You’re right that they’re both concerned more with usability than with playability. I think my point is that low usability will reduce how much fun it is to play with a game. It isn’t about catering to the player’s whims, because it is the burden of the designer to create the player’s expectations and then fulfill them/break them as they wish. A game with low usability, where you assume you can jump because the ‘A’ button on screen says jump, but instead you can’t for some design reason that is nearly unfathomable to you, you can’t play with all the results of jumping in the game. At some low level there is always an interface before the play – that was my point with the baseball game. In order to play with a toy or a game you first need to have a certain set of low-level skills or know how to interact with it in some way.

I haven’t played much of RE5 yet, but the situation you’re talking about is a classic ‘guess-the-designer’s-mind’ kind of scenario. Very poor adventure games had those kinds of scenarios, but some of the best adventure games (ie. Day of the Tentacle) had very non-standard solutions that were frustrating, but hilariously simple once you “got” the world and understood its bizarre sense of humor.

@Vin – welcome! Good points, but I’m not quite sure our examples are lining up. It would be ‘playful’ if the batter decided to sit on his bat and spin around in circles, waving at the crowd, instead of hitting the ball to achieve his instrumental ‘goal’ of nailing it to the bleachers. Sure, I can make ‘licking everything in the game’ an instrumental goal too, but the sillyness of the situation kind of prevents that from being a serious goal. There are no absolute lines drawn in the sand when it comes to ‘instrumental’ vs. ‘play’… it’s the player’s frame of mind that gives the situation it’s spin.

Re: Chris Crawford… interesting that he links up with Norman here. I agree – their philosophy of interaction is very very similar. However, both are still concerned with ‘usability’ and not necessarily ‘playability’. Why should the player expect that they can do whatever they want to do? Rather than cater to the whims of the player, I would *encourage* designers to “mislead” players into thinking they can do certain things. That kind of deception can make a game fun. Day of the Tentacle and Curse of Monkey Island has a lot of scenarios where trying to instruct the protagonist to do certain things results in responses like, “No way! That would just make him angry.” or “Gross. I’m not touching that.” Now, if the game *did not* respond to those actions and treat them as meaningful attempts to engage in the world, then sure, we’ve got a design problem. But encouraging the player to ‘think differently’ about a situation, by misleading them and deceiving them, can be a great opportunity to develop the character’s personality or game world.

When it comes down to it, every game has an “instrumental,” goal-oriented UI, and that’s necessary. In Zelda, that UI tells you that ‘A’ enacts context-sensitive actions, and in baseball, that UI tells you the order of operations and permissable actions at any given time. Experimentation and play still factor in, but they are goals in-and-of themselves. The ‘goal’ to lick random objects in one game is no less playful or experimental than a batter who steps up to the plate pointing to the specific spot in the outfield where he will hit the ball – the game hasn’t exposed to him the exact combination of inputs to produce this effect. It hasn’t even encouraged this action. However, it has provided him with a necessary visible interface (swinging a bat to hit a ball, physics, the visible field, the set of rules) to even give him the idea that it might be fun to try this out.

Norman’s point in The Design of Everyday Things is congruent with one that Chris Crawford makes in The Art of Interactive Design – in a perfect design, the player will be able to do everything that they expect to be able to do. If the game offers some hint, or creates the expectation, that the player can walk here, break this, or respond to a character in a certain way, then its interface will have mislead the player if the game does not actually allow the player to do so. If the player can do so, however, it will only be the UI that gave them the idea in the first place.

Obviously the one I’m using differs from the traditional definition of “User Interface,” which is something more direct like “mouse and keyboard,” but I think the principals are analogous with the ones stated above.

Nels articulated what I was reaching for far better than I could: that obfuscating the interface works best when there’s a consistancy to the logic in how the game world reacts to it. Things only need to be enumerated and detailed if the game world itself is unable to.

An example that Chris may recall is the ol’ Hoe Of Destruction. The game didn’t tell me that I had a garden instrument of doom by giving me a text window with a spreadsheet full of stats. Instead it had a slightly red glow, a unique ‘heartbeat/hum’ sound effect and killed dragons with ease. It was all fairly tongue in cheek, but experimentation with it proved that it WAS a serious weapon.

Another less obscure example is Half Life 2: the physics engine there didn’t require anything terribly complex in terms of UI to manipulate, but it provided opportunties to use the game world itself to do clear game obstacles in interesting ways.

Resident Evil 5 fails spectacularly at this at times. The worst example has been pointed out more than once: A boss fight where it’s assumed that the player would know to run up to a boss monster and trigger a quick time event to “Use” a grenade instead of just throwing the grenade.

It’s the sort of moon logic that powered the worst adventure games: I can’t think of a compelling reason for anyone using a grenade to attempt to get within hugging distance of an aberration of nature when you can just throw the damn thing.

In a way, we should enable the player to engage in the scientific method. They’ll form some hypothesis about the way the world works and they can test that through interactions. But this only works if the world behaves according to consistent behaviours. Of course, the thinking that goes into this kind of play isn’t this explicit, but underneath, I think that is what’s happening. The player tries something, it has an interesting result, and they vary what they did a bit and try it again.

Consistency is the watchword here. If a player wants to be playful in a game, the game’s systems ought to be setup in a way the player can, eventually through experimentation, begin to understand and internalize. If the player gets too much conflicting or incomplete feedback, they won’t be able to make these connections. Expressing their intent in the game becomes difficult. If we want to facilitate player agency, players need to be able to understand that if doing X causes Y and doing Y causes Z, they can do X to achieve Z.

I think both instrumental and playful interactions benefit for having more readable systems. It’s how those systemic relationships are presented that can direct the player toward one sort of interaction or another (or even support both).

And again, it’s fine to obfuscate these things if it will achieve our aesthetic objectives. But it has to be done deliberately, rather than just due to neglect.

It was great to meet you too (and I didn’t realize you were originally Canadian. Awesome!) =)

@Nels – I just had a chance to read your two articles (I’m going to update my post and add links to them) – your thoughts on ‘readability’ and empathy were bang on. There’s something to be said for thinking as a player instead of a designer.

But I think I am fundamentally at at odds with the idea that we need to make games fully transparent in terms of their interactivity, such that players can “make interesting, informed decisions”. An instrumental approach to gameplay is all about making informed decisions: do I use the +2 Shield of Healing, or go for the Cursed +5 Sword of Strength (which is permanent and unbindable)? That’s fine for a certain kind of game/player who want to min/max out their characters, finish the story as quickly/efficiently as possible, and explore all dialogue trees in on sitting. But what I’m arguing toward is opening up spaces for players who specifically *don’t* feel the need to first ‘understand the controls and then play it’. When I sit down to some games, I just want to play. I want to screw around. I want to break things. I want to make things. Having a designer deliberately opening up spaces like that is one thing (ie. Crayon Physics), but I think it’s another to quietly encourage the player to undermine the game’s goals.. to create goals of their own that might even be at odds with the storyline or design framework. In the end, I think there have to be a sufficient number of games that satisfy two kinds of gamers: instrumentalists who ‘want to get the job done’, and playful players who just want to have ‘fun’.

Great meeting you at the confab dinner in SF.

I’m reluctant to self-link, this seems too apropos not to: http://www.above49.ca/2009/04/improving-readability-empathy.html

As mentioned, I think visibility and readability are similar, but distinct in the context of games. Visibility is a measure how well an object communicates what it can do and how to perform said action. Readability is a measure of clarity of relationships, which isn’t oriented towards accomplishing a specific goal.

Democracy 2 makes the outcome of policy decisions complex and unclear, because learning those relationships and how to manage them is the source of the game’s satisfaction. But if this wasn’t the crux of the game, it would be deeply problematic. The latter is what we need to avoid. If done right, the former can produce very enjoyable interactions.

Gaming as a medium has something that literature, traditional art, and cinema does not have – and that’s interactivity. The best game design expresses itself in a manner that keeps the player engaged in the experience.

I find that Japanese (RE, Metal Gear Solid) design goes in the opposite direction; the game’s creators have a narrative that they have in mind, and you are NOT to change it. Gameplay and story are strictly segmented so that the player doesn’t interrupt what the designer planned.

And while that makes for very ‘cinematic’ moments, it also reduces the value of that narrative greatly. By putting that barrier in place, the player is removed from the experience. And the further the player is removed from the experience, the less likely they are to invest themselves in it. Metal Gear Solid 4 was an exhausting experience, and in the hours I spent playing it completion, I felt like I was involved in the game or cared about the characters a grand total of twice.

Planescape did amazing things not simply because it had engaging writing: it was because the players input itself changed the flow of that writing. The game followed the same chain of events to the conclusion, but the player felt like their choices *mattered* in terms of how the story developed.

The overall narrative was not impacted: the ‘big’ scenes were still there, and even though some outcomes could not be changed, the player was still involved in the process.

Braid definitely has the potential to alienate the audience, but it does that in a really ambivalent way. I noticed it when Stacey and I were playing it for the first time: we were enticed by the artistic style and tone, but pushed away by the coldly intellectualistic game mechanics. ‘I love you!’ — ‘Get away from me!’. I found that frustrating, and in the end, deceived by the author. (Which I think is a compliment in the end – how many game authors could I say that I’ve felt deceived by?)

We’ve discussed this topic before, but I think that because games are a mode of expression, they have the potential to be many things besides entertaining. Entertainment is *my* draw from them of course, but it’s always refreshing when a game like Planescape shows us something about the human condition.

To use a favorite of mine, look at Ultima VII: A game that’s bordering on archeological by now. The world presented did not have a complex interface: it was a simple mouse/keyboard arrangement.

The UI was very simple, and it resulted in the simplicity of how the world could be manipulated. You could rob the gem store by simple equipping a weapon and ‘attacking’ the display case. The game didn’t stop you to confirm your action or prompt you to continue; the Avatar simply smashed the case. And the game world would react with consequences of your actions: guards would come, etc. It was simple, fluid, and made sense in the context of the game. Experimentation did produce boundaries, but experimentation was quietly *encouraged*. And the game world felt far more solid for it.

Making the game a trial to learn and play doesn’t necessarily make it any more immersive or rewarding; it just presents a barrier between the user and the experience. I’m willing to play challenging games, I’m willing to learn difficult UI’s; but I find as I get older I have less and less patience for game design that’s unwilling to meet the user half way.

As an example: indie darling Braid drops a brick wall with “Go to hell, casual player” in bright neon at about the halfway point. It’s fairly clear that it’s a screening process: auteur Jonathon Blow doesn’t want the unwashed masses experiencing the game if they’re unwilling to play it ‘his way’.

It’s the gaming equivalent of the hipster at the record store sneering at you for looking at the Top 40 instead of recommending better but lesser known albums. It’s not there to be helpful: it’s there to prove that it’s better than you.

Which leads me to my next point: and it’s not a popular thing to voice in the academic gaming community. But at the very core of gaming is the unalienable fact that games as a medium are still very much rooted in the desire to entertain an audience. And I feel that in our quest to validate the fledging medium as important, independent game design loses sight of that.

@Joshua: Those are excellent design ideas… I’m trying to think of examples where a designer intentionally borked the interface to ‘play with’ the player a bit… an “unreliable UI”.. I love that idea. The only game that comes to mind right now is “A Mind Forever Voyaging”… it very intentionally subverts the usual text adventure UI by taking all of your assumptions about interacting with objects, and turning them upside down (you are a computer that gains sentience and must learn how to speak, how to operate objects, etc).. I suspect that many players were frustrated by the design, but man does it pay off in the end! I’m looking forward to checking out ROM Check Fail … neat idea for an arcade game.

You bring up a *really* important point regarding feedback. I’ve got one example of a game that does a brilliant job of destroying our expectation of ‘immediate feedback/satisfaction’… Ultima IV. In the game, all the healers/herbalists are blind. If you cheap out and only give them a portion of what they are owed for their services … they pretend to not notice. But the game keeps track of your dishonesty behind the scenes, and towards the end of the game if you’ve lived a dishonest life you cannot learn the mantra of the shrine of honesty! (And hence, never become The Avatar, nor complete the game). It’s “eventual” feedback in some sense, but the great thing is that it’s a fundamental part of the game design… it’s not some cheap trick.

@cbz: That’s a great insight with The Path.. when you lose direct control at the end of each level, it’s amazing how the tension mounts. Some players might feel that they’re getting stuck on rails, but I love that it makes the ending feel so inevitable..

I also loved Crayon Physics Deluxe for its direct embrace of playfulness and creativity. But I agree – there’s something missing… it’s an incomplete symphony for some reason. Games like Jeff Tunnell’s “The Incredible Machine” do a phenomenal job of taking that style of play to its conclusion. I bet that you’re right about the designer’s hesitation with giving up control – a lot of people (including myself) still wish to exert very powerful authorial control in the work… Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid series is a great example of it (and it succeeds!).

According to my experience, it’s crucial to most of these games (Rohrer’s, of course, but lately also “The Path”) not to point out those rules and the interface before the beginning – it’s about discovering them to understand them.

“Passage”, to take the most obvious example, wouldn’t be working if you had a tutorial or even a read-me file pointin out the basic mechanisms. You start paying way more attention to them by not having them spoon-fed, you get more time to think about them consciously (and come up with metaphorical links etc.)

So, yes, I think intentional obfuscation can be of great value in some games (if it’s the intention of the designer to establish some sort of communication via those elements).

“The Path” also had a point in half-taking away the control towards the end of a level (or at least that’s how I experienced it when I played it for a short time the other day): You can still initiate a movement, but not control the direction of it anymore – it’s freakin you out in a game where up to that point, you had the impression that if all other measures failed, you could still run away from peril. Instead, you’re walkin on towards what you think of must be a terrible fate. But again, it’s intentionally there, and for good purpose – it’s the controlled talking away of control.

Maybe even more interesting seems to be those designers that try to willingly give up some of that control: I liked “Crayon Physics Deluxe” for that idea: You can clearly see that the levels were designed with a specific solution in mind – but then again, the whole game is designed in a way to encourage you to come up with creative solutions that may differ from the designer’s. It does not completely reach it’s aims, but it certainly is a nice try (way more than a lot of sandbox-games that actually should put a lot more emphasis on this design-element).

I wonder if it’s not also a certain fear of giving up control on the designer’s side that is the issue here – not also an instrumentalist view of games, but maybe also a concept of authorship that is still very much influenced by less interactive forms of art, or if you prefer, entertainment.

I know that some horror games have explored this a little, though I can’t think of any concrete examples. I can only remember ROM Check Fail, and imagine what surprised reactions a player from the 1980s would give the first time the gameplay suddenly switches.

The way I see it is that usability is something the game creator should always follow, except when she consciously decides, for a good reason, to twist or shun it…

—but on the other hand, I can’t think of a single way to break one of the most important rules, giving adequate feedback of what the current mode is and when the current mode changes, without making the game tedious for the player. Even if it’s eventual, like the player figuring out that her UI is unreliable, the game needs to give a way of hinting that it’s unreliable.