Through Hiker

Many final projects are looking like they are in the 80%+ completion zone. It seems most are facing a payoff vs time required dilemma. For a while, we were covering a lot of ground vs the amount of time invested. Now in the 80%+ complete zone, the return on time invested seems to be minuscule.

Hunting and killing little problems here and there seems to consume endless amounts of time. The frustration springs from knowing where one wants to be, but not knowing exactly how to get there (or even where to find the information needed to illuminate the path) .

I was suffering for two weeks with the non-hosted WordPress blog I created for my website.  Going non-hosted gets you amazing flexibility, but you’re largely on your own with the inevitable problems.  I couldn’t get category pages to show up for over 2 weeks of effort, but finally broke through tonight when I figured out how to fix a 404 result from the archives page, Hooray!

Since time is limited, the question then becomes when is this project “good enough?” It’s a question we’re all going to face in the next week, so good luck and good hunting!

I made comments on Mark, Jenny, Laura, and Maureen’s blogs this week. The final projects are looking pretty darned good; keep up the great work!

Niall Ferguson’s How to Win a War made an interesting case for wargaming strategic alternatives in war. My reaction is that it sounds like fun, but it isn’t history

George Box once said “All models are wrong, some are useful.” This seems to be a wise caution about using wargames as historical tools. Ferguson quickly dismisses first person shooter games like Call to Duty and Axis and Allies, noting their easily detected flaws, and limited utility (learning about WWII weapons, for example).

The Calm & the Storm is apparently more sophisticated and its flaws are less apparent, suggesting that possible strategic results are more accurate and useful.

Red Alert! War is the volatile mixture of violence, chance and reason. Chance delivers results way outside expectations, uncertainty and fog result in actions that seem irrational, and the interplay of human emotion invoked by use of violence makes results inestimable.

Ferguson appears to have fallen victim to a convincing set of variables and a good-looking interface, suggesting the results are more “realistic.” This is similar to Fogg’s concern that people are more easily convinced by websites that look good in “How People Evaluate A Web Site‘s Credibility.”

It follows that the inevitably wrong results are more menacing since convincing data that looks good is seductively misleading

So where is Box’s “usefulness”? Perhaps it is best limited to better perceiving starategic dilemmas faced by each power rather than outcomes of alternate strategic choices.

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James Gee’s Learning by Design: good video games as learning machines is an interesting look at human behavior, but he’s dead wrong about the base assumption that videogames are about learning. According to Gee:

the question is: How do good game designers manage to get new players to learn long, complex, and difficult games? The answer, I believe, is this: the designers of many good games have hit on profoundly good methods of getting people to learn and to enjoy learning.

Gamers have to suffer through the learning to get to the interesting part. I think the payoff isn’t enjoying learning, it’s living a fantasy (experiencing the past or future, or other worlds), exercising extraordinary powers (space flight, magic, generalship, kingship), taking risks (going in harms way, confronting extraordinary dangers) outside normal existence. The learning part is the up front cost of doing business. Good, bad, or ugly: if the payoff after the learning is done, the game will be a success.

There are great posts out there this week on Gee and Ferguson from Jennifer, Jenny, Maureen, and Lee Ann. I commented on Jenny and Lee Ann’s posts

Dear Cliomates, Thanks for your helpful comments on the design project, I’m returning from Jakarta this evening and will be back in the US Wed PM. It’s been fun following your comments from the other side of the world. The design projects are looking great — we’ve all come a long way this semester!!

I made what I hope are constructive comments on the designs posted so far–sorry to miss Tues class, because my critical eye is calibrated by your comments in class. I made some comments on designs by Mark , Steven, John and Chris.

Laura sounds like she’s tackling an ambitious re-work of CHNM–Since Laura’s such a creative designer, I commented that we might benefit from seeing some of the designs rejected as vicarious experience.

Thanks to Tad for reporting on alternative reality games–I commented how they are similar to military wargames done in the Pentagon

The Powerpoint Briefings I’ve watched this week had every possible bell and whistle activated and I commented to Marty that they could benefit from some cleaner design principles.

Lastly, thanks to Ken for identifying how to get comments up and running. There seem to be many ways to skin that cat and getting web 2.0 interaction going…an integrated blog/web page is how I’m approaching the need, considering a wiki might be another. Comment to ken on Web forums.

Fellow Clio travellers, My design project is done for now, as I’m departing for a field trip to Indonesia and Malaysia for two weeks. I’ve attached a few of my struggles in the design process to date. The first thumbnail is a glimpse of the HTML and CSS reverse engineering I used to figure out how to how to make a blog and a web page marry up. I was surprised how long it took to deconstruct 4 pages of CSS and a couple of pages of HTML!

 After I got my first draft up and running, I applied heavy doses of alignment, repetition, contrast, and proximity. At this point the project started getting fun.  

Please take a look at my second draft. CLICK HERE FOR 2nd DRAFT I was pretty happy that it was looking so good. I re-read all the design readings and started to get very critical. I was reluctatnt to change my fonts around and I really wasn’t comfortable moving the logo to the left side for alignment. I did it anyway and it kind of grew on me.  

Please CLICK HERE FOR THE FINAL RESULTS. Please let me know which design you like better! I know of one small design glitch that I can’t fix here due to technology limitations on my computer at home, I look forward to seeing if you catch it in class on the 17th…please take some notes for me on the results of the murder board.

Next steps to move from the design project to the final project will be to migrate all the design fixes from the design page index.html to the blog side at oncombat.net/blog and to intertwine the content of the two below the top nav list

“Grinding out” a nice design doesn’t sound like the preferred way to go, but that’s where I am.

I keep feeling like there’s supposed to be a “euraka” moment, and I keep waiting for that lightning bolt. Reading Wroblewski’s Visible Narratives wasn’t the source of a spark (OK, I should clump stuff), nor was Guevin’s rule of three (OK, I’m supposed to make my design look like a lopsided triangle). Bowman’s A Design Process Revealed tried to help with how we should think through a design, so I drew some pictures. I paid darned close attention to Williams when I saw the proximity, alignment, repetition, and contrast since it has been repeatedly foot stomped in class…great guidelines to follow, but no Eureka!

Without the fireworks, I started an incremental approach, one little decision at a time. If you’d like to hear how I pounded through the design process, I describe it below. If you just have a few minutes, please send me some comments on the state of my design at www.oncombat.net Your comments have been of great help!

HOW I SPENT LAST WEEK (and weekend!) ON WEB DESIGN:

Big decision #1: white/black background with color pictures or color background with black/white pictures?
Decision: White/black background because my site will be organized around themes that will benefit from a neutral background and color can come in with paintings as headers.
Feasibility Check: The approach appears to be feasible due to Army, Navy, and USAF history sites with good artwork.

Big decision #2: find a good blog theme to use as a starting point. Non-hosted WordPress has the most flexibility and options, Cutline seemed to be a nice baseline
Implementation: First I had to first set up a non-hosted WordPress with GoDaddy. Lots of learning! Second, I tried out 5 or 6 themes. Cutline was the most promising so I built it up with a few small posts and a new header as a proto-blog.

Baby step: Create a prototype website with the Cutline CSS.
Implementation: There was daunting reverse-engineering to see how Cutline’s CSS works, and start re-writing. This entailed hours of trial and error. Good thing I had a weekend to spare.

Next baby step: re-read Williams, and apply rules of good design to the new website.
Implementation: Now we’re getting somewhere!

The design’s looking better, and ideas have been coming in from classmates. Thanks! Keep the ideas coming. Please check out the latest work in progress at www.oncombat.net 

Bottom line: plugging away seems works in absence of a spark of inspiration

Elsewhere in the neighborhood:

Not too many blog posts out this week, Tuesday may be a busy day….

I made a comment agreeing with Maureen’s objection to Wrobleski, WE only get a few seconds with our puny websites..the Library of Congress gets a lot of time from people clicking through despite the hard to use interface. LOC gets away with it because of all the great (and free!) content.

I appreciated Lee Ann’s head’s up on the CHNM podcast, but haven’t cracked the code yet on how to subscribe to a podcast, but would love to figure it out soon. This podcast sounds like a great way to stay up on new media after we finish Clio 1 and 2. See comment.

I suggested to John that we should provide links to works in progress, so that we can make helpful comments. My design project has been posted for a few days and I’ve already incorporated great ideas from Jenny (see my comments to her here) and Maureen.