That said, I knew that it was a popular game (that's why I paid my 99 cents for it) and that there was some sort community around it. The above linked article mentions how this community has influenced the ongoing design (32 releases so far) of this game. It must be interesting as a developer to now have the chance to get so much feedback from end users (and not just those involved in contrived usability tests).
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Pocket God and users influencing design
Read this story on Pocket God, an iPhone game, this morning. I have the game on my phone, but never really got into playing it. I was amused for about 10 seconds and then couldn't figure out what the point was. Then I determined it was either not designed for me (probably not!) and may require some reading or investigation to learn how to play (not interested, and my phone has much more intuitive games to play for a few minutes here and there).
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My brother has an iPod (unfortunately I do not), and he has "Angry Birds" on it - plays it all the time. I'll have to ask him to let me try Pocket God. It sounds interesting.
ReplyDeleteThe think you mentioned about "usability tests" is interesting. I was just thinking about focus groups as I read through shirky (chapter 9 or 10 I think) where he talks about Wikipedia and other similar apps using user-generated changes/edits to maintain quality and improve the content. That put me in mind of focus groups but on a much more massive scale, and a scale for which you don't have to buy your reviewers any Hungry Howies while they critique your stuff. I love Web 2.0!
My 21-year-old daughter has Pocket God on her iPhone. She just loves to play it. She gets to kill little islanders in 18 sorts of ways. She's just waiting for the newest update so she can have 19 ways to kill the cute little islanders—and I always thought she was the more well-adjusted member of the family :)
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