Notes

If you haven't Heard of It

This post actually started out as a long email to some researchers I work with that research user experience, specifically 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 share it here without permission. I find it fascinating.



My nine-year-old son Alex played with me recently at our home - after a while, he wanted to show his friend Minecraft Pocket Edition, which I just purchased for our iPads (we both have one, the best investment I've made so far in his education). He and I played for a couple hours on Saturday making virtual castles and underground hideouts and so on. It was very enjoyable.



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 lighter version. There's no zombies, fighting and so on. The only thing it has is the ability to make items, much like the PC version. At first I wasn't going to buy the iOS version because it costs $7 on the iPad, but Google has been advertising apps for Android, and Minecraft was available for sale for only 10 cents so I decided to purchase it for my Motorola Xoom (which I use for testing). Then I realized how much fun the game was! I soon after bought the iPad version, and Alex and I have had a blast playing with it since.



But I was unsure if Alex's friends would be as interested as it's a bit geeky, but it was an enormous success. And because the Android and iPad versions are compatible, we were all able to jump into the same world using all three tablets at the same time. We spent about two hours in the living room, each using one of our tablets making cool things together and then navigating the virtual world and looking at the work of others. No blasting bad guys, no puzzles, no challenges. It was just pure virtual creation.



There are so many parts of this experience which I think are pretty novel:



- Minecraft PE isn't a 'game' in the traditional sense. It's a sandbox. Minecraft PE is a sandbox, similar to Lego blocks, but better because you can actually build the world you're building. - The interface is so simple that anyone can play it without prior knowledge. It's incredible how quickly you can start from building a small tunnel or shack, to clearing out 10 acres of virtual terrain and constructing the largest castle ever. more It was great to see the boys' ambitions grow ahead of themselves, and then reduce their ambitions, support each to help each other, etc. The social aspect of sharing your creations is really compelling - however, I had to remind both of them at times to look at what the other one had made, because they were so absorbed in their work that they didn't want to stop. Once they did though, there were lots of "Oh! Cool! I'd be happy to help! Please take a look at my work! This is the first time that this sort of lesson has come up while playing any kind of game with co-op that I've seen. - Being able to easily jump in with the two boys and guide them along when they were stuck was great (in terms of new ideas or just getting lost - one of the boys tunneled down to the border of the virtual world, and then could not figure out how to return to the surface. :-) ) Cross platform compatibility - this is almost obvious, but it enabled all the above. Finally, the boys eventually came up with an interesting game to play: Hide and Go Seek. That, given that you can create your own endless tunnels was quite fun.



It was really fascinating to watch the boys dive into the game together and start making new stuff and having fun without hassle. Even though we all sat in front of each other with our respective devices the experience was still more personal than a co-op game where you all communicate with elbows and grunts. Instead, we were sitting in the living room, and would look up and talk to each other, leaning over to see what each other was doing, etc. This was a more typical social interaction than a shared screen one.



Again, I am truly amazed by the leaps in technology that tablet computers are taking. Touch can make UIs more user-friendly and intuitive. The tablet's design blends seamlessly into social settings without imposing barriers like gaming consoles or laptops. console.



I think this is just another convincing example of the technological leap tablets actually represent. It's not like tablets are a third type or computing device that's oddly related to the mobile phone and PC, but it's now obvious that tablets will be the primary computing device of the future. Maybe they'll be thought of as PCs with touch interfaces or big mobile OSes, but the design factor I believe has been awaiting for decades is here and it's as great as we all thought it could be or better.


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