Mirrors my thoughts on blog design exactly, including comments (i.e., people can respond on their own channels, they don’t need to do it on yours).

From Marissa Mayer’s announcement that Yahoo will acquire Tumblr:

We promise not to screw it up. Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going. We will operate Tumblr independently. David Karp will remain CEO. The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same as will their mission to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve. Yahoo! will help Tumblr get even better, faster.

Not many other billion-dollar acquisition announcement sound like a human being is talking to you.

An Atlantic reader’s comment on the article “The Cheapest Generation: Why Millennials aren’t buying cars or houses, and what that means for the economy”:

You mean the generation that paid three times as much for college to enter a job market with triple the unemployment isn’t interested in purchasing the assets of the generation who just blew an enormous housing bubble and kept it from popping through quantitative easing and out-and-out federal support? Curious.

People buy into trusting relationships. Just like with an investment, if you’re getting a return on the trust you invest, you’ll invest more. Likewise, if it goes sour, you’re going to get out while you can. It’s the same with a product, a game, or a society. If people don’t feel a society has their back, they’re not going to invest in it.

(Via bear-in-a-foxhole.)

(Source: bostonreview)

Kottke, quoting Vonnegut’s Bluebeard:

The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.

Putting playing experience first means being doing unpopular, uncompromising things, which means being well-versed in revolutions. If you’re building a team to rock your players’ worlds, this is a good guide for who to hire for it.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

John Gruber for Daring Fireball:

It’s always a sign of trouble when you’ve built something you don’t want to use yourself. Why does everyone I know who works at Apple carry an iPhone? Every single one? Not because they have to. It’s because they want to.

You can only make great experiences if you’re willing to experience them yourself. And you can only make them better when you understand why someone would want to experience them over and over again.

Eddie Cameron:

This is another symptom of this quest for ‘immersion’, pretending that all interactions outside of those prescribed to the player don’t exist. A game experience isn’t created only while we press the right buttons, but also how we think about it as a game. When we check info in the HUD, compensate for lag, navigate the menus, talk about it on forums, and even fiddling with graphics settings, we’re adding to our personal experience of the game, and sometimes others’.

When devs talk about immersion, I really think they’re talking about expectations. The “loading area” or bugsplat in the middle of a game sharply breaks expectations and, therefore, your flow through the game experience. Properly setting and reliably delivering on those expectations is the art of what some devs call “immersion.”

What we really should be talking about is total player experience, not just trying to attain a false suspension of disbelief. You really can put a player in another world, with different people with different values and culture from those around them — it’s just not the game world. It’s every expectation and every experience you create with and around the game.

Mike Mahardy writing for GameInformer on perma-death in games:

When the developer hands that responsibility over to the player though, the response is something entirely different. Gone is the helpless feeling that comes from having no control. You have the power to prevent the deaths of your beloved characters, and when they’re gone - it’s permanent. By using permanent death, games impart something unique: guilt.

We entrust every single Ritz-Carlton staff member, without approval from their general manager, to spend up to $2,000 on a guest. And that’s not per year. It’s per incident. When you say up to $2,000, suddenly somebody says, wow, this isn’t just about rebating a movie because your room was late, this is a really meaningful amount. It doesn’t get used much, but it displays a deep trust in our staff’s judgment. Frankly, they could go over that amount, with the general manager’s permission.

The concept is to do something, to create an absolutely wonderful stay for a guest. Significantly, there is no assumption that it’s because there is a problem. It could be that someone finds out it’s a guest’s birthday, and the next thing you know there’s champagne and cake in the room. A lot of the stuff that crosses my desk is not that they overcame a problem but that they used their $2,000 to create an outstanding experience.

When a developer goes out to create great gameplay, they’re really only tackling one part of a gaming experience. Everything surrounding it counts, too: the marketing, the customer service, the community interaction, even how people talk about it offhand. All of that is part of the total player experience.

Most game companies stop at gameplay when they think about delighting players. The great developers and publishers of the next decade will grok that the total player experience matters just as much, if not more than, gameplay, and they might think about taking a play from Ritz-Carlton’s book.

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.