The 13-foot-long three-seater’s interior and exterior are blank slates for whatever visuals you would like to wirelessly paint onto them in real time. And if you get too confused, there’s a holographic “navigation concierge” lady with a cute little hat to accompany you, guiding you around the vehicle’s futuristic features. She also helps you find your way from one place to another, which is probably effortless considering that the vehicle is networked with all the other cars on the road and drives itself.

Is a video game still a video game if there's no... video? Designer Adam Henriksson grabs that question by the horns with Pockit, a game console concept that has no graphics whatsoever. Instead, it's a Wii-like motion-sensing wand that "encourages everyone to be physical and have a reason to break norms," he writes. Rather than waving the wand around in front of a screen -- which is the only way you get to see what your wand is representing--the Pockit moves that aspect of the game experience into your own mind's eye. Whether you've configured the Pockit to be "running" a swordfighting game or something else, the point is that the players are focusing their attention on each other in real life, not virtualized avatars.

And start calling them Design Tools. Docs get appended, while Tools are put aside as needs change. Design docs are necessary, but their definition is both antiquated and inadequate to the task they provide. In fact, their task–as tools–is threefold, and it worries me that none of this was explained to me.
A game designers job goes through three major periods: figuring out what the hell you are making, getting the team on board with the initial idea, and then managing the vision as the game is redesigned (like, a lot – a LOT a lot); similarly, your documentation, as the project goes through these stages, serves three purposes: extrapolation, communication, and collation.

If you still practice or encourage the outdated practice of writing long design documents, you are doing your team and your business a grave disfavor. Long design docs embody and promote an insidious world view: They make the false claim that the most effective way to make a game is to create a fixed engineering specification and then hand that off to developers to implement feature by bullet-pointed feature.