My Apple bias is about to show through again, but it’s because I really think Apple is one of very few companies getting it really right on a really large scale. iPhone was the first successful device that really, truly put the user before the technology. Plenty of stuff that was possible (copy and paste, third-party development, &c.) wasn’t done, because it would have compromised the user experience. Heaps of legacy tech that people thought was crucial (hardware keyboard, stylus, removable battery) was instead completely jettisoned to make way for a better experience. The point of all this Apple fanboying is that it seems obvious to me that iPhone and iPad are the beginning of a new generation of experiences that eschew tradition, prioritize the experience, and exhibit good taste.

Eschewing tradition is interesting to consider in light of the Sears & Jacko chapter. It’s pretty fascinating to see people pontificating about the future of software design in the couple of years just before the iPhone was unveiled. Much of the speculation in these interviews focused on improvements in existing, familiar devices like cameras, music players, or PDAs — things that fewer and fewer people need to carry around anymore, thanks to iPhone-style smartphones. Of course we will have fewer devices, and of course they will get smaller. Stephanidis mentions “specialized devices designed specifically for everyday activities”, but it seems to me that more and more of your interaction with technology will happen through a single device. Not touchscreens and dedicated, disparate UIs on every appliance, but instead apps that talk to those appliances, all on one phone, all ahdering to the same UI guidelines. Of course, this doesn’t mean that iPhones are our future — iPhones are great for now, but a future of “pictures under glass” (as described in Bret Victor’s marvelous rant) is a short-sighted one. Hopefully something much more tactile, more visceral, and more present is our future.

Prioritizing the experience is harder than it sounds, because it deals with cooperation across disciplines that is still pretty rare to find. In the case of iPhone, the software and hardware engineering went out of its way to avoid taxing the system so that gestural interactions would never, ever skip or bog down  — thinking about which led me to compose this tweet: “Technology that does not constantly push its limits will not constantly remind you of its limits. Instead it feels magic. Restraint wins.” Companies that understand prioritizing the experience will get more common. And the ACM article makes it clear that it will be harder and harder to get away with bad UX. Customer satisfaction depends on it; people no longer have to settle for crappy experiences. Coming from a company that prioritizes good design, someone still trying to argue against HCDE practices seems to be saying “wait a minute, are you trying to tell me that we need to make our products good?”

Exhibiting good taste is my interpretation of the thrust of the Norman article. (I should mention here that I think Don Norman is one of the coolest people of all time.) Don’t mindlessly implement whatever users ask for. Don’t assume that the user has a far better idea than your team does of how the software ought to behave. Instead, put your expertise and experience to work and offer them something great. Let them adapt to it a bit, rather than trying to create something that will adapt to them every time. As I have put it in my talks on designing for iOS, “sometimes it is more thoughtful to ask people to learn how your app works than ask them to decide how your app works.”

Mac OS X Lion introduced a new type of trackpad scrolling that works the way iOS does: you drag as if the content is on a piece of paper and you are sliding it along. But you can still switch back to the old way, which I can barely believe anyone ever thought felt natural: you drag in the direction you want the viewport to move — even though the viewport doesn’t actually visibly move on the screen! And really, if you need to use the word “viewport” to describe how something works, it can’t be very natural!

Apple, too, felt strong enough about this basic interaction to solidify the consistency across platforms and change to content-scrolling on the Mac. In my case, it took about a day or two to get used to the new way. I even installed Scrollvetica, by my coworker Jim Correia, to make Snow Leopard work the same way. But I am of course an Apple fan and a software designer. So I was eager to switch to the future of scrolling and do things “right”.

But there are likely to be many confused and frustrated people out there, discovering that the viewport-scrolling they’ve gotten used to over the years has been reversed. Shouldn’t they be able to go back? (I do love the way Apple makes you turn off a setting labeled “Natural” in order to go back.)

And here is where Lukas and I disagree. He says that scrolling direction should not be a preference setting at all. We’ve figured out the right way of doing things, and we should encourage people to learn the new way. Just like how, for example, we make people learn to use Mission Control instead of Exposé.

In general, I agree that software creators should find the best way of doing something and ask people to learn, rather than finding several decent ways and asking people to decide. But there are two cases where I think preferences make sense:

One, dealing with technical differences in people’s setups. Sometimes you just have to work differently because you are interoperating with different types of servers, running on different hardware, and so on.

And two, dealing with abstracted input devices. Any input, other than something direct like a touch screen, has some sort of mapping going on. A keyboard layout is the way you want the keys to map to symbols on the screen. Keyboard shortcuts are how you want combinations of keys to map to commands. And scroll direction is how you want trackpad drags to map to moving content. These mappings are to some degree arbitrary, and people build up their own understanding of each mapping over time. The more time they have spent, the more painful the eventual change is going to be.

In the case of most changes, like onscreen controls moving or Mission Control replacing Exposé, people can see the change and adjust their interaction accordingly. But having a fundamental input change is frustrating; there is no change to notice until you have already made the mistake. The way you give input feels more personal, because it’s about how the computer reacts to you, not just about how the computer behaves. When something goes wrong, it seems like the computer thinks it’s your fault.

Of course, scrolling direction is easier to relearn than a keyboard layout. But if you are keen on taking advantage of Lion improvements today, I don’t think you should be required to go through that input frustration today. Encouraged, yeah. But not required.

In fact, a substantial percentage (often as many as 10 percent) of the sentences in first-rate writing begin with conjunctions.

Understandably, the answer that came back included this:

This is really confusing to me … because it seems to contradict the idea that if a word is frequently misused over time it becomes correct […]

Also, is there a definition for “first rate writing”?

It was a thrill to try writing a compact but reasonably thorough and accurate response:

I think we are stuck in the common conflation of language-related disciplines. Grammar, orthography, lexicography, usage, and style are different things, and they result in different kinds of advice.

Lexicography is a research discipline, so it tends to be almost totally descriptive — people who compile dictionaries just study how people use language and document it. So yes, the commonly recognized meanings of words in everyday use can and do change over time.

But usage and style are closer to art, and are more prescriptive — people who write usage and style guides try to explain how to use language as effectively as possible. Lexicography can help, but it can’t be the only factor. As with any (functional) art, one of the most reliable ways to know the right thing to do is to study respected artists (“first-rate writers”) as precedents: renowned novelists, esteemed journalists, cultural icons…

Of course, judging what is a good or bad precedent is fuzzy and difficult and controversial, and people can spend their whole lives trying to figure it out. That’s why we have all these disciplines! And reference books, for when we can’t spend our whole lives doing the research ourselves.

Here’s a software-design analogy. You could go out and describe how most software is designed, but your results would have nothing to do with how the best software is designed. Almost everyone uses a floppy disk icon to mean “save”, so it is widely recognized — but that doesn’t mean it’s good design. Likewise, Apple might do something unprecedented, like replacing OK/Cancel dialogs with single-button popovers on iPad — but that doesn’t mean it’s bad design.

…Wow, that was fun to write. LANGUAGE!

Typical tweet: “Amazing. Many American teenagers apparently have no idea who Osama bin Laden is.”

Correct reaction: According to a blog post (which is questionably-written enough to repeatedly use the figure “100,00%”), among people who use Yahoo search, who searched for something about Osama bin Laden on May 1st 2011, who phrased their search in the form of a question, the sixth most common question they searched for was “who is osama bin laden”, which amounts to an unknown number of searches, and which is unrelated to whether they have any idea who Osama bin Laden is; and two-thirds of people who searched for that question, who searched while logged in to Yahoo, who might be in the USA or maybe anywhere else in the world, are supposedly teenagers, according to their Yahoo demographic data, which may or may not be correct.

WOW SO DUM AMERIKAR

Create your own band and debut album cover randomly

To Do This:

1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random – The first random Wikipedia article that comes up is the name of your band.

2 – http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 – The last four or five words of the very LAST quote on the page is the title of your first album.

3 – http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days – The third picture in the top row, no matter what it is, is your album cover.

4 – Use Photoshop or similar to put it all together.

5 – Post it to your preferred online outlet with this text in the “caption” or “comment” and TAG the friends you want to join in.

Endless home improvement. iPad development scramble. Secrets. Silent Saturdays. At3. Personas. Science reading & listening. Job offer; raise. Briefcaseget. ScLl. Speaking engagement. Chaos;Head. Warmachine.

December 2009 – January 2010: Mother 2

My buddy Chris found me a copy of the Japanese Mother 1 + 2 for Game Boy Advance, and gave it to me at PAX. If I wasn’t going to get around to seeking out and playing his favorite game, he would bring it to me. Well, it says a lot that a GBA port of a SNES game, in 2010, made one of the strongest impressions of my gaming career. This story has more heart, more originality, more pure joy in it than any other ten games put together. I’ll never forget hiding under the covers, yeah, like a little kid, well past the time I was supposed to be asleep, tap tapping through this game.

January: Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

After D&D one evening, Rachael expressed interest in the new Silent Hill game on the Wii, but wasn’t too keen on enduring the creepiness alone. So a crowd of us agreed to meet up and play it together, thus beginning our Silent Saturday tradition. I guess the game didn’t really live up to its audacious psychological profiling claims, and most of the story (up until the very end) was not as compelling as the other Silent Hill stories I’d seen. But the experience of crowding around the TV together with a box of donuts and enjoying the game together amplified the game’s merits and softened its shortcomings.

January: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

H really likes Uncharted, mainly to see its gorgeous scenery, character models, and performance capture. Rachael pretty much dropped the game in my lap, and I knew it wouldn’t be more than a few hours, so I set it on Easy and went about shooting a million guys in the face. It was fun, mainly because I knew that H was getting some enjoyment out of watching me play a game, which is a rare thing.

January – February: Bayonetta

So I got ahold of a PS3 in anticipation of Ar tonelico 3, and I had about 10 days before that game was to come out. On a crazy impulse triggered by the descriptions of the game on the Giant Bombcast, I picked up Bayonetta. What a perfectly insane game it was. I played through it, put it away, and occasionally wondered whether it was all a dream.

February – July: Ar tonelico 3: Sekai Shuuen no Hikigane wa Shoujo no Uta ga Hiku

I have written a good bit about Ar tonelico 3 already, but here is what I think after some time to cool down. The distance of a few months has brushed away much of the frustration, leaving behind a sentimentality similar to what I feel about the first two games. From now on, I can just remember the bits about Tilia, and hope that the series-spanning survey Gust is doing right now will produce some more awesome Ar tonelico games in the future.

April – August: Espgaluda II

It would be great to go back in time about ten years, to my 19-year-old self, who while visiting Japanese arcades for the first time discovered danmaku/bullet-hell shooting. What a crazy genre, so exemplified by the company Cave, and so emblematic of games that we’d never get in the USA. Well, once I’d blown my younger self’s mind by showing him my iPhone 4, then I’d reblow it by showing him that Cave games were available on it, anywhere in the world, for ten dollars, as an instant download.

May – June: Persona

This was a lot closer to P2 than P3 was, which is a great thing. It had a good measure of that fascinating, retro-futuristic, perfectly late-90s storytelling. I ended up going through the game twice, after my first playthrough was sabotaged by a wrong answer in a dialogue. The second time, I played the famous masocore game-within-a-game Snow Queen quest, which was one of the most enjoyably grueling gaming experiences I’ve had. How cool it is that old PSX games I’ve always wanted to play are getting remade on PSP — Persona 2: Innocent Sin is coming in 2011!

August – December: Dodonpachi Resurrection

More Cave excellence on your mobile telephone. I actually play these more on the iPad, and I have gotten pretty good. For all the action games that don’t work as well on a touch-screen device, this sort of shooter is actually significantly better. And they are quite the conversation starter at WWDC or PAX, or on an airplane.

August – November: Persona 4

It’s super rare that H is actually interested enough in a game to insist that I only play it when she’s around. The experience of going through a single-player game together with someone is one that I miss very much: SNES RPGs with Tony in high school, Sakura Taisen with Andy in Japan, and various other precious chances. For once I got to have that with my wife. By the way it is a dang good video game. Everyone says it, but by the end of it the characters felt like family. We are actually not even done with this yet; because of a disappointingly narrow path to the special relationship with Naoto, we are determined to get him in our second loop through the game. 95 hours in, it is still making us smile.

October – December: CHAOS;HEAD NOAH

Something had me wanting a gal-game type of visual-novel with a complex, creative storyline. In 2004 I played Kaen Seibo; it is not an excellent game, but it showed that visual novels can carry you to a world as captivating as a sci-fi novel, not just to a typical Japanese high school. (And they can still have downright alluring characters by Yokota Mamoru, still my favorite character designer.)

The way Chaos;Head declared itself a “delusional science ADV” had me intrigued, and the attention it was getting for having a cerebral story made me go ahead and import it for PSP. Later I found out it was available for iPhone — I wish I could have gotten it instantly and cheaper, and supported the idea of visual novels on iOS. Maybe when Steins;Gate comes out.

The story immersed me in a way few games ever have. It’s rare that I can really feel like I am the protagonist a story. For about two months, playing this game was the thing I looked forward to all day, the thing I did once I had a chunk of free time, the thing I stayed up way too late doing. At several points in the story — Sena mysteriously eating her popsicle in the decommissioned train car comes to mind — I stopped and thought about how much unique, weird stuff is piled up in this one story. It is dark and paranoid without being misanthropic. It is occasionally terrifying rather than constantly painful to endure. And it repeatedly goes in unexpected directions.

Since finishing it about three weeks ago, no other games even seem interesting anymore. It’s a tough act to follow. Its comedy/fanservice counterpart comes out for PSP this month, but I’m sure if I imported it, the next day it would be announced for iOS. The sequel, Steins;Gate, is for Windows or Xbox 360; there are no plans yet to bring it to PSP or iOS. And the third in the series, Robotics;Notes, was just announced.

Chaos;Head gets my meaningless “Game of the Year” award for sure. Overall, 2010 was unprecedentedly packed with enjoyable games.

Electronic Arts and Visceral Games have put together an advertising campaign specifically constructed to provoke outrage, and I guess I have fallen for it, because it is literally keeping me up at night, writing an angry blog post.

The premise is that they lured over 200 mothers, one by one, to a bogus focus-testing room, without any idea of what they were going to see. Once they had a lady sitting down in front of their secret cameras, they played a reel of brutal, gory, and disturbing scenes from Dead Space 2. Edit together all the most horrified, disgusted, and offended reactions, and there is your viral campaign.

The reception around the web so far has been pretty unanimously that it’s brilliant and hilarious. Innocent old ladies crying are comedy gold, I guess.

I keep trying to come up with rationalizations, reasons that it’s not as cruel as it seems. Maybe they are actors, or the organizers somehow made sure to recruit women who could take it. But no, these ladies are genuinely shocked. Maybe they all signed some document with fine print specifying that they might see something disturbing, so they should have known better. Even so, the whole production is still based on causing someone distress, and exhibiting it for profit.

How can a project designed to traumatize random strangers get enough people and resources without somebody along the line realizing, this is downright evil? I wonder, does someone think they deserve it, for being ultraconservative, Jack-Thompson-like prudes, or something?

What if one of them had a violent experience in her past that she’s still trying to get over? How many of those 200 women ended up with nightmares or other aftereffects? I’m right in this game’s target audience, but it makes me damn queasy and upset — of course some of them will be even more strongly affected.

It is fine that the game exists. People should have the freedom to make and to play games like Dead Space, Dead Rising, Left 4 Dead, or some other kind of dead thing. And whatever someone else chooses to make, I must be able to maintain minimum contact with it in my life. (While it’s crucial that we are free to make whatever we choose, I wish we chose to make a wider variety of things.) Foisting it upon people unlikely to be able to handle it is cynical and sadistic.

Ultimately, the lesson seems to be that Electronic Arts thought it was cool to put their name on this. It’s a disgraceful idea as presented, whether it’s exactly as it seems or whether there was more to the story. EA is fine with people thinking it is real. They publish The Sims, PGA Tour Golf, Scrabble, Tetris, The Beatles Rock Band, and upwards of 1,000 other games. Now all those games come from a company that makes fun of old ladies crying for profit. Yeah, it’s a big company, publishing games from a lot of different developers, and you might think it’s not fair to judge the whole organization by what one small part of it does. Yet if they get all the benefits of being one huge, rich company, shouldn’t they also be held accountable as one huge, rich company?

Extra Credit: I focused on the direct offense so much, I didn’t even mention the implied offense. This campaign is called Your Mom Hates This — Those aren’t just some random ladies; they are supposed to represent your mother. EA is proud that their game is considered vile garbage not just by some backwards Puritan somewhere, but by your mom specifically. I don’t get some kind of perverse glee at the thought of my mother being brought to tears by something I did. I like my mom. And really, I’m sick of the casual way advertisers poke fun at their audience’s family, as if it’s taken for granted that my dad is a lazy idiot, my mom is a clueless prig, and my in-laws are domineering bores. (Usually the implication is not as explicit as it is here, but we are expected to identify with the dysfunctional families presented in commercials.) Maybe it’s because of how much exposure I’ve had to Japanese culture, where anything less than utter respect for a person’s family, especially a customer’s, is unthinkable. But EA is happy to explicitly associate their brand with the thought of tormenting not just someone’s mother, but one’s own mother.

I thought that what I wanted was some sort of fast-refreshing, high-color-depth e-paper. But Robin pointed out that in the end it’s still all just photons, and the display should be able to simulate the correct brightness and temperature. Of course! Macs and iOS devices already use ambient light sensors to adjust the screen brightness. First of all, they need to get better at this. My iPad is way, way too bright in a completely dark room and requires manual adjustment. But they also really need to detect the ambient light temperature. Like the site for f.lux explains, computer screens are designed to look like the sun — but at 10PM, “you probably shouldn’t be looking at the sun.”

Better adaptation to ambient light conditions should be incorporated into the operating system for every device with a backlit screen. It should use a camera to get really accurate information about your surroundings. The more I think about this, and the potential benefits to billions of people’s eyesight and sleep patterns, the more it seems like a moral responsibility for technology companies.

And, as Robin pointed out, this could knock down the greatest advantage the Kindle has over iBooks on the iPad: comfort. If they could get iBooks looking even 50% closer to what an actual e-ink display would look like in the same room, with the right number of photons at the right color, what a huge competitive advantage it would be. Suddenly I want this more than any other advancement.

1978: First Edition

Well, this edition was clearly designed by hobbyists for hobbyists. It’s hard to complain about design in a project put together by just a few geeks excited to share their cool new game. But I’ll try.

The big, thin, hardcover format used for these early books set the standard for pretty much all RPG books for the next thirty years. Maybe it appealed to the data-happy, statistics-oriented gamers of the day. The result is really big pages fulla lots and lots of information at once.

Super wide columns with minimal margins make pretty much all paragraphs significantly wider than they are tall, emphasized by the line between paragraphs. The tightly-leaded Futura, a typeface not very well suited to big blocks of text, make for a pretty dang unreadable document!

Futura, of course, has an oblique variant rather than a proper italic, so special terms are hard to pick out from the text around them. Headings are just bold Futura at the same size as the text, either all-capped or not.

So, yeah, all around a pretty difficult set of books to navigate and read. Of course, D&D was so novel and cool at the time, and the challenge of understanding the rules was probably part of the fun. Nerds of this sort don’t need to make their materials accessible to common folk!

1989: Second Edition

This era is dear to my heart; my brother-in-law introduced me to D&D when I was 10, and these were the books I spent hour after hour studying (without ever successfully running a campaign). Unfortunately I don’t have access to any core books from this edition, so I used a supplement that I found in the office library.

Yayy, Palatino! A lovely typeface designed for pages of text. Maybe it’s the sentimental value, but I have always loved the no-nonsense, clear design of this edition. The reading is spacious. There’s a single subtle color for headings (in the core books they were blue). (@sben reminds me that this typeface is Friz Quadrata. I hunted this one down a while back when I saw it in the Durarara!! credits and couldn’t remember where I’d seen it — turns out it was from World of Warcraft.) There’s just one level of heading, and subsections preceded by bold titles with colons. There are very few different styles of lists and tables. A little bit of flavor and color at the top, and the rest of the adventure is left to your imagination.

1995: 2nd Edition Revised

Holy good goshes do I dislike these books. If I had discovered D&D just a few years later, it’s unlikely I would have such fond memories of paging idly through the rulebooks time after time, imagining the worlds I could create. This edition feels so alien, so unwelcoming.

I have to start with the heading font. It’s so flagrantly idiosyncratic, so unreadable, so frequently used, and so… red. Except when it’s purple sometimes. It gives the entire page a too-unique flavor, one that’s just not quite right for this game. I could imagine some D&D campaign where that font would be at home, but it just isn’t appropriate in the core rulebooks for the whole game. (@sben informs me that this typeface is University Roman, also used by the Carson-era Tonight Show!)

The main text is not much better. It’s all in a not-too-attractive sans-serif that just isn’t comfortable to read. Big big swaths of text are presented in its oblique variant, which is even harder to read, without being different enough to usefully differentiate important terms.

Then the boxes. Oh the double-bordered black and bright-red boxes. The boxes next to separator lines next to boxes inside boxes. The boxes pushing partially into columns of text. The boxes encompassing whole pages. The too-dark “optional rule” boxes that go on and on. This layout already doesn’t afford nearly enough white space, and the claustrophobic boxes make it worse. There are so many dang ugly boxes.

Bleaurgh, I don’t like anything about these books!

2000: 3rd Edition

3rd Edition is where the production values and branding went way up, while the readability really didn’t. These books were cool to pick up off the bookstore shelf or your friend’s dresser and flip through. But trying to use them to play a game is a different story.

I do quite like the faux-3D covers, actually photographs of sculptures by Henry Higginbotham. They were something new, something unique, and something universal that suggested adventure without pushing too far in any particular direction. That’s actually pretty important to me — the simpler, more anonymous illustrations and paintings (especially around the 2nd Edition era) set my imagination going rather than trying to document precisely what a certain monster or character looked like.

Sadly, the hyper-cool approach to the cover design was continued inside the books. Cheesy year-2000 CG metal effects frame every page. Diagrams are wrapped in distressed parchment boxes. And every single line of text is defaced with intermittent sketchy brown underlines. This stuff is frankly an insult to the person who’s already paid for the book and is trying to make use of it.

Probably the worst thing in these books was the way that the first page of each chapter was especially distressed. It might have been cool if all that page held was a chapter intro. But actual content — spell details, stats, rules, tables — started right on that page. So, for example, of all the spells in the entire book, the 0- and 1st-level bard spell lists get this totally different and totally unreadable treatment. So many times our group couldn’t find what we were looking for because it was on the page that doesn’t look like normal chapter content.

2003: v3.5

The 3.5 update didn’t change the design much at all. The covers were prettied up, the brown underlines may have been toned down a bit, and the tables gained some alternating row coloring. This is the edition I used to finally start my first successful campaign. As you can see from the Post-It notes sticking out of the book, it was difficult to keep track of where stuff was, and the difficulty of certain rules (grappling!) made it necessary to look stuff up every time.

This era of D&D reminds me of my favorite Robert Bringhurst quotation — one of my favorite quotations from anyone, really:

The script of Macbeth does not need to be bloodstained and spattered with tears; it needs to be legible.

2008: 4th Edition

Here’s a design I can really get behind. Moving our gaming group over to 4th Edition was a pleasure. The game was redesigned to be friendly to players, and less demanding of Dungeon Masters. The materials were carefully and maturely designed. I am just as happy to spend gobs of time inside these books as I was with the 2nd Edition.

Something about the new cover treatment seemed so fresh and modern. It’s probably the swath of off-white behind the main logotype, the straightforward but attractive art, and the overall legibility. This is the first time the D&D branding was anything beyond “bad-ass, dark, and obfuscated.”

The goofy branding chrome has been minimized down into the corners, the chapter marker, and the major headings. The headings are populated by entirely appropriate and undistracting fonts. The color-coded headings and the beige boxes and tables are helpful rather than obnoxious. And the text has a nice balance between spaciousness and information density.

Also note that there are no sticky notes dangling out of this book; the rules are as clean as the design.

2010: D&D Essentials

The (sub-)edition that inspired me to finally compose this post. These books are reminiscent of my favorite sort of programming references.

Wow, a new form factor! The cover design has even more inviting, lightly-colored space than the 4th Edition. And there’s something so pleasant about the feel of a compact, slightly-heavy, handheld paperback book. It feels like it wants to get thrown in your bag and become battered by years of happy use, rather than stacked up and lugged around by hand like a grade-school textbook.

It took about three decades, but they arrived at a format that puts a digestible amount of information on each page. One column, legible text with plenty of breathing room, and just a couple of levels of clean heading styles. Especially cool is the way the subheadings flow right into their text. The branding chrome is almost nonexistent: a little fantasy flair around the page numbers, and the rest of the page is dedicated to words that explain the dang game to you.

That’s how it should be — this is a game that takes place inside language and imagination. I am impressed at and grateful for the amount of respect these more recent books show for the player.

Comparison Specimens

Here are a few of my favorite nonfiction book designs. It’s remarkable how well the Essentials books match the handbook approach of these fine documents.

Python Essential Reference

The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition

The Elements of Typographic Style

I think this came from my official GTD coaching session a while back. This context arrangement (in addition to the standard Home, Errands, et cetera) pretty seriously improved the way I work. I hope it yields some usefulness for you. :D

- Mac — Should probably change this; it really means Mac or iPad or iPhone. Nothing goes directly in here, only in the subcontexts. The subcontexts are arranged roughly by ascending cognitive expense.
- Maintenance — Mindless stuff like shuffling files around, paying bills, and fixing little problems on sites.
- Study — Research, Googlin’, finding out stuffs I need to find out.
- Commu — Contacting people by email or chat.
- Planning — Thinking pretty seriously about stuff, outlining, drafting ideas, and so on.
- Writing — Production writing tasks for things that need to be written well.
- Design — Grafflin’ & Photochoppin’.
- Code — Coding tasks that are likely to require a warmed-up brain.
- Translation — Making things that are in Japanese not be in Japanese anymore.
- Input — Videos; music; articles that won’t go in Instapaper.
- Output — Informal blog posts and such that don’t require intense thought.

Previously:

• Ar tonelico 3 impressions
• Ar tonelico 3 impressions, addendum
• Button Trance: Ar tonelico 3

Now, one more post to set the record straight.

My first playthrough of the game was with Saki, who I expected to like better than Finnel. In the end, I found that neither of them had grown significantly or exhibited any captivating or admirable traits. The word that H and I kept coming back to was “childish”. In a story like this, I want to meet characters I can look up to, or at least sympathize with.

Tilia redeems the game. Her “Normal End” hugely short-circuits the storyline of the game in a bittersweet way. Her “True End” had me feeling way more invested in the main storyline, once I was able to see the two main heroines just as well-developed NPCs. Even the unsatisfying combat was saved by her superior battle song choices.

Most of all, Tilia’s Binary Field storyline (the visual-novel segments of the game) had me as engrossed as any Cosmosphere or Binary Field sequence in the whole series. It recalls a crucial time in the history of Ar Ciel, injecting humanity into what was just some background lore about the origin of the towers and the reyvateils. Not only that, but through the magic of the Binary Field conceit, it puts you right into that 700-years-past story. I loved the blending of mythos and personal relationships, the deliberate thrice-over revisiting of the same few days, and, well, the pleasure of listening to Sakamoto Maaya talk a whole lot.

Even the lackluster character art in the game was replaced in my mind by this true-to-form portrait in the official design works book. It was presumably colored by Nagi himself, which makes all the difference. I did the best I could to reproduce it here via photograph and heavy iPhoto adjustments. [Edit: I found a proper reproduction of the original art!]

So, thankfully, I think I will be able to maintain fondness for the entirety of the Ar tonelico trilogy after all.

I spent several weeks doing nothing but work on OmniFocus for iPad (after several months of doing little else than working on it). Then I took my overdue vacation and spent a week buried in books and video games.

The Ar tonelico 3 DLC is starting to become available, and I still had Â¥400 in my account from when I bought Xenogears. So I am grabbing that up; it’ll be more motivation to go back and give that game some more opportunity to please. (Time passes.) Okay, thanks to the Skip button and my New Game+ leveled-up guys, I blew through Phase III in a couple of hours. Now I’ve got Tilia and I’m following her storyline; she may just be cool enough to make up for all of the game’s shortcomings. (Time passes.) Okay, Tilia is cool enough to make up for all the game’s shortcomings, and then some. I took the first couple of days of my vacation to play through her binary field storyline and get her two good endings. I may need to go back and do one last Ar tonelico 3 post, to set the record straight.

While on PSN I also found Shin Megami Tensei, the remake for PSX, as a Game Archive release. Last time I was in Tokyo, Book-Off was asking ¥3000 for a used copy, so that will be a deal at ¥1000 instead, although without the cool box.

Speaking of SMT, I finished the Persona remake, first with the bad ending (really not a fan of games that let you get a bad ending for a choice halfway through the game) and then with the best Snow Queen ending. That Snow Queen quest is like another complete game, and it was brutal. The encounters with the tower guardians in that storyline were among the most memorable and original scenes in the whole series for me.

After At3, I started in on Persona 4. It feels like Persona 2 in the way it’s confidently pushing the hardware to all of its limits. I’m glad that my biggest complaint about Persona 3, the disconnectedness between the story and the dungeon, is gone.

In San Francisco I was found by a terribly tempting opportunity that would change my life in ways you probably wouldn’t even believe. Really, really huge stuff. I passed it up; there is still a lot for me to do here in Seattle.

I read The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. Another one of those books that makes me look at the world in a new, clearer way, and that I wish everyone would read. I may do a post about how it applies to demographics in the technology industry.

I rushed to the end of that book so that I could start using iBooks. about 250 pages into The Name of the Wind, it is still striking me how miraculous it is to read this way, after so, so many physical books. Even just not having to deal with the book light and holding the thing open with one hand is tremendous. That will deserve its own post once I’m through the book. (Time passes.) Finished that book. I guess I’d better do that post soon.

There was my stuff. I want to start posting properly again.

Mito, my hero, the musical brains of [my dearest band clammbon](http://clammbon.metalbat.com/), has a special display up [at Tower Records Shinjuku](http://twitter.com/TOWER_Shinjuku/status/20763738519) to show off his favorite anime music. You can’t expect a much bigger display of nerdery endorsement than that.

That’s even *my* Tower Records, from when I lived in that area and whenever I go back to Tokyo. If I were standing in the store right now, I’d probably be tempted to drop the Â¥35000 to get them all at once. Because another of my neuroses is [worrying](http://heta.metalbat.com/?p=816) that I’m missing out on some captivatingly great geeky franchise. And here are ten recommendations, almost guaranteed to feature great music, at the least.

My more anime-aware friends have helped me figure them all out:

1. Patlabor the Movie OST Album INQUEST
2. Macross Frontier Vocal Collection Nyantama
3. Zegapain OST 2
4. Lucky Star Character Song Album Vol. 11: Kanata and Soujirou
5. Aso Natsuko – Programming for Non-Fiction
6. Hakuyoku no Seiyaku ~Pure Engagement~/Onnaji Kimochi
7. Kobato OST 2
8. Hidama~buru
9. Toyosaki Aki – Boku wo Sagashite

Related selections:

1. Aso Natsuko – Movement of Magic
2. marble – Senritsu no Yukue, Sora no Kanata
3. Sphere – Now loading…SKY!!
4. Fate/stay night UNLIMITED BLADE WORKS OST

1\. zola (Adobe Ideas)

2\. sea of lights (OmniGraffle)

3\. em (Pages)

4\. cobalt (OmniGraphSketcher)

5\. out of sight (Numbers)

6\. univocal (Keynote)

From early on, there was a miasma of frustration hanging around the game for me. The friend in Japan I was counting on to send me my Saikyou DX Combo box still hasn’t. After a few weeks without a sign of it getting shipped out any time soon, I broke down, spent another $40 on top of the $200 I had already paid for the deluxe edition, and bought a Korean copy on eBay. When *that* finally arrived, my mental state was already far from the brand-new-game excitement I had initially planned for. I tried not to let it color my impressions, but the final result was disappointment anyway.

**Immersion**

Ar tonelico 3 sure has a lot of high-tech bluish platform complexes and tunnels. Thinking back across the entire game, almost all of the dungeons that come to mind fit that description. Few give any impression that anyone had ever been there, or that they served any purpose.

The towns were as lively and fun as ever, islands of flavor among a thoroughly unmemorable world map. There was nothing like At2’s gorgeous panoramic views of Sol Ciel or its fascinating “Matairiku” worlds. I came away with almost no sense of what At3’s Sol Cluster even looks or feels like.

For much of the storyline, I had little clue of what I was doing or why. I was just getting bounced around from errand to errand, without any sense of importance to my goals. In At2, the game is right up front with its *campaign against god* and the realization of an ancient dream to *create a new paradise.* In At3, you are just kinda some dude. And you are helping some girls who are getting chased by some dudes, for some reason. Eventually you get caught up in a war, even though there don’t really seem to be many *people* around to fight it. Way later, when you’ve run enough errands back and forth across the tower to clear that up, you at last get to run the last few errands necessary to save the whole world.

Ultimately, I did not ever feel really present or emotionally attached to the story except for inside Tilia’s Binary Field. That was one storyline that didn’t feel like I could have made it up myself, given a couple of hours.

**Infatuation**

I can’t say I feel any closer to any of At3′s characters than I did at the beginning of the game, with the exception of Tilia. I followed Saki’s path, and made it all the way through her Cosmosphere, but she still seemed like exactly the same person at the end of it. I had nothing like the affection and respect I had for Chroche-sama at the end of At2, or for Shurelia-sama at the end of At1.

As for Tilia, It was lovely to participate in the story of her last days as an ordinary person, which was also the most compelling bit of mythos in the whole game. It was easy to get attached to her in the main story, too, probably because she stuck around as herself while the other heroines were cycling through their relatively shallow, mutually unaware alternate personalities. The result of the multiple personalities conceit was not a varied and deep main character to fall in love with, but a clique of minor characters to get acquainted with. Saki’s Cosmosphere was not an exploration of her psyche so much as it was a side mission to poke around in the mechanics of the Cosmosphere itself.

As for the 3D costume purging scenes, they ended up more tiresome than exciting. I would have much preferred some proper hand-drawn costume portraits and reward images by Nagi.

**Completionism**

Something about the balance of item and recipe distribution around the shops and dungeons, and the apparent irrelevance of equipment and items in battle anyway, made me pretty much uninterested in crafting items at all. At some point I must have missed some important chests in some dungeon, because for the latter part of the game almost all of the recipes depended on stuff I had never heard of.

The hyuuma “collection”, which happens pretty much automatically during Dives, didn’t encourage exploration like At2′s Replekia IPD collection did. Its resulting benefit amounted to some different music during battles and some barely noticeable effects on the physical combatants, who don’t make a difference anyway.

**And yet,**

After all that complaining, for some reason I still have fondness for the game. It is still an Ar tonelico game. The music is as brilliant as ever. I still feel like going back and completing Tilia’s path, some day when the frustration has worn off and I can play with a fresh mind. I truly hope for downloadable content and for more games in the series, hopefully with some more of the magic that they poured into the first two games. I have faith that GUST can succeed in bringing Ar tonelico to current-generation hardware, even if they didn’t quite do it this time.

An admirable but oft-unnoticed component of a good localization is properly adapting the foreign-language title and logotype. My gold standard for this practice is Atlus USA’s treatment of *Sekaiju no Meikyuu,* or, as they cleverly renamed it, *Etrian Odyssey.*

Recently Atlus posted about [the design process](http://sq3-blog.atlusnet.jp/blog/2010/01/post-df2b.html) for the original distinctive logo.

At the Atlus USA [Etrian Odyssey site](http://www.atlus.com/etrian/), there are fascinating accounts of how they adapted the name and logo. (Unfortunately, you’ll need to navigate their Flash thingy — Columns, Localization Stories, Page 4.) The result is a rare case of a localized game box that’s even better than the original. It’s brilliant, and a design I’m proud to have on my shelf. (Thanks to [Into the Labyrinth](http://www.intothelabyrinth.net/gallery/displayimage.php?album=11&pos=2) for the image.)

Most games don’t get a chance to shine this brightly on American shelves. One fine example of distinctive Japanese game box design is Irem’s *Zettai Zetsumei Toshi* — this game caught my eye every time I visited the used game shops (particularly at Liberty in East Shinjuku). It’s a striking, intriguing design, even on Japanese shelves full of striking, intriguing designs.

The American cover, while I must give it credit for being hand-painted, doesn’t compare. *Disaster Report* is a commendable choice of English title, but the Photoshop-filter-crazy rendering of it is particularly disappointing.

I wish they’d kept the bold original design and just adapted the logotype. As a challenge to myself, I tried it. I’m pretty happy with the result!

The OmniGraffle file ended up pretty intricate.

When I was 9, my cousins Tim and Steve and I discovered HyperCard. It opened the floodgates of our imaginations. Cybermission, Cave Quest, Tim’s World, Star Quest, Lymbo, Syquell, Johnny Boy’s Really Fun Adventure Parts I-III — we could make any game we could imagine, just as easily as drawing up proto-RPGs in our trusty spiral notebooks. They were a big enough deal that we *mailed floppy disks to each other* between summer visits. I truly believe our successes as adults are thanks to the logical thinking, storytelling, design sense, and ethic of meticulousness we built up in creating those games.

How can children nowadays can get similarly creative? It’s thrilling to see my nephews filling up notebooks and sheets of posterboard with games, stories, and drawings, just like we did. But I am worried about how appealing and approachable it is for them to learn to code. A 7-year-old can’t just hop into Python or JavaScript and start creating. It’s no longer as straightforward as flipping the power switch, putting in the MS BASIC disk, and typing stuff in to see what works. Nor just double-clicking HyperCard, starting to draw, and seeing what kind of interactive world you come up with. Modern computers offer sophisticated and powerful tools, constant connection, and limitless access to information. But they don’t have the blank-canvas, excellence-inspiring, quiet creative invitation of MacPaint, Word 5, HyperCard, or World Builder.

But, iPad.

At the last Apple shareholders meeting, someone asked about a simple iPad programming language. Steve said, [“Something like HyperCard on the iPad? Yes, but someone would have to create it.”](http://www.macworld.com/article/146739/2010/02/2010appleshareholdermtg.html) I’ve been thinking about that almost every day since I read it. iPad, in its single-taskingness, its [administrative-debris](http://tomayko.com/writings/administrative-debris)lessness, its necessarily simplified interface, could be just the thing that introduces today’s kids to how to make computers do fantastic things.

First, the artwork. From the first Famitsu scans that came out, I was kind of worried about the visual style of the game. It seems so flat and imprecise, compared to what we expect from Nagi. It’s most obvious in the portraits for the Origin Reyvateils in Ar tonelico 1 and 3. Nearly every surface of Shurelia’s Linkage suit is rendered with a continuous, careful blend of highlight and shadow, creating a hyper-idealized, tangible presence. Tilia’s Linkage, in comparison, looks like a sketch, with either flat fields of shading or indistinct gradients.

Perhaps Nagi had to rush through the greater number of significant character portraits this time around. Whatever the reason, this is part of why I’ve had trouble getting very attached to any of the characters. The other part is the multi-personality heroines: instead of spending the game with one heroine, discovering her complexities, you spend it meeting a small crowd of one-dimensional characters.

Gust’s forte has never been real-time battles, precise control schemes, or solid character movement. Ar tonelico 3′s real-time battle system seems to be a random number generator, with your button presses as the seed. When my characters die, I don’t know what I did wrong, other than fail to spam healing items. When I win, I don’t know what I did right, other than to stare at the Harmo graph, ignoring the actual battle, and mash Square whenever I see red. Ultimately, I don’t feel in control, challenged, or powerful, which are the most important things to feel in a battle system. I wish Gust had stuck to adding their own twists to traditional RPG battles, rather than trying for the action RPG.

The notorious Purge mechanic is, even considering its questionable premise, disappointing. The goal is titillation, but the reality is monotony. I’ve seen precisely the same costume-disintegrating animations, from precisely the same angles, with precisely the same absurd boob-jubbling effects, enough times for them to be more irritating than alluring.

The dungeons are are huge, desolate, featureless mazes. The world map is weak, offering the tower no sense of grandeur. The floaty, misanimated jumping could be the most embarrassingly bad character movement I’ve seen. What I’ve seen of the Cosmospheres is more silly than engaging. I might have had more fun meeting the more mysterious characters, if every one of them hadn’t been completely exposed on the web site first. At least the towns are gorgeous and loaded with personality.

A baffling extra failure is in the interface design, which shouldn’t be difficult for a company that’s been creating RPGs for a decade and a half. Some of the simplest conveniences we take for granted are inexplicably missing. At a shop, you expect to be told how the selected item compares to what you have equipped; if you buy the item, you expect to be able to equip it right away. Here’s how you figure that out in Ar tonelico 3:

- Open the store menu, and select an item.
- Memorize the stats of the item.
- Leave the store menu.
- Open the equip menu and navigate to the character.
- Memorize the name of the equipped item.
- Leave the equip menu.
- Open the Items menu.
- Locate the item you have equipped.
- Check its stats, and compare them to the shop item.
- If it is more powerful, buy it.
- Leave the store menu.
- Open the equip menu.
- Find the item you just bought, and finally see the numerical comparison to what you have equipped.
- Realize you miscalculated, and you didn’t want to buy that item after all.

So, there is my complaining, for now. I actually hope, almost *expect,* to be proven wrong. Gust has a history of introducing surprises well into a game, and negating my negative impressions. I still haven’t got the third Reyvateil (though I am fairly sure I have met her). There could still be a lot more story, a lot more Cosmosphere, a lot more enjoyment to be had. My secret wishes are that there are *two* secret heroines, that all of the heroines’ personalities will end up having Cosmospheres of their own, and that there are way more main-story Phases than we think. Any of these could still be true. They could even release a patch that fixes some of the technical problems. There is downloadable content in the works. Ar tonelico 3 still has a chance to live up to the lavishness of At2.