Parts of the game makeup could have usability applied to it. Getting menu systems wrong could result in a frustrating experience rather than a totally engrossing one. Some games make it particularly difficult to navigate the basic menu options. e.g. Are you sure you want to quit the game? Yes/No. Which choice is highlighted? The fewer barriers there are for the gamer to become immersed, the better.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi looked into this feeling of immersion further and proposed the Flow theory. This has been applied to various fields to design better human experiences, including the gaming industry. When the challenge presented is greater than our abilities, we become anxious, and when the challenge is significantly less than that of which we are able, we become bored.
Source: http://www.jenovachen.com/flowingames/
So the challenge or playability seems like the opposite of usability, but it doesn't have to be. An engrossing gaming experience can be capsulated by identifying where the challenge is placed in a game. Other features of the game outside this area (e.g. menu screens, maps, choosing weapons) should assist the gamer to meet the challenge and this is where usability is placed within the games industry.
Playability, intuitiveness and challenging are ways to describe a truly great game. A sign of a truly great game is when you ask yourself "Where did the last 3 days go?"
I'm looking foward to seeing how the much hyped 'Little Big Planet' does this.
3 comments:
A really interesting topic. There are certainly plenty of games with terrible menu navigation. Usability principles probably apply to a different extent in various genres though. Point and click strategy games should be analysed in the same way that normal software is, but shooters don't really have the same kind of interface.
PC games (even good ones) often have poor usability, and it has nothing to do with menus. In F.E.A.R., for example, the F key picks up objects and opens doors, while the G key throws grenades.
How many times have I wasted a grenade (and sometimes myself) because of this poor keyboard mapping before I finally remapped the keys myself? Too many.
I quite agree about the menu systems. They have to be 100% clear and usable, something many games (like many non-Apple phones!) get horrifically wrong. You shouldn't notice them.
On the gameplay side, I remember platformers from my childhood where you had to press two buttons simultaneously, having stood your wee guy on the exact right pixel, and then done a "turn right" without moving. That's not fun, that's just hard work.
Fuzziness and complexity are what I like, and you don't need to make the game hard to play if you have strategic choices to make in quasi-real environments. (that reminds me, I need to take a week off work to play Supreme Commander)
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