Roblog

An old but excellent talk from Martin Jonasson and Petri Purho about a quality within video games that they call “juiciness”. A “juicy” game is one that has little details, little moments of surprise and delight; it’s the difference between an experience that feels flat and dull and one that feels exciting and engaging.

It strikes me that it’s true of game design, but it’s true of almost all things we produce for human consumption that are at all interactive: good copywriting has juiciness, good design does, good websites do. #

Like the rest of the world, I’ve been enjoying playing Wordle in the past month or so. Being the nerd I am, I did a bit of digging into what the optimal strategies might be and in particular what the best first word choice was. I ended up being quoted in this Ringer article:

“By its very nature, Wordle inspires competition and comparison with other players. To finish a puzzle is to wonder how, and how efficiently, others did the same. Conversations about Wordle have a way of leading straight into debates over the ideal first word. Some words, surely, leave better clues than others. And if some words are better for kicking off the hunt, could it be that one might be best of all? Somewhere in the maze of 26 letters, is there a perfect diagnostic fivesome?”

#