The media equation proved an interesting read. At the beginning I was somewhat apprehensive of the books approach and techniques, which were a little to much self-fulfilling prophecy for my taste. However, later in the book the authors confess that most of these predictions were discovered after the experiment. I feel that the formatting of the book might have read better that way. I understand the structure of making a point and then supporting it, but I believe it would have been better presented as a discovery mounted from evidence previously provided. Once I got past that though I did enjoy the material quite a bit, especially the portions about cuts and negativity. Typically, computers don't adopt a negative tone towards people, but you deal with "cuts" of a sort rather regularly. Transitioning screens to applications, pop-ups, and different facets of the same application. Part of the reason people hate pop-ups might be explained by the fact that they are an "unrelated" cut from what's going on (I'm talking about internet pop-up ads, no just a regular dialog box native to an application).
Screen size and focus are something interesting to me, specifically for the purposes of video games. The idea for me was large screen TV's, while great for presenting movies and the like, may take away from a video game. With the bigger screen we can only focus on a smaller part of the screen relative to smaller TV's. The problem that arises is that information is spread to far apart, relegated to peripheral vision. For example, in a First Person Shooter game, a big part of those games is being aware of your surroundings, and noticing any items of importance (allies, enemies, weapons), on the screen in front of you. I often find myself having to check various parts of the screen on a big TV, and often miss someone I could have easily seen on a smaller screen.
Of course, big isn't the only problem. Small screens may try and mash to much information together on a single screen, such that UI is polluted by so many extras that the actual gameplay is hamstrung as a result. This is more likely to happen in hand-held games, (my experience is from Civilization Revolutions for the Nintendo DS).
My specific interest in media is video games, so it was interesting to try and apply all of these various things into it, in a very interactive social media.
- Eric
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I agree that things designed for small screens need to be kept simple. Civilization should probably not be put on a DS without significant changes from its PC counterpart. The PC has a large enough screen to handle added complication. That said, a small screen version of the game in some altered form is possible, granted it might come across as an entirely different game. The question shouldn't be "How will we fit this on a small screen?", but "With this screen size what can we make that people will enjoy?".
ReplyDeleteGood point about the pop-ups. You're concentrating on trying to figure something out, hoping the next page will hold your answer.. *pop-up!*.. I don't really care what the pop-up says. It's an annoying distraction and disrupts your train of thought.
ReplyDeleteThe same could be said for cuts. You have to focus more on trying to figure out what it's showing after the cut and how it relates to what has previously been shown. If poorly executed, it has the potential to be an unnecessary distraction.
I agree, I'd attribute the differences largely due to a new generation of thinking. Anyways, nice entry, I think had the book been structured a little different, more people might've like it better.
ReplyDeleteI understand the tv screen size and video games comment that you made. I remember playing video games on a small tv, and if I am far enough away from the screen, I am less surprised about gunfire from the corner of the screen since that area is in my focused view. However, on bigger screen tvs, the same incident would startle me at least a little, maybe causing me to mess up on the task I was focusing on. Audio is a totally different issue.
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