Emotional Design

Ben

Brad

Josh

This book was about Don Norman contradicting what he said in earilier books. He goes on about how robots need to have emotion and how the design of things evoke emotions in people.

I thought this book was fairly interestingin the way it reminds me of other things that are interesting. His ideas on how robots need to have emotion so they can learn and adapt is a little scary. Although in Terminator and The Matrix the machines don't seem to have emotions they're just cold killers. He goes on and lists some rules for machines that he ripped from I, robot. Which kind of says to me he really doesn't have any original ideas in this book it's all already been explored in Sci-fi.

Diagram for Mini-Project

Larger

CHI 2008: Heuristic evaluation for games: usability principles for video game design

adam

ben

brad

This paper was basically about these guys who are trying to figure out general problems with usability in games and try and make this heuristics, or categories, of the problems that come up and how they can be found and resolved.

They looked at 108 PC game reviews for single player games in 6 major game genres from the Gamespot website. Once the read all the revies and listed the problems that came up the invented some categories for the basic problems as follows.

And then from this they defined some hueristics for how these problems could be avoided defines in this next table.

Once they had the heuristics they tested them with people to see how they would be used to identify problems and which heuristics would be used the most, and here were the results:

So they found that heuristic 9 was the most common problem, which is a lack of a tutorial or help. And overall the testers thought the heuristics were very useful for finding problems.

Overall I think this is a pretty useful system thet have come up with but right now it only extends to single player PC games. So they need to get console and multiplayer games taken care of as well.

The Man Who Shocked the World

Josh

Brad

Adam

This book was about Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist who came up with some ground breaking discovers relating to how people think and act in certain situations. The book is basically his life story and goes over some of his most famous experiments as well as his personal life.

I thought the book was a pretty interesting read, Milgram had some ideas that just seemed to turn things upside down so that things could be seen in a different way. He definitely thought outside the box. As to his experiments, I thought that his work on obedience brought a new light onto how people percieve authority and how much pain the are willing to inflict just because an authority figure tells them to. Another famous experiment of his I actually heard of first as Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon", which is a game where Kevin Bacon can be related to another actor through a series of film roles. And I thought this was a very interesting concept and I want to try and do it myself someday.