Today we had a lecture about interface design. There’s a lot of things you don’t think about when creating an interface, but after we had the lecture I thought it was more or less obvious. I didn’t know that we had a focus area when we are looking at things, however when now being aware of it, you notice it right away. You only see a certain small point of the screen. Also you do see stuff outside, but the peripheral vision is more a way to make you aware that there are changes that you might need to look at. Which is how we need to think when we are creating interfaces.

It’s kinda one of those things that is more or less self explanatory when you hear it, but stuff that you at least I haven’t really thought about and it makes perfect sense. Also there’s no universal answer to how to design an interface, or even how to make a menu system intuitive. For the most part you want as little text as possible and you want to have as easy menus as possible without it destroying the message. That’s both in-game and in the menu system before you start. For instance that you let people have access to the play button without having to press a million steps in order to begin playing.

What also was interesting was the link towards webpages, where you want an easy signup button and easy way for people to get into the webpage without going through a million steps in order to get where they want to be. There’s a lot of smart and simple solutions. One example that was mentioned, was that you could let the player click on a play button, the client downloads, while it does that or while you start the game you can start typing in the name of your character, then an email address and you can get the ball rolling from there.

Very interesting lecture, although something that makes you go “doh”, I should have thought about that and that it is really self explanatory, sometimes you just need the information served in order to realize that of course that’s how you do it.

Serious games

In the serious games department we’ve had a couple of interesting days. We got our feedback on the game that we had in mind, and although I understand the whole thing about needing to have the serious game aspect baked into the mechanics it didn’t do us any favor. We had a game that we thought was really good, and looking at it in retrospect we might have majorly failed, and the tricky part now is that we need to find a way to put a story about Pablo Escobar into the whole board game that we are making without using too many cards to explain about what he did. That even though he was a drug smuggler and a really bad person, he also did some good things for Colombia. He wasn’t a saint, far from it, however the interesting part about him was that he managed to avoid capture for so long and it wasn’t until the U.S. got the Colombian government to allow for extradition to the US that he escaped custody (in a prison he owned).

The whole bribe or be killed aspect is kinda interesting as well. Not that it made him a good guy, far from it, however it would be a mechanic that is interesting in itself. Problem however is that interesting mechanics doesn’t make for a serious game and the whole getting the game to be a serious game about a person that had a huge impact on drug smuggling and getting that into a mechanic and at the same time not having a narrative that is only in a card that you draw is very very difficult. We now have a system that doesn’t really feel like a serious game at all. That said, it is a very blurred line if you abstract something too much and figuring out how you can tell a story about a person without spelling it out directly is the challenge we are currently facing.