Fani Kiran Vulapalli

I’ve recently worked on a game that was hard, way to hard. The game was so excited to show all its bells and whistles early, to grab attention, that it forget the basics of making sure that players knew how to play. I often see games where the developers have realised how important it is to explain to players how to play, so they interrupt the game flow every few seconds with some text, or a popup, or some other element to “teach you how to play”. Don’t teach me. Let me experience. Let me learn. When I learn a new thing, let me do it again, so I can clap my hands with glee and go “I learned it”. Let me feel a sense of mastery. According to Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun, learning and mastery are the heart of fun. Learning = fun. Fun = learning. So let me learn. Let me have fun. Show me how to play, how to do better and how to win. Nicole Lazzaro

Wish you were better/smarter/stronger/faster? Sure, hard work helps, but the truth is, your self perception may be getting in the way. We all form our own realities, and those realities aren't perfect. Your self perception can be very limiting, and shaking up your notion of the world can do wonders for your productivity, creativity, and happiness. Here's how to recalibrate your reality. Blast from the past is a weekly feature at Lifehacker in which we revive old, but still relevant, posts for your reading and hacking pleasure. This week, we thought it was time to do some mental house cleaning. Remember the last time you lost confidence after your boss was disappointed in your work—or maybe you were stood up by a friend? You second-guessed yourself after that, and ultimately your work or personal life suffered. The idea behind recalibrating your reality is pretty simple. When you get locked into a view of the world you get stuck in routines and you lose sight of different v...

In Oxford in the 1950s, there was a fantastic doctor, who was very unusual, named Alice Stewart. And Alice was unusual partly because, of course, she was a woman, which was pretty rare in the 1950s. And she was brilliant, she was one of the, at the time, the youngest Fellow to be elected to the Royal College of Physicians. She was unusual too because she continued to work after she got married, after she had kids, and even after she got divorced and was a single parent, she continued her medical work. And she was unusual because she was really interested in a new science, the emerging field of epidemiology, the study of patterns in disease. But like every scientist, she appreciated that to make her mark, what she needed to do was find a hard problem and solve it. The hard problem that Alice chose was the rising incidence of childhood cancers. Most disease is correlated with poverty, but in the case of childhood cancers, the children who were dying seemed mostly to come from affluent...

What we want in life depends on what situation we are in. Someone living in a war zone without a roof above their head will probably feel no need for a yoga class, beautiful clothes or classical concert. According to psychologist Abraham Harold Maslow all behavior is motivated by a need, and those needs have a strict order and hierarchy, resulting in the pyramid of needs: Maslow's hierarchy of needs, with the more basic needs at the bottom. It all starts with the need for physiological needs like food, shelter and sleep, followed by safety, love and warmth. Once you have those basic needs covered and reach the top of the pyramid you start worrying about self-esteem and self-actualization. For User Experience Design we can also create a hierarchy of needs. A user goes through the different states of motivation before caring for the next need. There have been several articles about a UX hierarchy of needs, like this one or this one, but I believe they got the hierarchy wro...

I have a pretty unreliable memory. Far too often I find people saying to me, "I told you this already!" or "we had this exact conversation!" I also tend to rely on other people to remember things for me a lot. I bet you don't know how often you do the same thing. Actually, group transactional memory, the process of storing information in other people's heads, is more common than I had realized. Storing memories Group transactional memory means storing memories in other people's brains, but the process is more complicated than it sounds (and decidedly less creepy). As we take in new information, we assign certain parts to other people, often based on their expertise or interest. Then, we tend to check in with them about their memories—both to make sure they're storing the information, and to help us remember who knows what. Here's an example of how it might work: Let's say you're going on holiday with a friend. They're good at ...

Last month, researchers created an electronic link between the brains of two rats separated by thousands of miles. This was just another reminder that technology will one day make us telepaths. But how far will this transformation go? And how long will it take before humans evolve into a fully-fledged hive mind? We spoke to the experts to find out. I spoke to three different experts, all of whom have given this subject considerable thought: Kevin Warwick, a British scientist and professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading; Ramez Naam, an American futurist and author of NEXUS (a scifi novel addressing this topic); and Anders Sandberg, a Swedish neuroscientist from the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. They all told me that the possibility of a telepathic noosphere is very real — and it's closer to reality than we might think. And not surprisingly, this would change the very fabric of the human condition. Connecting brains My first quest...