I first learned about Glitch through my friend, Shelly Bowman, after sign up I immediately fell in love with this cute little browser based massive multi-player game. You can get a feel for the game from the trailer above  but some of the stuff the trailer doesn’t show is the intricate details such as the count down to the end of a skill training:

I enjoy it is it’s “sense of humor” and quirkiness. You can pet trees (which I swear must be a take from the fact this company is based near Berkeley, California), talk to yoga frogs, nibble on pigs, massage butterflies, and they may even want to discuss things of this world with you (see below). In order to increase skill training time you can get “Rock” to speed read. They say the devil is in the details. In this case, the joy of the game is in the details and all those details help tell the story. Tiny Speck has gone so far to make their site a joy to use on mobile. I believe Glitch has a lot of potential to be a run away success when it goes public.

Update:
Tiny Speck Closes $10.7 Million Second Round on Social MMO Glitch, Entering Closed Beta Also of note, in the article, it’s mentioned that Tiny Speck will release an API for the Glitch animation to be utilized in other projects.

Tiny Speck Expects Glitch but No Glitches in Launch: User will be able to grow the game in their own way by using the API to add streets and other sections of the game. A truly customizable experience.

Tiny Speck Founder, Stewart Butterfield, Talks Glitch

Yet as a gamer and one that has been doing a lot of research on Facebook games of late, I find a lot of the games have little things that drive me up the wall. Some are slow to respond. Others have pop over layers that fly in my face constantly. In one case in particular, I could be in the middle of picking up goods, xp, or coins I need to keep my city alive and, “POOF”, yet, another annoying popover. Still, I keep going back because there’s an emotional element of accomplishment within the game that keeps me tied to it. “I must become mayor today!”, I think as I clear trees, build businesses and housing, working tirelessly to build my city into something I am proud of.

Thus if you take this emotional element and combine it with user experience you get nirvana! Which makes me curious, why then are UX professionals fighting over what we call ourselves when what we need to be focused on is, why even hire us? We are after all, information architects, content strategiests, visual designers, librarians, business strategiests, interaction designers and more. UX is a melting pot of an industry full of creative, intelligent, amazingly talented folks who offer solutions to common business problems. Therefore, shouldn’t we focus more on results and what we can deliver to our clients then trying to figure out what to call ourselves.

Just my 2 cents, anyway.

Games are invading the real world — and the runaway popularity of Farmville and Guitar Hero is just the beginning, says Jesse Schell. At the DICE Summit, he makes a startling prediction: a future full of points in the making. While brushing our teeth, getting enough sleep, everything we do we collect points for tax breaks, special incentives by companies. In one case there are points for the amount of soda we drink because we are not that far from every can of soda having a CPU and small camera to monitor our behaviour.

Sketch-a-Move from Superflux on Vimeo.

I’ve missed a couple weeks due to deadlines at work but here’s the next installment of UX Video of the Week. This one is a lot of fun to watch and only 5 minutes out of your day for some amusing commentary (by the girls in the video) and inspiration. Here Anab Jain and Louise Klinker, both graduates of the Royal College of Art’s Design Interactions MA program, show a nice example of the use of video for prototyping. (The project was also featured in Bill Buxton’s book “Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design”.)

First I want to state that for 2010 I think I will be talking about User Experience in a more generalized way.  I find I put too much pressure on myself to say something profound in my blog. Like every blogger in the blog-o-sphere must say something profound that has massive universal impact rather than simply saying, “I think this about that.” Thus in order to take the pressure off and to encourage more blogging, I will blog about anything I think impacts experience or technology. I’ll ask more questions. I’ll talk about stuff that inspires my thinking. Speaking of, my biggest inspiration lately has been gaming.

Girls and Games.

Ask most females and they would tell you they are either 1) not a gamer or 2) there aren’t enough “girl games” out there for them. What does that really mean though?

Let’s start with point one: “I’m not a gamer”

Any girl who tells you this is simply lying. Truth is they have probably played several games as a kids. As a member of the female gender, they play games with their friends, lovers, and others they come across. They are just not the “normal” type of game we might think of. Girls are competitive in nature.  If you don’t believe me, watch females play soccer or volleyball. (Or fight over a man.)

That brings me to point two: “The games out there aren’t interesting to me.”

I had an interesting conversation with the people at Playdom during an interview a few weeks back. It turns out the game, “Sorority Life“, has a strong appeal to women in their 30/40/50′s whom have the desire at the end of the day to “kill”. (In other words they love the fight feature where they can challenge other women and win battles for money, power, status, or game items.) It is a release of stress for them.

While I was not a fan of Sorority Life (because it felt too girly),  ”Mafia Wars” (by Zynga) appealed to me for much of the same reason. Fascinating, isn’t it?

Why then aren’t more games built for girls that allow us to play to our competitive natures? The game industry is missing a key component to the type of experience girls would want in games. Perhaps there would be more peace in the world if we could take out our aggression within games?

Then again, probably not.