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Do Games Know The Secret Of UI?

Posted by Hemos on from the better-then-most-interfaces dept.

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.

7 of 256 comments (clear)

  1. From Experience... by keesh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. "I can attest to JC being smart" by ObligatoryUserName · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  3. I can just see it... by Brownstar · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

  4. incremental disclosure and game UI by tim_maroney · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:incremental disclosure and game UI by cpt+kangarooski · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      -- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
  5. Pushing the oxymoronic UI envelope by KFury · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  6. This isn't technically true... by mblase · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...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.