Notes

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

The post started as a lengthy email sent to a group of researchers I work with who study user experience, especially with families (they're the folks that did the fun Nokia/Sesame street 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 house After a while Alex wanted to show his friend Minecraft Pocket Edition, which I recently purchased for our iPads (we each have one, best investment I've made so far in his education). He and I played for a few hours on a Saturday, creating virtual castles and underground caves and so on. 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. like in the PC version, only the ability to create things. It was initially hard for me to purchase the iOS version because it costs $7 on the iPad however, 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 use for testing). It was at this point that I discovered how much fun it was! I immediately purchased the iPad version and Alex and I have enjoyed playing with it for years.



That said, I was unsure if Alex's friend would be as interested , as it's kind of geeky and an enormous success. Because the Android and iPad versions of the program are compatible, we could all jump into the same world using all three tablets simultaneously. We spent two hours in the living room with our own tablets, enthralled in creating cool things both in tandem and independently and then hopping around the virtual world to see what the other players had built. No blasting bad guys and no puzzles, no challenges. It was pure virtual creation.



For me I have many aspects to this experience that I consider quite fascinating.



- Minecraft PE isn't a game' in the traditional sense, simply a sandbox. Minecraft PE is a sandbox similar to Lego blocks but cooler because you can actually construct the world you're creating. The interface is so simple that anyone can use it without prior knowledge. It's amazing how fast you can go from building a small shack or tunnel to clearing out 10 virtual acres of land and building the biggest castle ever. It was exciting to see the boys ambitions get ahead of themselves, and then reduce their ambitions, support each one another, etc. - The social aspect of sharing your creations is very compelling, even though I did have to remind both of them at one point or another to look at what the other one had made, because they were so absorbed in what they were doing they couldn't stop. There were many "Oh! Cool! I'd like to assist! Visit my work! This is the first time I have ever seen this kind of lesson while playing any kind of game. Being able to play with the boys and guide them was great. This was in terms of new ideas or getting lost. One player tunneled all the way to the virtual world's borders and couldn't get back. Cross platform compatibility - even though it's obvious, it was essential element to all of the above. The boys finally found the game Hide and Go Seek. It was quite amusing particularly when you consider you can make your own endless tunnels.



It was really fascinating to watch the boys dive into the game together and begin creating new things and having fun with no effort. Although we were all next to each other, with our respective devices the experience was much more personal than a co-op game where you all communicate with elbows and grunts. Instead we all sat together in the living room and talked with one another. We also glanced over to see what the others were doing. This was in a more normal and social manner than, for instance, a shared-screen experience.



It's been a while since I'm amazed at how far tablet computers really are: Touch can make UIs so much more user-friendly and user-friendly and the tablet's form factor can easily be integrated into social situations without creating barriers like the game console or laptop.



I believe this is another convincing proof of how much of a technological advancement tablets really represent. Tablets aren't a third-party computing system that is oddly related to the mobile phone and PC, but it's evident that tablets will be the primary computing device of the future. Maybe they'll just be considered PCs with touch interfaces or huge mobile OSes, but the form factor that I believe has been awaiting for decades is here and it's just as good as we've always thought it could be, or even better.

MCNAMES
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