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What Gordon Said About Accessibility Three Years Ago
January 24, 2007 2:29 pm
I have a notebook full of full-featured, college lecture-style notes from game conferences: GDC 2004, AGC 2004, GDC 2005, AGC 2005, and AGC 2006. It’s fun to see the exclamation points, where I realized I’d just learned something really important and wanted to be sure I’d remember it. I like the notes I took on Larry Mellon’s 2004 talk about his metrics system in the Sims Online, which ultimately influenced my career quite a bit.
During the same conference, I saw Gordon Walton speak about “Nine Things to Look For in the Next Generation of MMOGs” — GDC 2004, Friday, 9-10.
One of the nine things:
Accessibility
- topic selection — most of current “totally catered to hardcore gamers”
- hardware and software specifications — limits market because “real people don’t have machines like gamers have”
- compatibility
- ease of use/interface
- learning curve — “hard to learn, easy to use” is current norm
I really like that. “Hard to learn, easy to use.” Hasn’t changed yet, has it?
Joe Ludwig wrote:
I’ve run into the “hard to learn, easy to use” problem in a number of places, but the biggest is probably editors. Vi is an extremely powerful editor that is a real bitch to learn. Once you’ve learned it, however, you can do some pretty amazing things in just one or two keystrokes.
The editor built into Visual Studio, on the other hand, is really easy to learn. You can just start typing code and away you go. But trying to do any sort of advanced operation in VS is a real hassle. They have built-in tools for some of them, but often you have to do a whole lot of clicking and typing.
After all that, though, I use the editor in VS for 99% of my coding. I have VI installed for the occasional “do this operation 50 times in slighly different ways” and hard-core regular expressions tasks.
Posted on 24-Jan-07 at 3:48 pm | Permalink
Sara Jensen wrote:
On a break not ten minutes ago, I was thinking about how Gordon’s comment related to tools. The best, most efficient tools I’ve ever used have been hard to learn.
The non-games industry data entry tools I’ve used tend to be to be easy to learn, but hugely inefficient. You don’t get a sense of the data’s context, because they’re insulating you from everything but the exact task at hand (entering a single employee’s timecard, etc.). They’re trying to keep you from making mistakes, but they occur because you don’t know if the data you’re entering bears any resemblance to what’s already there.
My favorite data management tools for games have been Access databases with no custom forms or anything. They took me months to learn, but by the time I figured them out, I could get lots done fast. I could see all the data at once. Context is very useful.
Posted on 24-Jan-07 at 3:56 pm | Permalink
Sara Jensen wrote:
Another thought: those non-games tools were probably intended to be used by low-skilled, risky, non-permanent employees. I was always a temp, and they always had me working by my first afternoon on the job. The assignments never lasted more than a couple of months.
In games, you should be investing in quality personnel for the long term. Is it okay if the worldbuilding tool takes a month to learn?
Posted on 24-Jan-07 at 4:10 pm | Permalink
J. wrote:
The most powerful tools for any job are always the hardest to learn. That’s true of any job, even the ones where the requirements for the tools and the finished product are constantly changing. (Try newspaper page design, which is what I do. Next month, we’re upgrading to Adobe InDesign. Wheee.)
Tool programming and design is yet another required function that’s just not considered sexy enough in the game space. And I’ve never heard of a metric to describe how great the tools need to be (both in power and ease of use) versus the ability of team members to use them and produce great game material. There usually isn’t a balance, from what I’ve seen.
Besides, how many studios try to create careers for their employees? Answer: Only the best ones, but you usually have to have got your industry experience elsewhere to even get in the door.
Posted on 25-Jan-07 at 1:26 am | Permalink
Psychochild wrote:
This is a classic tradeoff in computer science: ease-of-use vs. power. In general, the easier something is to use, the less power you have, given that everything else is constant.
It makes sense that online games do this, because the newbie period is much shorter than the main play period. It makes a bit of sense that I might have to spend two weeks mastering the interface for a game I’m going to play two years or more. Same as Sara said about development tools above.
The recent trend to go toward simplifying everything is a step in the opposite direction. The problem is, of course, that this will in general make the system less powerful; this is something I’m not fond of as a game player.
Of course, the caveat here is in the second sentence I typed above: given that everything else is constant. If you dedicate more skill or resources to the task, you can make a system or interface that is easier to use while still retaining some power. Of course, this means that you either have to have deep pockets or have to take resources from some other part of the project.
I don’t think it’s entirely a question of sexiness as J. mentions above, rather that a mediocre game is still a mediocre game even if you have great tools behind it. Given the nature of the game industry, your great tools will likely not get to make a second game if your first game doesn’t’ sell enough to make a significant amount of money. You generally want to dedicate more resources towards finishing the game and adding as many game features as possible rather lengthening your schedule and/or releasing with anemic features in order to focus on tools and interface.
I also think that as some level, we do need to accept that playing a game will never be as easy as turning on the TV or turning the pages of a novel. Interactivity comes at a price, meaning that the end user has to have at least a few active neurons to participate.
My thoughts,
Posted on 27-Jan-07 at 10:51 am | Permalink
J. wrote:
I don’t think it’s entirely a question of sexiness as J. mentions above, rather that a mediocre game is still a mediocre game even if you have great tools behind it.
NWN was a really mediocre game. Dungeon Siege was an even more mediocre game. Both had fairly decent toolsets (OK, DS’s was not so great and GPG did jack all to create useful GUI tools beyond the worldbuilder, everything else had to be done in Notepad) that were subsequently used by others to make good games.
Of course, that sort of business model isn’t great for everyone. What I was trying to suggest is that there exist people who would just as soon not use Notepad and/or Excel to build stuff with if better tools could be made, that could still contribute meaningfully to the project. But maybe that’s off base.
Posted on 29-Jan-07 at 7:35 pm | Permalink
Aaron wrote:
Regarding the player interface, one thing to consider is that MMOGs, more than any other genre of deep and complex games, have the potential for attracting non-gamers. Old fogies, because of the culture they were raised in and not just an aversion to the unknown, don’t perceive “games” as a worthwhile passtime. They are, however, fascinated by the abstract concept of virtual worlds and online societies.
But, as I’ve stated elsewhere, such people lack more than merely the knowledge of which key or icon corresponds to which command. They often lack practice with tasks in computer-oriented eye-hand coordination, such as timely precision with a mouse pointer. There is no unified eye-hand coordination skill level that applies to all activities; catching a football is different than driving, which is different from playing guitar, which is different than using a remote control, etc..
So, depending on the game, it may be worthwhile for developers to offer separate UI for separate player roles and levels of game familiarity; separate UI which differ in complexity and utility, not merely in presentation.
One of these days, I’m hoping the MMOG industry will realize that you don’t need to offer every player the same range of available gameplay experiences. Look at real life. The trick is to create and arrange possible player roles so that they interconnect and augment one another in compliment. One player’s experiences do not have to be as complex as another’s. Accordingly, it’s not necessary to force the amateur gamer to accept a pro’s control scheme.
Posted on 01-Feb-07 at 10:09 am | Permalink
Psychochild wrote:
What I was trying to suggest is that there exist people who would just as soon not use Notepad and/or Excel to build stuff with if better tools could be made, that could still contribute meaningfully to the project. But maybe that’s off base.
Not so much off base, but it fits in to what I’m saying. It may be easier to click a button on a graphical interface that says, “Increase selected monster’s difficulty,” but it is more powerful to go into the spreadsheet and increase the damage value (or hit points, or hit percent, or any other value that increases monster difficulty) by tweaking the numbers directly. You have to decide what you want. Personally, I prefer more power over ease-of-use, but then again I’m a tech-geek by training.
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