Matthew Gallant posted an interesting commentary that confronts video game interfaces with Donald Norman’s ubiquitous book on design, The Design of Everyday Things. There is some sense in the three design principles that Norman distils from his analyses of well-designed everyday objects, and Matthew has done a wonderful job of translating them for game designers.
In this article I try to plead a case against ”good” interface design. Rather, I would like to see interfaces that frustrate the gamer and encourage them to explore the game’s world creatively, rather than instrumentally.
Here are some of the interface design goals that Matthew suggests:
- Visibility: It Should Be Obvious What a Control Is Used For.
If I press this button, what will happen? If I want to unlock the door, which control should I use? A system with good visibility allows the user to easily translate goals into actions. - Affordance: It Should Be Obvious How a Control Is Used.
The system should provide “strong clues to the operation of things”. A button affords pushing, a lever affords pulling, etc. The user should know how to operate a control just by looking at it. - Feedback: It Should Be Obvious When a Control Has Been Used.
Once the user has pressed a button, the system should react in a manner that clearly communicates what has just been accomplished. If nothing has happened, this fact should also be obvious.
Each of these design principles is sensible precisely because they are grounded in the way of life we already live: we have goals (or are given goals by the designer), we encounter objects in the world, we use those objects to achieve those goals, we receive feedback when we engage in them. Almost all games that we’ve played are based on this very rational structure.
Instrumental reason in video games
But to get a little philosophical here, all of these principles are based on an instrumental relation to video games. It’s an instrumental view insofar as the world is seen as a collection of things, and the gamer is an organism with clearly specified goals. In order to achieve those goals, s/he must use those things in the correct way. The fact that we call our HIDs “controllers” now instead of a “joysticks” is very indicative of the culture we live in: we tend to believe that games are there to satisfy goals.
But are games tools or instruments? This is the problem I have with Donald Norman’s usability studies: they are all based on an instrumentalist view of the world. If you aren’t playing by the rules that the designer has created, you aren’t doing it right. So the designer is encouraged to make the game’s goals and controls as transparent as possible, so gamers can satisfy quests/goals/rules as efficiently as possible.
But what about play? When we play games, are we trying to satisfy our instrumental goals? Perhaps vaguely. A friend and I used to play Midtown Madness together, and try to cause horrible traffic jams at one side of town, so we could race our car down the highway and hit the jam at the highest possible speed. Sometimes the car would catch an edge of a bumper and launch over the other cars in the jam – kudos would be awarded for the most spectacular collision. We were not playing the game according to the rules – we were trying to break the rules and create new possibilities within the constraints of the game.
Making a case for ‘broken’ interfaces
If you’re designing a new hammer or building a sports car, you want the ‘interface’ (the usability) to be predictable, reliable, and intuitive. You don’t want the hammer dancing around the nail, nor do you want your new sports car choosing a random direction every time you turn left.
But when we make video games, we should not be engineering for usability. A game is not a utility. It is an imaginative space and a play space. Creating “user-friendly” video games is another way of saying, “We are making a faster, better, hammer, that practically anyone can use!” What we need instead, I think, is a game that frustrates us. A game where learning the rules of play – whatever they are – is an exploration in itself. We don’t need to learn the rules first, then learn how to play. We play a game, and learn the bounds of the space as we do it.
Iroquois Pliskin (understandably) argues that Resident Evil 5 suffers from ”bad interface design” that prevents the player from moving forwards in the game. In my view, this has the potential to be a wonderful opportunity for play. Unfortunately, RE5 is just as instrumentally-minded as most gamers are, and only one “solution” to the “puzzle” is the “right” one. Creativity and play do not imagine specific ends such as these. So instead of making RE5′s interface more intuitive, easy-to-play, or straightforward, I’d like to see the game enable creative solutions to its very difficult challenges.
Sure, instrumental reason satisfies our desire for achievement and consumption… but it fundamentally denies other desires we have, such as the desire to play, think creatively, and undermine the rules. I’d like to see some badly designed interfaces that leave lots of cracks in the pavement – spaces for the imagination. A game is not a hammer.
Thank you to (fellow Canuck!) Matthew Gallant and Iroquois Pliskin for their thoughts on game interfaces.
Note: Nels Anderson, who lives dangerously near the 49th parallel, has some interesting thoughts on design/UI issues that are directly pertinent to this discussion here and here… his thoughts fall closer to Matthew Gallant’s reading of Donald Norman’s book than mine do, but they offer an articulate interpretation of game mechanics and interactivity.
History: For you collector, preservationist, historical types.
Indie Games: Reflections on indie games and their developers
Industry and Journalism: Commentary on the industry and its journalism.
Interviews: Conversations with interesting people, or interviews with Chris.
News: Current hubbub, moral panics and announcements for this site.
Philosophy and Psychology: Understanding how gaming intersects with human dwelling
Retro Gaming: Classic adventure, role-playing and action games of yore.
Storytelling, Narrative, and Writing: How and why stories and writing are important.
Visual Art: The roles that visual experiences and aesthetics play in games.
Worth Reading: Books, articles and blogs that are worth your time and money.
From Matthew Gallant:
Thanks Chris, I’m glad you enjoyed my post. As for your point about UI design and play, I completely agree. Games are only software up to a certain point, at which principles from programming become somewhat irrelevant.
I think there’s something to be said for intention in UI obfuscation. A game designer can intentionally reduce the visibility and affordance in a game in order to introduce challenge and allow the player to choose less-than-optimal paths. However, when a game element is intended to be obvious but is not, then that’s unintentional obfuscation. Applying UI principles in that case can improve the player’s experience.
From chris:
That’s a *really* good point Matthew – if you’re going to make a game that is about clear, intentional, goals – it better have its UI designed with equal parts intentionality. Very, very true.
Thanks for dropping by – glad to have found your blog!
From iroquois pliskin:
This is an interesting take on these ideas. I had some points:
1) in his talk at the GDC Randy Smith made the exact point that Matt brought up: sometimes you want to obscure elements of the game in order to pose a challenge. (like, normally you would want to convey that a switch affords pulling, but sometimes you want to hide a switch by disguising it as a torch.)
2) It’s worth noting that this same talk was specifically about puzzle design: its basic conceit was using UI design principles to think about puzzles. (though like matt notes many of these same lessons apply to other areas of game design.) Moreso than in other areas of game design you’re designing the puzzles with a view to leading the player towards a particular set of actions– a solution. This kind of goals going to work against creating the kind of emergent play you’re talking about with midtown madness etc.
This last point brings out a really interesting issue raised by your post: should games be about goal-oriented behavior or spontaneous emergent play? Like you I think there’s something odd, even misguided, about turning leisure into goal-oriented striving (say, work). On the other hand I think I have this native love for figuring things out– solving puzzles and the like– my favorite games (say, Portal and Shadow of the Colossus) are often these ones that present ingenious problems to the player.
From Joshua Choi:
In addition to the idea of eschewing good usability, I think there is big potential for using a game’s interface to manipulate the player or further its experience, story, or whatever. It’s an area ripe for subversion. What if the player realized that someone in the story was controlling his heads-up display? What if, at some point in a game, the interface for speaking with people suddenly changed in a new, challenging way? What if a game had an unreliable UI for an unreliable narrator-protagonist?
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.
From cbz:
Guess it’s a bit obvious, but I still would like to point out here the links to the big debate about “dynamical meaning”, “procedural rhetoric” etc., to which a fundamental point is the communication via rules.
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.
From chris:
@Iroquois: You’re hitting on the exact concern I have – when gaming becomes a form of cleverly-hidden ‘work’ it leaves little room for ‘play’. That argument walks such a fine thread, since one person’s work might be another person’s form of play. I too love ‘working out’ solutions to puzzles – that was half of the fun of old school adventure games. Yet, there was always a play element in them that made me laugh – typing in perverse or silly things into the text parser, or making Roger Wilco ‘lick’ nasty objects in Space Quest 4. Most of the time the ‘lick’ action made no difference to solving puzzles, yet it was a central element of the game for me. It did not detract/distract from the puzzles either, which is interesting.
@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!).
From Andrew:
I think that the interactivity in games doesn’t lie solely with the UI; and is instead something that it’s balanced between UI and environment design. RE5′s rigid interface is due to the restrictions on how interactive the environment is; the UI can only do so much because the world is there only to be a stage, not to be a WORLD.
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.
From chris:
@Andrew – Welcome man! Interesting point re: RE5 … the Resident Evil series definitely has that ‘stage’ feel to it in general. I definitely agree with your assessment of U7 – I was shocked when I realized that potentially anything I desired to do had a way of expressing it in the interface. Baking bread, or blacksmithing… they worked exactly like I’d expect them to work in real life (except for being much simplified). The boundaries were all “real world” boundaries, and not nonsensical boundaries-of-convenience to make it easier on the programmer’s fingers. “Solid” is a great way of putting it – the world is almost tangible at times.. and I think in no small part to the in-game narratives that coheres it all together.
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.
From Andrew:
Admittedly, when I approach games I primarly am looking for entertaintment and immersion, so that does color my opinions. This gets away a bit from the topic of UI design, so I apologize in advance!
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.
From Nels Anderson:
I think Matthew’s response is exactly right. There’s nothing wrong with violating some best practices as long as it’s deliberate and its full consequences are understood. The problem comes when a game’s interactions are unclear due to oversight and lack of evaluation, rather than deliberate obfuscation for aesthetic effect.
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.
From chris:
@Andrew – On the point of ‘interactivity’… I’ve put forward the idea elsewhere that interactivity is not something specific to games – we find it in all mediums. It’s just that games feature a specific kind of interactivity, one that allows us to ‘re-write’ the text/direct the movie in some fashion. Interesting re: japanese creators – they definitely do have a heavy artistic hand in their narratives. I haven’t played enough of the MGS series to comment, but I wonder if MGS fans would agree that cutscenes/disinteraction necessarily detracts from the game?
As for Planescape – if you compare it to the hundreds of other RPGs that used the same style of interactive UI or gameplay style, it certainly isn’t a shining star. In fact, in many ways it is a step-back to the 1980′s in terms of its lack of world interactivity. I think what made my choices matter to me, in the game, was that I had a connection to The Nameless One, as well as his party of followers – I rabidly investigated their backstories and tried to establish some sense to them. In fact, I would say that 95% of the game is spent trying to understand the background stories of the characters.
@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.
From Nels Anderson:
Thanks for the linkage. To be clear, I’m not positing that all interactions needs to be stripped bare and made completely obvious. That’s certainly one way to make systems readable, but not the only way and not the best way to facilitate the kind of interactions you’re describing. When I say informed, I simply mean the player has some notion of why things are happening.
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!) =)
From chris:
Thanks for the clarifications Nels – it looks like we’re not too far away from each other. In more ways than one – I’m an Edmontonian!
From Andrew:
Chris, I agree with you in terms of the idea of a fully transparent UI in the terms of Sword+1, Talking to People Skill +4: that sort of design is a giant sign flashing “You are playing a game”.
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.
From Vin St. John:
This response is taking all comments so far into consideration, but I feel the need to phrase it in response to the original post:
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.
From chris:
@Andrew – Great example with the Hoe of Destruction (Ultima VII: The Black Gate if some of you haven’t played it). It did have a lot of subtlety as a weapon, and it rewarded the player for exploring their possibilities. Of course, labelling a weapon “The Hoe of Destruction” (even if that was tongue in cheek) is a bit of a giveaway
HL2 is of course the classic example of world manipulability – and it gave a lot of freedom for players like me who just wanted to mess around. A quick google search for “Garry’s mod” yields a huge number of folks who’ve extended the HL2 world to suit their own creativity.
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.
From Vin St. John:
I think we agree, and I’m just not explaining my thoughts well enough. If the player takes Action A, which results in the game saying something like “No way!” and breaking player’s expectations, then the game DOES allow the player to take that action – it had a specific consequence, even if it was trivial and did not bring the player further towards their more long-term goals of “winning.”
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.
From chris:
Vin – Thanks for the clarifications – indeed our thoughts seem to be in the same territory. That’s very true re: consequences ARE responses to an action. I completely agree that a designer has to ‘build up’ or ‘suggest’ expectations to a player before the rules can be broken – that’s something I should have thought of earlier.