Artifact - Volume 1, Issue 4, 2007

From sales figures and interviews, we know that many people outside the typical video game audience play small downloadable video games like Zuma, DinerDash, or Bejeweled. Such small video games are known as casual games, and have unsuspectedly become a major industry during the last few years. However, video game studies have so far mostly focused on foundational issues (“what is a game”) and on AAA games, big games purchased in stores. In this article, I try to remedy the situation by examining the historical development of the casual game sub-genre of matching tile games, to see how their game design has evolved over time, and to discuss the opposing perspectives that players and developers have on video game history.

Since the emergence of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, the internet has become one of the most important tools for information, entertainment, trade, and social contacts. From a primitive, text-based medium, the web has become a highly advanced and complex mass-multi-medium representing multiple forms of design. Despite the web’s importance as a design medium, the development of website design has only been sporadically described. As yet, we have no historical, chronological descriptions of web design history similar to what we find, for example, in the study of art or “analogue” design history. The article demonstrates how website development can be analysed from a genealogical point of view. It does so by pointing out a number of genre and style formations and discussing their ideological and cultural sources. It is argued that the main engine for web development is the demand for renewal and differentiation from producers and users, which leads to various technical, functional, and symbolic distinction strategies for website design.

As digital design technologies become ever more widespread, CAD-CAM, virtual and rapid prototyping techniques are increasingly being exploited by creative practitioners working in areas outside the industrial design and engineering contexts in which these technologies are currently predominantly employed. This review paper aims to critically examine work by artists, craft practitioners, and designer-makers who creatively engage with these new and rapidly emerging technologies and, by doing so, extend their own practice and push at the boundaries of art and design disciplines. Historic precedents for new 3D technologies in the fine and applied arts are identified, and writing by Heidegger, Baudrillard, and Virilio informs the critical review of work by art and design practitioners in sculpture, metalwork, jewellery, and ceramics. The discussion reflects on relationships between art and technology and physical and virtual making, and concludes by pointing to the possibility of new “hybrid” forms of practice which bridge the gap between physical and virtual design worlds. The paper closes by suggesting that the notion of “truth to materials” in the arts and crafts might now be extended to one of “truth to virtual materials”, as practitioners creatively negotiate relationships between digital cause and physical effect.

John Maeda (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2006) Review by Per Mollerup, Designlab