Wednesday
Aug132008
Ignoring the Gaming Elephant in the Room
Wednesday, August 13, 2008 at 11:58AM 
Yes! People play games. Computer+Video Games. Why aren't they studied more in 'serious' interaction design? The menu systems, sound and graphics and responsiveness of good games are often a world above anything on a desktop.
Microsoft's Shane Morris has a nice short post on Gamer-influenced Design.
If you're not a 'gamer', and I'm certainly not, then like me you'll surely find some seriously good insight in the Play Value podcast series. Each show is personal, quick, well-produced and well researched. Skip some TV and watch this.
Games like the Nintendo Wii are finally pushing alternate controllers and contexts, whereas games like Grand Theft Audio IV are pushing consumer graphics and simulation technologies harder and harder.
I've recently started to seriously research (ie play) games with the intent to find fresh, brilliant UI designs and would love to hear from you if you have ideas.
tagged Game, gaming in Announcements
Game, gaming in Announcements
Reader Comments (2)
I've been trying to convince people (PM, Dev, etc) for years that we should be paying very close attention to gaming's UX paradigms. I don't understand why many people can't see that games are training the application users of tomorrow, and that we need to understand their expectations regarding user assistance. For example, my 12-yr-old son took a game design class, and at the show-and-tell session at the end, the kids unanimously selected the kid-created game with zero affordances (zero!) as their favorite. This can tell us a lot about the importance of affordances to application users of the future.
I'm looking forward to following the links above. I'll sign up to follow you on Twitter and I hope you'll tweet when you want to share info about gaming-inspired UX.
Martha Stevens
I was just now googling around about this when I discovered your post. I'm just visiting to say that I very much enjoyed reading this post, it is very clear and well written. Are you thinking of posting more about this? It seems like there is more material here for later posts.