Notes

It's an Excellent Idea, However, you May not have Heard of It.

This post actually started out as a long email to some researchers I work with that are studying user experience, particularly with families (they're the ones who created the fun Nokia/Sesame Street-related things). Today, I was thinking about the email and realized that I was not able to post it on this blog without permission. I find it fascinating.



My nine-year-old son Alex was playing with me recently at our home After a while he wanted to show his friend Minecraft Pocket Edition, which I just got for our iPads (we both have one, my best investment so far in his education). He and I had played for a few hours on a Saturday, creating virtual castles and underground caves, etc. mcnames It was a lot of fun.



If you haven't heard of it, Minecraft is an independently developed block-building-slash-survival game that hit it big over the last year, and they just came out with a tablet version a few weeks ago for both Android and iPad. The tablet version of Minecraft is a simplified version. There's no zombies, fighting or zombies. It's just a way to create items, much like the PC version. At first I wasn't going to purchase the iOS version as it cost $7 on the iPad, but Google has been advertising games for Android, and Minecraft went on sale for just 10 cents, which is why I purchased it for my Motorola Xoom (which I use mostly for testing). That's when I discovered how fun the game really was! I then purchased the iPad version, and Alex and I have enjoyed playing with it since.



But I was unsure if Alex's friends would be as interested as it's sort of geeky, but it was an instant hit. Because the Android and iPad versions of the program are compatible, we can all join in the same world with all three tablets simultaneously. We spent around two hours in the living room each with a tablet, building cool things together, then running around the virtual world looking at what others had made. No blasting bad guys and no puzzles, no challenges. It was pure virtual creation.



For me, there are so many parts of this experience which I consider to be pretty unique:



- Minecraft PE isn't really a "game in the traditional sense. It's an Sandbox. Minecraft PE is a sandbox, similar to Lego blocks but cooler because you can actually construct the world you are building. The interface is easy that anyone can use it without any prior experience. It's incredible how quickly you can start from building a small tunnel or shack to clearing 10 virtual acres of land and constructing the largest castle ever. It was great to see the boys' ambitions rise ahead of themselves, and then slow down, assist each to help each other and so on. - Sharing what you have built is a great social aspect. I needed to remind them at times to take a look at the work of the other person, as they were so involved in their activities that they couldn't stop. When they did there were plenty of 'Oh! Cool! I'd like to assist! Then come see mine" This is the first time that this some sort of lesson has been discussed while playing any type of game with co-op that I've played. - Being able to easily join in with the two boys and guide them when they were stuck was fantastic (in terms of new ideas or simply being lost - one kid tunneled all the way straight down to the edge of the virtual world and then couldn't figure out how to return to the surface. ((:) ) Cross-platform compatibility - this seems obvious, but it allowed all of the above. The boys eventually found the game Hide and Go Seek. This was quite hilarious, especially considering you could make your own endless tunnels.



It was fascinating to watch the boys jump into the game, make new things, and have fun together. And though it seems that with everyone's sitting down with our own device it isn't as personal - it was actually way better than playing a co-op video game in which you all play in one direction and communicate with grunts and the occasional elbow. Instead, we were enjoying a relaxing time in the living room. We would look up and chat with one another, lean over to check what the other was doing, etc. It was all done in a more normal social way than, say, a shared-screen experience.



Again, I am truly amazed by the leap forward tablet computers are making. Touch can make UIs more accessible and user-friendly. The tablet's form factor is able to seamlessly integrate into social situations without creating barriers such as a laptop or a game console.



I think this is just another convincing example of the magnitude of a technological leap forward that tablets really represent. It's not that tablets are an additional type of computing device that's oddly connected to mobile phones and PC, but it's now evident that tablets will be the main computing device of the future. They might be considered mobile OSes or PCs with touchscreen interfaces, but they're the form factor we have been waiting for over the last several decades.


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