Madmind

Slowly but surely I start to like Digg. It is Web 2.0 or better Web 1.0 on speed.

A Digg user sent me a link to a very interesting post on Angr Robot in which he states that the genre of first person shooter is bound to die because for some reasons. The two most important arguments of him are: you get motion sickness and it is too complicated for newbie gamers.

First, the newbie problem.

First person games and newbie gamers

Although I can relate to the problem of complex controlling situations I also know that this is a problem each and every interface has – not only game interfaces. And the success of Apple because of their well designed UI’s are a good example for the lack of good designs in

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What do you get when you mix a big database for movies and geeky movie fans?

You get an interesting list of characters you sometimes never heard of before.

For me, the Internet Movie Database, or IMDB, is one of the most important information ressource when it comes to movies or actors. I am quite sure that nothing else in the big wide net will come close to this vast amount of data. The best thing of course is the fact, that the team is not standing still. Some months ago (or weeks?) they added a new feature to the site: the character pages. This means, if you wanna know in which movies James Bond was a part of, now you can look. Moreover, it seems that those character pages

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Now this is what I call a music video.

Watch it and smile for the rest of the day!

It’s rare to see a music video with such a strong and powerful yet simple and obvious point.

(Note: if you already know the term MacGuffin, you probably won’t learn anything new)

Do you know what a MacGuffin is?

Since Alfred Hitchcock invented this term and used it extensively I think it is the best to let him tell a story to describe the term:

Imagine two men sitting in a train in Scotland. The first one looks up and asks “What is that package over your head?”. The second answers “Well, that is a MacGuffin”. The first one asks “And what is a MacGuffin?” The other one says “Oh, it is an apparatus to catch lions in the mountains of Andirondak.” The first one says “But there are no lions in the Scottish Mountains.” The other one answers “Well, then that’s no MacGuffin. You se, a MacGuffin is nothing at

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Do you know, why a long timeframe or many leaps in time can cause story problems for a movie?

Imagine the following fairy tale: once upon a time there was a poor farmer. Though he had to work a lot he also was bored with life. One day he therefore walked into a dark forest full of ghosts and gremlins going after each living soul in their reach. After a long walk he sat down on a tree. Four days later he was killed by one of them.

As you can see, the leap in time might on the first look be a way of storytelling, but on second thought it only causes big problems. Not only tension-wise but also logically.

A great and recent example for this problem is the movie

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