There's a lesson I learned from a game
that could have been very good. It was called Legend
of Faerghail. Built along the lines of The
Bard's Tale series, it had, as I remember, a good plot, good
mechanics, and a reasonable degree of balance and variety. All in
all, it should have been a fun game.
However, there was a decision made
involving about twenty pixels that killed it.
In games of this style, most of the
screen is taken up by informational displays. Lists of party
members, active spells, a box for textual descriptions of areas,
events and conversations. The remaining quarter to third of the
screen is taken up by a first-person view of the world in which the
player's party is traveling.
Both the Wizardry
and Ultima
series featured this view, and Bard's
Tale capitalized on it quite well. But there was a subtle change
when Legend
of Faerghail picked it up. In that first-person view in the
first three series, there was a bit of peripheral vision.
Specifically, one could see the last few pixels of the walls on
either side when in a dungeon. It didn't seem like much information
until I tried playing Faerghail, which eliminated this peripheral
vision.
Trying to map a dungeon became
virtually impossible. Random monster encounters were generated
randomly, and appeared based on a likelihood per keyclick (say,
turning one's facing to the left by 90 degrees). The probability was
high enough that in difficult dungeons, one was encountering monsters
every three to five clicks.
After combat, the first thing the
player would need to do was orient themselves, because mapping
absolutely requires knowing which direction you are facing. Given
the way things were set up, you were very likely to encounter another
fight before you had completed the orientation process. Resulting in
a game-breaking frustration, as much of it was oriented on exploring
and completing some pretty good-sized dungeons.
So what was the lesson here?
Interface. This was an otherwise good game killed by a seemingly
minor decision in the design of the manner in which the player
interacted with the game.
And I've seen it in software, hardware
and general design over and over again since.
The iPod®
didn't get popular because it let you play music easily anywhere you
wanted to, it got popular because the interface was sufficiently
intuitive for a sufficiently large number of people to find it
comfortable right off the bat.
Very often, an otherwise useful device
or system will fail not because it doesn't do what is needed, but
because a less effective system is easier to use. This is the basic
struggle that Linux
faces, in its attempt to bridge the worlds of the user-friendly and
the user-supportive.
And it's an important struggle. For a
long time, the question was one of form over function. In other
words, which was more important. Like many other A versus B
arguments, the actual answer is one somewhere on a spectrum between
the two named endpoints. If it doesn't do anything, then it really
doesn't matter how pretty or easy-to-use it is (Art communicates, so
it does do something, smartass). If it does something, but is
impossible to use, what value could it have?
Finding that balance point, the point
somewhere between the uselessly beautiful and the incomprehensibly
effective, is the secret of good design, good craft, and the creation
of successful systems of every kind.
Remember that the next time you're
designing something. And read Steve Krug's Don't
Make Me Think for an
examination of this basic idea in terms of web design (it's an
excellent book).
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