Hacking Restaurants, Post It Design, and Black Swans

Here are where my comments went this week. I couldn't pick one to focus on, so here's the lot. (Extracts are from my comments, not the post itself):

• Yehuda Berlinger posts on his endless desire to hack restaurant menus. I challenge some of his assumptions. Extract: "If you're running a cheap cafe, dealing with custom orders is too much of a risk: it increases the risk of getting the wrong orders, it increases the demands on the staff... and it increases the chances of disputes with customers."
• Dan Cook posts about post-it note prototyping designs. Great stuff! But I poke a hole... Extract: "By testing what programmers and designers find fun, aren't you designing games for 10% of people and not 100%? How does the wider audience get a say in developing new kinds of fun by your method?"
• Raph Koster posts about the ludic fallacy - the tendency to think that game models can be applied to real situations accurately. I get into tangential territory in my comment, as ever. Extract: "I appreciate any attempts to spread suspicion concerning induction (which is what the black swan story is about) - Hume was more than two centuries ago, how are we so slow to accept this idea? Perhaps because we don't want to give up our attachment to science, and science is almost entirely dependent upon induction."
• Dmitri Williams posts about some newly published gender research in MMORPGs over on Terra Nova. I comment on why female players were "more hardcore" than the males. Extract: "I worry that you will be cited as having claimed that female game players are more intense about their play than male players - which is not what your study found at all."
• Greg  Tannahil posts that Dead Space and Mirror's Edge will get sequels, claiming Mirror's Edge "possessed no real flaws that another six months in development couldn't have fixed". I point out that from EA's perspective, Mirror's Edge has a fatal flaw: a small potential audience. Extract: "First person platform games are unplayable by many, unpleasant for many, and enjoyable for just a few. Unless they give up first person, I suspect this franchise is commercially doomed."
• And finally, liberal firebrand Maha posts about the discussions concerning the Bible and gay marriage. I'll be posting about this next year, but here's an extract from my comment: "What seems to be at issue is people in the middle ground... not because the people in question have any express issue towards the Gay community as a *separate* culture, but because they are wary of integrating it into what they see as *their* culture."

Hmmm... I spent much longer on comments this week than usual, and commenting on six different blogs in one day is a rarity when I'm already busy. What was I thinking? Now I have too many dialogues to have any hope of monitoring them all... Oh well, this is a new experiment for me, and I'm sure it'll settle down in time.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Comments

[GregT]

Thanks for the link, Chris, and for your (thought-provoking as ever) comment! FYI your comment has been replied to:
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=24434266&postID=4770718386199741334