Fashion Dash: Dinertown takes Fashion forward!

Fashion Dash (15 MB download)
Step into the fashionable shoes of Coco, a young woman with dreams of creating a new fashion empire one custom fit at a time. Set in a series of exclusive retail shops, Fashion Dash will challenge you with a steady stream of customers willing to pay big bucks for perfectly tailored attire! Flo joins in on the fun to encourage you along the way. Come try on a game that really fits!

A New Artifact

Have you grown tired of my endless stream of reviews of various design cards? Of course you haven’t, loyal reader, because you love reading everything that I write! However, let’s assume that you are indeed completely sick of design cards and ready to move on to something else. With that in mind, what could be better than design-aiding artifacts? That’s right, design-aiding artifacts created by me! But before we get into that, let’s step back for a bit and discuss artifacts that aren’t cards.

As you already know, not all design artifacts are “Creative Whack Pack” derivatives. They can be quite a variety of things, including pre-patterns, storyboards, and scenarios. More specifically, one could perhaps define the term “artifact” (in the sense of design) as “an object, either physical or conceptual, that is used either to influence the design process, or as part of the design itself”. Come to think of it, that wasn’t very specific at all. However, if this class has taught me anything, it’s that there seems to be very little agreement as to what the term “artifact” actually refers to in design. Of the various papers dealing with design “artifacts”, none seem to share quite the same meaning. As previously mentioned, the textbook Interaction Design: Beyond Human Computer Interaction defines artifacts as things that “mediate” one’s interaction with the world, and can serve as a communication language. In the paper about pre-patterns, the authors hope that their pre-patterns will serve as a “communication language” between designers. In the paper Artifact as Theory-Nexus, the authors discuss artifacts as embodying “psychological claims”. After this, the list goes on. With that in mind, there is plenty of potential for differing ideas of what artifacts should be.

That said, the notion of artifacts that aid the design process remains, perhaps, the one that strikes me as the most interesting. However, what hasn’t been done yet? Certainly, the idea of design cards has been done many times before. Web-based collections of information also exist, such as Virginia Tech’s own LINK-UP, a textual database of information accessed via a web browser interface? So, what’s left?

A screenshot from Zork 1.

Have you ever play one of those text-adventure games? (They were big in the 1980s, but they still make new ones to this day.) Some popular ones included the Zork series (see picture) and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (based on the book of the same name). If you’re unfamiliar with such games, they’re basically like choose your own adventure books on steroids — using commands like “walk north” and “kick mailbox”, you can navigate the story, which will eventually result in some kind of ending, or in your character dying (usually the latter). However, I was thinking: what if this sort of presentation were applied to some of the concepts of artifacts from class? And that, ladies and gentlemen, brings us to…

Design Quest 3000: The Tentative Title

My idea is both simple and perhaps overly vague, but it basically goes like this: create a text-adventure game (or “interactive fiction” as they are sometimes called) to aid design. The game would draw from existing scenarios, designed to put you, the designer, into the shoes of potential users in such a way that might cause you to rethink your problem entirely. Basically, the idea is to combine the generically inspiring anecdotes of the Creative Whack Pack with the more-relevant design ideas of the IDEO cards, and create an experience more immersive (and, hopefully, more fun and memorable) than what you’d simply get by playing with cards. To this end, the game would be geared at quite a wide swath of people, from seasoned designers looking for generic inspiration to novices looking to learn more about design processes.

From this game, I hope that we could learn a bit more about what exactly makes design artifacts worthwhile. Can they be worthwhile at all? My hope is that, by making the experience a “game” rather than a deck of cards, people could have fun with it even when they’re not trying to solve a specific design problem, and consequently wouldn’t have to deal (as much) with the “this feels contrived” feeling I got during all the card-test design sessions done earlier.

Gemini Lost: Follow the stars to find your way home!

Gemini Lost (46 MB download)
A strange light leads your group to an ancient astrological site that suddenly transports you all to an unfamiliar world! You must take the lead and build a new community, while you search for a way back home. Gather necessary resources and food, build structures, conduct useful scientific research and increase your population by creating happy couples based on their astrological signs. Can you complete the tasks and puzzles needed to find the lost keys to the teleporter and get your people home safely?

Tourist Trap game

In Tourist Trap – Build the Nation’s Greatest Vacations, you will have to become the mayor of a small Middle American town that has a major US highway opening right next to it. You have a vision of transforming your sleepy one-horse town into a mecca for the hordes of cars flying by on this new superhighway. Your citizens are full of unique and wacky ideas for what will entice the stream of family vacationers, college students, business professionals, truckers and the buses of senior citizens with hope that they’ll choose your exit ramp on their cross-country travels.
Learn more about Tourist Trap game

Mancala

Pictured below is my new game of Mancala. It cost me $13 at Toyworld. After reading the history and rules of the game at Wikipedia, I couldn’t resist buying it. It is a very old game (at least 1300 years), but like most good games it has few rules and is easy to play. Note easy to play, not easy to win!

After a few games, I still couldn’t see any obvious strategy! So I searched the www and came upon Fritz Dooley’s Mancala Center. The optimum opening move is explained but despite a great deal of computer modelling, he concludes:

“We did not find a backward-induction sure-win strategy that resulted in such a quick, clear and decisive win that memorizing a series of plays several levels deep into the game would yield a practical way of consistently winning without having to apply soft strategy.  Thus, the relevance to a real player of our proof of mancala’s triviality is small.  In this regard, the triviality of mancala is more akin to that of chess than to that of tic-tac-toe.”

And so I will continue playing Mancala in search of winning strategies that have so far eluded me. Do you have any good strategies?

Guide quizzes with answers

Concours.biz game is a free guide comprising dozens of new quizzes internet every day. Launched in June 2004, the site has evolved and its growing community has made over the months, a benchmark for competitions.

Concours.biz game each day and includes dozens of new competitions and provides answers to commonly asked questions. By becoming a member, the player can access various options and markings which will then facilitate his organization, it saves time and especially him increase his chances of winning!

Among these options, the player may:
- Clearly marking games competitions he has participated,
- See games competitions he has not yet participated,
- Manage competitions favorites (not to forget to play every day!)
- Mark the competitions that do not interest him and he wants to ignore.

It is also possible for each user to note and comment on the contest. This allows players to share their impressions and help each other regularly while the team can be responsive when a problem with a contest.

The competitions are listed by prize category, there is also a search engine if the player wants to win something in particular.

Finally competitions are sorted according to their type (best quizzes, daily competitions, instant win contests, competitions finished soon -)

For the curious, a games forum contest was launched a little over a year. A wealth of information for any Coucours, whether beginner or insider – More than 100 000 messages have been posted.

You too can join this community of more than 150 000 members and start winning in competitions on the Internet.

An Update On The Weekend.

Sorry LizardSmizard blog readers, I totally forgot to blog for awhile, but i’m here now! Any way, over the weekend I had three Soccer games, ( two yesturday, and one today). Yesturday we won our first game, 4 to 3, and dominated our second game, 9 to 4. But unfortunately we lost the game today 3 to 4. The reff really hated our team because just before the whistle blew some one on my team, Emily shot and scored. But apparently she shot it after the whistle and it didn’t count. We would have tied the game if that shot would have gone in. What was really annoying was the other team shot and the reff gave them an extra four seconds. RAWR!! But two out of three is really good. =)