Do Games Know The Secret Of UI?

A reader writes "There is a nice interview at the BBC talking about how computer games are the ones pushing the envelope. Particularly interesting is it doesn't just deal with the tech aspects, but goes into the user interface aspect as well." Having conversed with her on a number of occasions, I can attest to JC being smart. Good interview.

Comments

From Experience...

[keesh]

Gamers want fancy interfaces. I know someone who's a huge fan of Civ, Alpha Centauri et al., but when I introduced him to FreeCiv his first comment was "the interface sucks". This isn't someone who's computer illiterate, either.

It seems that people want something different when playing a game. They don't want just their standard operating system look, they want fullscreen fancy eyecandy, even when that's not the nicest option.

You can even see this in game editors -- AFAIK, WorldCraft is the only editor even close to the standard OS style...

Whether it's because the whole screen should look SciFi / Fantasy / Whatever, or simply because users want something different, game interfaces have to be different from usual programs.

games aren't the only thing that uses 100% CPU.

[garcia]

remember there are other applications (other than just the military and games as she mentioned) that use most of the CPU (RC5, Netscape ;))

this really has little to do w/UI. It has to do w/what she feels is important in the industry at this time (cell phones that are connected).

It's true that games love faster CPUs but it is also true that it is probably possible to make much faster/better games in the standard constraints that we already have but people don't care to do that anymore (remember 64k games that looked cool as hell or even 4mb games?)

Sending your picture in front of the Eiffel tower to your kids on your cell phone is less important than decreasing the bloat!

Re:games aren't the only thing that uses 100% CPU.

[Midnight Thunder]

Another point that should be mentioned is that with faster processors new types of applications become accessible to consumers. Imagine trying to edit your home video on your computer, or trying to do other creative work, on a computer four years ago and it would not have been possible.

The way I see it, is that while games push the envelope, faster processors make new kinds of applications available and the interest in those applications also help people want faster computers.

We all use word-processors and spread-sheets but there also a lot of people who also want to be creative with their computers.

Nothing pushes a computer like games.

[sheetsda]

The only thing that will push a computer to its limits is a game. No one admits it but no one needs a new computer to do a spreadsheet programme or Word document.

*sigh* This is what I tried to tell my uncle last weekend when he shelled out way too much money for a 1.4 GHz P4 with a Geforce2 and 128 megs of RAM to run Microsoft Windows/Office. He believes buying a top of the line system now will save him from having to buy another one in a couple years. Ha! Good luck. Lusers just won't listen.

incremental disclosure and game UI

[tim_maroney]

Incremental disclosure with sticky adaptation, the single UI principle discussed in the interview, has been well known in the design community since the 1980's.

Just because Microsoft doesn't make good use of the principle doesn't mean that it's a gift from gaming to the rest of the world.

In most other ways, games are UI nightmares. They're difficult by design. Applying their principles to other domains would be a giant step backwards. Non-entertainment systems should be easy by design, rather than conjuring obstacles for the thrill of overcoming them.

Fans of UNIX will, of course, disagree. The popularity of archaic command-line interfaces in the UNIX subculture could perhaps be understood as a consequence of gamer-like behavior among hobbyists and tinkerers.

Tim

Re:incremental disclosure and game UI

[cpt kangarooski]

Which leads to something I've been saying for a while. The GUI and CLIs should be extremely tightly integrated. That isn't to say that it would ever, ever, be required that a user use an interface he was uncomfortable with. The two different methods would be alternatives of each other, but which would be more than the sum of their parts when used in tandem.

Having three or four terminals open in XWindows is _not_ an example of this, by any means.

For example, imagine that you want to move all your object files, plus a few others that don't have anything in common. (save to you - i.e. not the same name, or file type, etc.)

You could quickly navigate to the appropriate directory in the GUI - it's faster unless you remember the precise (short) path. Type a command along the lines of "select *.o" into the cli parser of that _very_ GUI directory window, and the appropriate _icons_ highlight, and are selected. Quickly mouse around to the other couple of icons you want, and shift-click to add them to the selection.

Then drag the icons from the window into another folder visible onscreen (which may be easier than having to remember and type in another pathname), change over to that window and enter a command like "rename * *.backup" to rename all of the moved files.

(n.b. command names would likely exist in several forms, with the full name of the command being the easiest to understand - for consistancy's sake, it would be precisely the same name as used in the GUI.)

Both pointing & grunting at things, as well as talking about them are good ways to control a computer. In the real world, we recognize the usefulness of using them in conjunction, rather than either exclusively. There's a place for that here too.

Pushing the oxymoronic UI envelope

[KFury]

There's a lot to be said for consistancy in UI. While games introduce some daring new metaphors and interaction models, it doesn't do a whole lot of good when each iteration forces you to relearn several of the skills you already learned (this, by the way, is also my beef with Mac OS X. People learn how to use a finder and you make them use a totally new one!)

On the simplest level it's things like the 'inverted mouse' problem in FPS games, but whenever a hot game developer figures out a cool way to convey manipulation of another custom game feature, it detracts from the learning curve.

It's a shame that 'pushing the envelope' and 'consistancy of design' are orthogonal terms. It would be great of the game designers got together and admitted that they're each trying to make the better game, but that establishing consistant design patterns for interactivity can increase the playability of all games, and let the struggle be with the puzzles, and not the interface.

Re:Games pushing hardware is great ...

[Brownstar]

I think you're confused as to what the user interface in a game is.

The special effects like fog and realistic lighting are part of what is being presented, you don't ever actually use it. The user interface is the menus, hand icon, etc...

One of the reason's why you may have mistaken that is because UIs in good games have gotten so seemless with the game its hard to tell the UI from the actual game (take Black & White for example).

If nothing else, game UI's are focused

[Junks Jerzey]

Most game UIs are written with custom code, not huge object-oriented libraries. And they tend to be very usable and snappy on what amounts to low-end hardware (thinking of game consoles here). Compare this to any method of creating a UI for your favorite OS, whatever it may be. It is an order of magnitude easier to write a game-like UI from scratch than it is to learn to use any of the various UI toolkits, even if you already know those toolkits.

Along those lines, I am continually amazed when Windows XP (or the even a new KDE or whatever) requires significantly more CPU power than the previous version. Does handling clicks on widgets _really_ take that much processing power? We just blindly assume "oh yeah, context sensitive help, that's _gotta_ be expensive." But c'mon, these things could have been lightning fast on the Commodore 64.

This isn't technically true...

[mblase]

...since every iteration of the Microsoft or Apple OS requires more RAM, a faster processor, and more colors on the monitor, I think it's more accurate to say that no one needs a new computer to do a spreadsheet program or Word document, provided they don't want to use the latest version.

And besides, there's more to a computer than just the processor and graphics card. I've got a three-year-old PowerMac clone sitting at home, and I can't hardly use it for anything new. It does its job fine, but all its hardware is legacy -- DIMMs, SCSI, and serial ports while everything else is moving to SDRAM, FireWire, and USB. This phenomenon exists in the PC world as well, just to a lesser degree. If I want to upgrade my machine, it's ironic that it will cost me more money than if I had a brand-new one with USB and SDRAM on the motherboard.

In other words, then: it also costs me more to make my machine compatible with a Palm handheld, a digital camera, a joystick, or a new printer, I need to spend the money to upgrade it first. If I want to do anything like digital video, I have to upgrade it a lot. Even downloaded Flash multimedia ran slow until I upgraded the processor, and I sure can't add an MP3 jukebox without a substantial hard drive upgrade (2 gigs doesn't go as far as it used to).

Games push the envelope harder than anything else in the consumer industry, true. But it's hardly the only thing. There's more to consumer PCs these days than video games and word processing, and it's all more demanding than it used to be.

Not quite right

[alexjohns]

Games only push speed of the processor and the video card. That's it. Most games play off the CD, so they don't push the size of the hard drive. They could care less about your printer, scanner, or anything else like that. Most big software packages require more RAM than any game. I have 512MB at work not because I run games.

So Intel and AMD love games. I imagine RAM manufacturers like bloated office app developers, and bloated OS developers - MS springs to mind. CD player/recorder makers like musicians. Printer makers like business and old people who want a hard copy of everything. Scanner makers love the internet for wanting everyone to share their pictures.

So companies like HP could conceivably help their bottom line by supporting musicians, longevity drugs, and getting more people on the internet. How about that. Someone should tell Bruce Perens.