[MUD-Dev] When the interface becomes the challenge.

[Brian Hook]

At 10:07 AM 6/25/01 -0400, Dave Rickey wrote:

> That's interesting....  One of the reasons I hate console games is
> because of the way that the same interface actions can have
> totally different results in different situations, that are not
> clearly divided (what if there was someone behind that ladder I
> was trying to shoot?).

Concise game design would prevent situations like that from
occurring.  Avoid creating scenarios where a player's action is
ambiguous given the context.  In my game designs, I have an "active
target", which is "the thing I will do something to".  When I press
"Action", there is only one logical action that can be performed --
and it is explicitly stated through an iconic interface -- so the
player knows what to expect.

In the ladder/enemy situation, if the ladder was my "target" the
only symbol I would see is the "Climb" icon.  If the enemy was my
"target", the only symbol I would see is the little "Attack" icon.
I would try to design a game where the target of my actions was
ambiguous.  Note that Baldur's Gate does something very similar to
this.

Another example are NPCs -- do you want to talk to that NPC or kill
that NPC?  I would venture that during any given situation, it is
obvious what you should do, so a generic "Interact" function is
fine.  You don't want the player to attack something he will regret
attacking (more specifically, something he will gain nothing from
attacking or, more likely, will lose by killing a key quest
component). While we can say "Let him attack the small boy, it will
teach the player a moral lesson when he can't solve the game because
he killed the kid" and sit back and feel all smug as game developers
that are so much more clever than our players, this type of thing
just generally aggravates players.  Don't let players do something
that they'll just have to hit Undo (i.e. "Load Saved Game") to fix.
The Save/Try/Load cycle is not good game design.

The strength of a console is the controller -- it forces fairly
concise control mechanisms that most people find easy to understand
and adjust to. The strength of the PC is the local storage and
keyboard -- it allows more depth of control.

The problem is that PC developers often end up using the
keyboard/icons/menu systems as a crutch that allows them to get
lazy.  They don't have to think about interface nearly as much as a
console developer because they have a very versatile input device.
Instead of thinking through the game design, they just make all
actions valid and attempt to code for all the relevant cases.  This
makes for an "open ended" game, but it's frustrating and often ends
up forcing the player to do "all possible combinations of actions on
all items" solution searches, which are lame.

Brian Hook

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