I work in the game industry as a technical artist. I’m somewhere between a designer and a “real” artist, and my college degree (Bachelor’s of the Fine Arts) was in computer animation, where I specialized in animation and rigging. I’m sort of a “left and right brain” artist, and I wind up doing a lot of different things in any given production.
In college, I used Autodesk’s Maya for 3D work. It’s a solid, if expensive, program that is used professionally in the film and TV industries. My first job in games used it, too… but now I work at a smaller studio that uses 3DS Max. It’s also a solid, if expensive, program, but three years of using it, and I’m still running into mental and physical tics where I want to use Maya workflow or keyboard/mouse functions that have no parallel in Max or are handled differently.
One particularly egregious dysfunctional keyboard shortcut in Max is the almost omnipresent CTRL-S. In almost every single Windows program that’s the shortcut for “Save”. That’s even true in Max… unless you’re editing UV layouts, which is pretty common in my work. Then, CTRL-S toggles the “Snap” setting. This tripped me up more than once, as I thought I was saving a file, only to find that I was turning Snap on, which messed up what I was doing with the UVs. I’ve also lost work when I thought I saved a file before walking away from my machine, only to have it crash while I was away. My reflexive CTRL-S didn’t save the file, so I was out an hour or so of work.
I consider this to be Bad Design. When user expectations are based on muscle memory and mental habits, there need to be extremely good reasons for going against that grain. That’s not to say that changing things up is always a bad thing, just that it needs to be carefully done and actually make a user’s experience better, not worse.
We see this in game design, too, from the FPS glut to MMOs. So many games look very similar and play very similarly that players come to expect that a new game that fits the mold will offer a similar user experience. This can run as shallow as pressing the same button to advance dialogue trees (a problem between SNES and Playstation era RPGs, where “cancel” was “accept” on the other controller and vice versa) to camera control (games really should let users flip the X and Y axis controls) to actual moment-to-moment gameplay.
I have an XBox game called PURE, an offroad ATV racing/stunt game made for the SSX mentality. It’s full of crazy stunts and absurd tracks, but it’s a lot of fun to play. My wife and I play SSX3 on occasion on our PS2, and we love playing together. PURE doesn’t offer a single-screen multiplayer game, which is a bit annoying, but much more annoying on a subconscious level is that the default controller setup asks the player to hold down the right trigger button to make the silly vehicle move. This winds up making sense as the face buttons (A, B, X, Y) are used for stunts, but going from SSX3, which uses the shoulder button (more or less the same thing as the XBox trigger) for a turbo boost which must be used carefully to the trigger that is almost constantly held is a bit of a jarring transition.
This has nothing to do with how the game itself plays or looks, except inasmuch as those taint player expectations. It’s not a game design issue, it’s a User Interface issue. Yes, that’s part of the overarching “game production” pipeline, but it’s not a function of the core game design (the game mechanics). Good UI design is crucial to making a good game playable, but it’s not something you can just toss a game designer or artist at and hope it works. It requires a bit more thought and study. That not to say that a designer or artist (or programmer) is incapable of good UI design, just that it’s a specialty in itself that needs attention.
Similarly, the Star Trek Online that I’ve been playing lately plays a lot like World of Warcraft in some crucial ways. Holding both left and right mouse buttons down makes a character jog in the direction you’re aiming the camera. Right button dragging moves the camera, left clicking selects targets, right clicking tells your character to attack the target, combat abilities are in a clickable hotbar that can also be activated with the numerical keys on the keyboard. At the same time, ALT-Z doesn’t turn off the UI visual elements that would allow a nice clean screenshot. It’s just a stupid little keyboard shortcut, but I find it annoying every time I want to take a screenshot… and that’s pretty often. STO is a pretty game. Apparently, the UI is automatically turned off for screenshots… but what then if I *want* the UI in the shot? There’s a command for it, but the default function is different from what I’m used to. I’m also not given any sort of feedback to know if hitting the Print Screen button actually takes a screenshot like it does in WoW. That’s not to say that WoW is perfect, just that there’s a difference.
That’s not a problem by any means, it’s just a little annoyance. Those tend to add up, though, even if they are subconscious. Players might find that they aren’t liking a game any more, not because the game itself isn’t good, but because they keep fighting their own reflexes and assumptions about how it’s supposed to work, and that tension is a constant low-level irritation. Something like Star Wars The Old Republic or Guild Wars 2 might find itself in a bad position between wanting to innovate and being stuck with gamers in a mental rut. (That rut may not even be a bad place, for that matter… even if it might hold back the potential of the genre.)
Another example is the vestigial jumping of Wizard 101, which has absolutely no function. It’s purely cosmetic… but because players have come to expect that the space bar makes your character jump in a PC game, by gum, it makes your wizard jump in Wizard 101. As I noted in my original article on it, I think that’s a smart business move, even if it doesn’t make sense within the game itself.
This can also run deeper and run into game design territory. STO has a vague (thankfully not strict) combat trinity of tank/healer/damage dealer with a few tricks thrown in, like WoW or any of a dozen other MMOs. That’s a little odd, but hey, it works for what players are used to, so it makes sense to use it. It doesn’t make a lot of sense for the game itself, and almost certainly not for the Star Trek IP, but it makes sense to gamers who might be coming to the game, so it’s a smart move. SWTOR will almost certainly be a “reskin” of WoW with many of the same core mechanics and UI. That’s smart business, even if it isn’t actually anything innovative or even evolutionary. Players don’t want to relearn how to play a game that they are expecting to play like their old favorite.
I’ve also done a bit of web design here and there, and I try to work within the W3 standards. That’s all well and good for practice, but in reality, Firefox, Opera, Chrome and that idiotic Internet Explorer all handle HTML, CSS and even the supposedly-universal Javascript differently. Standards are only useful if they are actually used, and it’s a mess when not only individuals ignore them but also the browsers. Each browser has its strengths and weaknesses, and can be perfectly usable in itself, but when they don’t cooperate on basic usability, it causes users trouble. Standards are incredibly important to communication in all sorts of venues.
By the way, Firefox, why in the world did you move the “home” button to the other side of the address bar? It’s one thing for different programs to change UI, it’s more troubling when a given program changes things between versions. Don’t get me started on Photoshop and its spawn, or the barely-incremental changes we see in other big software packages in an effort to sell a new box each year, not only adding to the cost (since previous versions no longer get sold or supported) but also decreasing usability. That’s not really a good pairing.
But so what? Why does any of this matter?
Well, if your audience is likely to have developed expectations, whether mental habits or actual muscle memory, you need to be aware of that and design your product accordingly. Automobile designers don’t arbitrarily switch the accelerator and brake pedals in an effort to differentiate their cars from the other guys. DVORAK keyboards still aren’t the dominant model. Single-button mice are still a dumb idea for Mac users who may be using PCs during the day. Americans still don’t use the metric system and we drive on the wrong side of the road.
Maybe the alternates are better for those who don’t have expectations, but how often is that truly the case? Designers don’t always have to cater to expectations, but flaunting them in ignorance or spite is a bad way to do business. And perhaps sadly, games are still business. Big business. We need to understand our customers. We still might have the courage or bullheadedness to do things our way instead of the “standard” way, but we shouldn’t do it from a position of ignorance.
Wise words. Innovation is rather easy, but innovation that does not clash with user expectations is rather hard. I still remember when Microsoft tried to push the whole single-click design on us users somewhere in the Win 95/98 era. It might not even be a bad idea in a vacuum, but users were just so used to double-clicks that this function has dropped back down into the depths of the windows configuration. Hell, I still know a lot of people who double click links and other active items in their web-browsers.
Similarly, the ESDF navigation scheme is simply superior to WASD if you need to access many hotkeys, but it is really hard to switch to it once you are used to WASD.
And people scoff when I point out that EVE Online uses the scroll wheel to zoom in a fashion inverted from every other application I use. It isn’t a big deal, but there is always that transition time where I have to do it wrong a few times before I get used to it again.
Indeed, Wilhelm, and honestly, *not* fixing that is just lazy in my book. I’m no coder, but it seems to me that a simple function like that or the camera axis change should be just a simple math toggle. We’re not talking about coding new shaders or 3D matrix math. Maybe that means a little UI work to give players control of the setting, but it’s the little things like that that really can make or break a user’s experience.
Scrusi, I had forgotten the single click thing. I hated that… must have blocked it out of my memory. You just don’t change things like that that have been deeply ingrained, not without some significant trouble.
While I agree that it’s risky business to go diametrically against customer expectations, and unnecessary in some cases (for example UI), I still wonder if it’s really as one-sided a deal, Tesh. Sure, your customer might not like or know it at first – but if it’s actually a good thing, the liking will come with the knowing. ‘convincing’ can work; telling people what they should like and do, works. just look at what the media are doing everyday worldwide and with new products too. they tell people how awesome they are and how they really need to have them, they run commercials, they do promotions. PR is a powerful tool to market the new and breach the wall of skepticism. I think developers and producers control consumer habits a lot more than the other way around, or at least as much.
So, maybe MMO developers have simply not used the right channels yet in order to campaign for different games. in fact, I don’t remember much commercials going on for any MMO; WoW is the one and only game I ever saw marketed in TV and only after it was already halfway into WoTLK:
Oh, you can certainly teach old dogs new tricks, it just takes effort, and you really should have a compelling reason to do so. Otherwise, you just make the dog mad, and he might just leave. It’s OK to challenge the orthodoxy, but it’s dumb to do so from a position of ignorance or hubris.
…there’s certainly a place for PR, too. I could write whole articles about that. Such is a different layer of the user experience, though, and not quite what I was writing about this time. Still, managing expectations can indeed be very useful.
I consider this to be Bad Design. When user expectations are based on muscle memory and mental habits, there need to be extremely good reasons for going against that grain. That’s not to say that changing things up is always a bad thing, just that it needs to be carefully done and actually make a user’s experience better, not worse.
This is a slippery slope – what were talking about here are trained expectations becoming a base line for developing ‘a better experience’ to a subjective viewpoint.
This really is where gamer cultural baggage starts to drag everything down. We should be designing for fun, shouldn’t we (well, particular types of fun, but w/e)? But because previous games taught someone to play in a particular way, now we have to fit in this baggage when we design?
I actually consider this a ‘damaged’ audience. One who can’t simply enjoy – they have had a particular condition so trained into them they…have lost the capacity to simply enjoy things as a blank slate human. I think that even applies to myself, to some extent, though I like to think I can eventually recognise where I’m doing this and potentially disolve the damage.
So I don’t think one should value the audiences subjective, trained expectations at all. Certainly not using it as a compass towards ‘a better experience’.
However, in practical terms, it depends on what you want to do as a designer. I mean it’s very obvious with language – if you want to get to a french audience, you’d need to use french in the game (or have no language at all). The cultural conditioning isn’t some compass towards a better expeirence, but a designer might find that following a cultural condition doesn’t negate his goal and even expediates him getting to it. But if the cultural condition does get in the way of the goal, no, that cultural condition does not trump because it somehow leads to a better experience. Not in how I design, anway.
@Callan S.
“blank slate human … So I don’t think one should value the audiences subjective, trained expectations at all. Certainly not using it as a compass towards ‘a better experience’.”
Good luck ever finding a blank slate human. We’re all going to have cultural norms, whether from parents, friends, or the other game we played before this. Imagine a small thing, like the icon used when clicking links, a hand with the index finger extended. Why not the middle or ring fingers? All of them can point and maybe using a different finger would allow a better pointer, but it wouldn’t make much sense, in the cultural context, to start using the extended middle finger for clicking links.
I’ve been back into SWG recently with the free time that Sony gave my account after they got pwned and the impending closure of the game. I played it from beta 3 through to just after the NGE destroyed the game I loved. Going back has been interesting because it doesn’t use a lot of the conventions that I am used to in modern MMOs. If I press both mouse buttons nothing happens, my character just stands there and I had to turn an option ON to allow strafing using the mouse and the A/D keys. The funny thing is, back in 2003 the SWG controls were the most natural thing in the world for me.
“It’s OK to challenge the orthodoxy, but it’s dumb to do so from a position of ignorance or hubris.”
/sign
To call something ignorance or hubris is to be speaking from an orthodoxy.
Klepsacovic, I dunno, I think blank slates are being born all the time. Children are often alot more open minded than adults. And even in adults, it’s a matter of finding the child…
Of course you can have it too far one way or the other way, but the examples you gave are good ones, and your criticism is fair.
What’s frustrating for me is that an article like this has to be written in this day and age.
Who is making these odd control choices? Game developers that are not even playing the games in the same genre they’re developing in?
Domarius, I do think that with these big megabudget games, and MMOs tend to be big budget, we wind up running into, well… corporatocracy. Those making decisions may well not really understand the games they are in charge of. I’ve seen it in my day working with some big corps, and it’s always frustrating as a dev, so it doesn’t surprise me that we see it as players.
Thanks for chiming in by the way.
You’re welcome. I worked for 4 years at http://www.halfbrick.com, and while we had our experiences with publishers forcing a particular decision, it was always along the lines of some overarching feature, such as “must include downloadable content”. Never once were they micromanaging to the point where they’d request an in-game action be a particular button. That’s why I don’t understand how other developers can do such things.
Development programs like 3DS I’m honestly not surprised to see that stuff creep in, being so big they lose focus and things slip by, plus they tend not to be as “user” focused as video games are. (CTRL-S not saving when the UV window is open is what brought me here – although mine doesn’t work either way, even though it’s bound… I’ve resorted to the menu…)
3DS Max really does seem to be a mishmash of separate modules that just sort of… congealed together. I’d say that’s the Autodesk way, but Maya doesn’t have nearly the same amount of trouble. It’s baffling.
Ohhh, and micromanaging drives me nuts.
Especially from the publishers. Can’t really fight it, but it’s frustrating.
Did you happen to work on Raskulls?
YES! I animated every single cut scene in single player mode
Of course the story itself was a combination of all our efforts, and the lead artist invented the art style, I just used it. Our iPhone game, fruit ninja (which I didn’t personally work on) is so famous it’s like every 2nd person I talk to has played it or at least knows about it. But I never hear anything about Raskulls – even though I think it’s an awesome party game. All Raskulls testing in the office was LOUD, no matter who we got into testing.
Well Maya was only bought by Autodesk in 2005 so assuming they just kept building on these products, that would go a long way to explaining the difference…
Sweet! We like Raskulls. The animations turned out great, by the way.
I got it with the whole “summer of games” promotion with the game I worked on, the World of Keflings and then there’s that IloMilo game, too that’s good fun. It’s fun to see the cross-pollination, too.
It’s hard for me to play Raskulls multiplayer, though. The kids don’t like losing, and my wife gets frustrated, too. I have too much experience gaming for them to catch up any time soon.
Hopefully the cutesy look won’t turn a couple of your mates off from joining in
Yeah it was a mad dash to release it for Summer of Games but we got a lot of good exposure as a result.
I only own a PS3 and not a 360 so I don’t even own my own game
much less Keflings. That looks like a great co-op strategy game… and the musical cannon bit looks impressive… what was your role in it?
I built most of the buildings in the World of Keflings, and had a hand in several other bits of art. I mostly just do whatever needs doing, working in 3DS Max and Photoshop all day.
The Keflings games are good fun. Not much strategy, exactly, as there’s no conflict, but it’s fun with several players.