[MUD-Dev] The Casual-Player Killer: Time? (was Re: MMO Communities)

[Amanda Walker]

On Aug 6, 2004, at 5:19 AM, Will Jennings wrote:

> From anecdotal experience introducing people to these games*, the
> biggest barrier to their enjoyment is the interface.  Simply
> moving around in a third person view is frustrating for them -- an
> object comes between the camera and the avatar and they don't know
> how to see themselves again, or they get stuck on things.  And
> they have as many controls and instruments to worry about as a
> shuttle pilot.

> These people aren't ignoramuses, and most of them play video games
> on a regular basis, and buy them occasionally.  These are gamers,
> but they don't have the experience necessary to play many of these
> games.

I suspect this is a factor, and it's a great argument for something
I've wanted to see for years: multiple interfaces into the same game
world.  A 3D bump-mapped motion-blurred interface for twitch gamers
with big honking PCs, an isometric Diablo-style UI for people with
older PCs (or laptops without power-hungry video chips), a web-based
UI for basic things (like email/chat, trading & auctioning), a
spreadsheet or text UI for playing in a window while at work :-), a
phone UI, etc.  This also ties into the recent thread on more
abstract interfaces ("travel to City B, fight anything that attacks
you, let me know when you get there or you died").

One difficulty with many games on the market is that gameplay and
graphics rendering are tied intimately together, which makes
scalable UIs infeasible.

Amanda Walker
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