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Alexander Rehm

Alexander Rehm is a web designer, information architect and usability & accessibility auditor. He's currently working as a Director of Live Operations and has extensive experience of developing large-scale architecture and frameworks for online services, catering for millions of users concurrently. In his blog, Alex shares his musings on all things internet, usability, accessibility and gaming.

Good Design Principles

Establishing a set of design principles for a project or brand can help teams create more consistent user experiences. They aid decision-making and make it easier to keep the product aligned. If you plan to establish a set of design principles for your product, we came across useful resources that will help you get started.

Ben Brignell curates an open-source collection of 195 design principles and methods. It features both heuristic design principles and design principles developed by companies specifically for their products. All of them are searchable and tagged, from hardware and infrastructure to language and organizations.

https://principles.design/

Documenting Accessibility

Image of a Guide to Documenting Accessibility

Unfortunately, accessibility is still an afterthought in many projects, even though fixing it later is usually a lot more expensive than doing it right from the beginning. Documentation is an effective means to help teams keep an eye on accessibility in every step of the process. But what do you need to consider?

Stéphanie Walter summarized how designers can document different aspects of accessibility and user interaction requirements. If you don’t have the time to document everything in your design mockups, Stéphanie suggests to focus on the things where there might be the biggest issues and misunderstandings.

Link: https://stephaniewalter.design/blog/a-designers-guide-to-documenting-accessibility-user-interactions/

Bad Microtransactions, controversial Patch and Downtime make Gran Tourismo 7 the players’ least Feavoured Game on Metacritic

Should that have been its real title?

It is quite a shame, really. Gran Tourismo 7 now is the least favoured game based on user reviews on metacritic, standing at a 2.2/10 (as of 20 March 2022).

The vast majority of the game’s user reviews were posted on or after March 17, when developer Polyphony Digital released a controversial patch reducing payouts from the game’s races, thus making it harder to unlock new cars without spending on microtransactions. It is worth nothing that some of Gran Turismo 7’s cars cost as much as eight times what they did on Gran Turismo Sport, if purchased using real money, or 20+h of grinding.

Gran Tourismo 7 was also offline for more than 30 hours between the 17th and 18th, which made it nearly unplayable due to the significant amount of content it requires an internet connection to access.

The Trends that Defined the Games Industry in 2021

2021 is nearly in our rear view mirror. The real world has, quite frustratingly, knocked on the video game industry’s door and said “hello! We’ve come here to stress you out again.”The pandemic, for what it’s worth, has not abated. But the spread of vaccines and loosening of public health restrictions have meant a slow adaptation to new normalcy. We must then instead turn our attention to the massive engines of finance that have rocked and rolled the video game industry for twelve months, the legal cases that have come to inspire everything from worker organization to (potential) platform policy changes, and the work being put in by game developers to make the wider industry a better place to be. Here are the trends that defined 2021 for game developers.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/culture/best-of-2021-the-trends-and-events-that-defined-the-year-for-game-developers

Fixing the “NO DC” issue on NVidia graphics cards – at least for now

The ‘NO DC’ watermark has been an issue for over a year with NVidia drivers – will we finally see the end of it?

Some of you may have noticed that whenever you play a game, or even work within an application within Windows that uses any kind of GPU acceleration that you sometimes see a “NO DC” in the top left corner of your game.

A method that was widely shared on reddit and also NVidia’s own forums was about deleting the “nvdrssel.bin” file from “C:\ProgramData\NVIDIA Corporation\Drs” – and to be honest, deleting any kind of driver dll always sounds lke a bad idea, right?

I friend of mine mentioned a possible solution which I’d like to discuss…

Keep Reading

This is the new Battlefield 2042 Ultimate Edition cover

Doesn’t it look grand?!

You can now pre-order the game on:

An up-to-date Video Games Release Calendar 2020

So I did a thing. I created a Games Release Calendar in GCal and .ics format, since I could not find a decent up-to-date one which listed games from PC, PS, XBO, Switch and Stadia.

Data is sourced from Gamesradar, Gameinformer and other sources. It is updated until early September, and I will add more regularly. Enjoy, please let me know what you think!

Link: https://www.alexanderrehm.com/calendar