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Greetings again members of the great pseudo society of the net.
I was wondering the other day as I was clawing my way through the EVE online trial that somehow, for all it's progressiveness, there is one area of design that online games are simply stuck in the stone age.
User. Interface. Design. I say that with all the periods to try and underscore how important it is, and it is important. It's probably one of something like three thrings that you simply have to get right, and if you don't you have not only done it wrong, but people will not play your game because you got it wrong.
Obviously there is mor than a simple right and wrong in this field, as there are certainly degrees of good interface design, but there are, at least as far as I can tell, two ways in which to be exactly wrong. Both of these deal not with the actual layout of the interface, but rather with the information that the interface presents the user.
The first way to truly fail at interface design is a scarcity of information in the interface. It is simply the nature of any complex game that certain information is required to play it effectively. Imagine playing a game of chess without knowing precisely where your opponents pieces were. This is the same sort of situation that you run into if you are playing a game and certain necessary pieces of information are denied to you.
Even in games where precise information is not provided to you there is almost always some indication of your status or situation through some method. It doesn't matter what kind of game you are playing, in order to play any sort of game there simply has to be some sort of representation of the players situation available to them.
The other cardianl sin of interface design is the more common one. Generally speaking there are very few games out there that make the mistake of not telling you enough. In fact I can't think of a single one without taking some time to consider it specifically. However there are a number that make the mistake of giving you just way too much information. This can be a problem for two reasons.
The first reason that this is simply unacceptable is that, if you are in fact actually required to have that much information to play your game in a normal manner, then your system is just too complicated and will not be fun. In fact it will rather feel like trying to read through a technical manual on a time limit. Granted there may be a number of players who find this sort of game fun, and more power to them, but I'm trying to make a point more for the general gamer here.
Even the most die hard, hardcore, whatever you want to call it, will generally only want to deal with a certain level of complexity while playing before it just becomes tedious. If you find yourself running into this problem it mighty be a signal that perhaps your design is starting to include complexity for the sake of being complex.
As a side note to that I would like to make a distinction between what I feel are two seperate entities. For lack of a better term, or perhaps because I simply don't know the technical term, I'll call them surface complexity, and system complexity. I'm entirely for complex game mechanics and systems, as I really don't want to move back to the days of pong.
However I think that there is a large amount of that information that doesn't necessarily always need to be at the surface of the user interface, which I'm going to call here the surface complexity. I'll try and explain that better in a short while after I go over the other problem with a glut of information.
The second way that having a godawful mess of information on the screen proves to be a problem is if most of the information you have displayed is hopelessly unimportant. There are some situations when you start up a new game and find yourself staring at six coloured bars, and a dozen panels with all manner of numbers, and lists of buttons, and all these things; but the problem is when you only need a minute portion of it to play in a general situation.
This is less a direct problem with the interface, though it certainly is unpleasant, but it is certainly a sign that the game design was not very carefully considered, and you will likely find that there are a number of things that are simply not, for lack of a better word, elegant.
Now as I said above, there are more or less only two situations that prove to be the "wrong answer" so to speak, and there is a wonderfully infinite set of situations between them, each of which can be said to be a better or worse solution to interface design. At this point I'm not even getting into the usability portion of interfaces which is very nearly a science in itself. Generally speaking I prefer that there is a highly complex system running the game, but I also would like it to be kept under the hood during the times that I am actually playing.
What I mean when I say this, is that I don't think that all those statistics and numbers should be permanently hidden from the player but rather should be provided on request. I may be strange but I find that character optimization is a fairly fun metagame that can be played when you're not up to much, or even when you're away from the game. In this way I think that you can find a workable combination of actual game complexity, while keeping the surface of the interface clean and usable.
