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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.
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.
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!
Hemos knows Jesus? Maybe he can let us know which distribution The Lord uses, and if he prefers vi or emacs - then we can decide for ourselves if he's smart or not.
*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.
What a game would do is immediately give you those three features and then as you progressed and became a more powerful character it would give you more features
Mr. Clippy: I'm sorry, you're not experienced enough to change text colors yet. Try underlining it for now!
... I mean, I'm all for faster CPU's, more RAM, better video cards, higher bandwidth, etc.
...
But I don't see games pushing the UI envelope in a way that's useful to most user tasks. Sure, game developers put an enormous amount of effort into creating detailed, realistic virtual environments, and that's great -- for games. But attempts to introduce such elements into OS's in general, and into general-purpose applications like word processors, graphics programs, and browsers, will lead only to clutter and bloatware. You don't need realistic lighting and fog effects when you're writing a letter
Browsers are an area that deserve special mention. I've seen a few attempts to use game-type visual metaphors to turn cyberspace into something Gibsonian (anyone remember Hotsauce?) and the effect is always ugly, pointless, and slow. Make the hardware fast enough, of course, and "slow" will go away, but "ugly" and "pointless" will remain.
When I'm playing a game, I want to be immersed in a virtual world. When I'm writing, or designing graphics for a Web site, or pounding out code, or looking for information on some obscure subject, I want a clean, simple interface that makes it as easy as possible for me to get, create, or manipulate my data. And that's it.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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
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.
The problem with the industry is nobody admits jack shit. Marketing folks seem to think everyone wants to buy airline tickets, but we all know pr0n built the Internet.
No one wants to get a trailer on their mobile phone. What people want to do is take a picture of themselves and their spouse in front of the Eiffel Tower and send that image to their teenage daughter back in England
Over in Japan, the most popular thing for 3G phones are entertainment (Pr0n and Instant messaging). One game, you can chat with an IA women and try to see how far you can push it before she gets mad.
For consumers its Entertainment, music, pr0n or video games. Business customers might pay 5x the price for the service, but you have 100x average consumers.
Come to think about it, I bets thats why they sell so many vibrating batteries.
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.
Kevin Fox
The Unreal Tournament UI certainly pushed game UIs to a new level, with easy to access, well organized drop down menus. . If I had more time I would probably hack up enlightenment to make it work like that. Trbies 2 did a great job with taking the UT and Tribes interfaces and merging them in tabbed pages and pulldowns to produce one of the best, albeit somewhat complicated (Due only to all the cool features of the game.) menus anyone has ever made for anything.
EverQuest is another great example of game UI development. Their UI was damned lame at first, but over time has become fully customizable in regards to positioning, size, colors and transparency, all created from the input of hundreds of thousands of users.
What I really would like to see is a merging of the UT/Tribes style interface with EverQuest customizability, along with all of the keyboard manipulation provided in Maya, and of course, easy to design and implement themes.
If anyone wants any help designing a gui, feel free to shoot me a message...
I suggest that from now on, instead of linking to the bbc URL you guys use the IP address, which always works.
You aren't the guy who wrote Code Red I, are you? Keep in mind ./ stories are archived, so if an IP changes after some time, boom, the link is dead.
Now, the DNS thing: sometimes adding a "www" after the "http://" does the trick for me (not with BBC but with a few other sites). I think this is easier than figuring out and typing an IP.
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.
...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.
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.