Seattle Waterfront Arcade

Because of this particular arcade’s proximity to a lot of Seattle’s tourist attractions on the waterfront, I suspect that local arcade game enthusiasts may not know about this one or want to deal with parking down in the increasingly popular area (according to a new report Seattle now ranks ninth in the nation for cruise ship embarkations). It’s small, and doesn’t have very many games, but if you’re in the area for, say, a burger or to look at fish it’s not a bad place to hop in a play a few ticket games or a game of Tekken 5.

Let’s look at this one at cnn.com, about obesity rates in the US.

At first glance, I noted, damn, look at the red, the south sure is fat. And what’s up with Michigan? How is Indiana, Ohio and Illinois this strip of thinness in the bulging belly of the midwest? What’s going on in those states? Then I looked more closely.

What’s going on here? The color (specifically the intensities of the red and blue shades) aren’t scaling evenly at all. A state could be 24 percent obese (according to their standard, of course) and in the land of the gray-blueish healthy people, but be 25 percent obese and be in a horrible, red, fat fat fat land. This sensationalistic and fundamentally unsound color shading methodology is horribly oversimplifying and misrepresenting the issues and data. The progression of colors, bluntly, is not granular or linear enough.

This is very deceptive and unhelpful to anyone who doesn’t look at the information presented carefully.

Stupid and bad chart, cnn.com.

Let’s get this out of the way. I hate, hate, hate this box. It’s incredibly flaky to the point that I can’t trust it to record a program properly without dropouts or crashes. The interface is clunky. There’s no intelligent managing of recorded content and the to-do list like my still-hooked-up Series 2 tiVo. But it doesn’t cost me much more per month to have the DVR, because I’m already paying for high definition programming and needed the HD box, and my tiVo doesn’t do high-def.

I had recently reformatted and resetted my DVR, so it had no recordings and no subscriptions on it. Weeds Season 3 (drool) finally started up again last night, and there was a new Big Love on as well. So I figured I’d give the new DVR a spin and set up some recordings for the girlfriend and I to watch later on this week.

Fine. Yes, the Interface is now totally different. I can’t exactly say that it’s better or worse than the previous interface yet. It doesn’t feel faster or slower. But when I went to search for Big Love, I noticed something somewhat different in the text input interface. Instead of the expected on screen array of letters to scroll through to enter “B…I…G……” I saw something that looked like this:

Wait, what? I have a Masters degree in Interactive Technology. WTF is that?!?!?!

I then realized what was going on. You remember how you entered your name when you won a high school at an arcade game? These games had no keyboard, usually just a joystick and a few buttons, so you had to scroll the numbers, letters and punctuation for each of the three letters you were usually alloted for your initials or some dirty word.

This interface works the same way as those arcade games, except it was five letters.

I’m not saying that this is a horrible interface. It isn’t. In some cases, it might actually be faster than an onscreen keyboard, and it definitely takes up less space on the screen. I can see how it may require explanation to some folks though - it’s not as immediately obvious as an onscreen keyboard. Some arrows indicating that the boxes are indeed scroll boxes wouldn’t hurt, as a start.

What bothers me though is, why not adaptive / predictive text technologies in DVRs? They work great on cell phones, after all. All of the possible words are already neatly indexed on the DVR as the TV program listings. Let’s say I enter a “B” in the first box…. there’s no reason why I should have to scroll through letters or numbers in the second box that would lead to words or partial words that don’t exist in the listings. There’s no show that could possibly start with the string “B2,” for example, so why should I have to scroll through the number “2″ to get to a possible letter?

edit: I just also realized something as well - why not use the numeric pad of the remote controller like a cell phone number pad, with each number key corresponding to 2-3 letters? That would obviously work just fine with predictive text technologies, and is a familiar interface to anyone with a cell phone.

This is just example of how clumsy these boxes are. These are devices that are designed for the mass market, not just geeks. Pull it together guys!

Jillians’s Billiards

This establishment seems to be primarily known as a place to play pool, but they have a decent selection of arcade games. They have a wider variety of games than the others listed - including a selection of driving games (including a multiuser Daytona USA set up), a 360 degree VR game that involves gunning down soldiers on the beach, and a Sega Marine Fishing machine (enjoy your fishing!).

Beer and food is also availible, which is a plus. And for you retro gamers, I remember that there’s a few cabinets with older games too. Not a bad joint, but not a mindblowing or particularly novel experience.

From National Geographic’s website.

So, back to the drawing board. I knew I wanted a development journal to blog my progress on my projects, and a side of the website purely dedicated to that journal and descriptions of my past and current projects. I wanted to keep it separate from my personal side, so that someone who wanted to read about my video tracking software progress wouldn’t have to dig through posts about what I think about the Simpsons video arcade game.

First things first, I needed to map out the site so I could easily keep track of what’s done and what needed to be done, as well as provide myself a conceptual map for what I wanted to do. And this was a fantastic excuse to finally pickup a copy of Omnigraffle. You know, the developers are literally next door to what I live. Wacky!

~!

It’s an amazing app, and I’ve begun to use it for mind mapping and interaction design-ing my latest art project. More on that in the future.

Here’s what I ended up with. I know, simple in the end, but still oh-so-useful and sanity-saving.

Website map, in hand, I began to get down to work on the actual site. I first found a theme which I thought would be a great foundation visually for what I wanted to do (which isn’t very much) - Cutline, which I’m very happily linking to on the bottom of every page and post on my site. It’s clean and inoffensive and is a great place to leap up and out from design wise.

Next step - I wanted to have my sidebar dynamically change depending where you were on the website. For example, if the user were on the software oriented side, I wanted her to only see software related content only.

Luckily, Wordpress lets you do that via some pretty simple programming (although I hit some snags which I’ll document as I continue describing what I did). Basically, in the sidebar.php page, you can go (in pseudocode):

if the user is looking at a page describing my software then......
- show the other software pages on the sidebar, categorized by type of software

if the user is looking at the development journal then.....
- only show the last ten posts from the development journal on the sidebar


.. and so on and so forth.

So what I needed to do was to figure out first was how to categorize software related pages properly so that they could be distinguished from other content. I ended up using the “Custom Fields” functionality in wordpress. Basically it lets you create your own metadata to add whatever information you want about your post or page. The “key” is the custom field you want to define, the “value” is the, uh, value of that custom field.

So on my software pages I created a “type” key and for my digital art pages, I typed in “digitalartinfo.” The pseudocode now looks like


if the user is looking at a page describing my software then......
- show pages on my sidebar if they are of "type" "digitalartinfo"


Wait! Ooops. Wordpress doesn’t let you test for metadata types, from what I understand. But you can test if you’re looking at a particular page by number or title, and you can use the boolean “||” to indicate an “AND” in an “if” statement, so what I ended up doing, and it’s a horrible hack that I’m going to investigate fixing later, is


if the user is looking at one of these particular pages that I'm listing manually ......
- show the pages on my sidebar that are of "type" "digitalartinfo"


or in reality, in my sidebar.php, it looks something like this right now:

< ?php if (is_page('14') || is_page('15') || is_page('16') || is_page('17') || is_page('19') || is_page('8') || is_page('3') || is_page('13') || is_page('10') || is_page('11') || is_page('software-and-digital-art-projects') ){ ?>
<ul>
< ?php wp_list_pages('title_li=&meta_key=type&meta_value=digitalartinfo'); ?>
</ul>
< ?php } ?>

(You probably shouldn’t copy and paste this code, by the way. It’s just a snippet for discussion purposes.)

So, well, that’s how it’s working right now for the individual “page” pages. Stay tuned for how I got my index pages working for each section of my site……!

Sadly, these places are gone. They disappeared at a time where home consoles were just beginning to replicate the experience of playing an arcade game in the comfort of your own home. I’d estimate that this occurred somewhere around the Super NES / Genesis time to the early days of the Playstation and Sega Saturn. Certainly, the first amazingly great port of Street Fighter II certainly couldn’t have helped the plight of struggling arcade owners.

The big draw for me, even in the post 16 bit world, was to play games that couldn’t be replicated at home due to peripheral requirements, such as Galaxy Force II, which featured a spinning cockpit, or those great multiplayer beat ‘em ups with friends, in particular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Mercs (which I still fire up on my XBox once in awhile).

But I digress. Since moving back to the Seattle area in 2004, I’ve visited several arcades. Let’s go over two of them in this post:

Oof. The ambiance is not the best, but it is the Fun Forest and it is Seattle Center - you know, basically a somewhat strange and aging amusement park in a chronically underachieving wasteland of potential. Of interest to gamers, there’s at least one working Dance Dance Revolution machine, and an aging but functional six person X-Men: the Arcade Game cabinet. Admittedly, I was bored and early before an opera once and went inside for a few games of X-Men. That was a great, great game.

Funtasia

I recently visited this place for my girlfriend’s friend’s bachelorette party. Just to get this off my chest, the mini golf course is awful, both in design and upkeep. The par set for each hole was nonsensical, there were loose bricks from the course just laying around, and the many of the holes themselves aren’t even marked clearly. However, the go karts and batting cakes looked fun. The Lazer Tag also looked fun (I didn’t partake), but the scoring system seemed to be needlessly complex and I ran into a half naked man in the bathroom attempting to mop off the sweat he accumulated during a heated session of the game with paper towels. The snack bar was disgustingly delicious; I ordered a hot dog from the rotating sausage machine and the girl basically said “you don’t want that,” so I settled for an order of nachos. there’s something about fake cheese product being squeezed out of a heated foil bag by tongs that gets my mouth watering.

Oops, I’m digressing.

The arcade itself was surprisingly decent, mainly because it was charmingly out of date. There were at least two Dance Dance Revolution machines. There was a working Silent Scope, which in the process of enthusiastically dumping a few quarters into and playing I managed to alienate at least one member of our party (was it the happy gunning down of snipers in the crotch?). The real finds at this arcade are a working Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cabinet and a working Simpsons arcade game cabinet. Fantastic. After seeing the movie and enjoying some of the 7-11 merch that my girlfriend brought me one day, it was great to be able to replay another game that will probably never see a console release due to licensing issues… ever.

(if you have to ask, I played Marge)

Check it out here.

Cute Overload is a nice beacon of cute fuzzy-wuzziness in what can be a cruel, cruel Internet sometimes….

Technological Transparency.

Interactive digital art installations have an immediate hurdle to face when presenting to the general public. The problem is that no one wants to look like an idiot and mess up in front of other people. More specifically, when someone is facing an interactive installation that he or she has never seen or experienced before, he or she does not want to do something wrong and possibly (a) mess up the project or (b) look ineffectual and unknowledgable.

This is why children have more fun with interactive art than adults do! They tend to be less self conscious about going up to something and pounding on it. They’re also more likely to understand the vocabulary of interactivity with kid oriented science museums and video games out there.

Adults are more likely to associate computers with work and productivity. If you’re presenting work on a computer, you have to break past that in presentation or you lose perception and immersion points immediately. You don’t want your stuff to be perceived as a “pretty screen saver” unless, of course, your work actually is supposed to be a pretty screen saver.

Some quick tips that I’ve picked up so far:

- Hide the CPU. If it is at all possible, the CPU should be hidden behind a wall or barrier of some sorts. Having a CPU exposed can look sloppy and god forbid, cause your project to be accidentally turned off or rebooted. Most CPUs look ugly anyway (if it’s one of those sexy new G5 IMacs that’s a totally different case….).

- On the same vein, flat screen monitors are nice and sexy, but make sure they work for the colors that you’re presenting in your project. I like flat screen monitors because their front panels tend to be nicer looking and they’re easy to hang on a wall. They’re also easier to enclose or build a frame around, which, if appropriate, adds a nice touch.

- If your project absolutely requires a mouse, consider a wireless mouse on a pedestal attached to a tether or a trackball. With one show I did a while back the wireless mouse was a godsend, as less cables are always better. Trackballs are good because they don’t require flat space to roll across to use, and people are generally familiar with their operation.

- Signs or placards. People do just about every approach when it comes to signage. Some people like to put up a poster carefully explaining technical, conceptual, and technical details about their projects as well as instructions. Some only put up the name of the piece and the title.

I think the first approach (an extensive poster) is awful, and I had to endure it while I was at ITP during their school shows. It’s horribly redundant to put a picture of the project on the poster next to the project, so don’t do it. It really depends on the environment, but many times the specific details about the technology are not important or relevant, so use your judgment there. Don’t give away elements of the user experience. Otherwise, you’re ruining the surprise, or at the very least, the users’ curiosity and spirit of discovery.

A traditional art example is this. How many times have you looked at a painting in a gallery and pondered it and wondered what it was (okay, so this is probably abstract art we’re talking about here), and then you read the title and was disappointed and suddenly disinterested and walked away?

The same thing can happen when you blow the fun on the informational poster. Don’t.

However, I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing to at least start the user on the right track. I felt that Eyebeam and Ars Prix Electronica blew it with the Prix Selection show they did this summer in this regard. When I visited I watched as people went into the gallery, looked at various works, got confused before they interacted with them, and simply left, especially with Interactive Plantgrowing.

Every person who walks out because they don’t even know where to start is another potential patron of the art lost.

So how did I do?

I’ll be blogging over the next few days my process in getting there, including my site mapping, dealing with some wacky wordpress inconsistencies that drove me up the wall (and how I got around them), how I’ve managed to compartmentalize different posts to different pages to give my site a sense of organization, and what I think of using wordpress as both a blogging and CMS platform at the same time.

A caveat - I am not a professional web designer or developer (although I helped build small parts of the blogging system at a previous job), so some of you will find my experience and/or views elementary, wrong, or wacky, but I’d love to hear from y’all about what you think anyway!