“Every time I sit down with a finely crafted title such as Tetris or Super Mario Brothers, I catch hints of a concise and clearly defined structure behind the gameplay. It is my belief that a highly mechanical and predictable heart, built on the foundation of basic human psychology, beats at the core of every single successful game.”
Daniel Cook, The Chemistry Of Game Design
P.S. this is a highly recommended article for anyone interested in the science of play.
“Players seeking to advance in a game will always try to optimize what they are doing.
If they are clever and see an optimal path—an Alexandrine solution to a Gordian problem—they’ll do that instead of the ‘intended gameplay.’
They will try to make the gameplay as as predictable as possible.
Which then means it becomes boring, and not fun.
In the real world, we call this ‘security’ and ‘steady jobs’ and ‘sensible shoes’ and ‘routine.’
Call it a treadmill, if you want.”
Raph Koster (via Kars)
Google Reader has been my feed reader of choice for a while now. There’s no deep-and-meaningful-here — it does the simple things well and that’s all I really want from this kind of tool.
As Jeremy noted earlier in the year, one of the most useful features is the ‘next’ bookmarklet, which simply loads the next unread post from your subscriptions. The crucial point here is that the the user is directed to the content’s original source as opposed to the homogeneity of the feed reader.
As trivial as this may sound, this little gem has had a fairly profound effect on my blog reading experience. Rather than being thrown knee-deep into unread message anxiety, the bookmarklet circumvents this, directing me to the next unread post in my queue of subscriptions. It’s subtle, but it goes along way to re-introducing an element of much-missed serendipity into the blog reading experience. A kind of one-armed bandit for the feed-reader generation (ahem).
Flicking through the Google Reader preferences, I noticed that the bookmarklet functionality has been extended to include tag specificity. Now I’m sure some people would argue that this is all getting a bit granular, but for me, this has added another layer of goodness. I really value the way in which I can now segregate my feeds to suit the mood I’m in. For example, there are certain blogs I can’t live without and others which only get read if the demands of the working day allow. Hence my must-reads are now tagged as ‘favourites’ and I now have a ‘next (favourites)’ bookmarklet sitting in my favourites toolbar.
I have to commend the Google Reader engineers for their ingenuity here. Lots of people are working hard to try and tackle the information overload that RSS aggregators lead to, but the focus (understandably) tends to be on achieving this within the app itself. By ignoring these constraints and focusing on the user’s goals, the good folks at Google have provided an elegant and simple solution that goes along way to solving a problem that every other reader suffers from.
You’ll find the next bookmarklets under the Goodies tab within Settings.