Monthly Archives: February 2010

>From a great article on metagaming at sleepoversf.com:

The more fea­tures an appli­ca­tion has, the more uneasy a user can feel. This prin­ci­pal is one rea­son why Apple’s prod­ucts tend to be so sat­is­fy­ing to use. The more lim­ited a product’s func­tion­al­ity, the eas­ier one can mas­ter it. And feel­ing like a mas­ter of your tools is a won­der­ful thing.

I would even say it’s simpler than that: more simplicity = less stress. It’s not so much the feeling that I’ve accomplished everything I can with my iPhone and its apps, it’s that it’s so easy for me to figure out how to do things I’ve never even tried before.

The rest of the article is about creating challenges outside of games to accomplish in-game. It’s form also follows the topic of metagaming, allowing you to hide areas you’ve already read.

Another nugget:

And like per­fectly fit clothes, that feel­ing is
empow­er­ing. A para­dox, then: the less you enable peo­ple to
do, the more they will do.