« PREVIOUS ENTRY
The flip-book of your life
NEXT ENTRY »
Why interactive websites can create false memories
As I’ve written before, video games were the first place we learned how to interact with information on a digital screen. Icons? Controller movement? Screen-scrolling? Navigation of complex menus? All these concepts now part of computer interface design were first hacked out in games.
So now Steffen Walz, a PhD student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, has closed this loop — by designing “Playce”, a web site that you navigate by playing it like a retro-80s video game.
Playce is divided into two panels vertically, and you begin by picking one of four different types of games based on your personality. As you play the game, you unlock different parts of Walz’s site (which is mostly a portfolio of his design work). Pick the “achiever” game and you’ll be playing a version of Breakout, where you have to destroy certain bricks to navigate to different site pages. Pick the “killer” game, and you play an old-skool shooter where you blast little tanks, soldiers or planes to go to pages. (That’s a snapshot of one section of the “killer” screen above.)
As Walz notes on his web site:
The art and craft of make-believe place-making challenges architects, urban planners, game and interaction designers, and it likely to (need to) take advantages not only of the game generation’s competencies … but also reflect the expectations of the Homo Ludens Digitalis, who has been trained to win not only in the gamespace, but in the gamespace that is everyday.
As Walz noted in an email to me, the interface isn’t exactly an efficient way to navigate, but it’s pretty thought-provoking. And it makes me wonder: Are there any examples out there of web sites that navigate in gamelike fashions, without directly referencing games? I.e. in a more subconscious way?
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”
“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912
“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex
» visit the Collision Detection archives
May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM
From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.
July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S
July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM
My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.
June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM
On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.
June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM
I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives.
According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable!
» see all of my photos on Flickr
ECHO
Erik Weissengruber
Vespaboy
Terri Senft
Tom Igoe
El Rey Del Art
Morgan Noel
Maura Johnston
Cori Eckert
Heather Gold
Andrew Hearst
Chris Allbritton
Bret Dawson
Michele Tepper
Sharyn November
Gail Jaitin
Barnaby Marshall
Frankly, I'd Rather Not
The Shifted Librarian
Ryan Bigge
Nick Denton
Howard Sherman's Nuggets
Serial Deviant
Ellen McDermott
Jeff Liu
Marc Kelsey
Chris Shieh
Iron Monkey
Diversions
Rob Toole
Donut Rock City
Ross Judson
Idle Words
J-Walk Blog
The Antic Muse
Tribblescape
Little Things
Jeff Heer
Abstract Dynamics
Snark Market
Plastic Bag
Sensory Impact
Incoming Signals
MemeFirst
MemoryCard
Majikthise
Ludonauts
Boing Boing
Slashdot
Atrios
Smart Mobs
Plastic
Ludology.org
The Feature
Gizmodo
game girl
Mindjack
Techdirt Wireless News
Corante Gaming blog
Corante Social Software blog
ECHO
SciTech Daily
Arts and Letters Daily
Textually.org
BlogPulse
Robots.net
Alan Reiter's Wireless Data Weblog
Brad DeLong
Viral Marketing Blog
Gameblogs
Slashdot Games