Friday picks: gaming, scrolling, Darth Vader, bike paths and AI art

It’s Friday and the end of another week with slightly too much news. Here are a few things I found insightful, interesting or inspiring that you might enjoy too.

Narrative design in video games

The content designers at SPARCK are constantly sharing interesting bits and pieces with each other via Slack; this one came via my colleague Stacey Budd.

It’s an essay by Steve Howe from earlier this year which explains that in the world of video games content design is also a thing:

“In video game development, the equivalent of content design is narrative design. A narrative designer thinks about how the player will comprehend the story through music, artefacts, character design, animations, and — of course — text and dialogue. They might even communicate the story through routine components of the game, like the pause menu… Or they might tell the story through the landscape and structures that appear in a game — what’s known as ‘environmental storytelling’…”

He goes on to look in detail at three examples, digging into how they guide players (users) through the journey the game wants them to take. We’ve come a long way since Zork and Zaxxon, haven’t we?

Are long pages necessarily bad?

This one is via my colleague Andy Turner and is from November last year. It came up in the context of a debate about expanders and accordions – those little widgets that help you cram tons of extra content onto a page by hiding it and making it optional.

Caroline Jarrett and Amy Hupe argue that long pages of content, with all the content exposed, aren’t necessarily a bad thing :

If people are confident that the content is going to be useful or interesting, then they are willing to engage with it and to scroll… Hiding content can give the impression of a less daunting page, but the penalty is that we’ve added extra interaction… Some users will not know how to use the content-hiding interaction, or won’t notice it, and will end up missing the hidden content altogether… Other users have limited ability to concentrate, perhaps because of an attention disorder, because they’re in a distracting environment, or because they’re stressed or in a hurry. Adding the extra step of deciding to deal with the content-hiding interaction gives them more to do, and threatens their concentration.

My project team recently used expanders/accordions on a prototype to hide potentially triggering content unless the user actively chose to engage with it. I think that’s a potentially valid use. But, yes, broadly speaking, if you’re hiding it, that might be a sign that it doesn’t need to be there at all.

Darth Vader is now voiced by AI

When I was five I watched Star Wars every Saturday morning for a year. I still have a soft spot for those original three films and even went out of my way to acquire bootlegs of them without any of the post-1997 tinkering. But I’m not especially engaged with any of the more recent additions to the saga – especially those long, boring TV shows.

This story did catch my eye, though: James Earl Jones, the 91-year-old actor who provided the voice of Darth Vader, has given permission for his voice to be recreated using AI :

What Respeecher could do better than anyone was re-create the unforgettably menacing way that Jones, now 91, sounded half a lifetime ago. Wood estimates that he’s recorded the actor at least a dozen times over the decades, the last time being a brief line of dialogue in 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker. “He had mentioned he was looking into winding down this particular character,” says Wood. “So how do we move forward?” When he ultimately presented Jones with Respeecher’s work, the actor signed off on using his archival voice recordings to keep Vader alive and vital even by artificial means—appropriate, perhaps, for a character who is half mechanical. Jones is credited for guiding the performance on Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Wood describes his contribution as “a benevolent godfather.”

If you watched Obi-Wan Kenobi on Disney+ it was the AI you heard voicing the character, not Mr Jones.

Some people felt cheated by this, having been led to believe he’d voiced the character himself.

The fact that nobody realised this until the news broke suggests that maybe the perceived lack of ‘soul’ isn’t in the performance, but in how we perceive it.

I wonder how many AI voice performances we’re already hearing every day without having any suspicion that’s what’s going on?

Something chunky to read

The city of Oslo has translated its street design manual into English (PDF). It’s a fascinating, detailed glimpse into how this work is done in practice, from the placement of benches to dealing with piles of snow. (Via @AndersHartmann .)

Something to play with

Dall-E, one of the new breed of image generating AI applications, is now open to everyone without a waiting list . You get 50 credits to start with and then 15 more each month – or you can pay to top up. Here’s its attempt at ‘Humphrey Bogart portrait by Peter Blake Lucian Freud’…