Much is said about interface in games today. After a long winter, producers and game designers discovered that a merely beautiful game does not work as product nor as a good experience to different kinds of players.
Try to imagine this situation: a beautiful futuristic game fulfilled of great cut scenes and technological characters. Everything in the scenario is perfect, but every action is a mystery for the player inside this fictional universe. It’s difficult to understand where you need to go, when the objective is accomplished, and it’s impossible to determine what kind of object you can take from the ambient.
Schell (2008, p.222) says in his book The Art of Game Design that the goal of a good gaming interface “isn’t ‘to look nice’ or ‘to be fluid’, although those are nice qualities; the goal of an interface is to make players feel in control of their experience.
Complementing Schell’s ideas, Perron and Wolf (2009, p.66) postulate that one of the “fundamental conditions that govern our interactions with video game virtual environments is that our actions are mapped onto the game system by various technological means, since we cannot physically manipulate the virtual entities directly”. By this last quotation we can understand the importance of a good interface and how it can create an immersive experience to the audience.
An interface establishes an answer system between the game and the player. Before we think about fantastic graphics, it is more important to design the interface to create a deeper experience. For more information and to discover more about this theme, I strongly recommend the following readings.
References:
PERRON, Bernard; WOLF, Mark. The Video Game Theory Reader 2. New York: Routledge, 2009.
SCHELL, Jesse. The art of game design. Burlington: Elsevier, 2008.
Try to imagine this situation: a beautiful futuristic game fulfilled of great cut scenes and technological characters. Everything in the scenario is perfect, but every action is a mystery for the player inside this fictional universe. It’s difficult to understand where you need to go, when the objective is accomplished, and it’s impossible to determine what kind of object you can take from the ambient.
Schell (2008, p.222) says in his book The Art of Game Design that the goal of a good gaming interface “isn’t ‘to look nice’ or ‘to be fluid’, although those are nice qualities; the goal of an interface is to make players feel in control of their experience.
Complementing Schell’s ideas, Perron and Wolf (2009, p.66) postulate that one of the “fundamental conditions that govern our interactions with video game virtual environments is that our actions are mapped onto the game system by various technological means, since we cannot physically manipulate the virtual entities directly”. By this last quotation we can understand the importance of a good interface and how it can create an immersive experience to the audience.
An interface establishes an answer system between the game and the player. Before we think about fantastic graphics, it is more important to design the interface to create a deeper experience. For more information and to discover more about this theme, I strongly recommend the following readings.
References:
PERRON, Bernard; WOLF, Mark. The Video Game Theory Reader 2. New York: Routledge, 2009.
SCHELL, Jesse. The art of game design. Burlington: Elsevier, 2008.
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