If you’re tired all the time, a change in what you eat (diet) or what you do all day (activity pattern) may be all you need to turn things around 180°.

You won’t be able to do everything on this list all the time — you’d tire yourself out trying to get more energy — but do try them all to see which ones work for you and your schedule. Add a few of these tips to your regular routine. Or mix them up to keep things interesting.

1. Change your socks for refreshment.

It’s an amazing trick. Bring a change of socks to work, and change your socks midway through the day (say, after lunch). You’ll be amazed at how much fresher you’ll feel. This trick is especially handy on days with lots of walking — like during a hike or family outing to the amusement park.

2. Rock out loud.

Whether you work alone or in a room with coworkers, a quick one-song rock out loud session is an effective way to beat back exhaustion.

In a cube farm? Get everyone to sing along! The key is to choose a song that everyone can sing along with. (I like Kokomo.) The energy boosting effect comes from bobbing your head and singing out loud. One song, 3 minutes. That’s a quick boost of adrenaline that lasts for a bit. You’ll be singing to yourself the rest of the never ending project delivery night.

3. Get rid of the stuffy nose.

If allergies have your sinuses blocked, you may be feeling more tired and cranky. An over-the-counter allergy medication should clear up your sinuses (and your mind).

4. Work with your body’s clock.

There is a natural ebb and flow of energy throughout the day. We start off sluggish after waking up, even after a solid 8 hours of sleep. Our energy peaks mid-morning, and it’s natural to want a siestain the afternoon. We get a second spike of energy in the early evening, followed by our lowest energy point just before bedtime. Once you understand this natural rhythm of energy throughout the day, you can work on the important tasks during your peak hours and avoid early afternoon snoozefests (meetings).

5. Have a piece of chocolate.

I’ve said before that socialization requires downtime, by which I mean that people who are busy pressing a bunch of other buttons or busy watching a dozen different colored bars have pretty much given all their attention to it, and therefore have difficulty having a conversation (or indeed paying attention to anything else, as other people in that person’s house can attest).

This doesn’t mean that you have to force downtime, necessarily. Users can choose to stop doing whatever it is, and choose instead to just hang out. But they often don’t. So why is that, and can we or should we do anything about it?

The short answer is “yes,” and you can just scroll down to the list at the end if you agree and want concrete actionable things you can do to improve the sociability of your game. But if you want to argue, then the next two big blocks of text are for you.

The arc of human activity

This blog post is “downtime” for many of you. We speak of “forced downtime” but let me reverse it for a second — what’s forced is uptime. Players can choose downtime whenever they want. It’s the default state — lounging around doing nothing. Uptime requires action. And you need to nudge people along the curve to get them to take action, because of simple inertia. A body at rest tends to stay at rest.

The result is that we have carefully designed the games to always be prompting players to do something. We use eyelines to tell players to go someplace, we push quests on them with glaring icons and popups, we put constant reminders up that they could be gaining experience and levelling up all over the place, in the game of giving them greater guidance. All the good work we have done to make the experience more directed and minimize confusion and boredom has the side effect of also making it somewhat less social, precisely because there are so many cues driving you to go do something that will occupy all your attention.

So gam...

The Making Of "Shadow Of The Colossus"

Translated from: http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20051207/3dwa.htm

With the PS3 being announced for spring 2006, you might think the PS2 is at the point where it's reached it's limit. At this time, the world's attention tends to go to the next generation machine, but this is actually the time where all the technology achieved over the lifetime of the current machine bears fruit, and is the age where the masterpiece games appear.

You could probably say that this winter, where SOTC (Shadow Of The Colossus) appeared, represents such a maturing period for PS2.

Shadow Of The Colossus is a good game in itself, but it is the technology which is operational within the machine, PS2-wise, that gives it the true "next-gen impression".

So now, we have brought together the information from the development of Shadow Of The Colossus, because we had heard discussion on the technology we used and wished to present it.

[Fumito Ueda]

[Hajime Sugiyama]

"I'm not sure where I could even start talking about it! Really! (laughing). The work on SOTC accumulated little-by-little, so when it finally came together, it seemed completely natural."

"I tried hard to make the appearance look natural to the eye. I'm not sure if I was able to achieve it, but it is hard to tell because it is not cartoony. Don't you think? (laughing)"

[Takuya Seki]

[Masanobu Tanaka]

"Rather than the programmer saying how about like this, he keeps making the kind of environment which the designer can adjust to whatever their heart's desire."

"You can spend far too much time making detailed adjustments on a case-by-case basis, just to get the exact right motion on each character."

* The HDR rendering and dynamic exposure / tone mapping algorithm

After starting SOTC, the first impressive visuals you get are probably the view of the magnificent scenery seen outside from inside the sanctuary. It floods the external scenery which is seen from the interior to white, and light overflows through t...