Rating:
(6 reviews)
Author: John Ferrara
ISBN : B0084E0HHA
New from $12.49
Format: PDF
Download Free Download Playful Design from with Mediafire Link Download Link
Game design is a sibling discipline to software and Web design, but they're siblings that grew up in different houses. They have much more in common than their perceived distinction typically suggests, and user experience practitioners can realize enormous benefit by exploiting the solutions that games have found to the real problems of design. This book will show you how.
Books with free ebook downloads available Free Download Playful Design
- File Size: 5547 KB
- Print Length: 264 pages
- Publisher: Rosenfeld Media; 1 edition (May 17, 2012)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B0084E0HHA
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #457,248 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
Free Download Playful Design
This is now the second time that this has happened to me with a Rosenfeld Media book: I believe what the content description says, and then end up really disappointed because the book doesn't deliver on the promise at all.
"Playful design" claims that UX professionals can learn from game design to "achieve great things int he real world". However, what John Ferrara delivers is simply a systematic categorisation of different computer game types, and how these game types cater for different audiences, and supposedly achieve different things. In typical UX-book style, this then gets fleshed out with a very large number of examples of various computer games.
Now you will ask: what's so bad about that? Nothing, of course, if you're after learning a little bit more about the various types of computer games out there, and if you're interested in general what computer games want and can achieve.
You won't find much that is useful for UX practitioners though. All the author does is to randomly seed sentences like "As a UX practitioner, you will know that..." or "You will be very familiar with this as a UX professional." Yes, John Ferrara, I am, and I wouldn't mind this, but can you then please continue telling me ways of how I can integrate your 'revelations' into web design?
I guess I should have figured this out before I finished reading: very early in the book, the author quickly dismisses 'gamification' as a misguided idea and not really worth considering, because a game has to be fun and needs to be able to stand on its own. And that is the last time you hear in this book about the idea of taking game elements and using them for different purposes.
"I love books". My girlfriend is glad that I have switched to eBooks as my collection of work related books is starting to get the upper-hand in our bookcases. Since last week, I have added another book to my e-collection, John Ferrara's Playful Design.
John's goal with his book is, as he states in the introduction `to let UX designers adopt game design as a competency that they can enlist' but he still says that the book is also for anyone who wants to learn more about how games can achieve great things in the real world.
Game design, gamification, aren't these two peas in a pod? Well, not exactly. Sunni Brown, who co-authored Gamestorming, tells in her foreword that their needs to be a clear distinction among UX designers between the two. Between the `all lipstick and no sex' and the `compelling game design that ignites our systems of pleasure'. From basic Likes to point systems, UX designers need to be able to create seductive user experiences with feedback loops and small, surmountable obstacles.
According to John, games solve real problems. Games have effect, both positive and negative, if meant for a serious purpose or as a leisurely time filler. From gambling to games that help improve social awareness, donations to charity, games can educate at levels that keep players engaged. In other words, games are not only for action and not only for learning, the direction you take your game design is only limited by your personal drive for creativity and how you imagine it to effect human behavior.
In Playful Design, the metaphor is made that UX design and Video Game design are like siblings that were raised in separate homes.