Over the Thanksgiving holiday I read the book "The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness" by Elyn R. Sacks. Ian grabbed it from the library because of its cool cover and its reference to a W. B. Yeats poem.

Turns out it was a very good choice.

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Super Mario Galaxy (SMG) isn’t a casual game, but it uses a lot of casual game strategies to make it addictive. While the basic mechanics are more involved than your average casual game, they’re surrounding by a host of tricks that casual games use to keep people coming back: level selection, variety, a mixture of short- and long-term goals, high scores, and visceral rewards.

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Ian and I recently watched Helvetica, a documentary on the eponymous font (if you have Netflix, you can watch it on demand). There are a lot of great interviews with designers talking about the impact of Helvetica, both when it was introduced and now. Despite the fact that they're talking about something inherently boring (a font), the interviews manage to be indredibly interesting. How? They're all overstated and passionate.

There's the "old guard" type designer who evaluates Helvetica in terms of carving letters into metal, the pair of designers who think that Helvetica is poopular because it says everything, and even the woman who talks about how Helvetica was behind the Vietnam War and the Iraq War.

My takeaway from the movie is that anything can be interesting if it's presented well. Most of the designers interviewed say something similar, but it never becomes repetitive. The film itself is also filled with long sequences of just uses of the font in public and music, yet they never become tiresome.

Ever a few years behind the times, I finally got a computer that the interactive fiction thing "Façade" can run on. This program is as close as anyone has gotten to "a story that reacts to your actions."

It’s an interesting concept, which boils down to "You visit your two friends at their apartment. You can walk around the room and talk to them. Sometime during this they will have a massive break down and you must try to talk them out of it… or make it worse by insulting them."

It works via natural language parsing and it’s the best NLP that I’ve seen, but it still doesn’t work that well. You type your text in and they react, but half the time the two characters thought I was talking to the wrong one, or they just wouldn’t understand what I was saying. Or they’d react with "That really helps us right now" without giving me the feeling that they’d actually understood me.

The whole thing feels more natural than a conversation tree but hurts as a game because I never felt like my actions in the world did all that much. Mostly I stood around and sipped my drink while two people sniped at each other. It was uncomfortable to listen to, so they have that realism down.

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We've been passing Make to Stick around the office for quite a while now. It's a great look at an important question: why is it easier to remember things like urban legends than things like mission statements?

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This is a continuation of "Screaming in the Mountains, Part 1"

The designers of Eldritch Errors have said that one of the things they can always count on is Human Nature. It let them get the online community riled up and working at cross-purposes to the campers all while believing they were doing the Right Thing. It was very cleverly done. But while I was there, I learned that while macro level group reactions are important to think about, the behavior of individuals become more and more important the smaller your group is. With only five people, our group was pretty small. Here are some of the things I learned about hosting a live event:

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