Game Interfaces

What does a click do?

You eagerly install and launch the latest game, ready to see if it lives up to your expectations. The splash screen appears as a promise of things to come, and finally the user interface appears. You begin to experiment.

Some things are easy. If you see a menu of buttons, you know that a single left mouse button click activates that item. You know at least roughly what to expect next based on the button’s labeling. If it says “Options” you would generally expect to be able to configure things like video, audio, keyboard and mouse controls. If it says “New Game” then you expect to be launched into either the game itself or some sort of game setup.

When you leave that first menu, things start to get more complex. You might see another menu, but then again you might not. You could see a deck of cards dealt out onto the screen for a solitaire game. Or you could see a health bar and a 3D view of your avatar standing around doing nothing. Or you could see an army awaiting your orders. You could even see a combination of menus and 3D view.

Once the scene begins to get more complex than a simple menu, it is time for you to figure out how to control this mini-universe, to identify what you can do, and how to do it. You move the mouse pointer over to something and click on it. What should it do? If you are a fairly typical player, and the designer of the game knew what he was doing, it should do exactly what you were trying to do. If you were trying to move something, you should be able to anticipate how to move it. Do you click a mouse button to fire a weapon at a targeting cursor? Do you click and drag things like in a card game? How about left click or click and drag to select, or right click to move like some RTS games? How about holding one button for mouse-look, and the other for moving in the direction you’re looking?

Then there’s the issue of RPG games and inventory. What happens if you click on a piece of equipment, or on a computer controlled player? What about a double click? Will it do what you expect, or will you accidentally kill the only merchant in the game who sells healing potions?

You’ve probably heard before that the great thing about standards is that there are so many of them. This isn’t always the problem that it appears to be at first glance. The goal of the interface designer is to either use the most common conventions, or come up with something that will be easier and less confusing to the player in cases where none of the existing conventions are a good fit. This could include allowing players to remap the controls if there is more than one control scheme that other games use in a similar situation.

The whole idea is that the player should be able to predict what that click will do with minimal effort and without severe consequences. If the player is surprised by the results of their click, it should be a pleasant surprise. Maybe clicking on a toolkit lists the ways in which it can be used. Maybe clicking on a game piece shows where it can be legally moved with a second click.

The learning curve

Every game has a learning curve to some degree. The player should progress from complete novice, to understanding how to play the game effectively. Teaching a player how to play the game is the first part of that learning curve. They can’t master the intricacies of a game’s strategy and tactics until they are able to control the game through the user interface.

Players want to spend their time figuring out what they want to do, not how to make the interface do it. Have you ever spent an hour typing word combinations into a text-based adventure, hoping to stumble across the right combination to make something happen? The interface should present the simplest possible path to interacting with the elements of the game, and leave it up to the player to choose between the available options.

Not that everything must always be simple. Some games have incredibly deep and complex control systems, but they also have a top level that gives you the access necessary to play. Once you have made it past that part of the learning curve, you can explore the more complex options. Maybe there is a macro system built into the game, or even support for scripting. It’s great to have complexities like that so long as they are not required in order to play the game. Not everyone will want to use those bonus interfaces, and not everyone should have to.

Does every interface designer know how to build intuitive interfaces with well-balanced learning curves? Of course not. That’s why some companies invest huge piles of money in usability testing labs where they bring in test subjects to work with designs ranging from early paper prototypes to release candidates. Designers learn over time due to the feedback they get from both formal usability testing, and where the pre-release testing fails, they learn from customer support.

Endgame

I’ve described a few concepts, which can be shortened to the following list:

• Discovery of control mechanisms should be easy.
• Experimenting should be relatively safe.
• Initial complexity should be very low.
• The game should simplify selections when possible.
• Complexity can grow over time, but should remain optional if possible.
• Games should conform to applicable standards.

Before you go nuclear on a game designer because of a game’s bad user interface, you may want to cut them a little slack because of that fine balance they need to achieve. It’s their job to give both the ease of use up front and the deeper complexity of play on the back end. Some game designs really do need to add their complexity into the interface for the design to work.

As a player you want to be challenged by the game beginning to end, without the user interface being a mystery at the start, or shackles keeping you from doing what you want at the end of the game. And that’s why good user interface designers make the big bucks. Or should, anyway.

John Olsen
Infix Technologies

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