Notes

It's a Great Idea, However, you May not have Heard of It.

This post started as an email to a group of researchers I work with. They investigate user experience, specifically with families. (They're the ones who created the fun Nokia/Sesame street things). I thought about the email today and realized that there was no reason not to share it here as well because I find it truly 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 each have one, my best investment so far in his education). We had spent a few hours creating virtual castles and underground hideouts together on a Saturday. It was great 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. Just the ability to create things, similar to 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 was available for sale for 10 cents, which is why I purchased it for my Motorola Xoom (which I mostly use to test). Then I realized how fun the game really was! I quickly purchased the iPad version and Alex and I have had a blast playing with it since.



Although I wasn't sure if Alex's friend would be interested, the event was an enormous success. Because the Android and iPad versions of the program are compatible, we could all join in the same world on all three tablets at once. We spent at least two hours in the living room with our respective tablets, excitedly building cool things together and separately and then exploring the virtual world to see what other kids had built. There were no challenges or puzzles or blasting bad guys and no fighting them. It was pure virtual creation.



To me there's so many parts of this experience which I find to be quite unique:



- Minecraft PE isn't a 'game' in the traditional sense. It's a sandbox. Minecraft PE is a sandbox similar to Lego blocks, but more exciting because you actually create the world you are building. - The interface is so simple that anyone can use it with no prior experience. It's incredible how fast you can start from building a small tunnel or shack, to clearing 10 virtual acres of land and building the biggest castle ever. It was amazing to see the boys advance ahead of themselves and then scale back, support each one another and more. - Sharing what you have built is a great social aspect. I had to remind the boys often to look over the work of the other, as they were so absorbed in their activities that they couldn't stop. Once they did though, there were lots of "Oh! Cool! I'd be happy to assist! Then come see mine!' This is the first time that sort of lesson has come up when playing any type of game I've ever played. - Being able to jump in with the two boys and guide them along in the event that they stopped was fantastic (in terms of fresh ideas or just getting lost - one of the boys tunneled all the way straight down to the border of the virtual world and then could not figure out how to get back to the surface. :-) ) Cross-platform compatibility - this is almost obvious, but it really enabled all the above. The boys finally found the game Hide and Go Seek. Which, considering that you can create your own endless tunnels, was quite amusing.



It really was fascinating to watch the boys dive into the game together and start making new stuff and having fun without fuss. Even though we all sat next to each other, using our respective devices, the experience was still more intimate than a co-op game where you communicate with grunts and elbows. Instead, we were sitting in the living room. We would glance up and chat with one another, lean over to see what each other was doing, etc. This was a more normal social setting than a screen-sharing one.
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Again, I'm amazed at the leap forward tablet computers truly are: Touch can make UIs much more user-friendly and user-friendly and the tablet's form factor is able to easily integrate into social settings without imposing barriers as a laptop or game console.



This is yet another example of the technological leap tablets are a part of. Instead of being a third type of computing system that seems odd in comparison to the mobile phone and PC I'm convinced that tablets will be the primary computing device of the upcoming era. They may be classified as mobile OSes or PCs that have touch interfaces but they are the form factor we've been waiting over the last several decades.


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