An Experience – The WoW Lunar Festival

Before we get into the meat and potatoes of what happened yesterday, we went over a reminder – the tools and the technical vocabulary we have been given are tools to explore what an experience truly is, and how to play with it and capture every detail. We get to play with these tools, as they will help us get the most out of an experience, while still being able to get into ourselves and the subjectivity of our own selves.

And Now to WoW

Given the above thinking, we entered story time: our professor and his wife wanted to celebrate the new Lunar Year together by attending the Lunar Festival in WoW. So they logged on (PvP server) and started to engage in the quests of the Lunar Festival, as they found the setting to be quite beautiful. As they were walking along, and nearly done with all the quests and enjoyment of the festival, they ended up getting pwned (in gamer terminology) and spat on by someone 50 levels higher than them and spitting on their corpses. Bad story? Your call. The point of this was to bring up a question: was there a mistake made in this on behalf of the designers (a video from YouTube showing footage from this year’s Festival is below)?

Some more background before we get to the meat of this discussion: special event quests like this only happen for 2 weeks over 1 year, so these don’t come up often; the Festival is located in an area where normally higher level people are; our professor and his wife were level 10; this is one time in the year where both factions and races can actually come together and celebrate something, rather than kill each other; they also received Chinese dumplings in another town, which is important to this Festival; the symbolism of the Festival is extremely powerful for those who participate and engage truly in the festival (to the point where one holds the day in reveration by not doing much else).

A Gamer’s Opinion

So, being a gamer and having played games similar (but not MMO) to this and having watched a sibling play WoW for a while now, I’ll pitch in my own 2 cents. I wouldn’t have done this on a PvP server to start with, as I am a person who enjoys the style of PvE much more. If I had been on a PvP server, though, the experience would have been ruined for me as a player, as I would be expected that a festival such as this would allow me to transcend the bounds of the game and let me enjoy something to this extent. Not being able to do this would let me rant on about how much the people who designed this experience would have messed up. Big Time. I like fair play, and this type of experience is exactly why I would never play on a server like this if I ever did play WoW. I could rant on much more about this, but I’ll cut that diatribe short (because it has to deal with morality and things of this nature, and we don’t want to have that type of discussion here). I also think that there is enough evidence to say there is an error here, as if I were in the same situation, I would be in the expectation that this would be a safe ground, and anyone who violated this trust should be banned (or at least flamed or trolled, in my opinion). Simply put: DO NOT WANT.

The Class’s Opinion

As a class, there were mixed opinions about where the designers messed up or not. Some had the opinion it was our professor’s idea to engage in this festival at such a low level and on a PvP server. Why didn’t he use a different character? We didn’t really get an answer.

Others had a mentality that this was messed up – people just randomly killing each in WoW – that’s just not right. But then we heard an alternate perspective – in PvP, many have fun going around and just killing others randomly. It’s just what you do (but it’s part of the reason I don’t like PvP – the experience gets destroyed in an instant) and how one has fun. This was a heated discussion.

But then an even more informed perspective was brought to our attention. The Festival foreshadows what type of year one is going to have. Death is not even supposed to be talked about or even hinted about on this day. To go about killing people on this day is the antithesis of what the Festival is about, and is quite offensive to those who partake in the festival.

With all that said, a spectrum emerged about this type of play: there is normal PvP play, then there are diegetic festivals for players in WoW on PvP servers, and then there are non-diegetic festivals. We came to a consensus that this type of play is OK the further to the style of play in normal PvP action, but as the style of play starts to shift gears towards non-diegetic festivals, the more not cool this type of play is, and offensive it is for some.

To take away from this an experience, we have to remember that our unit of analysis was the felt, subjective experience (in the narrative and presentation of it) of our professor, not the interface of WoW. We analyzed the felt experience and expression of this experience and brought it to our own horizons and were able to critically interpret and realize what is really going on. In addition, we had to pay attention to intricate, particular details of the expression and experience, and from these, we can become informed and have a better view as to how people experience and go through their lives, even if it is in a virtual world, like WoW.

Do You Want to Be a Critic?

Now it is time to touch on a subject which can get people flustered: the prestige and use of objective and subjective reasoning. So here we go, and some may troll, but that’s part of the fun and reasoning behind this writing.

Objective Reasoning

This type of thinking has been much enjoyed in the natural and “hard” sciences, as they need to use pure facts and evidence gained from means where the studier doesn’t alter the environment and doesn’t allow himself to get into the data as well. The type of writing style also reflects this, as it is being used in passive voice (and I also used an example of this in this sentence, too). This helps to create an objective inquiry into whatever one is studying. One can also think of this type of reasoning is an expression of something that is already out there, to use the terminology of what we have been studying.

This type of thinking can also be reflected in some of the methods we have been exposed to in our methods and foundations classes. We can take a look at Goals, Operators, Methods, Selection rules, as this is an objective way of looking at interactions we see everyday. For example, if we were looking at types of productivity software for workers out there, we can run a scientific test/comparison and see which is more productive at the end of the test. GOMS is one type of method to help get us there, but there are so many more. Something like this will also help us to see the tedium involved in people’s lives, and the tedium involved in carrying out this method. We can also be objective about people’s subjective thinking – an example of this is when we ask users how satisfied they are using or doing something. We can compute numbers based off this thinking, which is a type of objective analysis.

Subjective Reasoning

When we decided to tread ground into this topic, we ended up getting knocked off our rockers for a little bit, as we were asked what the difference between an opinion and a judgment are (what do you think?). As a class, here is sort of the consensus we ended up making: an opinion is just a personal preference one may have, whereas a judgment is crafted from one’s training in a system in knowledge (this training could result from an experiences and practice in a field), which is critical, and can be grounded in objective reasoning.

Subjectivity and its reasoning looks at complex phenomena, whereas the natural sciences try to make everything a smaller version of the problem (like one of our profs say, reductive). This type of reasoning is augmented by our educated experience that we have (just like in our class’s consensus), which can help us to shine new light(s) on a complex phenomenon. The nature of these problems and types of thinking rely upon us, which are shaped by our own history (and history of the phenomenon) and personal preferences. Not every single person has the exact same preferences and history, which is what helps to make these problems unique and complex. These can be used to help give us clarity and insights, just like PRInCiPleS do.

Help From Some Experts

And then we take a look into some critical critiques of experiences from Buxton and also Bertelsen. We went into the juicy world of Buxton’s mixers. There was no ethnography or objective studies done on his part to craft his critique of different juicers. An important part of this paper was that we got to learn about Buxton and his views, which helped to shape his critique, and critique over time (multiple houses, wife, etc.). One of the important reasons why he liked the juicer he liked the best was due to the design – it allowed him to not exert as much pressure at the end, while enjoying a cadence of the gears (music to the thirsty ears in the morning).

Buxton did include some objective thinking to help form his critique, though. He took a look at each of the objects and their designs, and related the designs to the experience. Some juicers made noise, and others were just hard to pull. This was a conclusion at taking a look objectively at each juicer – this something each of us has the ability to do, and not necessarily on juicers. Buxton interweaves his subjective thinking with his objective notes about the design and his life to be able to give a high-level critique of what’s going on for him. There were no comments akin to “it’s stupid” or “i just like it”, but rather his feelings which were grounded in the design. We need to be able to articulate these feelings and notes about the designs we deal with, not only as designers, but to other designers to help us note intricate details related to a crafted experience. This can lead us to a potential judgment of a design on our behalf. Can you bring your whole self and knowledge to a problem – the world may never know (that’s a Tootsie Roll reference there).

Beterlsen takes a much more objective approach with a garnish of subjective elements to discussing aesthetics and experiences of people using Word. There is a technical hodgepodge of vocabulary:

***hegemony (power of a majority to force minority to do something their way) – In this paper, office values are foisted onto the user against their will

***genre (type or kind – there are genres of books, movies, but there are also types of interfaces and interactions, which we have begun to study already) – In this paper, what type of genre is Word?

***remediation (the act of correcting faults or deficiencies) – How is remediation used in this paper?

***deconstruction (the close reading of texts (maybe in our case, programs/interactions/interfaces?) to show that instead of a whole entity and given text has contradictory meanings (wikipedia) – How is this concept talked about by Bertelsen?

***readerly vs writely texts (a term given to denote the amount of interpretations for a reader to give to a text. Writerly texts have multiple meanings and force a reader to be able to become an author to truly process and understand a text. Readerly texts are texts where it is geared towards the reader, where the reader doesn’t have to utilize this much effort to understand and process a text) – How is this utilized in Bertelsen?

We can be a critic!

So one could say a mountain (or big rocks) to get out of this set of readings is that we are trying to expand and grow our own critical eyes when we look at interactions and interfaces and whatnot out there. We have at our disposal many different pieces of a “bag of tricks”:

***We have a vocabulary:
Keep your technical vocabulary up to snuff, as we can use these as part of our conceptual repertoire. Don’t also forget to include the concepts you are basing “stuff” off of. That’s important, too.

***Taking the vocabulary further:
Now that we are beginning to get our vocabulary and use that as a basis to filter that through our own experiences and subjectivity. This will help us to create new connections and associations with ourselves which we never thought were possible. Then we can continue and make more associations and try to figure out more about the world and our world as well. The connections will fire everywhere – it’s bound to happen. But if you already know some of this stuff, dive deeper, as these are tools to help us dig deeper and find new details. Doing this for stuff we already know is just going through the motions, and we want to be better designers than that.

The Cultivate Counter

We have an update on this class side note, the number of times the word (or any of its variants) cultivate has been said is now increased to 9.

What’s Going On Right Now

There’s a lot going on in the world right now, especially in my little section of it. I’ve got my Master’s program in Human-Computer Interaction Design, a potential submission to Microsoft’s Imagine Cup, a lot of awesome people to interact with, and also I just recently gotten an internship as part of the Web Team at Game Zombie, an internet site which helps to garner interest in gaming by showcasing the latest and greatest videos and material from the gaming world. They are actually pretty well known, and I’m excited to get to work with them. Here’s their latest accomplishment, which is about their ongoing series called Button Mashers. Looks quite cool – you should probably check it out.

Also, here’s a sample of the web videos they create, with this one featuring the game Dead Space:

RE5 Demo Review

As many know, I love to play video games, and hopefully I’ll end up helping to make them in the future, but a demo came out recently of one of my favorite series, Resident Evil. I just got to play the new demo, and I have some things to say from both the player’s standpoint and the interaction designer’s standpoint. Before I begin, here’s a snapshot of the gameplay, taken from my iPhone:



















The Player’s Standpoint

From a player’s standpoint, the demo was pretty good. Aside from new graphics, I feel it is still the same as RE4. The only difference is that there is another player who can help you, but you’re plopped into the middle of two infested areas with infinite zombies, with no upgraded weapons. It was both fun and frustrating, as the default button configuration was not anything like the other RE games. Many of the people who ended up playing ended up either calling for the other player, or not knowing how to reload or switch to other guns (which all of these are all important and necessary things for the player to do!). It also felt exactly like RE4, with the exact voices and feel as RE4, which was OK, but there’s some promise for improvement. I felt utterly frustrated after playing this game, as there was so much left hidden that I could not get to or understand, especially since I was playing splitscreen. This will not make for non-online gaming in this game difficult.

The Interaction Designer’s Standpoint

There’s a lot about this demo which made me like and dislike the demo from this standpoint. I did like some of the ways which the UI helps to show a lot of information. Things like life, and what the other player has are really important to show at all times. I also did like how the interface changed when the other player was in trouble, but the introductions of annoying sounds (but the good use of voice overs) made it almost impossible to not know when the other player is in need of your help. The button combination was pretty poor, as it didn’t allow me to be able to get into the game immediately. I had to constantly keep asking about buttons and how to move my fingers, rather than having fun. The traditional RE style of play would have suited much better, and not having to use two sticks to move would be much better. Learn from the GameCube and the PS2 control scheme! Also, there were quick menus and such unavailable without knowing how to get to them. Some tips on that would have been really helpful. The same cues for when an interactable are still around (glowing light), but they force you to use the X button (which is on the right, not where one’s thumb actually rests), instead of the A button. It just doesn’t gel. Overall, there was a good use of the cues which worked from RE4, but these cues were hampered by the introduction of more information and the reduced screen size (not to mention the poor control scheme). Hopefully, this will be made better for the final release.

Some Firsts

I also had the experience of doing some things for the first time in my life. I got to go to a Slow Food potluck last weekend, and there was some great food there (couscous – so nice they named it twice!). Even though I was pretty satisfied, I ended up going grocery shopping and then having another awesome experience at a White Castle. I just loved the people there, along with how the food is presented, and how it fits in one’s hand. Combine the good taste of the food, and it’s one great experience to remember. A picture of the packaging is below to show you what I mean.



















Save the TGA

As many people know about me, I love to play in the arcade as often as I can. It’s not only fun, but it’s also a great way to meet people and get some exercise done as well.

I have originally started to venture into arcades back in my freshman year at RPI, where we had a DDR 4th mix, which was fun to start playing on. From then on, I got hooked onto going to these places because of the fun experiences they offer me, and I still go to them now out here in Indiana.

One of the best places that I have ever been to for an arcade is a place called TGA, which stands for Tokyo Game Action. You can find their website by clicking here. You could do pretty much anything you want there – play any type of imported music game, arcade game, or play bowling and eat. It was always a 3 hour trip to get there from Troy, NY, but it was always worth the effort to go, as I have never had a bad experience there.

I just found out that this awesome place has just been hit with a series of floods, and now they will have to shut down the place for good. That’s not only unfair to me as a player, but more importantly, for the ownership of the place, as they were the nicest bunch of people ever. They were always excited whenever we came to visit them, and they even helped us to find food arrangements in the area of Winchendon, MA. They were never pushy, either, and always kept all of their machines in the best condition.

I would like to know from the aether of cyberspace what you feel about arcades, too, but most importantly, about when bad things happen to good people. Hopefully this post will help to start generating some feelings about this place, and maybe they can reopen. I pray for the place’s return and continued operation as well, as I loved that place.