Edmundito

The two hardest and most critical skills for a game designer (IMHO):

• Be able to see the game with no hint of artwork, music, sound, anything — the bare rules, bare mechanics, bare actions, stats, feedback loops. The skeleton, the core, the bone and sinew of it, without any dressing, as a shifting, moving mechanical construct of guy wires and rigid struts. It’s not an attack, it’s force projection, it’s territory control in a graph. And you can see it in your head, and when a feature gets proposed, you can see where it slots in — or not, and know whether the whole construct will tip over.

• Be able to see the game without any mechanics, any rules, any knowledge of how it should play — to approach it as a user experience, the magical moment of immersion, the confusion, the dazzle and colors, the sheer sense of possibility and play. The skin, the surface, the way the music will swell when you step through that door, the way that moving will FEEL, the way the possibilities unfold. To know where someone would be confused, to know where they will be led, to see the whole construct as an innocent.

And a great designer? They should be able to see both in their head at once.

obsessivecompulsive:

Power will soon belong to those who can master a variety of expressive human-machine interactions.

“As the century goes on, those who don’t program — who can’t bend their increasingly sophisticated computers, machines, cars, and homes to their wills and needs — will, I predict, be increasingly left behind. Parents and teachers often disrespect today’s young people for being less than literate in the old reading-and-writing sense. But in turn, these young citizens of the future have no respect for adults who can’t program a DVD player, a mobile phone, a computer, or anything else. Today’s kids already see their parents and teachers as the illiterate ones.”

Click here to read the full article.

livejamie:

When profiling two New York Times reporter, they gave them the “ugly” treatment using Photoshop, distorting their features and giving them yellow teeth. Wtf?