Category Archives: Critique
“Play Money” and RMT is why I will never play MMORPGs again.
I just got finished reading Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot by Julian Dibbell, and I must say that no book in recent memory has riled me up so much. Don’t get me wrong – I am not angry because I am naive about virtual worlds [...]
Also posted in Games, Opinion, Readings Tagged Critique, Discussion, Games, Human-Centered, MMORPG, rant, Readings, RPG Leave a comment
Facebook needs human-centered design
The most recent user uproar against Facebook and its increasingly cryptic privacy settings spurred the New York Times to collect questions from concerned users and posed them to Elliot Schrage, vice president for public policy at Facebook. He responded quite eloquently in this recent article, but unsurprisingly his words have done little to calm the [...]
Also posted in Advice, Design, Human-Centered, Opinion Tagged Critique, Design, Discussion, Human-Centered Leave a comment
No Google, I don’t need advice on pregnancy.
I just got done reading an article from Google’s Official GMail Blog, entitled Serving Better Ads in Gmail. Scott Crossan, the GMail Product Manager, stated that GMail will now provide advertisements based on past emails if the current email doesn’t provide a good enough match. They are doing this in the spirit of giving you [...]
Critical Analysis Pre-Writing
In this post, I am attempting to make some sense of my argument for a paper I am planning to write. For this paper I am doing a critical analysis of World of Warcraft’s FigurePrints service. In making my thoughts and assumptions explicit, I have very strong opinions about how World of Warcraft favors certain [...]
Also posted in Design, Games, Human-Centered, Projects Tagged Academics, creative software, Critique, Design, Games, Human-Centered, MMORPG, tools Leave a comment
Phenomenological Reading of WoW Machinima
For my Interaction Culture class I decided to a close phenomological reading of a bit of machinima made from WoW clips set to the song “Here Without You” by 3 Doors Down. It has been an interesting journey. It is incredible to think that some clips from World of Warcraft set to a cheesy late [...]
Also posted in Design Philosophy, Games, Projects Tagged Academics, Critique, Games, Human-Centered, MMORPG Leave a comment
Mac OS vs. Windows vs. Insert Favorite OS Here
After watching Bill Buxton’s talk about Microsoft starting to understand design better, I proceeded to view the comments, knowing full well what I would endure. It was pretty much the standard fare for any talk about technology when Microsoft’s name gets brought up: people missing the point and then valiantly defending their OS of choice [...]
Also posted in Design Philosophy, Human-Centered, Opinion Tagged Apple, Critique, Mac, Microsoft, Windows Leave a comment
What We Don't Say About the Things We Love
I love my Mac. However it seems that because some products are loved so much, we don’t offer up the critique that they need in order to be even better. Contrary to popular belief, Macs are not perfect. The purpose of this post is to illuminate some often glossed-over issues with Apple based on my [...]
Literature, Film, and HCI
After reading this paper, Interaction Criticism: A Proposal and Framework for a New Discipline of HCI by Jeff and Shaowen Bardzell, I came away with several insights to add to my personal design philosophy. In the paper the authors claim that the HCI design process is missing an integral final step, the step of interaction [...]
People are not to blame for bad privacy decisions