Visceral, Behavioral, Reflective (a.k.a. vaguely health-concious drinks)

So today by way of subject topic, I picked “drinks which are supposedly good for your health”. For the people who are not overtly conscious about their health, but don’t mind selecting ‘healthier’ options to soft drinks when they are available. I wonder how many people will end up doing something which involves New Media. How did I end up on this subject, you may ask?

Well.

Last week when I asked my sister for a bad design, the first thing out of her mouth was “Jia Jia Liang Teh!”. When I thought about it, I had to reconsider protesting – their ads are terrible, memorable only for their bad-ness, and their product design not much better. I figured it’d be a good place to start this week’s assignment.

Visceral Design: Jia Jia Liang Teh

Definitely, my first reaction on seeing this was “What the HECK is that?”. It’s bloody hideous and looks vaguely poisonous. It reminded me of the black turtle-jelly stuff – I swear the cans look similar. I doubted it was any sort of drink.

My sister assures me that it is quite drinkable, for all that she dislikes ginseng (A notable ingredient, as you can see from the illustration on the can). I can’t quite figure out what the other ingredients are (the ingredients list is far less than forthcoming) but it looks like chrysanthemum and luo han guo.

Part of my initial experiment was to drink this stuff and see what it tastes like, but this can just looks plain suspect. I’ll toss it in the fridge first, and try it later.

Behavioral Design: Minute Maid (Mandarin-Pomelade)

The interesting thing about this one was that after I bought it, I left the drinks in plain sight, and no fewer than 3 people asked me if they could drink this – no one wanted the liang teh, nor the thing which I’ll describe later.

I like Minute Maid, personally. I think it’s a childhood thing. I was so happy when they started distributing their products to Singapore. When I was younger my mother would mix Minute Maid concentrate with Sprite and chill it to serve to guess as a party drink – It brings back fond memories.

    It’s pretty pricey, compared to the liang teh, which was under a dollar (this was $1.20). I guess if it’s made with REAL mandarin orange and pomelit (what the heck is that?) JUICE [see illustration], I guess we can afford to pay the premium. There are other bottled drinks like this out there – gatorade, green tea – but I picked Minute Maid becaus… it looked really appealing! Plus it holds its ground, with me, anyway.

I    ‘ve tried their other flavors before, the Limeade and Lemon. I can’t quite say I like this one. It’s a smidge too citruscy-sweet – not exactly sour, but somehow biting still. It works, though. It’s not a bad drink – a cut above most other drinks, I’d say, and still somewhat healthy (despite the sugar), although in the cultural context its health benefits cannot be compared to the Liang Teh. It’s pretty easy to use though – I’m glad it’s resealable, otherwise I’d have to drink the whole thing at one shot (Like the Liang Teh, which is anothe reason why I’m putting off drinking a canned drink). It’s also easy to port around, since it’s plastic. This becomes an issue later on, when we move on to…

Reflective Design: Perrier

This is a decidedly pretentious drink. $1.90 for water bottled at the source? Enhanced with ‘natural gas’? With descriptions in French? In real glass and a snazzy metal cap to boot? Ouch. (See Illustrations)

    Personally, I hate fizzy water, or whatever it’s called. Water that isn’t still. But still, you have a to admit, that drinking this stuff is decidely posh. If anyone sees you drink it, to begin with.

No one at home wants to drink this stuff, so I think I’ll pass it to Mom, who likes it for the design and prestige. It just makes the rest of us nauseous.

A Bad Design

The Bad Design I’ve picked today is the Sony Ericsson T630. My sister has one – it’s pretty old and dated, but was at one time really popular. I used it the other day to send my brother an SMS – and the system was ridiculously hard to use. Not the typing system – it seems the same as mine, but the number of steps and options you had to go through just to send your message.

User Reaction

I asked my sister about her phone – she admitted she wasn’t one to rely much on the handphone, as long as it served its purpose of calling and smsing. She understands why people find it difficult to use, and found it annoying too, at first, but after she did it several times, it became a habit. “You just had to do it! Not like I was going to change [my] phone, or anything. So until you mentioned it, it didn’t occur to me that it was troublesome.”

“It can be really annoying especially when I want to send an sms quickly, and the software is laggy, so I press the button several times when I want to send it without looking at it, and it really frustrates me when you find out your message hasn’t been sent because it’s slow. The only thing I learnt from it was to get used to it.

“I won’t change [my] phone until it’s old and dying and falling to pieces, and then maybe I’ll consider getting a new one.”

When asked about the brand, she said “strangely enough, I’m still a Sony-Ericsson convert/fan, despite Nokia being more ‘user-friendly’ and responds more quickly. The OS of the system is quite hassle-free – I find Nokia phones have to go through multiple menus before you get to what you want to do. The aesthetic design is also really appealing, compared to Nokia phones which have really ugly interfaces.”

Nokia’s have multiple menus? But your SMS system has multiple menus too!

“Oh, I’m talking about the phone overall. The SMS system, although annoying, has little effect on my overall impression of the brand.”

My Reflection of the Product

I have a Sony-Ericsson phone, the K310i, which is a comparatively newer model. The interface was still the same, and as I was used to it, it appeared easy to navigate. To plot the path to sending an SMS, it went from:

Envelope Icon > Text > Write New > [Type SMS] > Continue > Request Reply? Yes/No > Contacts> [Type Contact Name] > Select > [Number] > Select > Send

On my phone, it’s:

Envelope Icon > Text > [Type SMS] > Continue > [Select Contact from 'Recently Used Contacts' or 'Contact List'] > Send

I daresay there’s been quite a bit of improvement.

I’ve always liked Sony-Ericsson phones, primarily for their aesthetic design – both physically and of the interface. My OS is also quite a bit faster than my sister’s. My sister’s phone is slightly bulkier and heavier, but otherwise, they are quite similar.

Overall, I think her phone is a pretty decent phone, save for an annoying system. Thank goodness they’ve rectified it in later models.

Week 10

In her paper “The Puppet Master Problem: Design for Real-World, Mission Based Gaming”, Jane McGonigal suggests that “the success of the puppet master challenges our assumptions about the kinds of action and interaction that qualify as gameplay, reveal dramatic interpretation to be a viable game mechanic, and demonstrate the value of a dramaturgical perspective for pervasive game design.” Discuss how these ideas could be applied to designing elements of narrative and gameplay in interactive media systems.

When I thought about it, I didn’t see a large conceptual difference between puppet masters and dungeon/game masters, save the medium. If anything, a puppet master is remarkably like a webmaster, or a sitemaster. I think they essentially perform the same functions – organising people in real time. Like how livejournal communities have moderators, who organise events for the visitors to enjoy and rally around – to keep visitors coming, and interested! Visitors choose to be there and subject themselves to the rules of the community as laid out by the sitemaster. If they don’t like it they can choose to leave and join another community. It’s the the second-most ultimate emergent game (Life, in general, being the first)

I think, from the second project, I’ve learned that making a game merely progressive with emergent aspects (ala MMORPGs) is not enough. (At the moment, I’m playing Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, and finished the storyline, and now, there are so many options, I don’t really feel like playing anymore). It adds weight to the puppetmaster problem – you really need rules to make a game interesting, to add motivation to play.

Therefore, games definitely need a strong element of direction – that someone out there knows what’s going on, and it’s up to you to find out what it is and what to do about it – your interpretation. Isn’t that just like life? You’re not living life for no reason – you live life to find the reason for living. If this desire can be translated to game design, it’d be an excellent game. The idea that there is a plan to everything that happens, and that you have a choice as to how to reach the final point. Like a “puppet”, you play the game insofar as you derive satisfaction from knowing that what you do has a point. Even in the case of flashmobs, a seemingly pointless action gains meaning when many people do it together. You’ve =participated= in something, not did something random on your own.

Therein lies how the concepts can be introduced to game design – the sense of community. A puppet-master run game wouldn’t nearly be as enjoyable if you did it on your own. “No man is an island”, “You can’t do it alone”, are as applicable to the gameworld as they are in life. I think games need to go towards this – that there’s an ultimate aim, a reason for what you’re doing, and people to do it with! Games already head in this direction – even games where you play on your own have a sense of community (you play against other people, or have an NPC party/companion, or you go online and talk to people who have played and find out how to best get through the game, etc).