May the Blizzard fan-boy storm commence. Starcraft 2 is coming our way. We don’t know when but the holiday season 2009 seems a good guess. It’s almost 2 years after the first showing, characteristic of Blizzard, it’s the right time of year and the game seems quite polished today. Letting Blizzard add the final twinkle in the year to come.

South Korea and fans around the globe collectively shot their load as the first footage was revealed. Starcraft 2 looked great from the start and seems to hold true to the original. But is this really that odd? The game has been in production for what? 6 years? Anything less then a game of the year would be incompetent on Blizzards part.

So how do Blizzard ensure such quality in their products? Actually the secret isn’t very secret. It’s just not customary in the industry today. They take longer to make the games. That’s it. They don’t add more because they have time, oh no. They just take longer making the same features, and therefore make them a hell of a lot better.

Games aren’t movies, we don’t have a near perfect theoretical model for how to make them, neither in production nor result. And we certainly don’t have expensive rental of equipment and locations. What we do have is expensive personnel costs. But this is quite strange, games cost a lot of money to buy. They don’t cost a lot to make compared to movies. Why aren’t more publishers making games the slow and steady Blizzard way? Because we’re still not making any money of of merchandise. Which is odd since the merch that does exist is selling, and fast.

Basically, the industry has a lot to learn from Blizzard. And most of it isn’t about creating games, it’s about how to run a company and an interest. Games take time, therefore we must position them as long term developments and sales. Merchandising and expansions are a must. Just as longer development time with less features, we know it pays off. Just look at Blizzard.

Cognitive models are the basic blocks of understanding we use the deal with the world around us. Don’t worry, I’m about to explain just what that means.

When we look at something or hear something we try to understand what it is by summing up it’s parts. Using the smallest parts we already understand we match what we’re looking at to the part we understand, do they overlap? If not we use other parts until we find one that does. If we don’t have one then we think of a category of parts to put the new thing in and call that a part we understand.

Example: If we see a bicycle tire for the first time to try to understand what it is by matching it to things we already understand. If we know what a wheel is we’ll call the bicycle tire a wheel. If we don’t know that a tire is we might not be able to match it to anything and will therefore sum it up as well as we can: “a round metal and rubber thing”.

When we have a lot of there parts we’ll start to see that some things are made up from parts. For example a tree is made up from wood and leaves. And a car from metal, wheels and an engine. But to perceive these more complex things we can’t keep using the parts that they are made up.

This would demand to much of our perception, our minds would be overheated immediately. Human beings can keep 7 +- 2 (ranging from 5 to 9 depending on a range of factors) things in our awareness at any one time. This means that it’s possible to understand 7+-2 things at the same time. If you see a car and can only understand the parts, you’ll freeze up due to overloading before you get past the car door.

Cognitive models are a way for human beings to abstract things, give them a name and remove the unnecessary information that isn’t required to understand it. So I can add my wheel and engine and metal compartment parts together to form the model Car. I then place all the cars I see into that model and now I understand what cars are. At least until I see a completely different car.

Everything can be, and is, understood in this way. Try looking at something and looking at higher or lower layers of complexity.

Keyboard – buttons – plastic – rectangle shape.

Keyboard + computer part + writing interface + hand extension.

Pretty easy to understand huh? It gets a bit harder to think of things such as army maneuvers or Darwinian evolution as simple cognitive models but this is what makes humans work. Without cognitive models we would be very limited indeed. And we still are in some respects, to understand new things we compare them to already complex models. When they fully, or partly, overlap we categorize them together. But this means a lot of parts that don’t belong get added to the model. This is called prejudice and is a huge problem for humans, no matter how open minded they are.

Next up, I’ll explain how Raph Koster’s theory of fun explains what fun is by using cognitive models.

I’m reading a book about how to overcome procrastination, the Now Habit, and it is leading me to profound and intriguing insights into myself. Why I procrastinate and how I work as a person. It’s an odd sensation but not an unpleasant one. So to any procrastinators out there I definitely recommend this book, it’s thin and a fast read.

Don’t think It’ll change your life though, it will just change your understanding of life. If you really want to be more productive instead read Getting Things Done and get a Remember The Milk account right away.

Our limited awareness

Everything around us is competing for our attention at all times. Things that are large, have bright colors and move quickly usually take up most of our attention. This is because we, as humans, can only perceive a set amount of things at a time. Basically, we only have a bit of attention and we fill it up really fast.

We know a lot more about attention then most people think, read up on cognitive psychology if your interested in more details. In short, attention is limited and has a set of rules for what is more important to be aware of. Most of these rules we learn as we grow (speeding cars will hurt you if they hit you) some are based on instincts (sharp or slithering animals are not to be trifled with).

Thankfully we have cognitive models to help use make the most of our attention.

What are cognitive models? I’ll get into that next.

Preface, first draft

How does one write a book anyhow? I have no idea, I’ve tried it before but I’ve never gotten past the first 20 or so pages and my narrative arcs are just crap. But this is different, I hope, this is a book without dramatic narrative. In fact, this is a book about design. And I can’t be more passionate about a subject (after all, sex is an activity).

Design was for a long time the process to get things to work, engineering design, or the process to make something aesthetically beautiful, artistic design. But today these fields are merging and are joined by the less respected but at least as important field of human interaction design, the process of designing things so that they work with humans attached at some point or end. Basically making sure someone can use the damned thing.

This is where I come in. Engineering design I leave to the engineers, aesthetic design I leave to the people that can draw. But designing for humans has become my calling and I will in these series of articles or possibly book-to-be define and teach you about my theory for adding fun to any product.

I will use a lot of practical examples from a variety of products but will center mostly around games. As they are the most obvious products that need to add fun.

Next up: a short brief on Raph Koster’s Excellent: A Theory of Fun which explains the beginning of what fun is.

If you’ve missed it it’s a monumental day for game design today as Little Big Planet launches in the PAL territories. Hopefully the server issues from the US launch have been corrected and we can enjoy the full product. I’ll post my thoughts on LBP tomorrow.

Tim Shaefer has just released his complete first design document for his 98 super hit adventure game Grim Fandango. If your an aspiring designer or a full designer this is something you should read. It might be great, or might be crap, that’s for you to decide. But it is the very successful work of an acomplished designer and we can all learn from it.

http://www.doublefine.com/news.php/site/just_one_more_grim_thing/

I just tried the Mirrors Edge demo and before I say anything else: if you can play the demo and haven’t: PLAY IT NOW. Believe me, it’s worth it. And yes, it is that good.

Mirrors edge uses a first person camera with innovative gameplay and an extremely stylized environment to bring us the feeling of being a runner. A sort of lawless messenger service that hiden on the rooftops of a sparkling white totally oppressed city.

At first the game is disconcerting but in less then a minute of gameplay I was flying over the rooftops in a state of flow. The game is challenging, fun and beautiful. The controls are fantastic and the sense of immersion is quite beyond anything else I’ve experienced.

I have one problem that I intend to discuss with a friend of mine who happens to be a producer at Dice. The tutorial is pretty hard and therefore setup with restart points conveniently spaced in between maneuvers. But apparently Dice has either not played this part at all themselves, or their designers are so god awful bad that they didn’t see that if a player fails at doing something the player has to watch an NPC doing it. Each time. And the NPC takes about 3 times as long to do it as you do, and there is no way to skip it. In short: I fell of a pipe several times during the tutorial, which led to me sitting for 5 minutes watching an NPC walk across the same pipe with close to 1 minute of gameplay spaced in between. That’s just unforgivable. Well, at least I never have to play the tutorial again.

If I were you, I’d buy this game. Personally, I can’t afford it because I bought the PS3 to play it on… Catch 22 anyone?

Waiting for the Mirrors Edge demo to finish downloading I decided to try out the latest Ratchet and Clank adventure, quest for booty.

QoB is supposed to be a short and sweet downloadable game that will be a fun expansion to play for previous fans of the series and a simple introduction for players who’ve yet to experience Ratchet and Clank.

I’m probably neither of these groups since I have played some Ratchet and Clank tools of destruction but never actually bought a Ratchet and Clank game. I am however a big fan of platformers and Tools of Destruction really gave me a taste for the gameplay.

QoB starts the player off with a great intro sequence and superb voiceacting with some geeky humor. It looks stunning and the level of graphical and sound polish is just amazing. QoB is a very sleek product… Which makes the bad side so much more dissapointing. You see, those were the good points. The Control doesn’t feel sleek at all, there is no introduction and it certainly isn’t pick up and play. In some platform elements (climbing comes to mind) the controls are just wonky. Jumping is jerky and collision isn’t obvious because of the cinematic camera, I find myself hitting air in front of enemies or walking into fire because the damn camera is trying to be Gears of War.

Level design is also pretty bad. At least for the first few levels. The pirate cruisers at the start of the game are just copied and not very interesting. When I land on an island I have no idea where to go because the ultra-realistic scenary doesn’t give any hints and I still can’t see much because of the camera. Maybe there is a map or a way to look around but I still haven’t figured out all the control yet. This is a downloadable short and fast game, I didn’t intend to do anything but just pick up the controller and play for an hour.

To summerize this game is actually quite good. It’s funny and plays really well. It just dissapoints to no end when you’ve played Tools of Destruction, why does a game with more time for polish play worse?! If the control is exactly the same, games have moved on, why hasn’t the controls been improved?