The Meat and Potatoes
22 Game Design-ish Blogs
I’ve been amassing a rather large collection of game design related blogs. I thought I share a few of my daily reads. Some are directly related to game design, others indirectly. If you’re in the web space and you’re not following what is happening in the social/casual/mmo gaming space, you’re missing out. Here are a few places to get you going…
Lightspeed Venture Partners
Futuristic Play
Raph Koster
Applied Game Design
Avant Game
Brett on Social Games
Brinking
Free to Play
Casual Game Design
Inside Social Games
Jay is Games
Lost Garden
Massively
Master of 500 Hats
Musings of a Social Architect
Numberless
Only a Game
Susan Wu
Terra Nova
The Forge
Thoughts on Moroagh
Zen of Design
If you can add to this list, please do!
Choosing a Programming Language to Learn
Over the past few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of research on what programming language to learn. Being that my programming knowledge is limited, many of the arguments for or against a language were in terms that were beyond my experience level. You end up with a Catch-22 situation. You need experience to chose the language, but you need to learn a language to garner that experience. What’s a lowly designer to do?
I narrowed my selection down to two options: PHP (a la Cake) and Ruby on Rails. Below are the arguments I used to make my final selection: Ruby on Rails. If you’re in the same boat, this might shed a little light on which direction to go.
Ruby on Rails was made by people who’s opinions and methodology I closely identify with. I’ve always been a huge fan of 37signals. Tick was built using the Getting Real methodology. They value simplicity, elegance, and less. Assuming Ruby on Rails was built with similar values, I’d feel confident in the development of the language going forward.
Ruby on Rails seems to be the Apple of languages, while PHP seems to be the PC. I don’t mean which operating system they run on, but rather what they stand for. PHP is powerful and pervasive. Ruby is elegant and streamlined but is not nearly as widely used. Which is better? That depends on what gels with you. I’m an Apple guy so the latter is more attractive. Neither one is better than the other. It all depends on what you are looking for and how you work.
I have access to great peer resources for Ruby on Rails. If you’re learning a language from scratch, you’re going to need all the help you can get. If all your friends know PHP, I thats a HUGE reason for going that direction. I’m lucky to be friends with a few really good Ruby on Rails programmers that are willing to help me on even the most elementary stuff.
Ruby on Rails just feels more comfortable to me. This is another big factor. If Ruby feels awkward and you like PHP syntax more, go for it! You’re going to be the one grinding out the code, so make sure you’re having fun in the process. I think this becomes more of a factor if you are coming from another language. It can be hard for me to appreciate some of the elegance that makes Ruby great since I never have to deal with the not-so-elegant ways other languages might have approached a situation.
PHP seems loose and dirty. This one is hard for me to explain, its just a gut feeling. As I stated before, I tend to like very structured languages. I know AS3 at an intermediate level, and what I love about it is how strict it is. I believe Java is similar. It gave me the feeling that I was connecting things correctly. In a discipline where there are 1000 ways to do one thing, these little wins made me feel like I was fitting some imaginary puzzle together. This is similar to the feeling you get with Firefox and XHTML/CSS. Internet Explorer let you get away with anything, while Firefox made you work for it to be “right”. Knowing that fact made it more rewarding when things worked.
Ruby on Rails is said to not scale well. While this was a concern for me, it was one of those things that I didn’t have enough experience to really formulate my own opinion. I’ve also heard that once your application gets big enough (and more customized) you end up tossing out all of what makes the conventional aspect of Ruby on Rails shine. As of right now I have 0 people using my application, so I think its safe to push this one to the back burner for now.
PHP is tried and true. It’s everywhere! There are no questions of whether or not it can scale. Its been around a long time and it gets the job done. Ruby on Rails is new and only time will tell if it can keep up. Its hard to compare the two on the basis of pervasiveness. Ruby on Rails hasn’t been around long enough for that kind of adoption. Will it get there? That’s the big question.
PHP is more widely used by places I could see myself working at. Eventually my time at Scrapblog will end (not anytime soon I hope). When that time comes its possible that I will be in a much better position knowing PHP than I will Ruby on Rails. However, as with scaling, that is not a problem I have right now.
So as you can see there are strong arguments for both languages. It really comes down to your gut feeling. You won’t have much to go on in terms of pros and cons before you gather more experience, so use what you got! No reason is silly.
Old Portfolio Work
I posted a bunch of old portfolio work to Flickr for those of you that are interested. Most of this is agency work so the end product was not always what I envisioned. In any case, here it is…the good, bad and the ugly.
Sharing and Communicating on the Interwebs
We’re currently in what can be described as a social gold rush. Services come and go fast enough to make your head spin. The hardest part for me has been trying to create logical structure and organization in my mind for how all these services are arranged in my life. I tend to need to add rules and logic to anything that I adopt. Every in its place. I thought it would be interesting to analyze how I use a few of my core services (this is just a fraction of the apps I use) and how they all fit into the grand tapestry that is my social landscape. I’ll break each service down into how I use them, and my “rule sets” for forming relationships within them. For some this will be obvious, but hopefully it will provide a little guidance for those trying to make sense of the whole social movement.
I use Facebook as an aggregator for all my other social services. I think of it as my social dashboard. Many of the social applications I frequent revolve around specific social objects. YouTube has video, Dopplr has travel, Flickr has photos. With Facebook, your friends (and all their activities on a macro level) ARE the social objects. As such, I use Platform to feed in the information from all the other services. I used to hate how all my social objects were spread out over multiple social networks, many of which were very obscure to my non-geek friends. Now that Facebook is so pervasive, I can expose this information to everyone as long as they have a Facebook account.
Who do I add as a friend?
- Anyone I’ve met personally (online or off) for whom I have a desire to create a richer relationship
Twitter serves two very powerful purposes for me that I didn’t acknowledge early on. First, it serves as peripheral vision as to what is going on within the industry and with my friends in general. On a more granular level, I’ll often search for people that are attending the same event as me to gain a more local peripheral vision. This proves invaluable at someplace like SXSW and its numerous parties. At any given time you have a social radar of what’s hot and what to avoid. Second, it provides me with a non-invasive way of finding opportunities to connect with someone I’d like to start a relationship with. I can follow them and lurk in the conversation connecting (via @) when the opportunity presents itself. Brilliant!
Who do I follow?
- Anyone local
- Those I want to kick off a relationship with
- Those who serve as a pulse for certain industries
- Anyone interesting
As a side note, I recently stopped reciprocally following people. With the @ replies showing up regardless of if I am following you, I don’t really deem it necessary. I don’t understand when people follow 5000+ people. They may be following them, but are they really paying attention? Some feel it is a gesture of goodwill. Honestly I get a lot more satisfaction getting a follow from some one I admire that I know does NOT auto-follow, than from some one who I know auto-follows *cough*. It actually has the opposite effect of what they are trying to achieve.
Instant Messenger
I don’t need to go into much detail here, but I added it to the list for a reason. I currently use Twitterific to interact with Twitter. It has a feature that updates my Adium status with each tweet. This is extremely valuable to me as it serves as another link from my geek world to my non-geek world. You’d be amazed at how much of your “geeky” information sparks interest in your non-geeky friends via your IM status (which I believe is where Twitter actually spawned from).
Who do I add?
- Those I want to have direct access to me regardless of what I am doing, this could be anyone but I am very selective.
Blog
My blog serves three purposes for me. First, it serves as a place for me to publicly define my views and opinions. Anyone that might want to collaborate with me will be able to get a very rich sense of who I am, and how I work by reading my blog. Second, it serves as a thought archive. It’s very satisfying to have a thought and publish it into history. My memory is rather weak, and capturing something in writing ensures that the subtle nuances of the thought don’t evaporate over time. And finally, my blog serves as a way for me to flesh out my thoughts. I’ve found that the best way for me to explore and expand on a small idea, is by writing about it.
Flickr
Flickr is the visual complement to my words. It’s a more literal window into my world. When used in conjunction with other services it really takes everything to place greater than the sum of its parts.
Who do I add as a contact?
- Anyone with interesting pictures, regardless of a pre-existing relationship
The Future
With XFN gaining steam it will be interesting to see how my current paradigm changes. I have a few ideas on how this might take form, but overall I imagine it will model the above paradigm with a “mothership” profile/aggregator being fed by niche streams. It is already starting to happen with services like FriendFeed, although I’m not a big fan of their execution. Plus the key to the “mothership” is pervasiveness and another geeky niche site is going to have a hard time becoming that hub. In any case, its an exciting time to be in the industry and I am excited to see where it heads.
Plugin Conflicts with WordPress 2.5
I’m having a few issues with a couple plugins since I upgraded to 2.5. If things look a little funny around here for a bit, please turn the other cheek.
Jetblue Confusion
The JetBlue kiosk is pretty amazing. It’s clean, simple and is a joy to use. I especially LOVE the very gratifying audible click when you select options. So much more effective with a little mid-bass added versus the” treble-y” mouse click. But I did notice one flaw on a recent trip. Why don’t the seat symbols follow the direction of the cabin? Outside of this small detail, the chart is pretty straightforward. But I find my eyes constantly wanting to scan left to right instead of up and down.
Perception of Designers and Developers
While debating with Omar, our Lead Developer at Scrapblog, about a small chunk of UI, I noticed something interesting about the dynamic between a designer and developer. A designer trusts his eyes regardless of the logic behind the scenes, while a developer trusts the logic regardless of what he sees. In this situation I was making the case that the interface element in question was not properly aligned, and from my point of view, this was abundantly clear. I didn’t care about the code. Conversely, Omar insisted that the code was correct and didn’t care what it looked like. It will be interesting to see how my perception changes as I move further into the coding world with my current side project.
Scrapblog Featured on Adobe.com
We get to work pretty closely with the folks at Adobe given that Scrapblog is considered one of the slickest Flex apps currently out there. This has been one of the cooler unexpected perks. We have great access to the product teams and even get to participate in the development of yet to be released products (my lips are sealed).
They recently interviewed the Scrapblog team regarding our use of Flex, and the resulting video was posted this morning. You can find it here. We also got some prime logo placement on the Flex product page.
Against Happiness
My girlfriend Heather is a huge fan of The Secret. I however, am not. I am completely turned off and very skeptical of the glossy, Oprah-fied marketing campaign surrounding a very simple concept. Having said that, it may come as no surprise to you that I have often been labeled as negative. I’ve always argued that what seems like negativity is actually criticality. My actions are always in favor of the best desirable outcome in any given situation, but I achieve this by recognizing and attempting to eliminate the least desirable factors. I consider this my edge, and one of the foremost factors contributing to my regular success. My biggest fear in having a more “positive” attitude is that I will lose that edge. Theres a big difference between being negative, and never being satisfied. I consider myself to be in the latter camp.
To my surprise, I am not alone in this mindset. Heather forwarded me this article about Eric G. Wilson’s new book entitled “Against Happiness” knowing that it would get me fired up. While I haven’t read the book, I was sold by the excerpt. Here’s a snippet…
“With no more melancholics, we would live in a world in which everyone simply accepted the status quo, in which everyone would simply be content with the given. This would constitute a dystopia of ubiquitous placid grins, a nightmare worthy of Philip K. Dick, a police state of Pollyannas, a flatland that offers nothing new under the sun. Why are we pushing toward such a hellish condition?”
My $.02: What’s a Blog? (Seth Godin)
I agree with this post from Seth Godin, and since comments are off I’ll add my $.02 here.
I think that following the “musts” is an act of fear and laziness. I’ll be the first to say that people perform better within the boundaries of constraints, but not if you use them as a crutch. The bigger the company, the less risk they’ll take. “Musts” keep big companies safely in the status quo, which is right where they want to be. While constraints can lubricate decision-making and provide focus, you also need to know when the time is right to break them. Use constraints to guide you, but don’t let them suffocate you.