Monday, May 11, 2009

Prototyping Readings

Better late than never, as the saying goes.

I finally did the prototype readings, and was mildly suprised by what I found. Most of the stuff was either covered in class, or something I already knew via my wonderfully logicical (pfft) mind. However, when I was reading the first document with the five fun facts, I found the idea of the digital divide interesting. It's something I have yet to actually experience, but I understand it completely. Though not how to fix it. I know that the way people view things limits their ability to interact with it, but never had I really stopped to think about the fact that how someone views an item in real life vs. on the computer could be so different, even though it's the same image, shape, object, etc. with he same interactional traits. It's deffinately something I will ponder for a while.

1 comment:

  1. Steve,

    Great comments on the article. I'd like to point you to another one here which discusses some design process pitfalls:

    http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4017/10_game_design_process_pitfalls.php?page=1

    One of these is paper prototypes. The lesson to learn here is not that paper prototyping is worthless if you're doing a digital game but that the prototype must be used wisely. Thinking that the paper prototype is the final version and can never be altered is a fallacy, and this is also one of the reasons why many designers disdain design documents (they feel they are set in stone from the start).

    Prototypes can ultimately tell you some things about your game, and paper prototypes can communicate some things about digital games, but fail in other cases. Again, it all comes down to how the tools are used effectively to get the most out of them.

    -Devin Monnens

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