Breath of the Wild: Redefining Game Design
Introduction
At GDC 2017, Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Satoru Takizawa, and Takuhiro Dohta from Nintendo shared
their insights on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild's groundbreaking game mechanics.
One standout feature is the "multiplicative gameplay," which empowers players to interact with
the game world in diverse ways, leading to surprising outcomes.
More Is Different
The reductionist hypothesis may still be a topic for controversy among
philosophers, but among the great majority of active scientists I think it is accepted without
questions.
The workings of our minds and bodies, and of all the animate or inanimate matter of which we
have any detailed knowledge, are assumed to be controlled by the same set of fundamental laws,
which except under certain extreme conditions we feel we know pretty well.
HOWTO: Be more productive
“With all the time you spend watching TV,” he tells me, “you could
have written a novel by now.”
It’s hard to disagree with the sentiment — writing a novel is undoubtedly a better use of time
than watching TV — but what about the hidden assumption?
Such comments imply that time is “fungible” — that time spent watching TV can just as easily
be spent writing a novel. And sadly, that’s just not the case.
Learning with retrieval practice
Are there any specific techniques to make the process of learning more
effective?
Students often re-read, underline, or highlight materials, thinking that it will help them
learn better. But, the best method for really turning information into long-term memory is to
use what is called ‘retrieval practice’.
It simply means trying to retrieve the information from your own brain, instead of looking at
a sheet of paper.
This is Local-first software
You own your data, in spite of the cloud
Cloud apps like Google Docs and Trello are popular because they enable
real-time collaboration with colleagues, and they make it easy for us to access our work from
all of our devices.
However, by centralizing data storage on servers, cloud apps also take away ownership and
agency from users. If a service shuts down, the software stops functioning, and data
created with that software is lost.