Lost Garden: The Princess Rescuing Application
(Visited 5792 times) Game talk
Oct 272008
Dan's STARS model of game atoms
Dan Cook continues to outpace me on game grammar work, now with a delicious set of slides on applying skill atoms to application design. I already mailed it to several folks here in the office.
Lost Garden: The Princess Rescuing Application: Slides.
I just saw that a book was released the other day that teaches people how to use GoogleDocs. The more complexity that you add, the closer you get to something like Word. When we add ‘features’ we hurt learnability and end up turning off users.
Hacks:
- Segmenting features by user skill level,
- Layering less commonly used or expert features so they are out of the way.
- Creating a unifying UI metaphor that lets users understand new tools more easily.
- Elegant information architecture and clean visual design.
13 Responses to “Lost Garden: The Princess Rescuing Application”
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Brilliant work. Love to see someone really apply this knowledge to make a photo editor.
🙂
Rik, classic!
It’s such a common thing where people who know all about something specialized lose site of how hard it is to find what you want to do when you are a newbie. To the experts, it seems logical and easy, to the newbie, it seems like wading in muck.
And on a side note, Raph, what are you hoarding all those closing quotation marks for? Heh
“When we add ‘features’ we hurt learnability and end up turning off users.”
Adding features does add users. No reason everyone has to use every feature. Not everyone PvPs in a PvP\PvE game. Remove the PvP feature and some of the PvP users will leave for example. Replay is in part due to adding a feature by using something that was not used earlier.
PvP isn’t a feature. It’s a paradigm. 😛
PvP isn’t a paradigm. It’s just PvE with a gank factor. 😛
(I keed! I keed!)
I really want a version of Maya that’s as cheap and easy to use as the Spore creature creator. And then I wonder… if all the tools are cheap and easy to learn, if the barriers to creation are so low, do we get empowered creators rising to the top on the strength of their vision? Or do we get huge heaping piles of sludge that the end user has to wade through to find the scattered gems?
So far with Spore, I’m seeing sludge… millions upon millions of uninspired, inappropriate, or just plain bad creatures, and a handful of brilliant creations.
I favor the democratization of art; I think everybody with an interest should have an opportunity to create. But when that occurs, what happens to the artist? Is there any system that will reward talent over networking ability and salemanship?
Sorry if I’m meandering off topic. It just seems that in the case of artistic tools, there are consequences to accessibility that ought to be thought through.
I’m going to have to go with “yes” and “yes, but there can be systems set up to help sort the sludge by those who have waded thru it before you.”
As for the PvE vs PvP+PvE question, I think we have all seen or heard of games where the starting player is cut down by high level players camping the spawn spot. That would be an example of not letting the new player learn the basics before throwing him into a high-level game. Those players often quit, thus not helping your game grow. Most of the current crop of MMOs manage this by keeping the PvP game seperate for a while. Clearly the message here is “When we add ‘features’ we hurt learnability and end up turning off users.”
@Rik:
That’s actually kind of my point, if I were to make a serious point out of my snide comment. Until the player learns the game well enough to defend themselves, the only difference between playing on a PvP server and a PvE server is that you’ll get ganked on the former.
I’m only really speaking about your “traditional” MMOs here, meaning, among other things, that I haven’t played Warhammer Online yet (my computer won’t run it).
I’ve never understood this problem. If you care about it a lot, then you wade through the sludge to find the gems. If you care about it a little, then you get an RSS feed, from the people who do the wading, to hear about the gems. If you don’t care, then it doesn’t matter, does it? Do we really need critics trying to pontificate on the impurity of sludge?
Does it really matter that there are thousands of uninspired novels with trite plots and millions of pieces of fanfiction that make you gag, if you get to read good stuff every now and then? I don’t care that Spore is filled with random penises in various shapes and sizes. Some of it is good, and if I don’t like it, I’m welcome to make my own.
@Michael Chui,
Arguably, this is a clash between two sets of buying habits. Bear with me!
You have people that approach things with the same mindset as visiting a real-world bookstore, browsing the shelves, looking at the spines and covers, knowing full well most of them are junk and the words on their back covers can’t be trusted. To them, the prospect of a shelf holding so many books that it reaches to the horizon makes the entire enterprize overwhelming, impossible, and therefore pointless and frustrating.
You then have people that approach things with the more computerized mindset of searching and filtering, who feel they can first eliminate huge swaths of those books and in so doing carve out a smaller “bookshelf” that can then be satisfyingly browsed. Not only that, they know they don’t have to rely on the back-cover text and are savvy about surveying reviews left by others, again with the same mindset of being able to filter out noise.
The sludge isn’t relevant to the second mindset/approach/habit but is very relevant to the first. And these habits are likely very deeply ingrained by the years of actually shopping in that sort of way.
@Peter S.,
Interesting. What you’re describing in the first case seems to be a classic example of the paradox of choice, or a specific case of information overload. I’m not sure I see how buyer habit, in this case, should lead to a tyranny of the pen, wherein we should keep untrained authors from writing their crappy books.
The sludge is inevitable. And just as inevitable is the person who cares enough that they’ll pull on the rubber boots, strap on a hazmat suit, and jump in feet first, sifting until they pull out something awesome. If you don’t care that much, sit at the edge and catch the gems they find. Or, well, don’t.
In the case of books, the fact that something made it through the slush pile and actually managed to get published means that even the worst pick (usually with the best cover art) is tolerably readable. Compare and contrast with online fanfic — I don’t bother with it, even though I know the best of it is just as good or better than bookstore fare, because the best is so very hard to find, and the worst is so very, very bad.
And from the standpoint of a creator… well, it hurts to pour your heart into making something really good and then have it get lost in the forest. What’s the incentive to excel when the excellent are obscured by those whose primary talents are in marketing and promotion?
I’m seeing more options emerge for tagging and flagging content, and maybe in the long term they’ll float what is substantial over what is really shiny. Maybe.
I’m still in favor of making obtuse applications, especially creative applications like Maya, Photoshop and various flavors of music composition software, more fun and accessible. But… yeah, Michael, I guess I’m in favor of more critics and sorters and guides too, to help navigate the results. Maybe I’m just getting too old and impatient to go sludge-diving.