Games are made of verbs. Run, jump, punch, crouch. Hand held controllers are able to simulate the input of the player to use those verbs in a rather precise way, be it on/off or analog. And as developers, designing around verbs is a pretty straightforward affair which we have been doing since the first game was played. But when it gets to adverbs, the emotional variables of a verb, neither the controller or developer seems to be aware of what to do with them beyond pure visuals.

Enter motion controls. While initially it is the verbs we assign to the gestures, such as swing a sword, we quickly find out that they just don’t quite match up the crisply defined input of a controller.  Motion Controls also lack a tactile sense of feedback in many cases, making all those verbs feel hollow when we don’t feel the physical reaction. It is a fun gimmick, but we quickly grow tired of the theatrics and plug our plastic hands back into the machine.

So if verbs aren’t best used for motion controls, how can we use them as adverbs and adjectives?

You must be living under the rock to not to have noticed something called CES (Consumer Electronics Show) is happening in Las Vegas right now and something that has the bloggers sphere excited about is Android 3.0 aka “honeycomb” the tablet version of Android. It certainly is impressive from the videos we have seen. We instantly thought about the MeeGo tablet UI and started comparing. So what we where curious about was what you preferred and why. Of course the MeeGo UI is pre- alpha and the Android 3.0 is only a sneak peak. But we are still interested what your first impressions are when comparing the two.

If you check out this link you’ll see a flash presentation of a MeeGo tablet UI from Evolve III Maestro’s Slate, you” see something quite beautiful.

The MeeGo Maestro Slate from Evolve III has an interactive panoramic homescreens full of non-restricted widgets, Swipe up for apps, Swipe down for multitasking/notifications. There’s also album art cover flow style, and very neat photo viewing options with normal thumbnail, perspective and bottom bar thumbnails.

Over the last two months we have been working on several iPad projects: Two news applications, a social network and a word processor. We worked on iPad projects without ever having touched an iPad. One client asked us to “start working on that tablet thing” even before we knew whether the iPad was real. The question Are we designing desktop programs, web sites or something entirely new? has been torturing us until that express package from New York finally crossed our door sill. A quick write up of design insights before and after the appearance of the iPad at our office.

My name is Tina Roth Eisenberg. I am a 'swiss designer gone NYC'. swissmiss is my visual archive of things that 'make me look'. I am a graphic designer and run my own studio in Brooklyn. Contact me if you would like to team up, have a link suggestion or just want to say hello: submissions {at} swiss-miss.com.

I recently finished Outliers: The Story of Success, the latest book by Malcolm Gladwell. More than any other writer, Gladwell can take any topic, even the most dry and boring, and turn it into compelling reading.
The entire Outliers book is good, but Chapter 7: The Ethnic History of Plane Crashes, is amazing. It’s worth the price of the book just to see how Gladwell stitches this chapter together. In it Gladwell tells the story of several plane crashes and uses the last radio conversations between the pilots and the control tower to paint an incredible picture of how they happen.

The collected game design rants of Marc "MAHK" LeBlanc The List Because you asked, here is a brief list of the "Eight Kinds of Fun."