Designing for Experience

From Game Daily via Slashdot

More people play online games each week than any other single online activity.

Games… they’re more important than facebook, myspace, & youtube combined.

So why aren’t we studying games more? Why not take these things more seriously?

We have departments out there studying New Media, and I personally saw so many presentations at CHI about various social networks, but not a lot about games. Where are the game studies departments? Where is the scholarship. Yes, I know there are a few journals, and things are starting, but when will mainstream academia and online industry realize what a powerful force games really are?

Wake up world!

According to this article quoting the PriceWaterhouseCoopers report we will start spending more on video games than music.

Now I know that this is not exactly the freshest headline on the planet, but I just had to write about it here to draw attention to it.

Yes it’s true, we will spend more on games. This is monumental, and I think indicative of several things that are happening in the world. First of all, we like our entertainment to be interactive. Listening “passively” to things will have it’s place for a long time in my life at least, but I want more than that. Chilling out listening to music generally won’t distract me from that looming deadline, or project, and buy me a few minutes of blissfully unaware casual gaming mania. Neither will it envelope me in a whole new world for me to explore for hours on end.

Music dead? no way, just as I said in yesterday’s post about loving the music in games I’ve played, I love listening to music, especially music from games while I work. I think that music from games will become increasingly important, and we will certainly start seeing some more crossover into mainstream music from game music. I will probably also post sometime soon an interview I had with a lead sound designer for a major upcoming MMO, that will talk about how music and sound is evolving rapidly in games.

Thanks to Tyler Pace who sent me a link to the original post a while back.

OverClocked ReMix - Unofficial Game Music Arrangement Community

If you have spent a portion of your life playing video games you have come to love (and to hate) certain portions of the music associated with those games.  If you are as old as I am, it may been a couple of decades or more since you have heard the music from some of the games you used to play for hours.

Now fast forward to today, you probably have to work, whether it be school work, or office type stuff and as you work you probably have the chace, or the need, to listen to music while you work.  Enter Overclocked remix.  Many dedicated fanboys have taken some of those classic themes and music from games and remixed them.  It is like a walk down memory lane if you played that game, but it is also new, fresh and compellingly upbeat (for the most part).  It keeps me going while I work and read and even when I surf.  Because they have very little, if any, lyrical content there is no distraction in listening to them if you are also working on other projects.

So what are you waiting for, get over there and check it out!

Next post: some thoughts on this intersection of games and music and culture.

Blogged with Flock

I’ve finally done it, I’ve gotten the HCI/Games group going. It seems that there is very little out there that talks about Usability, User Interface, Human-Centered Security, and the many social aspects of games out there, so we now have a google group for it.

http://groups.google.com/group/hcigames

I called it HCI/Games because of the program I’m in right now. It’s called HCI/Design, so we look at Human-Computer Interaction and focus on how design fits into that. Well this group is focusing on how games fit into HCI.

If there is anyone involved with Microsoft’s efforts on usability in games (which I have heard is significant and pretty darn good) who would like to contribute to our discussion I welcome it.

So I have to admit that I haven’t been posting nearly as often as I would like.  Add to that the fact that I have tons of friends out there blogging these days and I’m really enjoying reading their posts.  While I had initially thought that I would keep this blog focused mostly on things technological and professional, I decided I must add in some family and friends posts.  It will be for the best I think.  If the day comes that I need to make two separate blogs, so be it, but for now here we are.

That being said please click some of my links to the right and see who else I know who’s blogging!