• My Life,  The Lazy Designer

    Be Careful What You Wish For

    As a game designer I spend a lot of time thinking of ways I can encourage players to act in particular ways. Some are obvious – drop a few expensive & cool items into stores at a particular place I want the player to return to because I know the items will encourage most players to travel back there once they’ve earned the gold for it. Some are less obvious like making the cost of using a visually impressive fighting ability slightly lower than it should be (balance wise) because it increases player engagement and the likelihood of them continuing to play the game early on. So I wonder sometimes…

  • My Life,  The Lazy Designer

    Distraction Devices

    Earlier I posted about how electronic devices can really disrupt meetings. Now Richard Curtis over at [e-reads] has a post discussing Christine Pearson’s book which goes into detail on why overuse of these distraction devices causes poor work performance. Worth reading, especially for those of you who still believe mobile devices allow you to ‘get more work done’.

  • My Life

    More reasons I like my iPod Touch

    I don’t own a cell phone. Have only had one, once, and for a very short span of time and doubt I’ll ever own one again. I don’t understand people walking, driving, and standing at counters, talking and texting away on their little devices. In truth, I find it annoying. But… I consider myself a tech geek. And so last year I bought an iPod Touch… I’ve posted about it before and overall I really like the damn thing. There are things I hate about it — so much of its media is locked in and has DRM, the device is sealed and discourages hacking, you can only develop Apps…

  • My Life

    eBook Software

    I’ve been reading eBooks for years now. Reading a recent post by Brad Torgersen on his blog where he discusses print books versus eBooks, got me thinking. While I agree with Brad on some points (i.e., that there will be print books for many years to come) I find eBook reading a lot more convenient than reading print books and I seldom buy print titles anymore. I started reading eBooks on a Palm IIIxe, then moved to my Dell Axim, and now I read on my iPod Touch. I love the convenience of having hundreds of titles at my fingertips and I find the iPod touch screen fantastic for reading.…

  • Writing Resources

    Story available on the Kindle

    While I don’t have a dedicated ebook reading device like the Sony reader or the Kindle I have been reading eBooks and stories on my Ipod Touch for almost a year now. I have all the various bookstore apps on it including Stanza, eReader and Kindle. But what I hadn’t thought about, ever, and I should have probably, was republishing my previously printed stories this way. I had looked into Fictionwise to see if they’d take my story reprints but I’m not established enough to qualify. After reading a post by Michael Stackpole where he was talking about updating his stories on the Kindle I checked into it. Now I…