My father is a sculptor and so several times as a child I found myself in art exhibitions. You learn a great many things when you are a child in an art gallery. You learn to keep your hands to yourself and you learn a great deal about human anatomy.

It was like living inside an alternate reality: here we have our normal cities and towns, our normal every day people. Then, every once in a while we’d travel to these strange buildings where normal looking people put their psyches in physical form and put that out for the world to see.

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Last summer I took a vacation in Walt Disney World, and after riding a few of the rides, it really struck me how similar imagineering is to designing ARGs. The people who design the attractions at the Disney theme parks are called the Disney Imagineers. All of the rides, from Space Mountain to the Tower of Terror, are the result of their work. But what makes designing theme park rides similar to ARGs?

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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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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.

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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When I look back at the board games I played in my childhood, Monopoly stands out. Compared to games like Mouse Trap, Scattergories, and even Scrabble, Monopoly is much more complicated, takes longer, and requires more thinking (at least in terms of math and strategy). European board games are often similarly complicated, but in the US, family games tend to be simple and fast. So how did Monopoly get to be such a popular game?

The title of Philip Orbanes' Monopoly: the World's Most Famous Game—and how it got that way indicated that it would hold the answer. And there's definitely a lot of interesting material there, especially about the early days of the game. Unfortunately, most of the history of Monopoly had to be pieced together from patent filings, court cases, and the memories of early Parker Brothers' employees, so there's a lot of detail missing.

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How do you keep people from getting bored with your game?

From Donald Norman's Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things:

First, the object must be rich and complex, one that gives rise to a never-ending interplay among the elements. Second, the viewer must be able to take the time to study, analyze, and consider such rich interplay; otherwise the scene becomes commonplace. If something is to give lifelong pleasure, two components are required: the skill of the designer in providing a powerful, rich experience, and the skill of the perceiver.

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It really bugs me when I see glaring flaws in a product. Usually you can understand how those problems were left in, perhaps by mistake or under time pressure. Every once in a while, though, you run across something and can't help but wonder if they actually tested with real people or even just used it themselves.

My latest brush with this type of abysmal failure came from an unlikely source: leftover Halloween candy. For those unfamiliar with it, Jolly Ranchers are hard candies about the size of a quarter but much thicker. Recently, I came across a new version that's more like a stick of gum, although still a hard candy. Take a look at the picture and see if you can recognize the problem here. I'll give you a hint by telling you that the first two people who got a piece of the candy complained about the exact same thing.

The company took something that worked really well, a hard candy that you can pop into your mouth and suck on, and changed it so that you can no longer do that. That size is great for a stick of gum because you can fold it. With a hard candy, it becomes impossible to keep in your mouth. And if you pull it out occasionally, your hands get all sticky. What were you thinking, Jolly Rancher?

Video games are often about shooting things because that is an easy mechanic to implement. You make a bullet appear in your world, have it travel across the board, and see if it hits anything. Or, you point the “gun” at an alien, draw an imaginary line between the gun and that alien. If the line touches that alien, pow! Fire off the gruesome death animations and cue the visceral sound.

Guns are often easy to create and fun for the player to shoot off, that’s why we see a lot of shooter games out there. I play a lot of games with guns in them, so I have little to no standing to say that games with guns are bad.

I myself do not design games with guns. I believe in the power of alternatives.

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From Bill Moyer's interview with Jane Hirshfield in Fooling with Words:

[Teahouse Buddhist] refers to leading your life as if you were an old woman who has a teahouse on the side of the road. Nobody knows why they like to go there, they just feel good drinking her tea. She's not known as a Buddhist teacher... all she does is simply serve tea - but still, her decades of attentiveness are part of the way she does it. No one knows about her faithful attentiveness to her practice, it's just there, in the serving of her tea and the way she cleans the counters and washes the cups.

I've been thinking recently about balancing work and the rest of life, so this passage really struck me. In this view, balance is a matter of integration. Instead of working in her teahouse 9-5 and then practicing Buddhism in the evenings, the old woman makes it so that she practices Buddhism in her work. Even though I'm not a Buddhist, I think a similar concept applies. The things that I do are best when they extend naturally from who I am and what I believe. Doing things just to pay the bills or to please others, I'm less happy and my work just isn't as good.

I'm lucky that I'm at a place where I can do things like work on a casual game when that's what really drives me. I think that shines through in what I do.

I'd be interested in hearing how other people integrate their work with themselves. How do you make sure that what you're doing reflects what you believe?