I'm Stéphane Bura, a design consultant interested in the fundamentals of computer interaction and how technology can augment both the individual and communities.
Videogames are the best medium for pushing the limits of interaction and many lessons can be learned from its many wonderful experiments.
Old pages and links
A Game Grammar - my take on Raph Koster's Game Diagramming.
Explicit Intent: Shared Story Ownership between Player and Game - a paper I presented at AISB'06 (Adaptation in Artificial and Biological Systems - Symposium on Narrative, AI and Games).
Information Economy in RPGs - a piece of gamemastering advice (English abstract, French text) that I wrote for Conspirations, the French adaptation of Atlas Games' Over The Edge. It deals with the economy of information in the game and how "Knowledge is power" doesn't necessarily means that "Secrets are power". Incidentally, I believe that this model would be great for a new kind of adventure games, less puzzle-oriented and more focused on character interactions.
Ontologie de la fiction interactive dans les jeux vidéo (Ontology of Interactive Fiction in Videogames) - a French article. It's a chapter I've written for Nicolas Szilas and Jean-Hugues Réty's book Création de récits pour les fictions interactives (Story Creation for Interactive Fiction).
MINIMEME: Of Life and Death in the Noosphere - an old paper I wrote for From Animals to Animats 3, the third international conference on simulation of adaptive behavior. It's an attempt to obtain some objective knowledge about emergent behaviors in a complex system. In my defense, it was published a few years before memes became a meme.
Augmented Communities
How can technology help us build better communities?
Augmenting Communities: A Revolutionary Idea
Rules of Trust in Humane App Design
A Purpose-Driven User Experience
Computers format our way of thinking about tasks. This is upside-down. They should help us express our goals and achieve them.
The Future of Context
Context as we understand it today is software-controlled and opaque. In order to achieve a purpose-driven user experience, contexts have to become human-readable, user-controllable, and shareable objects.
On-Demand Serendipity
Time and focus are the most precious resources of our digital lives, yet we’re systematically trained to squander them. Smart customizable filters can put us back in control.
True Interactivity Requires Artificial Intelligence
Computers are not truly interactive and it’s by design. They were never meant to be. True interactivity requires that actors understand one another.