"Parallax," A Mind-Bending Game Where You Leap Between Parallel Worlds

"Parallax," A Mind-Bending Game Where You Leap Between Parallel Worlds:

I aged out of playing modern video games way back when GoldenEye was popular and I couldn't keep the mazelike game environment straight in my head. So I'd be pretty much screwed if I attempted to play Parallax, an "interdimensional puzzle platformer" that superimposes two 3-D mazes on top of each other and forces you to phase-shift between them in order to find your way out. (That sizzling sound you hear is my brain melting.)

With a concept that's difficult to explain, designing it was even harder.

Parallax's gameplay is simple: Move your first-person avatar from point A to point B across a series of suspended paths and platforms. The twist is that your route is studded with circular portals that connect to a parallel universe with another obstacle course of paths and platforms, all occupying the same space. The only way to get from point A to point B is to exploit these portals, which connect both universes in a kind of meta-maze. Oh, and sometimes the paths, platforms, and portals are all moving, so the ways that physical space intersects with itself becomes difficult to predict. (Still sizzling? Yep.)

For a game whose concept is that difficult to explain, designing it was even harder. How do you present the player with two separate-but-superimposed gameworlds in a way that gives them a shred of hope of solving the puzzles? Creators Zi Ye and Jesse Burstyn found a simple answer: Make one world white, and the other black. Parallax's ultra-monochrome visual palette elegantly distinguishes between the mirror worlds while providing a stark, simple interface for solving the puzzles. (No need for distracting photorealistic ornamentation on walls or floors--Parallax is already demanding enough from your frontal cortex as is.) Ye and Burstyn are hoping to release Parallax by the end of the year for Mac and PC.

[Via Ars Technica]

After Trying To "Kill Math," An Ex-Apple Designer Aims To Kill Reading

After Trying To "Kill Math," An Ex-Apple Designer Aims To Kill Reading:

If you thought I was hard on Microsoft's "Future of Productivity" video, read interface designer Bret Victor's take on it (money quote: "Are we going to accept an Interface Of The Future that's less expressive than a sandwich?"). Victor, a former designer at Apple, is a guy who thinks big about UIs and builds working prototypes of his ideas--like his "Kill Math" project, which replaces abstruse differential equations with intuitive interactive visualizations. His latest creation, called Tangle, is an attempt to redesign the "interface" commonly known as the written word--and reinvent the experience of reading text online.

[A screenshot of a reactive document: When you drag the cursor on the chart at the bottom, all the figures change. The math has been programmed into the interaction, so that all of these formulas are alive. Click to view interactive version.]

"Imagine if every claim you read came with an explorable analysis."

Victor calls his concept "reactive documents," and the basic idea is that digital text should leverage the inherent interactivity of the web--turning written arguments into "apps" that the reader can manipulate and test, instead of just consume. But instead of doing this with fancy infographics or chrome, Victor uses Javascript to embed interactivity into plain-text sentences, phrases, even individual words. In his prototype "Ten Brighter Ideas", Victor turns 10 written arguments for energy conservation into "explorable explanations." For example, mousing over an assertion about "turning off the lights" launches a written premise: "Suppose 20% of US households always turned off lights in unoccupied rooms." The statistic "20%" looks like a normal hyperlink, but clicking it invokes a tiny sparkline-like slider that the reader can move back and forth, increasing or decreasing the numerical value--which then changes every other written assertion following from that premise, live and interactively.

The appeal of Victor's system is hard to explain--it makes much more sense if you just try it out--but the thinking behind it is visionary. "Imagine a world where we expect every claim to be accompanied by an explorable analysis, and every statistic to be linked to a primary source," he writes. With "reactive documents," critical reading--and by extension, critical thinking--becomes an interactive process. We don't just read a document; we can also use it, exploring the limits of and connections between ideas by physically manipulating the properties of the information behind them.

And since the whole point of fusing interaction design, programming, and writing in this way is to make communication more transparent, Victor created the open-source Javascript library called Tangle so that anybody (well, anybody with basic coding knowledge) can create or tweak their own "reactive documents." And making or reading one doesn't have anything to do with pretty fonts, fancy animations, or proprietary algorithms. In Victor's vision, the millennia-old "interface" of the written word remains unchanged. It's simply enhanced--because "digital documents aren't subject to the constraints of paper."

Will the future of writing and reading online be forged by writer/programmers and reader/users inspired by visions like Victor's? I'm not sure, but after seeing "reactive documents" in action, I'm already wishing that every op-ed writer and journalist at the New York Times would start using Tangle. Hey, they've got an R&D lab over there--maybe they should think about collaborating with Victor before he wins a MacArthur genius grant.

The New “I” In Journalism

Another look at objectivity/subjectivity and personal pronouns in blogs and other news articles:

The New “I” In Journalism:

Is integration of the personal narrative helpful or harmful in reporting?

A Video Series Teaching Web Design To Anyone Who's Afraid Of Code

A Video Series Teaching Web Design To Anyone Who's Afraid Of Code: Anyone who has ever tried to build a website for the first time knows that awful feeling when confronted with lines of HTML, CSS, and PHP, languages as foreign as any known to man. Well, never fear. Two graphic designers have begun releasing a series of video tutorials called "[url=http://www.dontfeartheinternet.com/]Don't Fear the Internet[/url]" that explains how to perform the basics of web design without having to become an actual web designer.

The videos, created by [url=http://jessicahische.is/awesome/]Jessica Hische[/url] (also the designer behind the “[url=http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663033/infographic-designers-should-you-work-for-free]Should I Work for Free[/url]” flowchart and [url=http://www.dailydropcap.com/]Daily Drop Cap[/url]) with her boyfriend [url=http://strangenative.com/]Russ Maschmeyer[/url], aren’t intended to be comprehensive guides. Instead, the process reflects a refreshing, stitched-together DIY sensibility. The two of them designed the title cards and interstitials in Illustrator (typeset in Brandon Grotesque by [url=http://www.hvdfonts.com/]Hannes von Döhren[/url]), cut and pasted the audio using GarageBand, and slapped it all together in iMovie.

[video]http://service.twistage.com/plugins/player.swf?v=03ea13bc09c5e[/video]

But the real “fear removal” work is done by analogy, and specifically, how coding is like food. In the video above, Hische calls HTML “hamburger text markup language,” and then uses the analogy of a hamburger to illustrate how HTML tags actually work--i.e., the opening and closing tags are like the beginning and ending of lunch hour. “We like metaphors in general,” Maschmeyer told Co.Design. “Code can be scary. Food is comforting. We think it balances well.” And they keep it loose, peppering the script with deliberately cheesy lines and pictures of cats--the idea is that if they learned how to do it and they seem to be having fun with it, how hard can it be?

The series contains six videos so far--each one takes about 2-3 weeks to make from start to finish--and more are on the way. But even though serious developers won’t find much in here that they don’t already know, Maschmeyer says the real audience is for people like he and Hische used to be--creative types looking for real-world analogies and common language to explain how to design online.

See all the videos [url=http://www.dontfeartheinternet.com/]here[/url]. Please note that the site does not allow embedding because the authors want the videos seen in their original context.

Geek Show! Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer Hit the Road

Geek Show! Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer Hit the Road: Newlyweds Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer are taking their love on the road. The author and Dresden Dolls singer will be touring the West Coast starting in October.

Review: M83, Hurry Up, We're Dreaming

I was first introduced to M83 in 2004, through the sublime Donnie-Darko-meets-Just-Like-Heaven video for “Don't Save Us From the Flames,” the lead single from M83's 2005 disc Before the Dawn Heals Us. M83, the electronic project of French born, L.A.-based Anthony Gonzales, releases a new double-album, Hurry Up, We're Dreaming, on October 18, from Mute. Here are my thoughts on the album.

First off, there are no songs on these discs that I enjoy quite as much as “Don't Save Us From the Flames,” or “Colours” from his 2008 album Saturdays = Youth. Overall, however, the album given its length, is surprisingly consistent in quality. Dawn had three or four songs that I loved, and many that I found unlistenable. Saturdays was more enjoyable overall than Dawn, but there were still some songs, notably those that seemed reminiscent of Cocteau Twins, that I skipped over. (I have a supremely low tolerance for the Cocteau Twins; the mere fact that Massive Attack managed to make Liz Fraser's voice palatable is one of the reasons I still consider Mezzanine to be the greatest musical achievement of the 21^st century.)

Gonzales has said that his inspiration for the album was the Smashing Pumpkins' 1995 double-disc Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. I have to say that I can hear that influence in the scope and ambition of the album, but not necessarily in the music. A large part of it has to do with Gonzales's voice; Billy Corgan has a very distinctive vocal delivery, and to my ears Gonzales sounds more like early solo Peter Gabriel, and at moments like a Berlin-trilogy era Bowie than the Pumpkins singer. At moments I can hear strains of some of the Pumpkins's tunes, but oddly enough not those from Mellon Collie—bits and pieces of “Disarm,” “Annie-Dog,” the cover of “Landslide,” and overall I'd say the album has the same overwhelming warped feeling as “Real Love,” as if analog equipment were overheating somewhere. [Incidentally, I took some of my children to see the final installment of Harry Potter at a drive-in theater this summer. At one point, the soundtrack became very warped sounding, as if Brian Eno had suddenly wrested control of the score. Then the projector overheated, the film restarted, and it was back to the average, boring Harry Potter soundtrack.] Maybe part of the reason I can't hear Mellon Collie is that to me, the standout track on that album was “1979” which had a blissed-out repetitive vibe much different than the rest of the Pumpkins's excess. Here everything feels over-the-top. There are only two tracks that seem to differ from the M83 formula in the slightest way. The first is “Year One, One UFO” which sounds a bit like someone mistakenly popped on a Clannad disc until it gives way to M83's frantic guitars in its closing moments. The second, which you can sample below, is “New Map” which gives way in the end to a sort of Sufjan Stevens style jam. Gonzales said that the inspiration for Saturdays = Youth was the films of John Hughes. Stevens wrote about Illinois, and the Smashing Pumpkins's rose out of Chicago. Maybe that city is the real inspiration. 

Revenant Victorians

One of the stories that caught my eye this week was Eric Schmidt's pronouncement that the UK should return to the Victorian era attitude of bringing art and science together. The google CEO made his comments in a speech that was part of a media festival in Edinburgh, and you can read about it here.  It's an interesting argument, and worth a lot more time than I'm going to spend on it here; I'll need to revisit it in a later post.

I mention it mainly because I had already been thinking about Victorian England's great social projects, in the wake of all the hubbub over property tax caps and the like. All of it seems to me to amount to a whole lot of noise that boils down to one thing: people like to have a say about where their money goes. Simple, right? I mean, that whole American revolution thing was about taxation without representation supposedly. So in essence we elect leaders, who we pay, to budget for us collectively, and then we complain about it, fire them, and elect new leaders who we then complain about. It seems dysfunctional.

Was it always dysfunctional? I doubt it. Like most systems, it was developed in response to the conditions of the time, using the technology of the time to develop ideas and project solutions. Given the technological infrastructure and educational levels within the population when the US was founded, I'm sure it made a great deal of sense to have a representative democracy. But clinging to this system now seems about as logical to me as insisting that everyone ride horseback and churn their own butter.

This brings me back to the Victorians, in particular, to Bentham and Mayhew, and the idea that the educated should prepare exhaustive studies of the needs of the citizens. To me this fits comfortably in the mindset of a representative democracy, and the hierarchical structure of most of our social organizations still bear the stamp and flavor of these origins. It is based on an informational system that was conditioned by the prevailing technological (the cost of printing presses) and the social (high cost of education, high population density of illiterate, etc.) of the day that necessitated a largely unidirectional flow of information. But those technological and social conditions have been superceded in our own time, which leaves the possibility of a new system that might have a more functional cycle than the present ill fit between system and technology allows.

What got me thinking about this in the first place was thinking about the tax-exempt status of churches. If churches are teaching about social responsibility (as most of the churches I've ever gone to do) then it seems that they should shoulder some of the tax burden. But then it occurred to me that churches already do spend a great deal of their funds on social projects. But then again it might be the case that church organizations are duplicating some of the administrative costs that government organizations administering social programs also face. If churches contributed tax money to government programs, wouldn't that remove some of the redundancy, so that more money would be going directly to the recipients of the social programs? But then again, there rises the specter of programs considered immoral by certain  religious organizations–wouldn't it be wrong to force them to contribute to such programs?

That's when it hit me. Rather than force religious organizations to behave more like government institutions, government institutions could adopt some of the methodologies of religious (and other non-profit) institutions. How so? Here's my example. If I want to give a sum of money to a church, I can attach a stipulation that the funds be applied to a certain project, or go to a certain budget. The same would occur if I were to donate money to a university. Why couldn't that approach be utilized in funding government services? (I know, I know, insert your favorite old bake sale bumper sticker here.) Such an approach would never have worked when the government began collecting taxes, because the information infrastructure did not exist to support it. Imagine today, however. When I go online to file my taxes, there is no technological reason why I could not be presented with a screen with drop down boxes that allows me to set a certain percentage of the funds to go to Budget Item A, a certain amount to go to Budget Item B. Imagine–a direct voice telling the government exactly what programs people are willing to spend money on, and which they aren't. Wouldn't this create more of a sense of a shared vision, or at the very least point out with a much greater degree of accuracy where the conflicts were and how they might be resolved?

It's a crazy idea, but nevertheless, I'm working on some visuals for it.

But enough seriousness, right? I've also been working on a new album, which isn't ready yet, and a new single, which is called "Thief of Hearts."