Designing for Experience

While doing some youth research earlier this year I was surprised to see many teenagers on YouTube, but not really to watch, but to listen to music.  A free way to listen to a ton of interesting music.  I hadn’t really thought about doing that, but here they were all doing it. I’m not sure if the fine people at Google knew about that kind of emergent user behavior, but they are sure going to profit from it.

So I’m not sure how I didn’t notice this when it came out last week (oh yah I was sick in bed) but you should read this: Official Google Blog: I clicked to buy and I liked it.

Essentially viewers on YouTube will soon be able to click over to Amazon and the dreaded itunes store and buy music used in a video, or if the video is of a video game, you can buy the game (presumably from Amazon).  No word yet on how much they will get from this, and if they will share with the video creator (not likely).

Many have wondered how Google would monetize it’s massive purchase price of YouTube, aside from a relatively small attempt at ads in the videos in a non-obtrusive way, they haven’t done a lot.  Here it goes, but how will it affect the experience of YouTube?  Let’s wait and see..

So back to the topic of games, I’ve posted a few times on this… but games are important: we spend more money on online games than music.  Gaming is the #1 online activity.

HCI, or Human-Computer Interaction, studies technology with very different methodological and philosophical bent than Computer Science or it’s many sister sciences, that of phenomenology.  This embodied approach to computing and it’s concomitant commitment to human-centered design and usability is badly needed in most end-user systems.

Currently game designers and developers tend to be, like CS, in the positivist/reductionist way of thinking.  While this can be helpful we need more than that. It’s also pretty clear to me that many games fail, or are less successful, because of usability issues, and I’m not a huge fan of many of the game UIs out there.  For example: ,I’m an avid gamer, and I was bewildered by the WoW interface when I started playing.  I hate to think of a gamer n00bie trying to grapple with WoW.

The study of games, or Ludology (the fashionable Latinate title it goes by now) is in my mind a subset of HCI.  It seems clear to me that video games are a human-computer interaction.  Do I need to back that up anymore?  If so I need to do some more thinking on that issue.

Building on my post from yesterday I think that philosophy plays a significant role here, and of course both HCI and it’s subsets are still working on a coherent language of description and criticism.

At IU School of Informatics we have HCI/Design and HCI/Security (and HCI/Music?), so I think we ought to think about HCI/Ludology or to be a little more layperson friendly maybe HCI/Games.

There has been talk for years that this could be a possibility, and I want it to happen, we could have another first in the US.  First School of Informatics in the US, first PhD program in Ludology, or at least HCI/Ludology right?

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.

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