[MUD-Dev] Clients

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

At 02:48 PM 2/16/98 +0000, coder at ibm.net wrote:
>
>Note for starters how dependant IQ tests are on education and (often)
>cultural assumptions.

Agreed... some years ago, I was helping a junior high student with his
English homework (English as a second language, that is, he's Vietnamese),
and they were asking him to define words and use them in sentences. Some of
the words were just ludicrous. Like "circumscribe". How the hell often does
the average person say that? He didn't know the difference between a lima
bean and a green bean (after all, they're both green), but they were
teaching him words like circumscribe, aversion, and synecdoche (one of the
toughest damn words in the English language, if you ask me). 

Interestingly, in some testing later that year, I noted that all three of
those words were in the vocabulary portion of the standard Wechsler
battery. Rather an odd coincidence, wouldn't you say?

>There's an implicit assumption in there that an interface which is more
>readily understandable and usable without aforethought or education is
>necessarily better.  I question this with the case of language itself
>being my best example.

The key features I look for in an interface: with a very few pieces of
instruction, you can get work done. With additional study of the manual
and/or help, you can do your work faster and better. Theoretically,
language is an excellent example -- you can use a very small vocabulary of
just a few dozen words to state an awful lot of ideas. As your vocabulary
grows, you can state more complex ideas, and state simple ideas more
elegantly. But in the end, you only really *need* a couple hundred words. I
think an interface should be like that. You should be able to sit someone
down, tell him three or four simple things, and then he can go off and be
happy using it and get his work done. When he runs into something he
doesn't know how to do, he can open something up and learn how to do it in
a rather short span of time (say five or ten minutes). 

My major problem with the interface on MUDs is that the command you're
looking for is pretty much impossible to find a lot of the time unless you
know the vocabulary the developers used. If you come from a D&D background,
you might try 'help ac' and expect to learn something about armor values,
or you might try 'help armor' or 'help armor class' or 'help defense' and
in the meantime you're on a MUD designed by Palladium jockeys who list all
that under 'structural damage capacity', 'sdc', and 'damage'. Not like
you'd know, since they've carefully concealed all your actual stats from
you in order to make things a little more realistic, and when you look at
your statistics you get 'You are healthy as a horse. You are carrying a
sword which does moderate slashing damage. Your chain mail is moderately
protective and slightly magical.' or something like that. This is something
I hear bandied about an awful lot on the list, and I don't see it as
realism. I see it as needless abstraction and complication of the user
interface, which effectively locks out new users unless they have a friend
who can teach them how to look things up and what to type.


In a related story, some wiseass once demonstrated that the only necessary
operators in the C programming language were incrementation,
decrementation, and equality. He wrote a huge series of functions that
demonstrated how you could simulate everything else with these two
operators. He had things like:

int add(int num1,int num2) { while(1) { ++num1; --num2; if(num2==0) return
num1; } }

The acrobatics got much, much worse. I'm not sure whether he was brilliant
or a complete moron. Probably a little of both. ;)

>The command line is an obscure and austere interface, useless without
>education (training), and forethough (needed to assemble the command prior
>to entry).  It is also powerful and capable of fluently stating processes
>which are difficult if not impossible to state in a general purpose
>graphical environ.  Are GUI's necessarily better?  

Ever try to draw from the command line? ;)

The answer: It All Depends. What are you doing and under what circumstances
are you doing it? Database access can be done from a GUI much better than a
text interface if you're using a small database and just collecting items,
like for a shopping cart. On the other hand, data entry from a GUI is often
tedious. Large jobs that require repeated activity sometimes work great in
a GUI (moving all the files in directory X to directory Y), and sometimes
really suck in a GUI (moving all the files about Bob's business activity
into a specific directory). Sometimes a GUI is great. Sometimes it sucks.

Lately I've been doing some Quake 2 level building in BSP. There's this
window that has the properties for the current brush face. Sometimes it
updates when you select a new brush. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it
updates the brush when you change the properties. Sometimes it doesn't. And
in a truly obnoxious development, the same accelerator key that unselects
the current brush will close the properties window if it's the current
window. The end result is that I'm constantly clicking in this window and
that window and unselecting all brushes and reselecting the brush to make
sure the changes got applied and accidentally closing the window and then
having to hit the menus to open it again. The basic attitude of the
existing userbase is "Hey, it was free". The author's attitude is a little
better, but making the editor easy to use isn't something he's terribly
worried about -- after all, thousands of people like it just fine the way
it is. The problem, I think, comes from wanting to do everything from the
same screen using the same interface. There are some truly sick rules for
how to do certain things, and they're not too obvious. When I finally
figure out what I was doing wrong, my usual reaction is to think "God, what
a horridly designed piece of crap". 


It entirely eludes me why I'm using BSP instead of the qED or Worldcraft
editors I have already registered and find much easier to use. I think it's
become a personal vendetta at this point.  

>Or do they merely
>present a lower inital learning curve?  How valuable in an absolute sense
>(I'm not talking marketing here) is that initial lower learning curve? 
>How important is the lack of a matching learning curve (due to missing
>functionality) at the upper end?

Missing functionality at the upper end is absolutely unacceptable. However,
lower learning curve at the bottom end helps the novice and the expert
alike, because the expert can devote more of his effort to the top end
instead of the bottom. Know what I mean? Ever been on a system that was
complex and difficult to learn? It ends up being difficult to use.
Difficult to use, whether in a CLI or a GUI or anything in between, is just
plain BAD.

>The CLI is not a holy mandate.  GUI's ala WIMP's are certainly not an
>ultimate answer or anthing even remotely close.  What is?  Why?

Ideally, you should have a GUI and a CLI -- see AutoCAD -- from which
pretty much anything can be done. If it's a terrible pain to do something
in one interface or the other, then you should examine the reasons. If it
can't be helped, it can't be helped... but you should at least make an
effort. Some things by their very nature don't transfer well between the
two modes, and sometimes command resolution is a problem. You may be able
to attack by choosing it from a menu, but consider the difference between
typing 'attack ogre with sword' and going up to a menu to select
"Action->Combat->Attack", "Attack player or monster?", "Monster", "Which
monster?" <list>, "Ogre", "Attack with what weapon?" <list>, "Sword",
"Sword is not readied. Would you like to ready it now?", "Yes", "Are you
sure?"... and meanwhile the ogre is making hasty pudding out of your
entrails. On the other hand, if you can do something slick like
double-click on the word 'ogre' on your screen to select it, and then you
automatically get a menu that includes the option 'attack', the CLI user
ends up at a serious disadvantage. You can do things in a good way, or a
bad way, no matter which interface you choose. Theoretically, a command is
a command, but different people work different ways. I almost always use a
combination of keyboard and mouse to control my system. Depends on the
activity. Most other people do the same -- but in a little bit of a
different way.