Zhan Ye Hcigamedesign

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HCI and Game Design: From a Practitioner’s Point of ViewABSTRACTThe intent of this paper is to present an overview of themany aspects of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)research and practices, show their relationships withcomputer games, and discuss the possibility of using some

of the HCI processes, methodologies, and tools for gamedesign.KeywordsHuman-Computer Interaction, game design, usability,gameplay, user interface

INTRODUCTIONGame designers face the challenge of creating games thatcan be easily learned, effectively played, and emotionallyenjoyed by gamers. With very limited theoreticalfoundation and little research or data on gamers, they haveto solely rely on their intuition and experience. This is whyabout 80% of games fail on the market each year [1].While technologies have improved rapidly, game designhas evolved slowly. No guidelines or principles have beenestablished to help game designers do their work.

On the other hand, HCI has been a thriving field in recentyears where a lot of innovative ideas have been generated.These ideas lead to a variety of processes, methodologies,techniques, and tools being developed and successfullypracticed in other software industries. They have helpedsoftware developers solve many of their problems. Manyof these problems are closely related to the problems of game design. Once they are learned and used by gamedesigners, these processes and methods can greatly improvetheir work.

However, little is known about HCI in the game industry,partly because of the prevailing culture of the gameindustry that game designers dislike anything fromacademia. They tend to think that researchers in theuniversities know nothing about games so that what theyare doing or talking about does not matter. This is simplywrong! Researchers may not know games as well as gamedesigners do, but they do know computer and behavioralsciences well. If we agree that computer and behavioralsciences form the very foundation of games, we shouldadmit that game designers can learn a lot from theircounterparts in academia.

Let us, then, look at some of the areas of HCI, examine

their relationships with the corresponding areas of gamedesign, and see how they two can work together.

USABILITY AND GAMEPLAY“Usability” has been a buzzword among HCI practitionersand enthusiasts in recent years. It is at the center of thewhole HCI phenomenon - many of the HCI processes andmethods have been developed around this concept. The

practice of these processes and methods has had atremendous impact on how users use software and howdevelopers develop software. However, it is not easy todescribe what usability really is. As Jakob Nielsendescribed [2], usability is not a single, one-dimensionalproperty of a software product. It has multiple componentsas figure 1 illustrates.

Usability

L e a r n a b i l i t y

E f f i c i e n c y

M e m or a b i l i t y

E r r or s

S a t i s f a c t i on

Figure 1. The multiple components of usability

Game designers may impatiently point out that, in the gameindustry, they have their own buzzword - gameplay , alias“playability,” which was coined by game designers andgiven extensive attention in the game industry almost 10years before usability began gaining any exposure in othersoftware industries. Since the mid 80s - the golden age of Nintendo’s 8-bit and 16-bit consoles – the enormousimportance of good gameplay has been recognized by gamedesigners, and thusly good gameplay has become theultimate goal pursued by anyone who wishes to remain inthe business of game design.

But after all these years of hard work, can game designersgive a clear description of what gameplay really is? Canthey show what specific efforts have been made to improvethe many aspects of it? No! Today “gameplay” stillremains as a very vague concept. It is commonly known insoftware engineering that if you cannot define a property of a software product or process, you cannot measure it. Andif you cannot measure something, you cannot improveupon it. Thus, game designers have failed to develop anyuseful methods or tools to evaluate and improve gameplay.By contrast, HCI researchers and practitioners have taken asystematic and quantitative approach to not only defineusability, but also develop formal processes and methods toimprove the many aspects of it, and create a large set of tools and databases that can help designers do their work.

Game designers, then, need to first define what gameplay isand what attributes it has, and second, find ways to measurethese attributes. Only after achieving these goals can theydevelop processes and methods to improve these attributes.



In order to do this, a layered structure may help to representgameplay as a complex property of games. As figure 2shows, this structure treats usability as the foundation of gameplay, since usability is a universal property of allkinds of software. The second layer includes game-specificattributes that make a game distinctive from otherapplication software products. These attributes are genre-neutral. The third layer introduces the idea of game genre.

Depending on different genre categories, differentattributes are introduced and studied. For example, unitbalance might play an important role in RTS (real-timestrategy) games, while level and magic systems are morecritical to RPG (role-playing game) games. The topmostlayer is a highly subjective layer that deals with the nuancesand uncertainties of gameplay, in short, this layer detailswhether or not the gamer likes the game. It corresponds tosatisfaction in the definition of usability.

Usability attributes

Game-specific attributes

Genre-specific attributes

Usability layer

Game layer

Genre layer

Emotion layer

Figure 2. A layered structure can better represent gameplay

This layered structure can help game designers betterunderstand the many aspects and different levels of gameplay, so that they can direct their efforts moreeffectively toward them. This structure also forms thestrategic framework that can be used by game companies tooptimize their design processes and organize their teams.

USER INTERFACE DESIGNUser interface (UI) plays an important role in games. Wecan look at a game as a layered system with a core and ashell. The core is the game mechanics, which determinethe rules of the game - how high the character can jump,which directions he can go, how many enemies he willencounter at a specific level, etc. The shell is the UI,because through it the gamer controls the character,receives directions and feedback, fights with enemies, andhas fun. The shell is what the gamer actually sees, andsignificantly influences the player’s impression of thegame, no matter how well the core works. The shell hidesthe core from the gamer, thus making games playable, aswell as more fun and challenging – the gamer has to figureout the internal mechanics while competing with it throughthe course of playing.

However, the concept of UI design has been long neglectedby the game industry. In most game companies, there is nosuch position as a “user interface designer”. Most UIs areconceptualized by game designers and created by graphicsartists. Typically, neither the game designers nor thegraphics artists have knowledge or skills in either

traditional communication design or UI design. In fact,most game designers tend to focus exclusively on gamemechanics, where they have most expertise, and ignore theUI altogether. Under these circumstances, it is notsurprising that bad UI designs are everywhere in the gameindustry today. Here are two examples of the UIs fromsome popular games currently on the market. Both showthat even the most successful games can have serious flaws

in term of UI design.

Figure 3. An information panel of The Age of Empires, ahighly successful RTS game from Ensemble Studios. It waspoorly designed without a sense of balance – icons and labelsare crowded over to one side.

Figure 4. The server configuration screen of EverQuest , anonline fantasy/adventure game. Gamers have to choose aserver from the list, and click on the PLAY button, which isthe huge button with an overlaying graphics on the extremeright, to play. Of the 20 players we tested, 16 of them couldnot recognize it and felt confused simply because the size of the PLAY button is different from the three normal buttons tothe left. Also, the lack of a clear label combined with the

misuse of a graphic and font makes it more like a logo than abutton.

Most of the design flaws can be easily corrected with alittle help from the expertise of UI designers. The balanceof the information panel in Figure 3 could be improved byusing a grid system. The confusion caused by the PLAYbutton in Figure 4 could be easily detected by a simpleusability test conducted by UI designers before theshipment of the game. Game design needs UI designers’participation. A few companies in the game industry are



moving in this direction. Larger companies such asEnsemble studios and its parent company, Microsoft, havehired HCI graduates to work as UI designers in their gamedivisions. Other game companies need to catch up.

Ideally, each game project team should include at least oneUI designer to work with the game designers to help tackleon the UI design issues. UI designers should use theirtalent and knowledge to create better UIs, and mostimportantly, stress the importance of UI through their work and across the game industry.

Although bad designs prevail, a few good designs do standout. They may not all root from HCI research, but we canclearly see some connections. Figure 5 and 6 show twoexamples.

Figure 5. The elegantly designed in-game interface of Neverwinter Nights , an upcoming RPG game from Black Isle.The designers used the idea of pie menu proposed in someresearch papers in the late 80s to achieve natural efficiency in

menu selection. The clean and highly transparent interfacedoes a great job of preserving a sense of immersion withoutdisturbing gamers’ attention from the “virtual” game world.

Figure 6. Game designer Peter Molyneux developed aninnovative and intuitive gesture recognition interface for

Black & White .

ITERATIVE DESIGN AND PROTOTYPINGMost game designers use an iterative approach to designinggames and are devoted to extensive testing, which they’vedubbed “playtesting,” to help them reach a solid gamedesign [3]. This sounds ideal to HCI practitioners.However, game designers face two major problems. First,they have difficulties fitting the iterative design approachinto the whole game development process. Most

companies use either a modified waterfall model or anincremental model to develop their games. Gamedevelopment runs almost parallel to game design. Thusthere are always contradictions, conflicts, andinconsistencies among programmers and designers. Abetter synchronization scheme needs to be developed toaddress this problem. Also there are debates on whether ornot game design should be completed before gamedevelopment starts. Second, it is very hard to makeprototypes for games. Games are extremely time-criticaland unlike applications software, require high fidelityprototypes – a slow primitive prototype made using VisualBasic or Director cannot faithfully represent the gameplayof the real game and its usefulness is questionable at best.Although a few successful efforts, such as the “MiyamotoBox” [4], have been made for some specific genres, overallprototypes haven’t gained much popularity among gamedesigners because they are too expensive to build and toolimited in their usefulness.

These two problems, especially the latter, have greatlyimpaired the effectiveness of the iterative approach takenby game designers. Without good prototypes, gamedesigns cannot be effectively evaluated and tested.Realizing the problem, progress has been made by a few3D software vendors to provide 3D prototyping tools to thegame design community. Compared to the high-end 3D

software used for animation movies and special effects,these prototyping tools are simpler, much easier to use, andyet they are powerful enough to create convincing gameprototypes. Most of them also include embedded scriptinglanguages that help game designers create morecomplicated behaviors of the characters and gamemechanics.GAMERS’ ROLE IN GAME DESIGNSoftware development efforts can be classified into threecategories, or three generations, which are engineer-centered approach, designer-centered approach, and user-centered approach. Game design is still at the designer-centered stage - ideas are generated by game designers,

evaluated and tested by game designers, then implementedby programmers. Only after the game has been put into themarket will the game designers know whether or notgamers will accept it. Many game designers are nowworried about this situation. Some have expressed thebelief that gamers should be more involved in game design,which means moving game design from a designer-centered approach to user–centered approach. Nintendo’sShigeru Miyamoto, arguably the most prominent (andsuccessful) game designer in the world, said in an interview:



“We design the games from the players’ point of view” [5].Another famous game designer, Peter Molyneux, says thathe brings gamers to his company every week to test hisdesign ideas. By getting gamers actively involved at allstages of game design, game designers will have a betterchance to understand gamers’ needs and create bettergames.

Of course, game designers cannot just sit mindlessly next togamers and watch them play – that is not what the user-centered approach is all about. Game designers need torestructure their design processes, redefine their designstrategies, and reorganize their teams to reflect these newideas. This is where HCI can offer its help. There are twobasic questions that need to be answered in order to get realbenefits out of the user-centered approach. First, whenshould gamers be involved in the game design process, andsecond, how should gamers get involved? To answer thefirst question, a structured collaboration framework isneeded, such as the user-centered design (UCD) process [6].This would reveal when gamers could be most effectivelyused within the design process. To deal with the second

question, game designers need trainings on how to observeusers, how to interpret their behaviors, how to record testdata, and how to get the most out of the test data. Theusability test methods, such as think-aloud protocols [7],are particularly helpful in these situations.

USABILITY ENGINEERING METHODSA major focus of HCI is in usability engineering methods[8]. These methods can be analytical or empirical,formative or summative. Their goal is not only to gaugethe success of software systems with respect to measurablecriteria, but most importantly, to guide redesign within aniterative framework. A number of usability engineeringmethods can be adapted for game design. Some work for a

specific genre, while others can be applied to a broad rangeof problems and domains of game design.

Among the usability engineering methods, the so-called“low-cost” inspection and walkthrough methods areparticularly useful [9]. These are relatively inexpensiveand not too intimidating to learn by game designers. Forexample, cognitive walkthrough can be used to evaluatelevel designs of action adventure games. Action adventuregames consist of a set of levels with various goals. Theplayer has to explore a level to achieve that goal, thenproceed to another level for another goal. This scenariomatches the idea behind the cognitive walkthrough verywell, the intent of which is to evaluate a design for its easeof learning through exploration [10]. Heuristic evaluationis a “discount” usability engineering method [11] that canbe used to solve genre-specific issues in game design.Game designers working on a specific type or series of games have accumulated a lot of knowledge of thisparticular genre. They can build a list of gameplayheuristics for this type of game, which are principles thatdescribe common properties of good designs of this genre.Other game designers can examine their designs and judge

its compliance – and thereby discover its relative worth –with those recognized heuristics. Therefore the heuristicsbecome a general guideline that helps game designers sharetheir knowledge, and benefits the whole game designcommunity by allowing designers to learn from theexperience of others. Table 1 shows a list of heuristics forRTS games [12].

Name DescriptionBalance The rock-paper-scissors paradigmSimplicity The number of building types should be

limited under 15.Tech tree The tech tree should be broad instead of

deep.Micromanagement Avoid complicated micromanagement.Resources Resources should be dispersed as

equally as possible.Table 1. A partial list of example heuristics for RTS games.This list was developed by game designers at EnsembleStudios.

Figure 7. Cognitive walkthrough can be used to evaluate thelevel designs of action games such as Mario 64. As thewalkthrough proceeds, game designers should ask themselvesquestions like, “Will the gamer know what goal is to beachieved?” and “Will the gamer realize the actions andstrategy required to achieve that goal?”

COGNITIVE MODELINGCognitive Modeling – the technique to build models tosimulate human behaviors – has been used by both the HCIcommunity and game designers, but in two very differentways. HCI researchers use cognitive models, such asModel Human Processor and GOMS, to predict task performance times of different designs [13]. By contrast,game designers mainly focus on using simple cognitivemodels to create more realistic behaviors of syntheticcharacters in virtual game worlds, like Sega’s Seaman .

Many game designers have noticed that while some gamegenres attract a wide variety of gamers, from young to old,casual to hardcore, others are played exclusively by a smallgroup of dedicated gamers at a very high skill level. FPS(first-person shooter) games are a good example. Due tothe nature of FPS games, gamers playing them need to have



good eye-hand coordination and have fast reflexes.Therefore gamers become skilled users, playing gamesbecomes a routine cognitive skill, and performance issuesbecome very important. GOMS are designed specificallyto measure performance issues. Thus it can be deployed toanalyze the efficacy of FPS games.

Figure 8. Sega’s Seaman made use of several cutting edgetechnologies - artificial life, speech recognition, and cognitivemodeling - to create a virtual sea world populated withsynthetic characters.

Figure 9. GOMS can be used to analyze the efficacy of FPSgames such as Half Life: Counter Strike .

Other genres, such as RPG, are played in a more casualsetting that mainly involves exploration and learning, towhich GOMS does not apply well. But the Model HumanProcessor can still help game designers to improve the

efficiency of their UI designs.CONCLUSTIONWe have explored the many aspects of HCI research andpractices and shown their close ties to the corresponding

areas of game design. For all the challenges facing gamedesigners, we can always find useful help from the manyfacets of HCI. The effort to integrate HCI processes andmethods into game design is still at a primitive stage anddemands a lot of attention. The game industry is so youngthat it lacks both sound disciplines and useful tools. Webelieve that by combining HCI and the raw experiences of game designers, we have a great opportunity to create the

tools of the trade for the game design community andestablish disciplines that can guide game design in the newcentury.

REFERENCES1. Game Software Industry Report. In AlienBrain product

catalog . NxN software. 2001.

2. Jakob Nielsen. Usability Engineering . Academic Press,San Diego, CA 1993.

3. Chuck Clanton. An Interpreted Demonstration of Computer Game Design. In Proceedings of CHI. 1998.

4. Randy Angle, and William Dwyer. Effective ProjectManagement. In Proceedings of Game DevelopersConference . 2001.

5. Marc Saltzman. Game Design: Secretes of the Sages .Macmillan Publishing. 2000.

6. John M. Carroll. Human-Computer Interaction in the New Millennium . ACM press. New York, NY, 2002.

7. HCI lecture notes: think-aloud protocols. Available athttp://staff.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/HCI/cscln/trail1/Lecture5.html

8. John M. Carroll. Human-Computer Interaction in the New Millennium . ACM press. New York, NY, 2002.

9. Jakob Nielsen, and Robert L. Mack. Usability Inspection Methods. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1994.

10. Jakob Nielsen, and Robert L. Mack. Usability Inspection Methods. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1994.

11. Jakob Nielsen. Usability Engineering . Academic Press,San Diego, CA 1993.

12. Mickey Kawick. Real-Time Strategy GameProgramming Using MS DirectX 6.0 . WordwarePublishing, Inc. Plano, TX, 1999.

13. Gray, W. D., John, B. E., & Atwood, M. E. (1993)"Project Ernestine: A validation of GOMS forprediction and explanation of real-world task

performance." Human-Computer Interaction, 8, 3, 237-209.

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Zhan Ye Hcigamedesign