Forging The Seal: When beating the game is beating the interface

Commentary

Breaking the
drake’s will was the easy part.

The dragon “Emberstrife” faltered before her, his wings flailing in
the air, struggling to support his massive and broken frame. Ichor
fell from his wounds, sizzling into the water below him in a crimson
torrent.

“Use the orb! Control his mind!” yelled her comrade, the hunter.

It was time. She had to do as the mystic instructed: now that the
dragon’s will was broken, she must use the Orb of Draconic Energy to
claim dominion over his mental faculties, and force him to unleash his
breath on the Unforged Seal of Ascension, heating it in the Flames of
the Black Dragonflight and forging it into the seal that would open
the gates to Upper Blackrock Spire. Only then would she be able to
walk the dangerous path to her final enemy.

With a deep breath, she lay the unforged seal in the water and
activated the Orb.

Suddenly, she could see through the drake’s eyes. Before him was
the unforged seal, and at the bottom of his vision lay the key to all
his powers.

“Blast!” she cried. “It’s a toolbar.”

src=”http://www.humanized.com/weblog/emberstrife_toolbar.png”
width=”112″ height=”32″ />

The hunter sighed. “Does it at least have tooltips?”

Scanning over the toolbar’s buttons, her eyes — or rather,
the dragon’s eyes — were immediately drawn to the icon of the
flame. As she focused on it, a small tooltip of text appeared above
the picture, identifying it as an ability called “Flaming Breath”.

That had to be it.

She activated the ability. A cascade of fire erupted from the
dragon’s maw, just missing the unforged seal. She adjusted her aim and
tried again, but the seal remained unaffected by the fire’s searing
heat.

Was his breath defective? Did the seal need more heat? What was
going wrong?

In desperation, she tried again, but to no avail.

“Hurry!” said the hunter. “The tooltips!”

She scanned over the other icons on the toolbar, hoping to find
some other useful ability in the dragon’s skill set. Finally, she
focused on the enigmatic squiggly yellow icon on the far left. A
tooltip materialized to reveal its true purpose: The Flames of the
Black Dragonflight.

Moments later, the seal was forged, and the dragon
lay motionless before them. In time, songs would be sung in their
praise, for it was they who broke the will of the great Emberstrife,
mastered his treacherous toolbar, and forged the Seal of
Ascension.

The above story
wasn’t made up — it’s actually a quest from the game
href=”http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/index.xml”>World of Warcraft.
A quest whose primary challenge lay not in defeating an enemy, but
mastering a graphical user interface in a high-pressure
environment.

When did playing a video game become so much like using a really
bad operating system?

When I was a kid, mastering a game like Super Mario Brothers was
about using the right gameplay strategies and tactics to overcome
obstacles. But these days, it’s increasingly the case that winning a
game is about mastering an inhumane user interface, rather than using
a humane interface to master gameplay. And at least for me, mastering
an inhumane interface isn’t much fun.

Most of yesterday’s games were simple enough that their user
interfaces were easy to make humane: there’s only so many ways one can
design an interface when the only abilities the player has are to move
left, right, jump, and possibly throw a fireball.

A lot of today’s games are still humane. Nintendo, for instance,
continues to create innovative experiences that offer a lot of
gameplay depth while presenting a very simple interface to the player.
The category of
href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casual_gaming”>casual gaming
promotes a similar level of simplicity and accessibility. This is
eminently user-friendly game design.

Yet other games — especially those played on personal
computers and console systems that have controllers with lots of
buttons — are so complex that designers are turning to inhumane
GUI paradigms as a basis for interaction. This means that the
frustrations of using a GUI quickly become part of the challenge of
playing the game itself: such games are rife with unnecessary
href=”http://www.humanized.com/weblog/2006/12/07/is_visual_feedback_enough_why_modes_kill/”>modes,
preferences,
inscrutable
icons, and even third-party usability enhancements. As anyone
who’s played World of Warcraft for more than a few days knows, a core
part of playing the game today lies in researching and determining
which of the hundreds of community-created addons one wants to
install, locating said addons on the internet, installing them, and
dealing with upgrading them when the game is patched and the addons
break. This is all aside from configuring one’s in-game preferences,
assigning custom hot-key combinations, setting up macros, and a number
of other tasks that should be the burden of a user interface designer,
not the player of a video game.

All of this wouldn’t be so bad if the out-of-the-box experience
were humane to begin with, but it’s not. The aforementioned
configuration activities are, in fact, a requirement for taming the
game’s interface: for example, if one wants to be able to scroll
through a field of text without
href=”http://www.humanized.com/weblog/2006/05/12/interface_math_1/”>targeting
tiny buttons, they have to install a third-party addon that allows
them to use their mouse’s scroll-wheel. In essence, just as software
designers often
href=”http://www.humanized.com/weblog/2006/04/09/preferences_hiding_interface_complexity_1/”>misuse
preferences as a way to shunt interface design decisions to the
end-user, providing a mechanism for third-party developers to
programatically customize the user interface allows the lazy designer
to take this philosophy one step further: don’t even worry about
creating a humane interface — just have your customers create
one for you.

Ultimately, many of today’s video games are quickly descending into
the morass of usability that is the modern graphical operating system.
My hope is that the designers of these games learn from the mistakes
of the GUI, rather than reinventing that old wheel and inheriting all
its problems — because overcoming an inhumane user interface
shouldn’t be a requirement for mastering a video game.

Usually Blizzard is known for having excellent interfaces, so it would be surprising to me if World of Warcraft didn’t follow suit (I haven’t played it).

If you can install third-party modules in this one, yeah, that’s the beginning of a nightmare.

Fortunately games will always have interfaces that are ahead of the curve, because that’s their product. They don’t have the freedom to be lazy in that department. If it isn’t usable and seamless and fun, it fails in the market. The same isn’t true of Microsoft Office, for example, as so many businesses have been logistically trapped into using it no matter how tedious and unfun it can get.

Software companies that don’t pay attention to video games are missing out on some very valuable information.

I wonder if these sorts of UI challenges are intended by game designers to be part of the fun. The icons are just an element of the larger puzzle of how to win. I suspect game players express pride in learning the UI like wizards learning ancient incantations in forgotten tongues. The goal of game design is to attract the user to the UI and make the UI challenging. The purpose of playing is to master the UI. A game UI with a lonely ?Win? button is no fun at all.

But should a chef?s kitchen be laid out like a literal labyrinth? I?m skeptical of the idea that productivity applications can learn much from games, because apps have the opposite design goal. The purpose of an app is to get an external task accomplished, not to master a UI. The app?s UI shouldn?t attract the user but rather disappear, leaving the task to fill the user?s awareness. UI challenges and triumphs are no fun at all. The task is enough of a challenge –and it can be fun too, to the degree the UI _helps_ with the challenges, not adds to them.

And personally, that’s why I hated all FPSs before Doom and up until Halo.

Not even the games that seemed very fun for me were worth mastering all the damn controls.

Sigh… And my little brother still wonders why I like old games far more than today’s.

I completely agree. Other examples: most of the first Resident Evils. (Analog-left or -right means rotate?!?!)

Lack of familiarity with controls is why I dislike FPSs on consoles.

I think Wario Ware: Smooth Moves is the worst culprit for making the entire point of the game figuring out the controls. It is, however, very fun.

I think for game interfaces context pie menus are often best. The buttons are close to the cursor and can easily be enabled/dissabled according to whether they make sense without causing too much confusion.

If you’re going to pick on a game, at least pick on a game that has a truly terrible UI. The complexity of the UI is due to the complexity of the domain. You can argue that the game is over-complex but I’d argue that’s outside of the scope of the quality of the UI.

Given:
* The game provides dozens of abilities for each of the 9 playable classes.

* The relative importance of these abilities varies varies depending on the environment, opponent, character specialization, player preference, party composition, character equipment, and transient game mechanic modifiers.

* Most abilities must be used with split-second timing in order to be effective.

* Most players are expert users, having logged at least 200 hours on a single character by the time they get to the situation brought up in this article.

* To keep things interesting game designers break the rules. The emberstrife example in the article is an example of this.

* You can’t expect specialized hardware in the installed base.

* UI features can’t trivialize the challenges imposed by the game.

How would you go about designing the interface?

Blizzard’s UI is designed to satisfy the most common needs of the average player. This disappoints the power users, so much of the interface modification/macro work is exploratory in nature and geared towards power users. Blizz regularly pulls in popular mods for inclusion into the default client.

I won’t argue that Blizzard does a perfect job. There are some bizarre interface decisions and quite a few bugs — the toolbar in the example wouldn’t show up if you tried to do it today, there’s a bug in current versions of the client that prevents that bar from showing up consistently.

I will say, however, that the design decisions made by Blizz are reasonable given the constraints and the extension mechanisms provide an outlet for areas they don’t address. It’s easy to point at things and criticize, but I’m struggling to come up with a better system given the constraints.

Karl G: Just because a video game is complicated doesn’t give it an excuse for having a bad user interface; a parallel argument to your own could be made for Microsoft Office, claiming that it’s okay for an interface to be inhumane so long as it has powerful functionality.

While I certainly think that World of Warcraft has an interface that is far better than its competition, and I do empathize with some of the challenges they face, I still think there’s a lot of room for improvement in their UI, and I personally disagree with their apparent prioritization of adding content over making the interface more humane; for example, there’s still no built-in mouse-wheel support on chat windows, and it wasn’t until three months after the game was released that more than one action-bar could be displayed on the screen at a time–a feature that should have been in the product at launch, as the game is very frustrating to play without it. Even setting aside my belief that distinguishing between beginners and experts is a mistake, these aren’t features for “power users” by any stretch of the imagination.

The design challenges WoW designers face are very different from the design challenges the Office team faces. While both teams struggle with presenting a large number of potential actions, there is no penalty in Office for changing the border style a half second too late.

The discoverable way to present options is Search. Search is great, it’s the house that HCI bulit and generally the favored mechanism for almost any design problem you can come up with. The entire WIMP paradigm is driven by the Think->Search->Locate->Activate cycle that goes into every mouse click. Most of what makes Enso discoverable is the list of possible completions as the user types. The one problem with Search is that it’s slow. Enter the other pillar of interface design: Memorization. Memorization is fast but it requires training, so it’s usually relegated to ‘expert user’ situations like keyboard shortcuts, the command line, and macro triggers. I’m interested in interaction patterns where search reinforces memorization. Examples: transient/contextual command lines (of which Enso is one) and Pie Menus.

Given the real time constraints on the inputs in WoW, the obvious solution is a memorization based input scheme. I can come up with search based schemes involving pre-queued search commands –essentially a macro recorder and playback though triggered differently — but that only works when situations can be predicted beforehand. That’s not always possible in WoW — it’d be rather useless in pvp, for example.

Regardless of what they could have done, Blizz did build a fairly pure memorization-based interface. The icons are memorization, the keybinds are memorization, the on screen button locations are memorization. To Blizz’s credit, they do make concessions to learnability. New abilities are introduced fairly slowly so that the user can organize and acclimate themselves to its use and there are reinforcements like the keystroke printed on the button and the button highlighting when the keystroke is pressed. The icons are fairly consistent both in color and use. I know, for example, generally what the icons pictured to: fire ability (combustion for me ;]), fire spell, thunderclap, mortal strike.

I can argue that Blizz took the easy way out by providing a ‘build your own memorization interface’ kit instead of biting the bullet and building a more organized interface themselves. In particular, the slow introduction of abilities means that action bars tend to get filled according to when an ability is introduced rather than how important the ability is. In particular, I’ve noticed in screenshots that later-introduced important abilities tend to be placed in awkward keyboard/screen positions because earlier-introduced but less-important abilities already occupy the prime real estate. I know enough about the game to know when to leave holes in my action bars, but many people don’t. Why is this important? You hit the buttons hundreds of thousands of times rather than on occasion.

I can argue that the targeting mechanism is deeply flawed. I’ve seen videos of expert players showing off that botch targeting. I’ve seen the spectators in the Rend event in UBRS pulled because someone tab-targeted the wrong mob. I’ve managed to repeatedly heal myself instead of the tank because I have auto-self cast turned on and had the boss targeted (since fixed by macros). The currently favored setup for raid healers is to set up a grid of buttons representing the raid members’ health and play whack-a-mole (which IS what they call it) by clicking the player’s button to cast a heal instead of the normal target then hit the heal key. Whack-a-mole is faster. I don’t have a good solution to this problem. I can solve the problem by changing the mechanics of the game. I can solve it by making the selection process text based/tree based, but those would probably be rejected for killing the game atmosphere.

I can come up with more problems — simply look at the addon sites, addons indicate itchest to scratch — but those are two that affect 90% of the interactions in the game. Could there be a better solution? Sure, but Blizzard’s design tradeoffs are reasonable and in my opinion are executed fairly well. It’s quite possible to play the vast majority of the game with no addons at all. I run with very few addons — most of mine are of the meter/measurement type because I enjoy theorycraft — and I get along fine.

My read on your argument, however, is essentially that memorization is not Humane. You’ve said several times that the interface is bad and brought up examples that strike me as nit picking**. The games you cite as examples of good interface design are simple because the domain is simple. This doesn’t make them any less fun, though it does usually mean that people usually don’t play them hours per day for years on end.

I’m curious to find out exactly what you find to be bad about WoW’s interface. I have trouble interpreting “Humane” versus “non-Humane” because “Humane” seems to be “however I think it should work” and I don’t always agree with you gents. Is it the memorization? The lack of conformity to your expectations? Bugs and inconsistencies? Simply too many things going on? Further, can you sketch out what can be done to make it less bad?

I started reading this article in hopes of getting opinions on how to explore interaction problems in this domain and expand my personal design toolkit. I’m just trying to get my money’s worth. ;]

** If we continue the WoW to Word metaphor, mouse scrolling would be the equivalent to the three letter status lights at the bottom of the window, awkward control over pets would be that the page header/footer controls, and the fixed-but-still-not-discoverable additional action bars would be like mentioning the laughable “How would you like your help indexed” wizard from the Win95 era.

Actually, the toolbar example given pops up in many quests, so this is a pattern, not just a single mistake. And it absolutely sucks.

If they want to give you other and/or additional actions to perform - which I don’t think is a bad idea in itself - they should at least go out of their way and display your new options prominently and clearly.

The toolbar in question is a tiny little thing that appears in a busy part of the screen. Staying alive and finding the right buttons to press is a nightmare.

There’s a lot wrong with the WoW design, I think - even though it’s the one of the best game designs I’ve seen. And that does not just include the UI, but other parts of the whole game experience that have little or nothing to do with the game mechanics.

I ranted about that (at length, be warned) here, in case anyone is interested: http://www.unwesen.de/articles/wow_design_improvements_introduction

I was a heavy game player for many years. While designing my own game, I realized what every video game has in common with every other game.

Video games are, at their core, a math problem. Sometimes it is a complicated math problem, often it is a simple one. World of Warcraft is a fairly simple one. It is made more interesting in that you are simultaneously solving it both with and against the other players, but it is still fundamentally a math problem.

Because most people find pure math problems unappealing, game designers intentionally wrap this math problem in the worst possible user interface that will not disgust the users and drive them away instantly.

If the interface makes it too difficult to solve (or even understand) the math problem, people will just get frustrated and leave. If the interface makes the math problem very obvious, and it is clear how to solve it, then people just solve the game and move on. All of the interest in video games lies in making the interface clumsy, cumbersome, and unwieldy; yet still giving the player the idea that he/she is just about to undersand or master it.

I quit playing (other than with my kids or with friends) shortly after making this realization.

Karl G: I don’t disagree with what you’re saying about memorization. As you say, one of the things that really distinguishes the UI of WoW from the UI of Office is the fact that many decisions are split-second ones, so, for instance, it’s clearly infeasible to hold down caps lock and type “attack” or “heroic strike” every time one needs to do it.

However, this shouldn’t be the case for all actions that one needs to perform, as not all actions are time-sensitive, and Blizzard’s default hotkey bindings are both ergonomically and cognetically unsound in this regard. For instance, the left hand is always placed over the “WASD” keys, yet the slots for the single default action-bar that’s displayed on-screen are bound to the top row of the keyboard–keys “1″ thru “=”, where anything past the first half is extremely difficult to press due to the fact that one’s left hand is on the keyboard and one’s right hand is on the mouse. It took me quite a lot of playing to realize that it was better to map my actions to the keys immediately surrounding “WASD”, which were by default set to completely time-insensitive actions such as “sit/stand toggle”, “sheathe/draw weapon toggle” (which is purely a visual effect that has nothing to do with combat), “honor pane”, and the like. It’s one thing to require memorization for certain time-sensitive actions, but it’s another to provide the end-user with a bad interface that they need to reconfigure to make more humane and ergonomically sound. It’s actually due to all this customization that I don’t create alternate characters to play: playing two characters in WoW means manually configuring and maintaining two interfaces, which is terrifying.

The interface for interface customization isn’t particularly friendly, either: shortcut keys for an actionbar slot are displayed on its icon, for instance, yet the font is so large that the hotkey text disappears into an ellipsis if the text is longer than 3 or 4 characters (so if your hotkey for an action is “CTRL-X”, it shows up as “CTR…” on the icon). The interface for assigning hotkeys is quite cumbersome, too: if I want to assign a hotkey to my rogue’s “Stealth” ability as “CTRL-S”, since the mnemonic would help me remember it a lot better than its default of “CTRL-F1″, I have to go to a keybindings menu, search through the enormous list of keybindings, figure out exactly what my stealth button is registered as (this turns out to be “Special Action Button 1″), and remap it to “CTRL-S”. It’d be more humane to be able to, say, right-click on the icon on my screen and select an “assign hotkey” option from a pull-down menu. But even this is an incremental improvement, and a far better solution would be for Blizzard to provide default hotkey bindings that are as humane as possible, while still allowing them to be usable in time-sensitive situations. Doing otherwise is like an application developer assigning completely arbitrary shortcut keys for their pull-down menu commands and then providing a customization interface for the user to reconfigure them to bindings that make some amount of sense. Some may actually consider this to be part of gameplay; if it is, then it’s just really bad game design.

I’d also argue that all of this isn’t nitpicking, as the vast majority of my frustrations with the game have been due to UI issues: the dramatization at the beginning of my post was actually much more prolonged than the story suggests, and essentially ruined a night of gaming for me.

Decent solutions to a lot of these problems aren’t terribly difficult: have the full shortcut key for a button be displayed over its icon or on its tooltip, for instance, or make it possible for someone to easily use the chat system while they’re browsing the auction house or writing a letter to someone. I’d much rather see solutions to these issues–ones that millions of players, from newcomers to veterans, deal with daily–than yet another content pack.

Blizzard interfaces are good? In starcraft, the interface takes up 1/3 of 1024×768. They didn’t make any pie menu for fast mouse commands, or any analogous key array for fast mouse commands, even tho there 3×3 command box would map easily to the numpad. You cannot rally point to a mineral or gas location for immediate harvesting for slightly less micromanagement. You cannot zoom in or out. There is no way to pan by holding down the mouse button. You can only select 12 units at a time. Using only a touch screen to play it is annoying on the terran race because the buildings will liftoff when you attempt to build an add-on. There are no mouse gestures.

It’s still a fun game, it’s a pity SC2 doesn’t seem much better.

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I completely agree that the default keybindings are a mess. This is much more significant than arbitrary menu accelerators because it affects everybody who plays. I blame the default bindings for the prevalence of clickers.

As for multiple characters, I had to completely redo my bindings, rebasing them on EDSF for movement/strafing and using the mouse to turn. That opens up an additional 5 keys around the movement keys. I also have caps bound to ctrl, so my alternate key is ctrl rather than shift. I also bind the bars on the right to the numeric keypad/ctrl-keypad. The keybinding settings carry over between characters, so at least I don’t have to do it again.

From there, playing multiple characters is all about putting similar abilities from the different characters in similar locations. E.G. ‘a’ is the instant-use key: fireblast on mage, arcane shot on hunter, moonfire on druid, etc. It’s a lot of work to set up and requires some knowledge of both game mechanics and ergonomics. It also happens to correspond to my preferences, which is what would make it harder to generalize. Blizz really should have done something similar at release rather than making the player do it. It is clear to me that the interface really is designed for players up to level 30 or so and the assumptions it makes works against higher level players. I do feel sorry for the people who don’t change the defaults.

That being said, how do they fix it? I can’t see them forcing a change of the defaults, though that probably is the best option. Is this just a lesson to future MMO designers?

I agree that all of the changes you’ve suggested would be beneficial. I don’t agree that the sum makes the interface terrible. I’d classify it as adequate with the ability to improve. I have quit playing games due to the terrible interfaces but my main beef with WoW is the time input and not the interface.

Thanks for making the post as well; got me thinking a bit.

IT IS A HARDWARE PROBLEM FIRST.

Interface control is a hardware problem first, followed by software design.

The problem with computer games and computer interfaces is using the stand-alone keyboard and mouse for control. Old technology.

When you use an advanced integrated keyboard/mouse, interface problems go away. You have total control of the interface.

With an advanced keyboard, you have the capability as if you have two hands on the keyboard and a third hand on the mouse.

An advanced keyboard gives the user the ability to point, click, type, or scroll in any order simultaneously and instantly with the fingers never leaving the home row.

I had developed and use advanced keyboards everyday that have the above capabilities.

I can work across four 19” screen so far at will. I just point, click, type, or scroll.

My main application for my keyboards are for financial traders and the military, where microseconds count, that is, mission critical situations.

Working on AutoCad or gVim are a very easy.

I am now working on an advanced interface that integrates gui and cli into one interface that includes search on the command line that is fully customizable by the user. This is the interface of the future.

I hope to present my research and developments at an HCI or ACM conference next year for requirements for my PhD in advanced input, interface, and interaction technology.

I have looked at Aza’s video and found Enso has some interesting features, but the caps-lock change is a problem for easy use. I find mode switching with the caps-lock key an unnecessary step/action.

With my advanced keyboard you plug it in and use it.

from the “father of the perfect keyboard”

%-) genuinely interested by this website