Stuart writes up the process up making a mobile game as a web app—not a native app. The Wordle effect reverberates.
It’s a web app. Works for everyone. And I thought it would be useful to explain why it is, why I think that’s the way to do things, and some of the interesting parts of building an app for everyone to play which is delivered over the web rather than via app stores and downloads.
The result of adding more constraints means that the products have a broader appeal due to their simple interface. It reminds me of a Jeremy Keith talk I heard last month about programming languages like CSS which have a simple interface pattern:
selector { property: value }. Simple enough anyone can learn. But simple doesn’t mean it’s simplistic, which gives me a lot to think about.
Like Wordle, but for geography instead of words.
Every day, there is a new Mystery Country. Your goal is to guess the mystery country using the fewest number of guesses. Each incorrect guess will appear on the globe with a colour indicating how close it is to the Mystery Country.
At the end of every Thursday afternoon at Clearleft, we wrap up the working week with an all-hands (video) meeting. Yes, I know that the week finishes on Friday, but Fridays have been declared the no-meetings day at Clearleft: a chance to concentrate on heads-down work without interruption. Besides, some of us don’t work on Fridays. So Thursday really is the new Friday.
At this Thursday afternoon meeting we give and get updates on what’s been happening with project work, new business, events, marketing. We also highlighted any shout-outs that have posted in the #beingsplendid Slack channel during the week. Once that’s all taken care of, the Thursday afternoon meeting often finishes with a fun activity.
The hosting of the Thursday afternoon meeting is decided by fate. Two weeks ago, Rebecca and Chris hosted an excellent end-of-week meeting that finished with an activity around food—everyone had submitted their dream meal and we had to match up the meal to the person. Lorenzo, however, couldn’t help commenting on the typography in the slide deck. “Lorenzo”, I said, “What are you more judgmental about—fonts or food?”
The words were barely out of my mouth when I realised I had the perfect activity for the next Thursday afternoon meeting, which fate had decreed I was to host. I put together a quiz called …fonts or food!
It’s quite straightforward. There are 25 words. All you have to do is say whether it’s the name of a font or the name of a food.
It was good fun! So I thought I’d share it with you if you fancy a go.
Ready?
Here we go…
Total: /25
This is fun (and addictive)! With every new entry pulled from Wikipedia, you’ve got to arrange it onto a timeline correctly.
Now you can play a demo of Townscaper right in your browser.
There goes your productivity.
The ZX Spectrum in a time of revolution:
Gaming the Iron Curtain offers the first book-length social history of gaming and game design in 1980s Czechoslovakia, or anywhere in the Soviet bloc. It describes how Czechoslovak hobbyists imported their computers, built DIY peripherals, and discovered games as a medium, using them not only for entertainment but also as a means of self-expression.
I played a lot Lords of Midnight (and Doomdark’s Revenge) on my Amstrad 464 when I was a kid. Turns out there’s a dedicated labour of love to port the games to modern platforms. I just downloaded the OS X port, so there goes my weekend.
My current score is one minute and 18 seconds. Can you beat it?
What’s important is that you test it with real users… and stop using hover menus.
Strong agree!
Match up images that have been posted in pairs to Twitter with the caption “same energy”. This is more fun and addictive than it has any right to be.
Ten years ago I gave a talk at An Event Apart all about interaction design. It was called Paranormal Interactivity. You can watch the video, listen to the audio or read the transcript if you like.
I think it holds up pretty well. There’s one interaction pattern in particular that I think has stood the test of time. In the talk, I introduce this pattern as something you can see in action on Huffduffer:
I was thinking about how to tell the user that something’s happened without distracting them from their task, and I thought beyond the web. I thought about places that provide feedback mechanisms on screens, and I thought of video games.
So we all know Super Mario, right? And if you think about when you’re collecting coins in Super Mario, it doesn’t stop the game and pop up an alert dialogue and say, “You have just collected ten points, OK, Cancel”, right? It just does it. It does it in the background, but it does provide you with a feedback mechanism.
The feedback you get in Super Mario is about the number of points you’ve just gained. When you collect an item that gives you more points, the number of points you’ve gained appears where the item was …and then drifts upwards as it disappears. It’s unobtrusive enough that it won’t distract you from the gameplay you’re concentrating on but it gives you the reassurance that, yes, you have just gained points.
I think this a neat little feedback mechanism that we can borrow for subtle Ajax interactions on the web. These are actions that don’t change much of the content. The user needs to be able to potentially do lots of these actions on a single page without waiting for feedback every time.
On Huffduffer, for example, you might be looking at a listing of people that you can choose to follow or unfollow. The mechanism for doing that is a button per person. You might potentially be clicking lots of those buttons in quick succession. You want to know that each action has taken effect but you don’t want to be interrupted from your following/unfollowing spree.
You get some feedback in any case: the button changes. Maybe the text updates from “follow” to “unfollow” accompanied by a change in colour (this is what you’ll see on Twitter). The Super Mario style feedback is in addition to that, rather than instead of.
I’ve made a Codepen so you can see a reduced test case of the Super Mario feedback in action.
See the Pen Unobtrusive feedback by Jeremy Keith (@adactio) on CodePen.
Here’s the code available as a gist.
It’s a function that takes two arguments: the element that the feedback originates from (pass in a DOM node reference for this), and the contents of the feedback (this can be a string of text or it can be HTML …or SVG). When you call the function with those two arguments, this is what happens:
span element and puts the feedback contents inside it.translateY applied so it drifts upward. At the same time it gets its opacity reduced from 1 to 0 so it’s fading away.transitionend event that fires when the animation is over. Once that event fires, the generated span is destroyed.When I first used this pattern on Huffduffer, I’m pretty sure I was using jQuery. A few years later I rewrote it in vanilla JavaScript. That was four years ago so I wonder if the code could be improved. Have a go if you fancy it.
Still, even if the code could benefit from an update, I’m pleased that the underlying pattern still holds true. I used it recently on The Session and it’s working a treat for a new Ajax interaction there (bookmarking or unbookbarking an item).
If you end up using this unobtrusive feedback pattern anyway, please let me know—I’d love to see more examples of it in the wild.
Fourteen years ago, I gave a talk at the Reboot conference in Copenhagen. It was called In Praise of the Hyperlink. For the most part, it was a gushing love letter to hypertext, but it also included this observation:
For a conspiracy theorist, there can be no better tool than a piece of technology that allows you to arbitrarily connect information. That tool now exists. It’s called the World Wide Web and it was invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
You know those “crazy walls” that are such a common trope in TV shows and movies? The detectives enter the lair of the unhinged villain and discover an overwhelming wall that’s like looking at the inside of that person’s head. It’s not the stuff itself that’s unnerving; it’s the red thread that connects the stuff.
Red thread. Blue hyperlinks.
When I spoke about the World Wide Web, hypertext, apophenia, and conspiracy theorists back in 2006, conspiracy theories could still be considered mostly harmless. It was the domain of Dan Brown potboilers and UFO enthusiasts with posters on their walls declaring “I Want To Believe”. But even back then, 911 truthers were demonstrating a darker side to the fun and games.
There’s always been a gamification angle to conspiracy theories. Players are rewarded with the same dopamine hits for “doing the research” and connecting unrelated topics. Now that’s been weaponised into QAnon.
In his newsletter, Dan Hon wrote QAnon looks like an alternate reality game. You remember ARGs? The kind of designed experience where people had to cooperate in order to solve the puzzle.
Being a part of QAnon involves doing a lot of independent research. You can imagine the onboarding experience in terms of being exposed to some new phrases, Googling those phrases (which are specifically coded enough to lead to certain websites, and certain information). Finding something out, doing that independent research will give you a dopamine hit. You’ve discovered something, all by yourself. You’ve achieved something. You get to tell your friends about what you’ve discovered because now you know a secret that other people don’t. You’ve done something smart.
We saw this in the games we designed. Players love to be the first person to do something. They love even more to tell everyone else about it. It’s like Crossfit.
Dan’s brother Adrian also wrote about this connection: What ARGs Can Teach Us About QAnon:
There is a vast amount of information online, and sometimes it is possible to solve “mysteries”, which makes it hard to criticise people for trying, especially when it comes to stopping perceived injustices. But it’s the sheer volume of information online that makes it so easy and so tempting and so fun to draw spurious connections.
This is something that Molly Sauter has been studying for years now, like in her essay The Apophenic Machine:
Humans are storytellers, pattern-spotters, metaphor-makers. When these instincts run away with us, when we impose patterns or relationships on otherwise unrelated things, we call it apophenia. When we create these connections online, we call it the internet, the web circling back to itself again and again. The internet is an apophenic machine.
I remember interviewing Lauren Beukes back in 2012 about her forthcoming book about a time-travelling serial killer:
Me: And you’ve written a time-travel book that’s set entirely in the past.
Lauren: Yes. The book ends in 1993 and that’s because I did not want to have to deal with Kirby the heroine getting some access to CCTV cameras and uploading the footage to 4chan and having them solve the mystery in four minutes flat.
By the way, I noticed something interesting about the methodology behind conspiracy theories—particularly the open-ended never-ending miasma of something like QAnon. It’s no surprise that the methodology is basically an inversion of the scientific method. It’s the Texas sharpshooter fallacy writ large. Well, you know the way that I’m always going on about design principles and they way that good design principles should be reversible? Conspiracy theories take universal principles and invert them. Take Occam’s razor:
Do not multiply entities without necessity.
That’s what they want you to think! Wake up, sheeple! The success of something like QAnon—or a well-designed ARG—depends on a mindset that rigorously inverts Occam’s razor:
Multiply entities without necessity!
That’s always been the logic of conspiracy theories from faked moon landings to crop circles. I remember well when the circlemakers came clean and showed exactly how they had been making their beautiful art. Conspiracy theorists—just like cultists—don’t pack up and go home in the face of evidence. They double down. There was something almost pitiable about the way the crop circle UFO crowd were bending over backwards to reject proof and instead apply the inversion of Occam’s razor to come up with even more outlandish explanations to encompass the circlemakers’ confession.
Anyway, I recommend reading what Dan and Adrian have written about the shared psychology of QAnon and Alternate Reality Games, not least because they also suggest some potential course corrections.
I think the best way to fight QAnon, at its roots, is with a robust social safety net program. This not-a-game is being played out of fear, out of a lack of safety, and it’s meeting peoples’ needs in a collectively, societally destructive way.
I want to add one more red thread to this crazy wall. There’s a book about conspiracy theories that has become more and more relevant over time. It’s also wonderfully entertaining. Here’s my recommendation from that Reboot presentation in 2006:
For a real hot-tub of conspiracy theory pleasure, nothing beats Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco.
…luck rewarded us, because, wanting connections, we found connections — always, everywhere, and between everything. The world exploded into a whirling network of kinships, where everything pointed to everything else, everything explained everything else…
What web development can learn from the Nintendo Game and Watch.
The Web now consists of an ever-growing number of different frameworks, methodologies, screen sizes, devices, browsers, and connection speeds. “Lateral thinking with withered technology” – progressively enhanced – might actually be an ideal philosophy for building accessible, performant, resilient, and original experiences for a wide audience of users on the Web.
I made an offhand remark at the Clearleft Christmas party and Trys ran with it…
When the game developer Blizzard Entertainment decommissioned some of their server blades to be auctioned off, they turned them into commemorative commodities, adding an etching onto the metal frame with the server’s name (e.g., “Proudmoore” or “Darkspear”), its dates of operation, and an inscription: “within the circuits and hard drive, a world of magic, adventure, and friendship thrived… this server was home to thousands of immersive experiences.” While stripped of their ability to store virtual memory or connect people to an online game world, these servers were valuable and meaningful as worlds and homes. They became repositories of social and spatial memory, souvenirs from WoW.
After reading this account of a wonderfully surreal text adventure game, you’ll probably want to play AI Dungeon 2:
A PhD student named Nathan trained the neural net on classic dungeon crawling games, and playing it is strangely surreal, repetitive, and mesmerizing, like dreaming about playing one of the games it was trained on.
Six UX lessons from game design:
- Story vs Narrative (Think in terms of story arcs)
- Games are fractal (Break up the journey from big to small to tiny)
- Learning loop (figure out your core mechanic)
- Affordances (Prompt for known loops)
- Hintiness (Move to new loops)
- Pacing (Be sure to start here)
Boolean logic manifested in a Turing-complete game