Articles Tagged with portal

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Today’s hotlinks include Pearson’s take on publishing for the iPad, designing playful experiences, the coolest marketing program I’ve seen in a while, a new augmented reality game to promote social change in Africa, and Photoshop disasters.

John Makinson of Pearson Penguin gave an interesting talk on the future of publishing in an iPad world. Textbook publishers take note – he specifically cites one as part of his examples. This isn’t just for Penguin.

Pearson gets it – mostly. But they can’t escape the book metaphor. Essentially this is the sidescroller stage of evolution. Beyond Pong, but no further than Mario Brothers. Do something interactive, flip a “page.” 3D, embedded social connections (“who else in the world is looking at this page that i could talk too…”) etc. is still in the future and will require some radically different ways of constructing and navigating content. Hopefully they are working on that in the back of the back room. Hat tip to personanondata.

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Crayon Physics from Kloonigames is a very cool serious game. I can see young kids in particular playing with this for hours. The designer said about one comment “Chris Baker wrote a great article about Crayon Physics Deluxe for Slate. He wrote that the game looks like it was designed by a third-grater. I take that as a compliment.”

If you don’t get video games this is an excellent video to watch. The kinds of puzzles kids are solving in Portal and World of Warcraft are very similar to the ones you see here. But with the interface stripped down to bare essentials you can get a sense of the brain work that is going on while players wrestle with the more complicated games.

If you want a sense of how engaging this kind of simple interface with some basic physics can be go play Linerider for a while. It only take a couple of minutes to learn it – then see if you don’t want to just PLAY.

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