At the beginning of any medium’s lifespan is a period of rampant, unstructured experimentation. Creators work by trial and error, and in the absence of strategies that reliably work, they follow their own whims and interests. Over time, ideas about what does and does not work build up and are taught to future generations as rules or guidelines. For each medium, this process plays out differently, but in each case it is motivated by the need for some relatively reliable system to predict the profitability of a given venture. Once some novel venture starts making enough money, the accountants are going to start taking over.
The hope is that whatever system gets produced will be flexible enough to allow for innovation. American comic books provide a good example of how badly this can all go; in the beginning there were crime comics, horror comics, detective comics, romance comics, adventure comics, etc., all of which eventually gave way to the domination of superhero comics above all else. Innovation in mainstream comics has been an incestuous mess of deconstructing, reconstructing, recontextualizing, and rethinking superheroes, then repeating the process on whatever new ideas about superheroes came out of the previous cycle. This makes for an output which appeals to a fairly narrow segment of the audience, and has left the entire medium in the undignified state of mainly providing characters and ideas for other media in order to eke out a living at all.
Earlier this week I linked to an article from Wired entitled “Halo 3: How Microsoft Labs Invented a New Science of Play.” For all the hyperbole of the title, the gist seems to be “they’re play-testing it a whole lot.” The new science of play would appear to be the reasonably well-established science of human-computer interaction (HCI). What makes this endeavor remarkable is probably the fact that usability principles are being applied to a field which is not often thought of by either its supporters or detractors as being especially useful.
While HCI researchers have been trying to steal ideas from game design for years, under the reasoning that videogames are the class of software that people seem to enjoy interacting with the most, it seems that the interest has been rather one-way until more recently. Some researchers have been working to develop heuristics of gameplay analogous to Jakob Nielsen’s well-known usability heuristics, but being outside the industry I don’t know if these efforts have had any effect on actual practice yet. The techniques described in the Wired article, though, sound unmistakably like classic HCI evaluation methods: having the user think out loud while interacting with the software, administering subjective surveys of satisfaction and enjoyment, and recording keystrokes.
And whether or not usability is being explicitly considered in the process of game design, it’s clear from a player’s perspective that games have been getting substantially more usable since their inception. As John Harris points out in his piece on difficult games for Gamasutra, videogames have gradually transitioned from being seen as tests of skill to being seen as providers of an experience. When a game’s purpose is to put you through hell to see if you can survive it, ease of interaction is obviously the last thing on the designer’s mind. When its purpose is to immerse you in a world or storyline, there should be no barriers to that immersion in the form of excessive difficulty or awkward interaction.
The big question all this raises is this: what are we talking about when we talk about interaction? It isn’t just a matter of the interface; the Halo 3 team, at least, is also testing gameplay, level design, and mechanics with their analysis. And the changes alluded to by Harris encompass the basic philosophy behind the design of a game, not just how that design is presented to the player. I’ve been using the terms HCI, interaction, and usability pretty interchangeably throughout this post, mainly because I’m uncomfortable applying any of them to what goes on between a player and a game.
In any case, these ideas come from the analysis of software which is designed to aid in some specific set of tasks, and task orientation has been built into the fiber of HCI from the word go. The implicit assumption in the application of HCI to gaming seems to be that the task is to finish the game, or some subset of the game. After all, what else does the user do with the software that you can actually quantify? And if enjoyable finishability starts becoming the gold standard of game design, what kind of games are and are not going to get produced?
“Filmmakers proceeded blindly, with little to guide them in the way of either precedent or theory. They did not exactly know what effects they wanted, nor, to the extent that they knew, did they all want exactly the same effects. As a result there were many experiments – in technology, in dramaturgy, in narrative, in set design – some of which proved to have no sequel.”
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ”The Heyday of the Silents,” in The Oxford History of World Cinema
