Breath of the Wild: Redefining Game Design
Introduction At GDC 2017, Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Satoru Takizawa, and
Takuhiro Dohta from Nintendo shared their insights on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the
Wild's groundbreaking game mechanics. One standout feature is the "multiplicative gameplay,"
which empowers players to interact with the game world in diverse ways, leading to surprising
outcomes.
More Is Different
The reductionist hypothesis may still be a topic for controversy among
philosophers, but among the great majority of active scientists I think it is accepted without
questions. The workings of our minds and bodies, and of all the animate or inanimate matter of
which we have any detailed knowledge, are assumed to be controlled by the same set of
fundamental laws, which except under certain extreme conditions we feel we know pretty well.
HOWTO: Be more productive
“With all the time you spend watching TV,” he tells me, “you could have
written a novel by now.” It’s hard to disagree with the sentiment — writing a novel is
undoubtedly a better use of time than watching TV — but what about the hidden assumption? Such
comments imply that time is “fungible” — that time spent watching TV can just as easily be
spent writing a novel. And sadly, that’s just not the case.
Learning with retrieval practice
Are there any specific techniques to make the process of learning more
effective? Students often re-read, underline, or highlight materials, thinking that it will
help them learn better. But, the best method for really turning information into long-term
memory is to use what is called ‘retrieval practice’. It simply means trying to retrieve the
information from your own brain, instead of looking at a sheet of paper.
This is Local-first software
You own your data, in spite of the cloud Cloud apps like Google
Docs and Trello are popular because they enable real-time collaboration with
colleagues, and they make it easy for us to access our work from all of our devices. However,
by centralizing data storage on servers, cloud apps also take away ownership and agency from
users. If a service shuts down, the software stops functioning, and data created with
that software is lost.