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WebWord Weblog Posting Posting Date: January 20, 2003 User-centered Game Design (.doc format) (microsoft.com) -- "Deep gameplay involves bringing in cohorts of users in to play a product repeatedly throughout the development cycle and collecting qualitative data from them. The goal of deep gameplay is to provide fairly structured user-centered feedback on gameplay that occurs after the first hour of experience by supplying each team with its own dedicated game play team."
Reader Comments...
I think games tend to be more usable because they are based around perception and action rather than cognition. We are perceptual creatures and we find it easy/pleasant to evaluate things perceptually rather than cognitively. Games tend to be movement/action based, with one to one mappings between user actions and things on the screen. This makes habit formation relatively easy, which leads to automatic (pleasant) interaction. Other applications tend to be about tasks/decisions/ideas - i.e. cognitive stuff. This is harder to learn and harder to form habits. There are often one to many ways of performing actions, which makes habit formation difficult. Rather unelegant prose there, early in the morning...
What's .doc format? You mean MS Word format? Posted by: Da Mole on January 21, 2003 06:35 PM
Well, let's take the case of "Black and White" - a game which was promoted partially by its focus on usability. Their interface was supposed to be more intuitive than most games that have a health meter, weapons selector, power-up tally, inventory, and so on. The truth is, it was clunky and hard to use and only the most dedicated or inexperienced gamer wanted to use it for any length of time. For games, usability comes in the "background" areas - games that allow you to customize controls so you can set up the same save, restore, inventory, and navigation buttons for all your games, no matter who the maker is. Or for games that have a built-in tutorial to help you get used to the different controls you'll have to use (No One Lives Forever, Medal of Honor, Max Payne, Oni, the list goes on). In this respect, games have improved greatly and make the user experience even better. As for gameplay, though, if it weren't for the awesome graphics, I might be more annoyed by the interface. Posted by: Lydia on January 24, 2003 08:25 PM
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