In the board game Monster Munchies you control monsters whose aim is to survive and get home, eat other monsters and not get eaten by other monsters. It is a fun game for kids in all ages.
The rules resemble a cross between Ludo, Chess and Checkers.
The game was developed in collaboration with Lars Marcus Vedeler and Anders August Kittilsen.
Frozen Lamp is a mood enhancing candle holder that changes its characteristics over time – as the ice melts. The basic product is a reusable mould and a tripod. Fill the mould with water and put it in the freezer; a few hours and the lamp will be ready for use.
Fed up trying to find the right plug to the right appliance?
Tired of that old ugly plug up on the wall?
PlugIt is the product for you. It hides, disguises, changes, marks and organizes your plugs.
The way YOU want.
It’s not here. It is not missing. is an interactive installation exploring the negative space of perceived reality, seeking to sensitize the visitor to the subtracted parts of the whole. It uses the metaphor of shadows as masks for visuals as well as sound.
The installation cycles through two states, a subtractive state and an additive state, complementing each other as two approaches to the same theme: the small parts that make up the whole. The subtractive state is meditative and subtle, while the additive state is brash and immediate.
The installation is built with Arduino (arduino.cc/) and Processing (processing.org/). The music is by Sindre Husebø.
The Void Which Binds is a distributed system of physical autonomous agents based on the theory of Emergence, a term used to describe the phenomena of when interactions between parts create a whole, and this whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Something new, different to what was before occurs; something unpredictable, or not immediately deducible.
The system consists of a series of autonomous agents in a distributed system. Each agent, or unit, has a brain (microcontroller), a light source, a light sensor and a sound module (solenoid and percussive part). The units communicate with each other via light, listening to each other and passing the information forwards. A unit will become agitated if it is separated from the group (this happens if it stops getting input when someone or something obstructs the line of sight to its sensor), and will start a rippling effect throughout the system as its neighbours pick up on the state and sends it forwards.
The system was built with interactive installations in mind; however potential uses varies from games, via educational tools to presence aware control systems.
The Urørt Hitmetron is a playful installation for creating sound art and music. Part instrument, part installation, part performance, part toy; using a sequencer’s logic and a simplified interface allows the user to make continuously changing audio track. The background for the concept was that it would be placed at music festivals as a promotion for NRK Urørt, touring the country during the summer season.
The project was a part of the Tangible Interactions course at AHO (aho.no) run in collaboration with NRK Urørt (nrk.no/urort), a Norwegian site for promoting young, unsigned bands and artists.
Ambiance is a concept for a sound art installation and a public intervention.
Tags are located around the cityscape that allows you to download location specific soundtracks to your mobile phone or other connected multimedia capable devices.
The book Rules of Play is not a book about creativity, nor is it a book especially concerned with the act of designing and thereby using creativity. It offers no explicit methods. Instead it is a book delving into the fundamentals, the core elements of games themselves, seeking to find an understanding of what causes Meaningful Play.
So why this critical review of a book that doesn’t concern itself with creativity? Because from one design view, the act of giving oneself restrictions and a clear framework to work within often sparks the creativity and thus makes the way to a better end product that much easier. And that is exactly what this book offers: insights into the mechanisms of game play, definitions of the basic components that make Meaningful Play, the different elements that can be used, or ignored when designing games. Meaningful Play is a phrase that is used throughout the entire book. After all the aim of a game designer, according to the authors, is just that, to create meaningful play. The authors define meaningful play as both “the process by which a player takes action within the designed system of the game and the system responds to the action” (p. 37) and “what occurs when the relationships between actions and outcomes in a game are both discernable and integrated into the larger context of the game” (p. 37). By this they say that meaningful play is both the logic solutions within the games system, as well as the players feeling that whatever action he or she makes at any one time belongs in the greater context of the game.
The book is divided into four main Units: Unit 1: Core Concepts, Unit 2: Rules, Unit 3: Play and Unit 4: Culture. The first Unit is concerned with a lot of definitions. The authors have taken key phrases such as Meaningful Play, Design, Systems, Interactivity, Games and Digital Games and broken them down to find the elusive meanings of these words we normally so easily throw around. They analyze the etymological origins, go through both historical and contemporary theorists own definitions and break them down, before building their own rather explicit definitions and meanings from the bottom up. These core concepts then form the basis of the professional language they use throughout the book. In conclusion of this unit they go through three “game design schemas”, namely Rules, Play and Culture. These schemas offer different viewpoints when analyzing games.
In the second unit – Rules – the authors go into both the formal and the informal rules that make a game. These are rules on three levels, what the authors call Constitutive Rules, Operational Rules and Implicit Rules. Constitutive Rules are the core mechanics of a game, the mathematical systems that make things work. The Operational Rules are typically the rules written in a game manual delivered with your new board game, they are the “rules” that the players are meant to follow. The Implicit Rules are the “unwritten rules” such as etiquette and behaviour. In addition the authors delve into systems theories and how different kinds of systems can offer different kinds of meaningful play.
The third unit – Play – goes into the experiential aspects of game design, how the rules instead of being a formal system can create a meaningful experience for the players of a game. They go through themes such as Games as the Play of Meaning, Games as the Play of Pleasure, Games as Narrative Play and Games as Social Play. Through these different viewpoints they delve into topics like narrative and social interaction. They look at rule-systems as a way of conveying an experience; as participation, as observation, as a mental state or bodily sensation, as emotion, or in their own words, “as something lived” (p. 104).
The final unit – Culture – takes a look at the games’ context, the way culture influences the creation of games, as well as the way games can transform and create culture. The authors go through Games as Cultural Rhetoric, Games as Open Culture, Games as Cultural Resistance and Games as Cultural Environment. They look at how games communicates cultural ideas such as gender specific roles, but also how they can be consciously used to change such ideas. They also take up again the idea of Implicit Rules, and show how these always take their cue from society and its culture.
By finishing this last unit you suddenly find yourself having gone through the whole architecture of games from a molecular level to a planetary level, from the vaguest of concepts via the basic building blocks up to the overall view.
Having only these four Units from the book available would have made me a happy fish. Instead they top it off with wonderful extras. It boasts an excellent index, a most exhaustive bibliography that lets you delve deeper into the authors own research, as well as suggestions for further reading and study after every chapter, many of these articles freely available on the web. In addition the authors have commissioned one essay and four games especially for the book. This is a joy to read. The essay is written by Reiner Knizia and is a description of his design of the Lord of the Rings board game. The games are designed by Richard Garfield, Frank Lantz, Kira Snyder and James Ernest, and with the games follow a description of how they went about designing them. The last thing I would like to mention in the book is a list of game design exercises that they have included. In total 16 fully formulated exercises suitable both for educational use as well as personal training.
Claiming that the authors offer no methods of creative work is half a lie. They do touch upon it. But they never go into specifics. They do not cover how to come up with ideas, and they do not describe a way of going from idea to concept to full product.
In chapter two of the introductory part of the book they mention Iterative Design. Iterative design is in their words “a play-based design process” (p. 11). Focusing on early prototyping and a cyclic process, the game goes through many iterations, or versions, before finally arriving at the “best” possible solution. This is a process of prototyping, play testing, evaluation and refinement. In the words of Eric Zimmerman in his online essay Play as Research: The Iterative Design Process: “Test; analyze; refine. And repeat. Because the experience of a viewer/user/player/etc cannot ever be completely predicted, in an iterative process design decisions are based on the experience of the prototype in progress”, and “In this way, the project develops through an ongoing dialogue between the designers, the design, and the testing audience”. He reflects that iterative design is not only a design methodology, but also a form of design research; this because of all the questions that pop up in the process and the reflections you as a designer is forced to make regarding those questions.
Zimmerman also claims that the iterative design approach is a powerful tool far outside the boundaries of game design. In designing a game you design rules and play. If you look a bit outside the box all this means is that you design structure and experience. And what is it designers in other fields usually do? They design structure and experience. Therefore designers in general should be better at implementing iterative design in their repertoire of design methods.
In conclusion in the words of Zimmerman: “In iterative design, there is a blending of designer and user, of creator and player. It is a process of design through the reinvention of play.”
As a book Rules of Play is a decidedly good read. It is well written, has a light and pleasant layout. In content all praise to the authors. This is a book worth reading, not only for the game interested, but also for the general design audience as it’s a well balanced work of not only game mechanics and components, but delves into the mind of the player, the experiencing user. (A warning though: the theme throughout the book is games and how to create meaningful play, so if you do not find that the least interesting it might be a bit tedious to read through.) The authors draw from different areas of research such as mathematics, psychology, sociology and anthropology giving us the necessary means to gain a greater understanding of who we actually make things for. For a professional or wannabe game designer the book offers new ways of approaching the field. And in addition (I must repeat myself on this) the share load of reference material listed is almost worth buying the book in itself! The authors have trawled through an enormous amount of literature both concerning the theme and going way beyond; and not only read and listed it, they have incorporated them in the book as the themes they touch upon corresponds, giving the reader an opportunity to delve deeper into exactly what he or she may please.
Does reading this book make me more creative? I don’t know, but I think it gives me some nudges in the right direction. Does it give me more information to use when doing design work? Definitely. Reading the book and the articles on iterative design has at the least made me want to be more iterative in my approach to design when the projects allow it. And that, if nothing else, I consider a good thing.
“People love pong.
They do. But why?
Really. What’s to love? There isn’t much to the game: a pair of paddles move two blunt white lines on either side of a black screen, a blocky excuse for a ball bounces between them, and if you miss the ball, your opponent scores a point. The first player to score fifteen points wins. Big deal. Yet despite its almost primitive simplicity, Pong creates meaningful play.” (p. Xiii)
References
Salen, Katie/Zimmerman, Eric. 2004. Rules of Play – Game Design Fundamentals. London/Cambridge: The MIT Press
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010706/schell_pfv.htm
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20050720/gold_01.shtml
http://www.ericzimmerman.com/texts/Iterative_Design.htm
This is a short video made for use as a bumper on NRK3 television between shows. The only restriction was that it should be no more than 8 seconds long.
The video is currently running on NRK3 from time to time, as of winter 2011/2012.
The concept for Ballerina was developed in collaboration with Martin Sandstø.
The soundtrack is made by NRK3.
This is Bricks, the sequel.