Pointy Wiimotes

The original Nintendo Entertainment System was released in North America in 1985. It was quite the revolution in gamin, and its controller did not take into account the ergonomics of the hand. It was quite pointy:

Fast forward 16 years to 2001, and the Nintendo GameCube shows how far design has come in understanding how our hands grip things and how best to design controllers to effortlessly fit human hands.

But now, with the Wii, there is the Wii Remote, or Wiimote. It is held in your hand like a remote, and there and several easy-to-reach buttons for most games. However, for other games, there are alternative control schemes. For example, in Super Paper Mario, you play the entire game holding the remote sideways.

The pointiness has returned. WIth Super Smash Brothers Brawl, there are many different ways to control the game. One way is to turn the controller sideways, which is, once again, pointy. Many gamers have said they prefer to use the GameCube controller with this game because of how much more comfortable it is.

Options are a good thing, generally. The Wii enables more analogous control for many games, such as Tennis or Bowling. But for other games, you need a more traditional controller. At least the designers of Brawl understood that the Wiimote is not the optimal control and allowed for others. Not all games allow for this, which means users are back to pointy controllers jabbing into our hands.

Miscellaneous Note: Controller design has been remarkably difficult for consoles throughout the ages. The original Microsoft XBox controller, for example, was a monstrosity:

It was rumored that the controller was too big for most Japanese hands, so Microsoft had to redesign the whole thing to be sold overseas. Whoops. Penny Arcade even made a non-work safe comic about it (NSFW due to language).

Super Smash Bros. Brawl: Text Input

Nintendo, being the child-friendly video game company, has tried its best to keep online play as safe as possible. Not only do users not have any real-time voice or text chat in-game, but each and every game requires its own game code. For example, to add a friend to Super Smash Bros. Brawl, users need to perform a multitude of steps that are quite confusing.

The worst part of the entire process, however, is adding friends to play with. To add a friend to play against, users need their 12-digit Brawl code, which they can only obtain outside of the Wii environment. Communicating this code requires writing it down over the phone, or waiting for an e-mail or text message. Anyone who remembers e-mail addresses like 72223.10@compuserve.com knows that randomly-assigned number codes are not easy to pass around. Users simply don’t have the memory for that many numbers, and the sending or receiving of that long number can get easily garbled.

What is absolutely mind-boggling, however, is the way to enter an easy-to-recognize nickname for that person. Firstly, users are limited to only 5 characters with which to name that person - an arbitrary limit. Secondly, the typical expectation for text input is an on-screen keyboard to do the typing. This, after all, is the de facto method of entering text. Instead, users are presented with:

Anyone who has sent a text message with their cellular phone recognizes this: it’s T9. It’s a human factors nightmare even though it makes sense on a phone with only a limited number of buttons. In order to type an “H”, users need to click on the “GHI” button twice. To type an “S”, users click on “PQRS” four times. This is necessary on cell phones because you have a limited number of keys. On a television monitor, you have a LOT of space. Why not make a full-sized keyboard?

After all, this is supposed to be a family-friendly game, but when non-text messagers have to type in a simple nickname, they get confused by the keyboard? Ridiculous! Poor design, through and through.

The entire Nintendo online experience is not a pleasant one, and can be summed up from a snippet from this VGCats comic. Click here to see the rest of it, which is Not Work Safe, not PG, and not Child Friendly. But it is funny!

Surprise enemies!

In gaming, most levels work by a script: the player passes a certain point, then an enemies pops out of a doorway. However, researchers are using eyetracking technology and our understanding of how eye movements and attention interact to display enemies where they are least likely to be noticed. Even though the eyes are focused in a particular location, attention could be elsewhere. As a great deal of attention capture research has shown, an irrelevant object popping into existence can capture attention and the eyes even if there is no visual focus there.

To learn how to predict where a person’s attention was focused, the pair tested subjects’ reactions to an image suddenly appearing on the computer screen under different circumstances.

The experiments showed two things. First, when someone is looking at a fixed point in a complex part of a scene, they find it harder to divert their attention to a new object. Second, the researchers confirmed previous research suggesting that when looking at a moving object, people tend to focus their attention slightly ahead of it.

Those results were used to design a first-person shoot ‘em up game that could choose to make enemies appear in places where they would be either easy or hard to see. The game tracks a player’s eyes to work out areas they are paying most, and least, attention to.

http://technology.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn13264&print=true

Halo 3: The Science of Fun

This story was originally published in Wired last August, but it’s still incredibly relevant to how Human Factors is finding its way everywhere. The author profiles employees at Bungie studios (which produces the wildly popular Halo games for the PC and XBox 360) that explore User Experience. These people examine how players play a game and determine whether their experience is fun or not. How do you define fun?

“Is the game fun?” whispers Pagulayan, a compact Filipino man with a long goatee and architect-chic glasses, as we watch the player in the adjacent room. “Do people enjoy it, do they get a sense of speed and purpose?” To answer these questions, Pagulayan runs a testing lab for Bungie that looks more like a psychological research institute than a game studio. The room we’re monitoring is wired with video cameras that Pagulayan can swivel around to record the player’s expressions or see which buttons they’re pressing on the controller. Every moment of onscreen action is being digitally recorded.Midway through the first level, his test subject stumbles into an area cluttered with boxes, where aliens — chattering little Grunts and howling, towering Brutes — quickly surround her. She’s butchered in about 15 seconds. She keeps plowing back into the same battle but gets killed over and over again.

Continually getting killed in 15 seconds is not fun. “Oh sure,” you may say, “that’s common sense! Obviously that’s not fun!” But how many level designers will realize that? How will they know it takes exactly 15 seconds for the common, inexperienced player? The designer may have considered it especially challenging, not realizing the full implications of putting all those enemies right there.User Experience is more than just applying basic cognitive principles of memory, perception, and decision making to game design. It’s more subjective than that (but that’s not a bad thing!). It’s about bringing in users and videotaping them, asking them questions, and maybe tracking their eyes. It’s like Quality Assurance testing, but instead of looking for software bugs, you’re looking for usability bugs. This is likely easier in linear games like Halo and more challenging in open-ended games like The Sims. But it must be done to ensure that gamers are getting a good experience - essentially, that they are having fun.

Link to the article: http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/15-09/ff_halo?currentPage=all (PDF)

Also, my friend and fellow graduate student, Carl Smith, is very much into the User Experience of games. He has a blog that discusses these issues at his blog, aptly named Evaluating Design.

If at first you don’t succeed, you fail.

I’m a couple of months behind on the phenomenon that is Portal, a short video game produced by Valve Studios. Portal is a first-person puzzle game with an ingenious twist: you have a “gun” that can shoot an entrance and exit portal pretty much anywhere, so you can cross a chasm by shooting portals next to you and on the wall across from you, allowing you to “cross” the chasm by avoiding it all together. The game is surprisingly hard to explain, actually. I’ll just embed a video:

The game is amazingly well done, and it makes me think about the video game and cognition research that is all the rage right now. Multitudes of studies (most famously Green & Bavelier, 2003) have shown that video game experts can process more information and have a larger functional field of view. This is just a side effect of these action video games, though - they weren’t designed to enhance cognition. A game like Portal, however, stretches the mind and requires an entirely new way to solve problems. Portal requires the player to completely re-conceptualize their concept of 3D space. Not many other tasks do that.This game provides a fascinating platform for learning this entirely new concept in a first-person environment. There are times (when learning how to maneuver a submarine, for example) when this type of spatial nonconformity is necessary to successfully complete a task. It would be interesting to examine what new cognitive skills develop as one becomes an expert with a game like this. The field of video game and cognition research is still fairly new, but I anticipate seeing it expand in many new directions, including leveraging innovative new games such as this to examine how we can train our minds and expand the way we think.