First a short awesome clip of Little Big Planet gameplay where someone has constructed a working calculator out of more than 1600 parts in the game. Watch it to the end, so you’ll see the magnitude of the construction. Boggles my mind.

Second clip is an hour long, but worth watching if you do any design work which results in users making choices. The video shows a talk from Barry Schwartz and deals with the Paradox of Choice as he’s putting it – people get paralyzed of all the choice available nowadays, and end up choosing nothing as a result. My head is exploding with the amount of application this has in the design work I do, as well as explains a lot on why life feels a bit hard sometimes.

A simple game design example could be, this explains why choosing which quests to do in which order in WoW is so painful compared to installing an addon that tells you what to do next. Of course, I don’t do the quests in the order the addon tells me to most of the time, but having a reference point to compare my choice to makes it faster to decide what to do, and I get more satisfaction for not having to doubt my selection as much.

(Apologies to those with RSS readers that don’t show video.)