of the event where they announced this stuff. All these hassles I was puzzling about, the presenter swept aside in two sentences. He explained that sometimes you want to get right down to the text, and focus on that rather than all these extras. Viewing a book in landscape mode gives full page layout with pics, movies, and interactive elements as integrated parts of that layout. But turning the iPad sideways into portrait mode automatically changes the formatting, and extracts all those non-text elements and puts them in a labeled column to the left. You can touch any of them to make them full screen, then close them when you're done to return to rest of the book. And this view is generated automatically by the authoring tool, so book-creators only actually have to worry about designing the page layout mode (landscape). You get the portrait mode "for free."

I tried it out with one of the new texbooks on my iPad, and it works well, as promised. It makes sense. The reason I mention this is I thought it was an interesting example of lateral thinking--of solving a different problem rather than the one you're stuck on. I was imagining this whole "you have to layout every book twice, how do make a good authoring UI for that?" type of problem. But that's a sucky problem to have to solve. A simpler solution is to not have the problem in the first place.

I think that comes up in game design quite a bit. Many times I've struggled with the wording of a card in a card game where there thing it's trying to do doesn't fit so easily into the system. Sometimes we come up with a good wording. Sometimes we sort of can't and say we'll come back to it, then later realize that card should be doing a different thing entirely anyway, which just happens to be easier to write text for! So you know, if you're stuck on something, maybe come back at it from a new angle.

Flash Duel Update

I just wanted to let you guys know that all ability cards in Flash Duel 2nd Edition are up in the gallery now. That's all 20 characters plus the Dragon. You can get a sneak peak at the 10 new characters in the upcoming Puzzle Strike and Yomi expansions, because all three games have the same characters.

Also, shipping costs to Canada are down slightly, so Flash Duel (from www.sirlingames.com) costs $8 shipping instead of $10. I think it was even $20 originally, so there's been a lot of progress there. Also, heavier orders to Canada that were recently $20 in shipping are down to $15.

Here's another review of the game, while we're at it.

I hope you guys are enjoying all the modes. I'm kind of curious which modes people like the most, and if it's still the 1v1 mode.

Star Wars Players Banned for Dancing

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you celebrated, but not by dancing in the Star Wars MMO, as that got a lot of people banned. Doing the "group dance" command by typing /getdown apparently messes up enemies targeting you. You get to be basically invulnerable.

It's kind of mindblowing that a developer would ban people for an exploit like this. I thought we've been around the block over and over and over and over on such things. Fix the problem, and don't BAN people for taking advantage of advantageous properties in the game. I mean really. BioWare has instituted this squishy rule: "dancing is currently not permitted outside of special Dance Zones." Sounds kind of like living in a dictatorship, which I guess it is, but that's just really eerie. What are the special Dance Zones? I think it means "dont' do this in combat," but I honestly don't know. How about a hard coded rule that doesn't make me guess if I'm doing ban-worthy dancing?

If fixing the problem is some hard thing, then remove dancing entirely for a brief time, or disable the /getdown command. I'm disappointed that banning players was the response here.

UPDATE: BioWare says that the e-mails telling people they were banned were fake e-mails. If so, the fake e-mails skirt dangerously close to what seems standard practice in MMOs, but maybe BioWare is off the hook, if they just fix the dancing thing.