Nick Hide
Nick has been playing videogames for 20 years. He believes games are as valid an art form as music or film. They are interactive sculptures capable of profound emotional impact, so it really annoys him when games come out where you can mug old women.
Thursday 24 January 2008, 12:44pm
Hey Koreans, get my mum to design your stuff
My mum's staying with me this week, enjoying the sights and sounds of London town, and last night conversation turned to a staple of mother-son exchanges: gadgets and why she can't understand them. This was prompted by a superb column in the Guardian by professional misanthrope Charlie Brooker about how he can't understand people who are confused by technology.
Now, my dear old mum's no fool -- she's much better read and more widely travelled than me by far -- but remote controls and tech in general baffle the bejeezus out of her. She doesn't have the conditioned response of my generation to seeing a button we don't know the function of: where we simply press it and see what happens, she's worried that it'll break the damn thing.
It occurs to me that this is the result of the industrial collapse of the western world. While we were blithely pissing our profits up the wall in the 60s, 70s and 80s, the Japanese and Koreans were investing in new technologies and the means to build them incredibly cheaply.
As a result, every phone, every computer, every TV is built in the Far East, where user expectations and mindset are very different to ours. When my mum was growing up, everything was built in Britain with the British way of doing things in mind. If remote controls and instruction manuals were designed and written by middle-aged women from Wiltshire, they'd be ten times easier to use. And ten times the price, of course. The cost of importing cheap technology is that we've had to develop the ability to find out what our gadgets do, instead of it being obvious.
Articles by Nick Hide
OpenOfficeMouse has frankly preposterous 18 buttons, joystick
Crave With 18 buttons, 63 profiles and an analogue joystick, the OpenOfficeMouse by WarMouse is set to be the most customisable peripheral ever. And the most insane, by some distance
EMI Abbey Road Live: Instant gig recording
Crave The major label has announced a new service that will sell recordings of gigs, mixed and mastered at the gig itself, and sold to fans as they make their way to the car park
Sony BDP-S760 Blu-ray player: Super bit-mapping reality enhancer
Crave Sony's new top-of-the-range Blu-ray player, the BDP-S760, is jammed full of exciting new features such as Wi-Fi Internet access and multi-channel headphone mode
Nokia Booklet 3G hits US: Hands-on verdict
Crave Nokia's Booklet 3G netbook has arrived in the US and our chocolate-voiced NYC colleague Dan Ackerman has one in
IT execs: 'UK will never create a tech giant'
Crave Leading British IT executives believe the UK doesn't have the skills, economic environment or governmental help to make a global giant like Google or Microsoft
Nokia exec: 'Apple taught the industry a painful lesson'
Crave Nokia exec Niklas Savander, has given a forthright interview in which he praises Apple's App Store and outlines the lessons learned in creating Nokia's Ovi Store
Google amps up music search
Crave Google has officially announced a new, integrated way of displaying search results for artists, songs and lyrics, through partnerships with MySpace and Lala
Unironic Windows 7 party held in Georgia church hall
Crave Astonishingly, someone has taken Microsoft's invitation to hold a Windows 7 party seriously. Elliot Minor held his OS bash at his church in Albany, Georgia
