(crossposted from limelight)

Just a couple quick comments on tonight’s seminar, which I thought was pretty damn interesting. (by the numbers, clearly other people agree.) There was a lot of stuff said and while I did spend a couple very confused moments wondering why a Powerpoint presentation by Microsoft people looked an awful lot like it was made in Apple’s “Keynote” software, mostly I was very attentive to what they were actually talking about. :P

I enjoyed the veritable moment of poetry, where design was described as “negating oblivion” and compared to trimming bonsai trees or creating a sculpture out of a block of marble. You don’t create something out of nothing, you merely get rid of what doesn’t belong. So very zen.

I also got a huge kick out of the design version of Godwin’s law: the longer a design conversation goes, the more likely a comparison to the iPod will be made. But I digress!

I do admit, however, to some small disappointment about the examples that were talked about. I really should have expected it however… this is Microsoft, and their flagship title is Halo. I don’t have anything against Halo, but considering the fact that their talk was supposed to be about emotion in games, it’s mildly frustrating to have the primary example be a game that — to quote Hermione — has the emotional range of a teaspoon.

(if I am completely wrong about that assumption, and I could be as I’ve never actually played Halo, please … kick me.)

So Jenova (haha, I didn’t even know who it was until after Tracy was paraphrasing, and then I had a omg-it’s-Jenova almost-fangirl moment :P ) and Tracy’s questions at the end were of particular interest to me… and none of the resulting answers were all that satisfying. Oh well.

The only other thought I had was that I didn’t think the whole psychology of emotion aspect was nearly as unintuitive as they kept implying it was. Hm.