Usually, I start the conversation about Game Design with a discussion of HCI and User Experiences more generally. This year, we’re doing it backwards.

what I want you to think about is something even more fundamental than Human Computer Interaction: let’s start by considering the design considerations for making usable things in general.

The readings for this come from The Design of Everyday Things, a great book by Don Norman (link on Amazon). The required reading is the first 2 chapters. The third chapter is optional (but highly recommended).

Chapter 1: The Psychopathology of Everyday Things

Chapter 2: The Psychology of Everyday Actions

Chapter 3: Knowledge in the Head and in the World

Note: all three chapters are in the protected reader.

Read at least chapters 1 and 2 (I recommend reading chapter 3 as well), and post a comment.

In your comment, consider some object (it might be a computer program, or it might be something else) that you use on a regular basis. How does it follow Norman’s principles? (having a good conceptual model, making things visible, good mappings, feedback, affordances).

Please post your comment before reading other people’s – although, you will probably find reading other peoples’ comments instructive (and comment on their comments). There has been some interesting discussion in the past around this.

We’ll discuss this material in class on Wednesday, October 12th. Please complete the reading and post your comment before class on 10/12.

18 (of 29) people turned in assignment 4 (reading 3) on time.

If you’re curious about the “raw data”, you may look at Don’t Know (raw list from assignment 4) or topics of interest from reading 3 (raw data). Both of these lists are “raw” – i just concatenated the lists, turned them to lower case, and sorted them.

This reading will be discussed in class on Monday September 19, but if you don’t get to it, it’s OK if you “read behind” (look at the reading after the lecture). There will be an assignment due at the end of the week based on this reading.

It’s really difficult to pick a graphics overview reading. There is nothing that is at exactly the right level of detail: everything is either too broad, or too much about the details. Things are either too trendy, or too out of date. Things are either too long or too short.

And, there is a diversity of graphics backgrounds in this class.

So, with that caveat, I am going to recommend that everyone reads:

An introductory tour of interactive rendering, by Eric Haines. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, January 2006. (IEEE explore link) (course reader)

Yes, its pre-historic (it’s hard to believe that 6 years ago is pre-history). It’s a little on the “buzzword” heavy side. But its well organized, and has some nice aspects to it as well.

As you read it, keep in mind that it is 6 years old, and a lot has changed.

Based on your level of graphics expertise, you will probably approach this reading differently. Your assignment will vary accordingly. Please choose what is appropriate for you (it will probably be a combination of the three):

1. If you are new to graphics: there are probably a lot of words and concepts you don’t know. Make a list of the words you need to have defined for you.
2. If you have a normal graphics background: in addition to #1, there should be some techniques you are unfamiliar with, or curious about (since some are obscure) – make a list of them.
3. If you are a graphics pro: you probably can pick out what things in this article are out of date.

Details of the written assignment will be coming soon.

For project 1, you will need to program in Javascript, using some graphics capability (probably HTML5 canvas).

Either you are a Javascript wizard (in which case we hope you’ll help your classmates), or you aren’t (in which case you’ll be looking for help).

We’ll have some tutorial time in class (for example on Friday, September 9th), but you’ll probably want to do some reading. There are some good books out there, and the web is full of tutorials, advice, example code, etc.

We’ll start with a few of the ones we like, but we want everyone to contribute. Everyone should add comments to this page, either suggesting good resources, commenting on other people’s recommendations, etc. Hopefully, the comments on this page will quickly become a good list of resources for people who need to use Javascript in this class.

Some Javascript Books (available online)

• Learning Javascript, by Shelley Powers. O’Reilly books. A good tutorial. And its available online through UW library. (permalink) (direct weblink)
• Javascript: the Definitive Guide by David Flanagan. O’Reilly books. (permalink) (direct link)
• The Essential Guide to HTML5 Using Games to Learn HTML5 and JavaScript, By Meyer. (permalink) – The title sounds promising at least.
• You can find a lot more by searching the UW library for “Javascript”

Some basic Javascript Tutorials:

• Wired webmonkey: Thau’s JavaScript Tutorial, which goes on to include a more advanced tutorial as well

Some tutorials on Canvases:

• An official Mozilla tutorial – helpful, and has lots of useful links
• DiveIntoHTML5 – this is useful since it has lots of handy stuff, although I think it might be dated and contains lots of kuldges and ugly hacks.
• A random canvas tutorial (that gets to animation and interaction quickly).

This reading should be done before class on Wednesday, September 7th so you’re prepared for class discussion.

Since you’re taking a class on Game Technologies, you should probably know what a game is.

The required reading is Chapter 2 and 3 of Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design (book online @ UW library):

• Chapter 1 (pdf) is totally optional – its basically an introduction to the book, and while it sets the tone for the rest of the book, its not essential to this assignment.
• Chapter 2 “The Designer Creates and Experience” (pdf or use links above) is essential for understanding Chapter 3.
• Chapter 3 “The Experience Comes out of a Game” (pdf version) is the main reading for the class discussion, but you need to read Chapter 2 first.

An alternate reading is:

• Jesper Juul. The Game, The Player, The World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness. (online version) (pdf)

Schell is much more long winded, but I like the way he approaches the overall problem better (as trying to create “Experiences”). We’ll read more from Schell later, so getting used to him is worthwhile. If you’re really interested in game design, I’d recommend reading both and thinking about the similarities – they say very similar things, in different ways.

After you have read this, we’ll ask you to do Assignment 3. (Note that Reading 1 is coupled with Assignment 3, yes its confusing).

For this class, there will be a number of readings.

Some readings, will be assigned for you to read before the lecture in which they are discussed. Other readings will be for you to “read behind” – to read after the ideas were introduced in the lecture. Often, readings will be coupled with a written assignment designed to help you think through the reading (and help us check that you’ve done it).

Some readings will come from chapters in books. You are not required to buy any books – all the chapters will be provided (although, often it will be through Wendt libraries online service.

Some readings will be papers to download.

Many of the readings we give to you will be placed in a protected course reader. In order to access this reader, you must use your valid CSL login. The reader is located at: https://graphics.cs.wisc.edu/Courses/Readers/Games11/

Note: we put things in the protected reader to honor copyright restrictions that allow only to provide documents for class use. Please do not redistribute them.