Alpha Centauri, anyone?
on
Game with God
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· Score: 1
That game provided a deep spiritual experience for me, one that has endured over the 5+ years since I last played. A good friend and I were hiking once when the game came up, and he'd had a similar experience. The way Gaia is handled in Alpha Centauri is simply beautiful. I'm not surprised Sid Meier was too modest to bring it up, but I am a little surprised no one, either in the article or here in the forum, has mentioned it.
Alpha Centauri, anyone?
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
That game provided a deep spiritual experience for me, one that has endured over the 5+ years since I last played. A good friend and I were hiking once when the game came up, and he'd had a similar experience. The way Gaia is handled in Alpha Centauri is simply beautiful. I'm not surprised Sid Meier was too modest to bring it up, but I am a little surprised no one, either in the article or here in the forum, has mentioned it.
This seems to me a key point, and raises another set of questions. Talking about "what users need" is like talking about "what students need"...users, like students in a classroom, need all kinds of different things, some of them not just divergent but directly at odds with one another.
Another post in this topic argued convincingly for "consistency" as the highest value in GUI design, but I wonder. It seems to me that software needs to be consistent for each user but flexible across user types. The future of OS GUI might be the ability to individual users to customize, the extension of "themes" to the GUI as a whole.
People have very different learning and thinking styles...the amount of coding required to produce a product for all of them is totally unmanageable, but there has to be some way to give users the opportunity to customize.
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That game provided a deep spiritual experience for me, one that has endured over the 5+ years since I last played. A good friend and I were hiking once when the game came up, and he'd had a similar experience. The way Gaia is handled in Alpha Centauri is simply beautiful. I'm not surprised Sid Meier was too modest to bring it up, but I am a little surprised no one, either in the article or here in the forum, has mentioned it.
That game provided a deep spiritual experience for me, one that has endured over the 5+ years since I last played. A good friend and I were hiking once when the game came up, and he'd had a similar experience. The way Gaia is handled in Alpha Centauri is simply beautiful. I'm not surprised Sid Meier was too modest to bring it up, but I am a little surprised no one, either in the article or here in the forum, has mentioned it.
This seems to me a key point, and raises another set of questions. Talking about "what users need" is like talking about "what students need"...users, like students in a classroom, need all kinds of different things, some of them not just divergent but directly at odds with one another. Another post in this topic argued convincingly for "consistency" as the highest value in GUI design, but I wonder. It seems to me that software needs to be consistent for each user but flexible across user types. The future of OS GUI might be the ability to individual users to customize, the extension of "themes" to the GUI as a whole. People have very different learning and thinking styles...the amount of coding required to produce a product for all of them is totally unmanageable, but there has to be some way to give users the opportunity to customize.