Today I’ve stumbled upon two highly inspiring talks. The first one I want to recommend is Media for Thinking the Unthinkable by Bret Victor.
He talks about re-thinking the way we think about systems. The take away for me was in order to understand systems better and easier in general is to visualize its behaviour under multiple perspectives. Also I like the following inspiring quote:
“Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste. Why then, given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark, “Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think,” surprise you?” by Richard Hamming
The second talk is Designing Journey by Jenova Chen (video). Where Jenova introduces a new kind of way to interact with people online at the GDC 2013. His approach is to reduce every noise that would ultimately lead to toxically hating, exploiting and mistrusting your fellow players which is sort of a counterproductive and an unhealthy gameplay overall.
GDC overview: “It took thatgamecompany three years to develop a two-hour long video game. Many high-level experimental ideas were tested and failed, and many lessons were learned during the design and production of the game. 12 months have passed since the game was launched, and we would like to share what we learned with you. This talk will give you the insight into the process thatgamecompany took to come up the original concept for Journey, how we polished and executed the design to realize an emotional arc, and most importantly, the difficult lessons we learned throughout the process.”
Here is gameplay video where a player wanders around and meeting up with a stranger in order to interactivly play walk together.
The takeaway for me is that playing together with other people can actually leave you behind with a very welcoming and healthy feeling if a game is actually designed for social interaction.
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