If you follow my Twitter account, then you should already know that I regularly post stuff from Muddy Colors.
This is no exception, even more so because it will be relevant to my current work. Two posts by Dan dos Santos about basic image composition, the first one about value structure, the second one about temperature structure.
Those two posts struck a chord with me, since they clearly explain what I already plan to do in the therapy game I'm working on.
When it comes to games, adding depth to the composition is seemingly less of a problem, since the movement already provides you with that information. However, discerning objects you can interact with from the ones that act purely as set pieces is another question.1 The higher the player's velocity within the 3D space, the faster he has to parse the environment for clues – especially when the players are not able to influence their own velocity, which is the case in rail shooters. As it happens, I'm exactly making one of those, thus the need for an environment that can be parsed instantly.
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As well known by the red barrel problem. ↩
Living by the numbers – why yes, that's something I do and find quite fascinating. I love RescueTime and Google Analytics.
So it's no wonder I find Nothing's Time Tracker and Office Dashboard such an awesome idea.
Everyone continuously tracks the tasks they’re working on and thus generates his own stream of project Tracs, and there’s also a “team stream” running on a monitor in Twitter-like manner.
Project time tracking was now not only to be done as info to the project manager, but as statement of one’s own efforts. This new significance boosted meaning and quality of the Tracs. With that there is a much clearer picture of how different types of projects – and also for different sorts of clients – work.
The stream of Tracs is another knowledge tool that leads to many exchanges like “You’re having trouble with this? Maybe I can help.” or “Interesting stuff you do!“. Our latest “meta tool” therefore impacted positively on the internal communication culture: It was fun to add to the information stream with events and have an exchange in real-time. It repeatedly prevented task redundancies and helps tapping existing knowledge instead of creating it from scratch.
It functions similar to Twitter by keeping everyone in the loop.
Benjamin Burger has watched the episode titled Addicted to Games? of the BBC series Panorama, and is not exactly happy about it (as have been other people, as I could watch on Twitter):
Unfortunately the report was not satisfying at all. It was like looking for an intelligent crime story and ending up with CSI Miami. The whole show was just a show. [...] Panorama simplifies the Game-Scene to problem-kids and how they corrupting their family or social life.
Of course, the journalism is bad, the conclusions hackneyed – but it shows mostly one thing: games do make their way into (mainstream) culture, and just as with any new medium (like radio or TV or films or pop music, to name just a few), they are met with resistance and fear from the current generation that has not been socialised with that new medium. Even more so with games. After all,
[it's] a tremendous difference between watching games or playing them,
and that makes it even more scary.
No one denies that games can be addictive, and no one denies that games may be built upon such mechanics – but then again, even most board games use those mechanics, and no one complains.
The same goes with alcoholic beverages: obviously, it can be addictive; yet the times when politicians demanded a complete crackdown are long gone.
