Vex Appeal is a weblog and collection of projects by Guy Parsons, a game designer, online community and digital strategy dude in London, England. Read more about the saucy butcher boy here.
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projects:
law 37 / sleeper cell / lets change the game
101 things in 1001 days
psychopatch
LOLgod
elsewhere on the internets:
flickr
myspace
zoominfo
linkedin
facebook
guy.lewis.parsons@gmail.com
vexy young things:
jey biddulph
mike jewell
roo reynolds
dan hon
adrian hon
naomi alderman
steve peters
previously on vexappeal:
Back soon... Free Moshi Monsters Codes Spokeo... or spookeo, more like I'm Prove Very Where J.C Leyendecker and Team Fortress 2 Train of thought "Love Is Like A Bottle Of Gin..." Links for FAME people They Tell Stories Ffffudging it slightly
Game face
Saturday, November 03, 2007
A quick little game that challenges you to identify the facial expressions that appear for a few milliseconds. I did surprisingly well - 9/10 - so I'm not sure what that means! It's based around the work of "that guy from Blink" who can read people's emotions amazingly well by focusing on the expressions that flash across their face very quickly.
Incidentally, this article may have crossed your feedreader recently:
One exercise shows a grid of faces, with 15 of them frowning and one smiling. The player must find the smiling face as quickly as possible... the group that played the "find the smile" exercise reported feeling less stressed, had higher self esteem, made more sales, and were rated as being more confident in their phone calls. Most remarkably, said Balwin, they had 17 percent lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol.But you can actually play it online at Mindhabits.com! I mean the presentation is pretty meh and it's too big for my browser window and won't let me scroll and so on and so forth, but hey, check it out. I'd like to say I'm approaching a Zen state after 15 minutes of playing earlier, but at this exact moment I'm feeling more like carving out my eyeballs with rusty teaspoons, so best check back with me in another six days - unless I've become a Buddhist monk by then. Or actually have done the rusty teaspoons thing.
Labels: cognition, emotion, games, psychology
Illusioneering
Sunday, July 15, 2007
A couple of really nice illusions:
This is a silhouette of a woman spinning on the spot. However, your brain can interpret the image to see her spinning either clockwise or anti-clockwise. If you're struggling getting her to switch direction, try:
- closing your eyes and visualising her spinning the other way
- concentrating on the shadow
- covering the silhouette apart from the bottom-left corner, and when you see her foot swoop past, try and perceive at as moving away from/towards you, as desired.
It's really weird and a bit frustrating - sometimes it's very easy to change direction, and then inexplicably I'll stop being able to do it for ages. There's no trickery with the image itself, either. You can download the picture to check if you want, or have the fun experience of getting a group of people to watch it and have them all see it spinning different ways. Next up:
(Or see on YouTube if you can't view the embedded video.)
Not much I can say about this without giving the game away, but needless to say it's impressive, and will leave you feeling a bit daft. It reminds me of a conversation I had with Stuart Nolan at PlayTime about using metaphorical sleight of hand and misdirection in game design to create the illusion of open-ended play within what's obviously a finite system. Although the actual trick he showed me just involved using different routes of getting to the same ending, so whatever cards you picked, it still ended up working as a "trick." Quite an interesting line of thought, nonetheless, although probably most effective in narrative-driven play than other sorts of experiences.
Labels: brain, cognition, illusion, perception, sleight, trick