A question that I am asked quite often, relates to my chosen Twitter name – @daverage.
Before we get into that, I want to clear one thing up. It is Dave Rage, not the Excel function, DAverage!
Back to the story. Dave has-been with me since university. On one of the first nights in the halls of residence, we all decided to make door signs for each other. The thing was, no one could spell Andrzej, so they decided to call me Dave!
That stuck with me and from that day onwards, I was known as Dave.
If there is one thing that Pokemon Go has shown me, it’s that nostalgia is a powerful tool in onboarding. The main reason I played it to start with? I used to love Pokemon – just like everyone else I knew. I was around 16 or 17 when it first appeared on the Gameboy in the UK and I immediately fell in love with it. This is a familiar story for a couple of generations as the game has managed to reinvent itself (or at least add more Pokemons) every couple of years since then!
When I heard about Pokemon go, it was not the clever use of augmented reality that attracted me, it was the chance to be Ash and go and “Catch ‘em all” that got me. Once I played it, it felt familiar. The Pokemon matched to those found in my first encounters with the game. Pikachu was there, Bulbasaur, Squirtle, Pidgey etc. I felt comfortable, as if I was in the cartoon I used to watch back in the day.
Writing about Pokemon Go is almost as popular as actually playing it, so I thought I would join in the trend.
TL:TR It’s great fun but needs to have some careful consideration around safety concerns
In case you have been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks, let me just set the scene. Pokemon Go is a game based on the popular Pokemon franchise. It sees players using their mobile phones to hunt down and capture Pokemon in the real world. Using Augmented Reality (AR), Pokemon pop up all over the real world for players to capture and train. Once caught, they can be leveled up, evolved, battled with at Pokemon Gyms and more.
Years ago I read an interview with a musician (whose name escapes me), where he was giving advice to new musicians. There was lots of good stuff, but the one that really stuck with me was this.
Save your best songs for the encore, even if you never get the chance to play them.
At the time, this struck me as very odd. However, over the years I have started to see where this guy was going. The first thing is that all your songs should be good – if you rely on one or two and the rest are fillers, people will notice. If you are so confident in your songs that you can leave the ones you feel are best for a potentially never heard encore, you are on to a winner!
Hi all.
Lots of changes on the go at the moment, but one big one is an overhaul of the User Type Test. In collaboration with the Austrian Institute of Technology and HCI Games Group, this new test has been validated and should provide a much more accurate set of results over time. It is early days yet, but the last version had over 4,000 responses – so I hope we can do just as well here.
It will be used for continued research by them (I will link to a couple of papers that have been written about the process once they are available), but also for my own interest.
