Playing with (e)paper and (e)ink

Solitaire was designed to cheer you up when you are bored, but I would much rather stare at the ceiling than play the standard form of solitaire that almost every computer, cell phone and device carries. There are several variants of solitaire that you can play (101 as per one count). How could you make all these variants available in digital form, on any device? You could spend years implementing each and every one of them, or, you could simply provide the same card pack metaphor on a gaming device – where users can pick cards, place them where they want, shuffle the pack, etc. In the latter case, the user can play all the solitaire games on the handheld device, and gain the benefits of a digital experience, such as saving the game and resuming later, not having to bother about card wear, etc. There is a deeper choice that is being made here. Many game developers tend to design games around the device and its capabilities. This is to be expected, since, well, they are developers, who understand the platform better than the target customer's archaic pre-digital experience. However, often players of non-digital games will find it vastly more appealing to transition to familiar experiences on digital platforms rather than learn all new ways of playing a game designed for the platform and device itself. For instance, this is the reason for the success of Artrage, a painting software, which tries to emulate the painting experience as close to real paint and water as possible. Even if there is a convenient feature that can be provided in the program, if it destroys the natural painting metaphor, then it is avoided.

The same issue arises in the domain of ebook readers, ambitious devices that intend to replace paper books. However, books continue to thrive, and ebook readers have not quite replaced books - yet. A good ebook reader, at a bare minimum, requires to provide a paper like look, a paper like feel and an easy content delivery mechanism.

You will be amazed by the Sony portable reader’s paper like look – the first time I saw the device, I saw a page on the device and thought someone had stuck a paper page on the display model to show how it would look when turned on – there is no noticeable backlighting, and there is almost no way to tell that the device is rendering this page digitally.

Exciting advances are being made in the paper like feel – for instance, rollable digital displays will hit European markets later this year.

In terms of connectivity and easy portability of books, wireless downloads of books are definitely preferable over physical media of any sort.

No ebook reader seems to provide the right combination of these three core requirements, yet.

But enough about readers – back to the PSP and its games.