David Sirlin is a familiar proponent of increased simplicity and usability in video game interfaces. It's a principle he put into practice rebalancing Street Fighter II for Super Street Fighter II HD Remix. At Montreal International Game Summit, he continued the theme with a polemic that used the famous writing handbook The Elements Of Style by Strunk and White to argue that a design must do its best to avoid needless effort on the player’s part.

Using one of William Strunk’s celebrated style rules, “omit needless words,” as a basis, Sirlin took the audience through an entertaining series of case studies demonstrating obvious pitfalls overlooked by many developers.

One such obvious mistake? Needless effort needing to be expended when restarting a task in restart-heavy titles such as Burnout 3: Takedown. “If you make a single mistake in a Burning Lap you generally have to restart if you’re going for the best time. To restart, you have to press start, push down twice to skip past the options, and then press restart. I took a look at what these options are that I’m skipping past every time I had to restart, and they were music and sound effects volume sliders. I can’t imagine fiddling with those more than once or twice, yet I restarted levels hundreds of times in this game—with hundreds of needless extra button presses.”

In comparison, a title like Tony Hawk 4 got it right in Sirlin’s eyes, with restarting the first option after resuming, and a selection to simply quit the current task directly, minimising the number of button pushes for the most important options.

Another example that gained Sirlin’s ire was the otherwise widely beloved Psychonauts. Apologising and promising that he “loves Tim Schafer”, he found the game to be one of the greatest examples of an “excruciatingly long start up.” With clicking past all of the game’s intro movies, title screen and file selection, to begin the first section of actual play takes over twenty button presses, a stark contrast to what Sirlin called “the best example in the entire game industry” of instant game accessibility, Braid, which includes no clicks to begin playing.

“It’s unheard of. Braid is a landmark in interface and I really wish Jon Blow was here to talk about how he made this happen, because I know that starting a game like this — without a title screen, without intro — is a violation of Microsoft’s certification standards. More people need to have this kind of self belief on issues that directly benefit the consumer.”

Perhaps Sirlin’s most strident example was used in discussing Resident Evil 5, a game that Sirlin claimed to “absolutely love” and especially in Mercenaries mode. “In Resident Evil 5 there’s a very odd occurrence in that certain weapons have a very long reload time. Mercenaries is entirely about making the most points in a set amount of time, so in order to get the best scores, you must first each time you play pay a eight-click ‘tax’ — to rearrange your inventory — and then you can reload your weapon via a five-click button combination without having to view the reload animation. In fact, you can reload during other animations!”

The thing Sirlin took particular exception was that this interface quirk was “completely foreseeable”. “They explain how to do this in the official strategy guide for the game, so they knew all about it when they shipped. It’s the optimum way to play the game for the highest scores, in fact you cannot compete if you don’t do it. Now, to many gamers this is a positive part of the experience, that they’re ‘beating the game’ using the interface. But you’re actually just fumbling around in the menus a lot when you should be trying to do your best playing the game, not the interface.”