For Tigoe’s “Physical Computing” piece, one of the quotes that stood out to me was the idea that pretty much everything physical computing-related has already been done before, and if it hasn’t, many aspects of your idea are inevitably going to be unoriginal, and that is okay. The main message I got from this piece was that there are endless ways of remixing things using the same concepts you see– your specific combination of physical computing-ideas is going to make your idea.
Out of the motifs he listed, I thought the tilty stands/tables were the most amusing to me. The first reason why is because it reminded me of the game Super Monkey Ball, a game I loved as a kid; the second reason is because I’ve been wanting to integrate my old skateboard into our final project since the first class, and a skateboard is basically a “tilty table” you stand on. I hope to learn more physical computing skills to eventually create an interactive experience using my skateboard.
For Tigoe’s second piece, “Set the Stage, Then Shut Up and Listen”, the title immediately reminded me of the mindset I had to approach my midterm presentation with– if my game is good, I have no need to explain anything myself. Sure enough, that was roughly the mentality Tigoe was preaching here.
I’ve heard staying quiet and watching the experience can be very frustrating for many people, but my personal belief is that the frustration is an indicator of poor user experience design. My experience with watching has always been so much fun as I get to confirm my hypothesis with how the user interacts with the game.
For example, I wanted to create a situation where players would communicate “let me handle the red ball and you get the blue ball” in my midterm game’s co-op mode. The game would only start with one ball but a second one would spawn after the ball’s second bounce, which would hopefully prompt the players to coordinate whose responsibility the new ball was. When it came to the first ever playtest in-class, I was overjoyed when Yongje and Khatira said “let me handle the red ball and you get the blue ball” pretty much word-for-word.
However, I also recognize that not every system is foolproof as there are prerequisites I had not considered for understanding the game. Many people struggled to figure out what fingers to use to press WASD or the arrow keys so they would use one finger from each hand to press WASD separately and get really confused why the controls were so clunky. Obviously, WASD is a very gamer-coded instinct so anyone who inherently doesn’t play games would not understand to put their middle finger on “W” and ring and index fingers beside on the “A” and “D” keys respectively. That begs the question of whether explaining finger placement was necessary or whether there was an unforeseen restriction on who could enjoy my project.
