Editorial: Can you play me now? … Good!

By Jeffrey Philipp | July 31, 2009 | | Filed under: Editorials | Tags: Game Design, Human-computer interaction, Interface Design, Usability

Greetings again members of the great pseudo society of the net.

I was wondering the other day as I was clawing my way through the EVE online trial that somehow, for all it’s progressiveness, there is one area of design that online games are simply stuck in the stone age.

User. Interface. Design. I say that with all the periods to try and underscore how important it is, and it is important. It’s probably one of something like three thrings that you simply have to get right, and if you don’t you have not only done it wrong, but people will not play your game because you got it wrong.

Obviously there is mor than a simple right and wrong in this field, as there are certainly degrees of good interface design, but there are, at least as far as I can tell, two ways in which to be exactly wrong. Both of these deal not with the actual layout of the interface, but rather with the information that the interface presents the user.

The first way to truly fail at interface design is a scarcity of information in the interface. It is simply the nature of any complex game that certain information is required to play it effectively. Imagine playing a game of chess without knowing precisely where your opponents pieces were. This is the same sort of situation that you run into if you are playing a game and certain necessary pieces of information are denied to you.

Even in games where precise information is not provided to you there is almost always some indication of your status or situation through some method. It doesn’t matter what kind of game you are playing, in order to play any sort of game there simply has to be some sort of representation of the players situation available to them.

The other cardianl sin of interface design is the more common one. Generally speaking there are very few games out there that make the mistake of not telling you enough. In fact I can’t think of a single one without taking some time to consider it specifically. However there are a number that make the mistake of giving you just way too much information. This can be a problem for two reasons.

The first reason that this is simply unacceptable is that, if you are in fact actually required to have that much information to play your game in a normal manner, then your system is just too complicated and will not be fun. In fact it will rather feel like trying to read through a technical manual on a time limit. Granted there may be a number of players who find this sort of game fun, and more power to them, but I’m trying to make a point more for the general gamer here.

Even the most die hard, hardcore, whatever you want to call it, will generally only want to deal with a certain level of complexity while playing before it just becomes tedious. If you find yourself running into this problem it mighty be a signal that perhaps your design is starting to include complexity for the sake of being complex.

As a side note to that I would like to make a distinction between what I feel are two seperate entities. For lack of a better term, or perhaps because I simply don’t know the technical term, I’ll call them surface complexity, and system complexity. I’m entirely for complex game mechanics and systems, as I really don’t want to move back to the days of pong.

However I think that there is a large amount of that information that doesn’t necessarily always need to be at the surface of the user interface, which I’m going to call here the surface complexity. I’ll try and explain that better in a short while after I go over the other problem with a glut of information.

The second way that having a godawful mess of information on the screen proves to be a problem is if most of the information you have displayed is hopelessly unimportant. There are some situations when you start up a new game and find yourself staring at six coloured bars, and a dozen panels with all manner of numbers, and lists of buttons, and all these things; but the problem is when you only need a minute portion of it to play in a general situation.

This is less a direct problem with the interface, though it certainly is unpleasant, but it is certainly a sign that the game design was not very carefully considered, and you will likely find that there are a number of things that are simply not, for lack of a better word, elegant.

Now as I said above, there are more or less only two situations that prove to be the “wrong answer” so to speak, and there is a wonderfully infinite set of situations between them, each of which can be said to be a better or worse solution to interface design. At this point I’m not even getting into the usability portion of interfaces which is very nearly a science in itself. Generally speaking I prefer that there is a highly complex system running the game, but I also would like it to be kept under the hood during the times that I am actually playing.

What I mean when I say this, is that I don’t think that all those statistics and numbers should be permanently hidden from the player but rather should be provided on request. I may be strange but I find that character optimization is a fairly fun metagame that can be played when you’re not up to much, or even when you’re away from the game. In this way I think that you can find a workable combination of actual game complexity, while keeping the surface of the interface clean and usable.

Now that I’ve covered the big no-no’s, I think I’ll take a little bit of time to talk about some of the usability principles that seem to be lost on the general developing community. It starts with a very VERY simple principle. The player is going to spend most of their time looking at one place, and because of the nature of the human eye, it’s likely going to be a fairly narrow region of screen real estate. Really all one needs to do from this point to make a better than average UI is to keep that simple fact in mind.

The most important pieces of information should be as close to the action of your character as possible. Keep in mind that doesn’t even have to be the center of the screen, or on the avatar of your character. It simply means that the most important information, for example character health and resource pools, should be housed somewhere very close to where the situation is updated for the player.

From there the information that is less important should move out from the focal point. Essentially the things you’re going to be looking for the most often should not require you to move your eyes that much, and things that you will only need to search for occasionally can suffer that small inconvenience as it is not a common occurance.

Step two of proper interface design is an extension of the first principle. Make sure that things don’t get cluttered. These days any moderately powerful machine is going to have a stunning amount of space on screen if you consider it. A mistake that is made far too often is to put far too much in the same area, causing any single element of the interface to be difficult to pick out of the group.

While grouping together similar relevant elements, you should never blend them together and make them difficult to differentiate. Something else to keep in mind when thinking about this principle, is to consider the colours of your interface. If I’m not mistaken this is actually a rule of general graphic design, but we’ve all been to the website that is white on yellow, or purple on black, or some other bizarre combination of eye straining pain. Generally you’re going to want to keep in mind, if most of the environments in your game are bright … you should probably stay away from white text, and black is not a good colour if your game is much darker.

This next bit might be a more personal dislike, but I also would say you are best served by staying away from the neons and the pastels as your text colour, as they are distracting and tend to draw the eye away from colours that happen to be more muted, which in this case is very likely to be your main view.

The third general principle to interface design, is to be conscious of your control method. If your game is intended to be controlled largely using the keyboard, then you are probably much less constrained, but if you intend to have an appreciable amount of mouse control, then you mus tbe very conscious of where you place your control elements.

They should certainly not be crowding the main game view, but they certainly should not be spread far and wide around the screen. They are best placed grouped together, and large enough to easily tell the difference between them, however they should also not be so large as to require more than a few centimetres of mouse movement to go from one to the other.

I apologize if I’m sounding preachy here, but this is a subject that I find myself intereseted in as something of a hobby. I’m also a little bit curious as to why a better than average number of recent game releases seem to subscribe to the theory that having the players vital statistics in one far corner, and all the important control elements at the opposite corner or side of the screen is a good idea.

I’d love to hear what everyone else thinks about the situation, and I might also suggest that a quick read of some introductory material on graphic and interface design can be a suprisingly interesting blend of psychology, biology, and art and I heartily endorse it if you have a little bit of time to kill.

Well, I feel good to get a lot of that off my chest, and like I said, I’d be glad to hear what everyone out there has to say on the subject, and we can get some decent discussion going.

Until next time!