At MIGS you talked extensively about simple, obvious mistakes developers make in interface design. Why do you think these mistakes keep getting made?
I think there are many reasons that all contribute to that. One of them is that game designers like to think about system or story?big ideas. And that is not big ideas. It’s mundane and boring and not sexy to care about. And yet you can end up with this great story that’s written in children’s handwriting. It’s ridiculous. It’s that extra level of polish that we as an industry need to care about more.
I asked one of my friends, a designer at Sony, for examples where games have too many clicks and I’m still laughing at his answer. His answer was starting to play any game ever. The opening sequences of games all have publisher and developer logos, they all have middleware logos, they all have nested title screen options. The number of clicks to even start a game is usually five, at least, when you count cancelling movies.
I think it just falls through the cracks. People focus on different things. Making games is so big and expensive that I think the attention gets put on how the engine is going to work, are the graphics really working right, the marketing. I know even I’m guilty of this too ? you design a game and then someone says, “Oh, we need a menu system”. Even I think, “I just spent all this effort making a game, can’t you just pick up the menus?” I understand the pain there.
And gamers can become rather protective of interface quirks, even if they’re not intuitive.
I have seen that attitude, of asking if the flaws in a system aren’t good because they contribute to the “feeling” of the game the designers might have been going after, even if unintentionally. I disagree with that. In Resident Evil 1-3, the control scheme is really super clunky but if you asked those players what they wanted, they probably not ask for a different control scheme.
I think it takes real vision to look at every detail of something and see the possibilities of what could be. Someone said, “If we have different control scheme maybe it would open up the market, maybe more people will be interested”. Even though the core base would say it didn't want it, Capcom took an exact risk with RE4, and they made that control scheme less clunky and it paid off. RE5, in my opinion, took another step forward to being a bit more useable. In each case like the pro-clunky crowd as proven wrong, there is better ways to give a feeling in a game than bad control, even if it might take some vision to see that.
Gamers also become good at these unintuitive systems, which seems to be another reason for resistance.
That debate happens in StarCraft. There is a unit selection limit, and you can only select certain number of units at once, but now, in modern era, we could have that anything we want. Maybe you could select hundreds of units in StarCraft II, but there are some players who are absolutely against the idea of making the limit whatever they want, because there is a skill in selecting the units you need to select in a game of StarCraft, particularly under time pressure.
Someone can make this argument, but I disagree with it. What these players are really saying is that they want a skill test in the game, which is fair enough, but they are also demanding that the test of skill be a specific skill test that they have all mastered. I think that's not only greedy and self-centred, but short sighted ? there are many ways to test a player's skill in a game like StarCraft, so why does it have to be a test of your ability to manipulate the interface?