As great as the spirit of this article is, it only offers problems without solutions.
I’d love to see example of “bad” solutions made “good”.
As a result, I feel like solving this problem is easier said than done. I can’t think of a great way to solve many of the problems presented here. (Admittedly, I’m not a UX designer, so the bar is low for me.)
This reminds me of a lesser known and underrated game on the GameCube, Pac-Man Vs. (designed by Miyamoto). [1]
It worked by having one player use a GameBoy Advance (connected to the GameCube with an adapter) to (privately) operate Pac-Man while the other three players use GameCube controllers to operate ghosts from the TV.
Additionally, to give Pac-Man a better shot at winning, the three ghosts play from a third-person 3D perspective, rather than top-down.
The ghost that caught Pac-Man would get to take over as Pac-Man (which would inevitably result in a tangled mess of cords by the end).
It was a great couch 3v1 game.
The WiiU had similar mini-games in Nintendo Land [2], with one player operating the Wii U gamepad, while the others played from the TV.
Funny how perhaps "localized" this might be? Grew up an only child but now I have 2 kids, and "couch multiplayer" is now perhaps the majority of my game time.
This is where Steam shines;e.g. Speedrunners, Boomerang Fu, and the very deceptively deep Bopl Battle. Co-op too. Not a huge fan of the cooking games, but Bish Bash Bots is a fantastic co-op tower defense game.
I came to mention the same game. I have many fond memories of playing co-op games on the Gamecube with my cousins back in the day (Mario Party, Shrek 2, Lego Star Wars… Pac-Man Fever). But Pac-Man Vs. was possibly my favorite. It had the novelty factor because of the Gameboy link, but it doesn’t feel gimmicky or cheap - it makes a classic game better in such an elegantly simple way.
TIL my favorite Namco game was designed by Miyamato lol. I wonder if the Gameboy link was sort of a pilot program or a seed of the concept of the Wii U. I always wanted to try the Wii U but it never really had a “killer app” and I think the were very few games that took advantage of the gamepad.
It’s a shame that we’ll probably never get a unique console like that again since it was a huge financial failure that almost ruined Nintendo.
Yup - I mentioned it in an earlier comment [1], came out all the way back in 2003.
If you like this kind of "players become hero" mechanic - highly recommend checking out Crawl [2] - a local multiplayer dungeon crawler where the other players possess the monsters, and if you manage to kill the hero, you become the new hero.
That era is not over. My kids and their friends and us parents play a lot of couch Nintendo games on the Switch. Mario Kart, Mario Party, Overcooked, Lego Party, Super Smash Bros. There's a multiplayer mode in Super Mario World 3D and Super Mario: Wonder.
It's only two player but my older son and I are working on Lego Voyagers. I'd like to play It Takes Two and Split Fiction with my spouse.
I do like the idea of the asymmetric multiplayer games but I am not aware of any that work with the Switch. They might be out there though.
It's a past that's readily accessible in the present and has carved out a niche in the gaming scene. Is that really "past"?
I fully intend to delay my kids' introduction to online play in favor of in person multiplayer as long as possible. I have had up to four 6-8 year olds playing Minecraft together on the LAN on my kitchen table already.
It's part and parcel of my whole "good screen time vs bad screen time" beliefs.
Oh, my kids are older now (18 and 21), but when they were younger, we definitely did plenty of LAN-party games like Minecraft, StarCraft (1 and 2), Terraria, Torchlight, and (when they were older) TFC (which we had some hilarious times playing with/against some terrible bots).
My gripe isn’t so much about what we can do, but just the fact that nobody cares as much about it these days (it’s not mainstream and most devs don’t think about it).
So while I agree the era may not be over, it’s mostly forgotten in favor of remote play without needing to be colocated.
I flagged it because it looked like a low-effort vibe-coded cash-grab app that doesn’t do anything novel that Pages doesn’t, and the submitter has zero other history (reinforcing it’s a cash-grab).
The OP not responding to any of the claims also reinforces this.
This is true, to an extent, but one missing variable is peers, and the — sometimes outsized — influence they have relative to parents.
Some parents limit screen time and delay giving their children phones, but if their peers all have phones and spend much of their time on screens, the parents’ influence may lose out.
In your example, if the friends that came over pulled out their phones and spent most of their time on the phones, the others would eventually follow suit.
And, of course, the reverse is often true — if friends are sitting around talking/interacting, it can sometimes get the others off their screens.
But I’ve also seen many cases, unfortunately, where this wasn’t the case — even though many are interacting, they’ll still keep their face in their screen.
Peer groups sort themselves to an extent. It's never everyone that does X or is into Y.
I recall being immediately out when one of the boys asked which football team I support, to which I replied "none". So I got sorted to the much smaller group of kids who are not into that and we had our own common interests to bond over.
Looking at my daughter's social circle it starts as early as in preschool.
> A “friend request” mechanism is one way of achieving this.
But then you’re left dealing with spam “friend requests”, which is still something I have to take action on, filter out, or ignore — same as spam email.
Having a trustworthy inbox that contains only legitimate email and a separate friend request queue where you can decide “do I know this person / organisation?” is far better than having a single inbox that’s a vast ocean of emails of unknown provenance you have to make a trust decision for for every single email.
You can do this with email today. Heck, you could do it in 2001, I remember. Hotmail's "exclusive" spam filter policy where anything not from your contacts goes to spam, where you can decide if you want to add them as a contact or not.
That doesn’t work because it relies upon the receiver adding all the possible variations of the sending email address to their address book ahead of time.
> Yet all car safety regulation on the 59% that are
I don’t think you meant literally “all”, but one that comes to mind that definitely is intended for pedestrian safety is around requiring that EVs make audible noises when they’re moving at slow speeds (the fake humming as they move forward, and the beeping as they reverse).
This is one of the things I really like about driving a minivan. Excellent visibility compared to just about any other vehicle, including sedans. A combination of higher sitting position with larger windows and sloping hood really opens up sight lines. My son has a Mazda 2 and I hate driving that thing. Feels like the columns and ride height really kills visibility.
100%. I have a Mazda cx-5. Visibility sucks looking left & right because the A frame is so thick.
My thought: demand a certain level of visibility from car manufacturers, and they can figure out how to design around it. Like, I must be able to look left and see the pedestrian 3 feet away from walking into my car. Blind spots like that in the front are ridiculous
How often do you come across kids sitting on the ground in a parking lot? If they want to make a point about visibility at least have them standing up.
Yup, and I still don't know how she was able to do that, knowing that he was there. If you know that you can't see well out of your vehicle, make sure the kids aren't anywhere near it when you're driving. Hell, when my kids were young, they weren't even allowed to be outside on the same side of the house that I was mowing.
Not sure if you have kids but it's pretty terrifying to navigate through parking lots with toddlers. It's the most stressful part of my day, honestly. And yet what choice do I have in the US but to put up with it? Safer city planning is pretty much banned except for the most expensive places in the US.
However I think your EV examples shows an important attitude about what types of vehicles can be regulated. EVs are fair game for regulation, oversize trucks and SUVs are not. That's an attitude not based on safety, but on societal priorities.
This two-class system extends even beyond safety regulations, into emissions regulations too. Trucks and oversize SUVs get a free-ride out of everybody else in society.
Where did the 20% number come from? I’d argue it’s way more than that (or variable, i.e. dependent on who’s using it/how it’s being used/what it’s being used on).
Having said that, the number, to me, doesn’t even matter. You could replace that with 200%, and it’d be just as true.
"The air leaks escalated on Friday from a pound of air per day to two pounds, according to a senior NASA official who asked not to be named.
Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev were using a saw to break into an area where they believed they could access the crack leaking air, the NASA official said.
NASA officials disagreed with this method, the NASA official added, prompting mission control in Houston to order safe-haven procedures."
Why would I steal a link from someone who submitted a story first and take credit? I know it's normal behavior in tech to stab everyone in the back but...
> We envision 2.1 as our last major update of Factorio, and we will shift the focus onto long term support. So things like bug fixes, platform support/compatibility, modding features, etc. Other than that we feel we've reached a good place to conclude the active gameplay development.
Also embedded in mention of the departure of a few team members.
I feel like this is truly the end of Factorio.
What a game, and what an effort. It is what, I consider, the game that kicked off the “automation” genre of video games.
And in my mind, is to this day still one of — if not the — best automation games.
I’d love to see example of “bad” solutions made “good”.
As a result, I feel like solving this problem is easier said than done. I can’t think of a great way to solve many of the problems presented here. (Admittedly, I’m not a UX designer, so the bar is low for me.)
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