If I would have to pick one life motto it would be ‘under promise and overachieve’. The concept is simple: You promise next to nothing and deliver a lot. If you tell someone ‘This will be done tomorrow’ and you get it done the day after tomorrow they will probably be pissed because you didn’t deliver. What if you had promised them it would be done late next week and you delivered it the day after tomorrow? They would be delighted! It’s as easy as that. Still, game developers can’t seem to grasp this easy concept.

I’m a gamer. So I check the news on game websites quite frequently. Everyday some news item pops up with a game developer (or executive) running his mouth claiming this game they are working on is the best we’ve seen yet. “You can do this and that and when you do this… this will blow your mind!” And it does! It’s truly amazing what they are promising, and in most cases the game does deliver. But the WOW-factor isn’t there any more. I already expected it to be in the game. I’ve already become accustomed to the fact that I’m able to do that kind of stuff. And most of the time it sounds great but when you’re playing the game it becomes boring pretty quickly. A great example is Assassins Creed. When the first gameplay movies were released every gamer was drooling. But when you play the actual game the features become repetitive and annoying. I understand there needs to be some kind of buzz about the game so that it can become a big seller on the day it’s released but please keep some features a secret. Let us gamers experience the WOW-factor when we are playing the game so we can tell all their friends. Leverage the power of word to mouth. Under promise and overachieve, I bet it will work out great.

Following my post on how we need to stop touching and start talking with our machines I want to emphasise the fact how this is done in videogames. Videogames have a lot of elements which can be useful for our day to day interfaces. A little game called ‘Scribblenauts’ for the Nintendo DS is a great example. The object of the game is simple: You are a little guy called Max and your goal is to get a ‘starlite’ which is placed in a level. Boring, you might think, but the fun part is you can spawn any object you can think of in order to get this starlite! You have to ‘talk’ (type in words) to your Nintendo DS and the game understands you. In one of the first levels a starlite is stuck in a tree. An obvious choice would be a ladder, but why be so uncreative? Why not spawn an axe? Or a chainsaw? And why should you do all the hard work? Type in ‘lumberjack’ and all you have to do is wait untill the lumberjack takes down the tree so you can get the starlite. The more creative you are the more points you get.

This game is revolutionary, not only for the game industry but in the way we interact with machines. Scribblenauts gives you so much freedom. Imagine if Scribblenauts was purely touch-based and you had to scroll through all the available objects (which I guess must be thousands). First of all the game would be less fun and second of all it takes a long time to find the right object. Sribblenauts gives us a little peek into the future of how great games (and interfaces) can be.

(P.S: If you ever play Scribblenauts first spawn ‘God’ and then ‘Satan’ and see what happens!)

I’ve been playing Fifa 2009 online against other players. There seems to be a ‘leaderboard’ where you can check how much you progress. Though, it’s all very unclear and EA doesn’t have a reasonable explanation. So I’ve done some research and here’s the result:

When you play someone online (in a ranked match) you receive or lose ‘skill points’. The more ‘skill points’ you get the higher your ‘skill rank’ becomes. How much ‘skill points’ you receive or lose depends on:

• Skill rank of the opponent.
• The difference in stars of the teams being picked. (If you pick a 3 star team and beat an opponent playing with a 5 star team you will get more skill points when you win).
• You get skill points for completed passes, possession, shots on target, successful tackles, etc.

You only get ranked in the leaderboards if you are one of the top 10.000 players. At the moment you have to get a 1600+ skill ranking to get into the top 10.000.  I believe you can get a maximun of around 50 skill points for one match.  Also when you play a match and the game is paused or finished you will see points being displayed below your username. These points are not your ‘skill points’ but your ‘EA World points’ so you can ignore them. To see your ‘skill points’ and ‘skill level’ go to ‘Player Hub > Career Stats > Skill Points.’

Good luck! If you have any questions please comment.