John Ferrara writing for UX Magazine:

UX designers are accustomed to thinking about experiences that people enjoy because they’re completing some objective that exists outside of the interface, but games must be enjoyed for their gameness. That gives the designer a different kind of responsibility: to design player experiences that are themselves enough reason to play.

I’d go even a step beyond this and suggest a game UX designer must introduce frustration into the player experience — but frustration coupled with a strong motive to succeed. Those two emotions play off each other in games to create moments of intense joy and satisfaction when the obstacle is finally overcome.

I haven’t ever come across a UX designer who admitted their job included producing negative experiences. Some game designers have, though. I’m excited for a time when those ideas mate — when game UX designers use their talents to craft usable and fluid experiences to specifically introduce frustration in a calculated way that ultimately results in joy.

GameInformer has an entire article devoted to Skyrim’s menu system.

Matt Bertz quotes Skyrim’s game director Todd Howard:

”You know in iTunes when you look at all your music you get to flip through it and look at the covers and it becomes tangible?” game director Todd Howard asks. “One of our goals was ‘What if Apple made a fantasy game? How would this look?’ It’s very good at getting through lots of data quickly, which is always a struggle with our stuff.”

Nick Cowen reviewing Skyrim for VideoGamer.com:

The talent-trees themselves are represented by swirling star constellations in the heavens above Skyrim and are both beautiful to look at and easy to navigate. That latter quality is, fortunately, shared by all of the game’s menus and while it may sound like a bulletpoint on a factsheet to praise the menu system, Bethesda really do deserve some credit for its work in this respect. Given the volume of abilities, attacks and information players need to have readily available to them in the game, a poor menu system could have easily turned Skyrim into a chore.

Menus have the potential to destroy the immersive qualities of games like Skyrim. Other games will sometimes take the nuclear option, erase menus entirely, and replace them with skeumorphic oddities such as walking around a room full of costumes to try on outfits, like in Fable. Really high quality titles take the time to craft masterpieces that conveniently double as selection tools.

Don Reisinger reporting for CNET:

Citing industry sources, The Wall Street Journal reported today that Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, along with his top executives, decided last year as they were preparing for an initial public offering (IPO) that they had given out too much stock to employees. But rather than accept that reality, the executives reportedly tried a different tactic: demand employees give back not-yet-vested stock or face termination.

That’s one way to increases shareholder value.

Adam Saltsman for Gamasutra:

Freemium game technology can be one of the tools we use to increase convenience, but if it is at the price of contrivance, we are doing a profound disservice to the players that support us.

Fantastic article for anyone interested in the ethics of games where the entrance price is free.

We’ve opened this Pandora’s Box of market and psychological technology with free-to-play games. They’re a sort of freakonomics atom bomb where the possibilities of application seem simultaneously dangerous and benign, and the question is no longer what can we do but what should we do.

As a direct beneficiary of a game where you can start playing for free, I’m happy to work with a publisher who thinks about these problems every day. The best way we’ve found to answer that “should” question is pretty simple: what is the best experience for the player? It distills all the psychological, emotional, and market forces down into only the bits that matter — to the player and the business.

GLaDOS:

The traffic will be slow and meaningless.

The Onion on the death of Steve Jobs:

“We haven’t just lost a great innovator, leader, and businessman, we’ve literally lost the only person in this country who actually had his shit together and knew what the hell was going on,” a statement from President Barack Obama read in part, adding that Jobs will be remembered both for the life-changing products he created and for the fact that he was able to sit down, think clearly, and execute his ideas—attributes he shared with no other U.S. citizen.

Apple’s vision of the computer for “Project 2000.” Sounds familiar.

Steve Jobs, on a phone call with Vic Gundorta, on a Sunday.

[ via John Gruber ]