iPhone: If you’re traveling to a country that doesn’t speak your language and you want to be able to communicate without dedicating most of your free time to learning the language, TripLingo can help. It’s an iOS app that teaches you useful phrases you’ll actually need when traveling, and you can learn different variations so you can speak formally, casually, or like one of the cool kids. More »
Windows and Mac OS X: Hackety Hack is an application designed to teach complete beginners how to program in Ruby, eventually giving you the ability to create actual applications for the desktop and the web. More »
If you regularly use flashcards to build your brainpower but find it too easy to cheat or just inadvertently see through the cards, reader Honda Wang uses QR codes for an inventive solution. More »
iPhone/iPod touch: If you’re interested in getting beyond automatic mode on your camera but don’t have a lot of time, the free versions of Photo Tutor Module Lite 1 and 2 explain the finer points of aperture and shutter speed on-the-go. More »
This is by far the best guide ever written for designing games. All kinds of games, simple and traditional, but of course video games too. This fat book is packed with practical, comprehensive, imaginative, deep, and broad lessons. Every page contained amazing insights for me. The more I read and re-read, the more important I ranked this work. I now view it as not just about designing games, but one of the best guides for designing anything that demands complex interaction. My 13-year-old son, who, like most 13-year-olds, dreams of designing games, has been devouring its 470 pages, telling me, “You’ve got to read this, Dad!” It’s that kind of book: You begin to imagine your life as a game, and how you might tweak its design. Author Jesse Schell offers 100 “lenses” through which you can view your game, and each one is a useful maxim for any assignment.
— KK
The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses
Jesse Schell
2008, 512 pages
$34 for the paperback from Amazon
Sample Excerpts:
We must be absolutely clear on this point before we can proceed. The game is not the experience. The game enables the experience, but it is not the experience. This is a hard concept for some people to grasp.
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Lens #1: The Lens of Essential Experience
To use this lens, you stop thinking about your game and start thinking about the experience of the player. Ask yourself these questions:
If there is a big difference between the experience you want to create and the one you are actually creating, your game needs to change: You need to clearly state the essential experience you desire, and find as many ways as possible to instill this essence into your game.
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Let’s review the list of game qualities we have picked out of these various definitions:
Q1. Games are entered willfully.
Q2. Games have goals.
Q3. Games have conflict.
Q4. Games have rules.
Q5. Games can be won and lost.
Q6. Games are interactive.
Q7. Games have challenge.
Q8. Games can create their own internal value.
Q9. Games engage players.
Q10. Games are closed, formal systems.
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The thing that really seems to bother people about calling puzzles games is that they are not replayable. Once you figure out the best strategy, you can solve the puzzle every time, and it is no longer fun. Games are not usually this way. Most games have enough dynamic elements that each time you play you are confronted again with a new set of problems to solve. Sometimes this is because you have an intelligent human opponent (checkers, chess, backgammon, etc.), and sometimes it is because the game is able to generate lots of different challenges for you, either through ever-advancing goals (setting a new high score record) or through some kind of rich challenge-generation mechanism (solitaire, Rubik’s Cube, Tetris, etc.)
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Specifically, that the player puts their mind inside the game world, but that game world really only exists in the mind of the player? This magical situation, which is at the heart of all we care about, is made possible by the game interface, which is where player and game come together. Interface is the infinitely thin membrane that separates white/yang/player and black/yin/game. When the interface fails, the delicate flame of experience that rises from the player/game interaction is suddenly snuffed out. For this reason, it is crucial for us to understand how our game interface works, and to make it as robust, as powerful, and as invisible as we can.
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Experiences without feedback are frustrating and confusing. At many crosswalks in the United States, pedestrians can push a button that will make the DON’T WALK sign change to a WALK sign so they can cross the street safely. But it can’t change right away, since that would cause traffic accidents. So the poor pedestrian often has to wait up to a minute to see whether pressing the button had any effect. As a result, you see all kinds of strange button-pressing behavior: some people push the button and hold it for several seconds, others push it several times in a row, just to be safe. And the whole experience is accompanied by a sense of uncertainty — pedestrians can often be seen nervously studying the lights and DON’T WALK sign to see if it is going to change, because they might not have pushed the button correctly.
What a delight it was to visit the United Kingdom, and find that in some areas the crosswalk buttons give immediate feedback in the form of an illuminated WAIT sign that comes on when the button has been pushed, and turns off when the WALK period has ended! The addition of some simple feedback turned an experience where a pedestrian feels frustrated into one where they can feel confident and in control.
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For all the grand dreams of interactive storytelling, there are two methods that dominate the world of game design. The first and most dominant in videogames is commonly called the “string of pearls ” or sometimes the “rivers and lakes ” method. It is called this because it can be visually represented like this:
The idea is that a completely non-interactive story (the string) is presented in the form of text, a slideshow, or an animated sequence and then the player is given a period of free movement and control (the pearl) with a fixed goal in mind. When the goal is achieved, the player travels down the string via another non-interactive sequence, to the next pearl, etc. In other words, cut scene, game level, cut scene, game level?
Many people criticize this method as “not really being interactive, ” but players sure do enjoy it.
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If 10 choices sounds kind of short, and you want to have 20 opportunities for three choices from the beginning to the end of the story, that means you’ll need to write 5,230,176,601 outcomes. These large numbers make any kind of meaningful branching storytelling impossible in our short life spans. And sadly, the main way that most interactive storytellers deal with this perplexing plethora of plotlines is to start fusing outcomes together — something like:
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Problem #3: Multiple Endings Disappoint
One thing that interactive storytellers like to fantasize about is how wonderful it is that a story can have multiple endings. After all, this means the player will be able to play again and again with a different experience every time! And like many fantasies,
the reality tends to disappoint. Many games have experimented with having multiple endings to their game story. Almost universally, the player ends up thinking two things when they encounter their first ending in one of these.
1. “Is this the real ending? ”
2. “Do I have to play this whole thing again to see another ending?”
There are exceptions, of course. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic featured a novel type of player choice — did they want to play the game on the “light side ” or “dark side ” of the force — that is, with good or evil goals? Depending on which of the paths you choose, you have different adventures, different quests, and ultimately a different ending. It can be argued that this isn’t really a case of two different endings on the same story, but two completely different stories — so different that they are each equally valid.
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Problem #4: Not Enough Verbs
The things that videogame characters spend their time doing are very different than the things that characters in movies and books spend their time doing:
Videogame Verbs: run, shoot, jump, climb, throw, cast, punch, fly
Movie Verbs: talk, ask, negotiate, convince, argue, shout, plead, complain
Videogame characters are severely limited in their ability to do anything that requires something to happen above the neck. Most of what happens in stories is communication, and at the present time, videogames just can’t support that. Game designer Chris Swain has suggested that when technology advances to the point that players can have an intelligent, spoken conversation with computer-controlled game characters, it will have an effect similar to the introduction of talking pictures. Suddenly, a medium that was mostly considered an amusing novelty will quickly become the dominant form of cultural storytelling. Until then, however, the lack of usable verbs in videogames significantly hampers our ability to use games as a storytelling medium.
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As the character tries to overcome the obstacles, interesting conflicts tend to arise, particularly when another character has a conflicting goal. This simple pattern leads to very interesting stories because it means the character has to engage in problem-solving (which we find very interesting), because conflicts lead to unpredictable results, in other words, surprises (which we find very interesting), and because the bigger the obstacle, the bigger the potential for dramatic change (which we find very interesting).
Are these ingredients just as useful when creating videogame stories? Absolutely
and maybe even more so.
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One focus group I witnessed was trying to determine where the average mom drew the line about what videogames were “too violent ” for their kids. Virtua Fighter was okay, said the moms, Mortal Kombat was not. The difference? Blood. It wasn’t the actions that were involved in the games that bothered them (both games are mostly about kicking your opponent in the face), but rather the graphic bloodshed in Mortal Kombat that is completely absent in Virtua Fighter. They seemed to feel that without bloodshed, it was just a game — just imaginary. But the blood made the game creepily real, and to the moms in the interviews, a game that rewarded bloodshed felt perverse and dangerous.
Despite the proliferation of laptops and netbooks, the vast majority of students still use their computers like $500 typewriters. Stop working so hard and be a better student by leveraging some clever computer tools to your advantage.
Photo by Brad K..
Every semester I get a new wave of college freshman into my classroom, most of them armed with laptops. For the last several semesters, I have been informally tracking how they use their computers. I always assumed that my students were using their computers to their full potential to help them with school, research, and such, but almost all of them were simply using their laptops as extremely expensive typewriters and instant-messaging terminals.
What good is all the computing power of the pre-1960s world sitting on your lap if you’re not using it to make college life easier? The following is a guide for students everywhere that want to spend less time on the tedious stuff, and more time on the things like study and research that actually produce results.
Never, ever, do something the hard way without checking to see if any easy way exists. Applications come in every shape and form to automate tasks on the computer. Never undertake a tedious task on your computer without first visiting a search engine and searching for a method of automating it. Whether you're resizing photos for a class project, renaming files, or crunching numbers in a spreadsheet, check for the simple—and automatic!—way first. Photo by striatic.
File Renamers: Renaming tons of files has to be one of the most boring and grinding tasks you can undertake. Never waste time renaming files. If you’re on a PC, check out the powerful Bulk Rename Utility for a dashboard of options and the less-overwhelming but still effective Ken Rename. If you’re on a Mac, you can download specialty apps like File List, but it pays to become acquainted with Automator, which can do so much more than simple file renaming.
Text Replacement: Unless you’re writing the next great American novel, chances are you type a fair number of things with a high degree of frequency. Your email address, common phrases you use, formatting you find yourself typing over and over again when working on papers or taking notes, and so on, it might not seem like much but you can easily save hours over the course of a semester by using text replacement. How does text replacement work? Each text replacement tool handles things a little bit differently, but nearly all of them have two basic methods: instant replacement and hot keys.
With replacement, you tell your computer to replace every instance of a string with another string—like notes1 becomes your favorite bullet-list format for taking notes, or mymail becomes your full email address.
Hot keys allow you to assign a phrase to a bit of shorthand plus a hotkey. For example, I have a phrase that is XXX+TAB. Typing it takes only four key strokes but it types out a phrase that would require 53 keystrokes if I typed it manually.
If you’re on a PC, you can try out our home-grown text replacement tool Texter, or other capable tools like Phrase Express. Mac users should check out TextExpander or become more familiar with the built in text-replacement tools in Snow Leopard, and Linux users can give AutoKey a whirl.
Regardless of what you’re trying to do, you’ll almost always be able to find a tool online to automate or at least make that task easier. Get in the habit of always asking yourself, no matter what the task, “Could the computer do this faster and with less input from me?”. Over time you’ll build up a set of tools for quickly completing common tasks.
Learn the keyboard shortcuts for everything: your word processor, your note-taking tools, your email client. Slinging the mouse around for tasks that can be accomplished with a keystroke or two is a really inefficient way to work, and far less comfortable. If you’re furiously taking down notes in class do you really want to break your stride to dig around in the toolbar or menus for something like a bullet point activation? You can find shortcut lists for every operating system and application under the sun; hit up Google with a search query like “myapplication shortcut list” to find more shortcuts than you knew existed. Photo by John A. Ward.
Note taking is an art form, and it is most definitely not simply writing down everything your professor says or that is in bold print in your textbook. How you take notes is a highly personal thing and heavily influenced by your learning style, but everyone can stand to improve their note taking with a tip or two. Photo by D’Arcy Norman.
Study Note-Taking Techniques: We’ve shared tips with you on how to take more effective notes and how to utilize different note-taking styles and you’ll find no shortage of resources elsewhere on the web for being a more effective note-taker. You can further hone your note-taking skills by researching subject-specific note taking techniques—how you take notes in Medieval Literature won't be the same way you take notes in Organic Chemistry.
Ditch the Pen:
People who love to take handwritten notes love to take handwritten notes, and we don’t expect to dissuade the everything-looks-better-on-a-Moleskin crowd from abandoning their pens. For the rest of you, taking paper notes is, quite literally, so last century. It’s 2010, and there is no reason for you not to have dynamic, media-rich, cross-indexed, and always available notes. At the end of the semester, do you really want to pick through a hundred pages of hand written notes looking for specific bits of information? No, you don’t. You want to be able to search through your notes quickly and efficiently the same way you use major search engines like Google.
Two extremely popular note-taking tools are Microsoft OneNote and Evernote—so popular, in fact, we faced them off in a reader poll last year. The awesome features of the two applications are beyond the scope of a paragraph, but suffice to say they both have excellent systems for searching (with handwriting recognition!), organizing, and accessing your notes—I use OneNote for everything from graduate school to teaching to writing for Lifehacker. You can check out our overview of OneNote here and Evernote here.
We’re not talking about Facebook-ing everyone in your class. We’re talking about actively using online study and collaboration tools to interact with your classmates. Sharing notes, discussing assignments and class topics, and collaborating on group projects are but a few of the ways you can take advantage of the hyper-connectivity the information age has brought about. Photo by krossbow.
Share Your Notes:The first objection I usually hear to the idea of sharing notes is that people don’t want to share their hard work and they don’t think that other people should benefit from it. Fair enough, how you deal with who participates in your class-centered groups and note sharing sessions is your business but as an instructor I can tell you this: the kind of person who doesn’t bother to take their own notes isn’t exactly the kind of person you’re going to have to fight for the top grade in the class.
You can share notes and collaborate in quite a few ways but it would help your cause to stick with methods that have a low barrier to entry—most people don't want to sign up for a bunch of services just for a class. Google Notebook and Documents are great tools since having a Gmail account is nearly universal. You could also set up your own wiki with free tools like Luminotes or customize MediaWiki into your own personal collaboration server.
Build a Contact Web: Whether it's a group on Facebook, an email list, or a list of phone numbers for text messaging, it's wise to create a way you can quickly communicate with other students. Many times you have a question about an assignment, something that happened in class, or what you missed when you were absent and sending out an email to your fellow students will result in a faster response than waiting to hear back from the professor. It also helps you build a contact list of your peers—not as important in a freshman Psychology 110 course, but by the time you're in at the end of your schooling you'll be taking more focused classes and meeting people in your career path you'll want to stay in contact with.
You have no excuse for not backing up your data—none. The number and methods for backing up data, especially the small volume that constitutes text-based research and class notes, are so numerous that there simply is no excuse for doing something foolish like keeping all your hard work on a single hard disk or flash drive. Photo by Jeff Wilcox.
Dropbox: It's free, the basic account can more than hold a semester's worth of work—short of a film school project—and it syncs to all your computers and to the web. "I accidentally deleted my homework" wasn't a very good excuse ten years ago and it's an unforgivable one now. You can sync your passwords, your OneNote notebooks, and access your favorite portable apps from anywhere.
Online Backup: While Dropbox is great for syncing files, if you want to go all out you’ll definitely want to check out some full-fledged computer backup tools like Mozy and Carbonite. Check out our Hive Five on best Windows backup tools to get more information.
The preview edition of Gina and Adam’s new book, The Complete Guide to Google Wave, is now available in PDF form for your offline, ebook-reading pleasure.
Google Wave is a young tool that’s not terribly easy to understand for a lot of folks, but at least a couple of your Lifehacker editors are completely nuts for Wave and its potential. The DRM-free, 102-page personalized PDF of The Complete Guide to Google Wave is available for six bucks, but keep in mind that the content of our book will always be available for free at any time at completewaveguide.com/.
The preview edition is just the start. We plan to release the first edition of the guide in early 2010 as both a PDF and a softcover print book, with new editions to follow throughout the year as Wave evolves.
For a quick look at why we’re so excited about Wave, check out Gina’s keynote speech at the Web 2.0 Expo this week in NYC, and follow @gwaveguide on Twitter for a regular stream of useful Wave tips and for updates on the book. If you do decide to purchase the PDF, you have our sincerest thanks for supporting our little project, but as I said, it’s always freely available on the web site. Beyond that, we’re all ears for suggestions on how we can improve the guide in the comments.
iPhone/iPod touch: You may be doing your best to get your textbooks for free, but for those times you’re thinking about buying, consider CourseSmart, a new iPhone application that puts textbooks in your pocket.
CourseSmart the-mobile-app is the baby of CourseSmart the-web-site, which sells digital versions of over 7,000 textbooks from most of the leading textbook publishers. When you buy a book from CourseSmart, you also get access to it (for free) on the CourseSmart iPhone app.
And while your iPhone screen certainly isn’t the best place to pore over hundreds of pages of your bio textbook, it’s probably not a bad tool for a little last-minute cramming or studying on-the-go. CourseSmart is freeware, iPhone and iPod touch only.
Cobocards is a free, web-based flash card application with an emphasis on collaboration, so you can create and study a set of flash cards alongside your friends or fellow students.
We’ve covered several flash card apps in the past, but Cobocards sets itself apart with an impressive feature set. Not only does it do all the basics, like tracking your progress as you study, but it also sports several useful features we haven’t always seen from its competition, such as several printable templates, an activity feed and message board for keeping track of your friends’ and collaborators’ activity (like if they’ve added new cards to a deck), and, of course the collaboration itself.
For a fuller understanding of how it works, hit up the video demonstration on the homepage. If you’ve already got a preferred study companion for this sort of work, let’s hear about it in the comments.
Open Culture has a comprehensive list of totally free resources for anyone looking to learn a language though audio files. Whether you’re brushing up your Yiddish or delving into Dutch, you’ll find a free feed here.
Organized alphabetically by language, Open Culture’s list of free foreign language lessons includes links to each lesson series’ iTunes site, podcast RSS feed, or basic web site to get you downloading and e-nun-ci-a-ting immediately. It covers a whole lot of languages you might have no idea there were freely-available tutors for, and the variety of lesson types is intriguing. If straight-up repeat-after-me audio lessons get tiresome, many language areas also have humorous amateurs offering some local color, or the language’s mother nation’s news, read extra slowly to help with vocabulary and comprehension.
Know another site that’s packed with free, language-teaching audio? Tell us about it in the comments.
