Comments on: Useabilitosity: Jason Schklar Interview

By: jsutcliffe

jsutcliffe — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:13:19 +0000

An excellent read. Thanks for the article. Usability is a very interesting subject, and I don’t think I’d ever given much thought to how usability issues are solved in games.

By: Scandalon

Scandalon — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:25:00 +0000

Clovus, you mad me laugh. That can be difficult to do.

(But you forgot to explain “pass interference” and “free throws”)

By: Radiant

Radiant — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 23:49:29 +0000

Sorry I meant Hoshi Saga.

By: Radiant

Radiant — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 23:46:39 +0000

@Jason Schklar hey thanks for replying!
I find that layering in a control scheme is difficult for casual games because of the length of time each one is played.
With something like Clown Killer 2 [a wasd flash shooter] it’s difficult to bring in the complex controls over time and still retain the ‘quick blast’ of fun the game is trying to achieve.
Have you ever played any of the Hoshi’s Story series?
I think you’d enjoy it; there’s no instructions bar “find the star” and it uses the players confusion to introduce quite complex interactions.
They’re absolutely awesome to play and I think you’d find them interesting.

By: Jason Schklar

Jason Schklar — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 23:12:26 +0000

Whew. I’ve had a chance to re-read the post and here are some responses:

@Radiant: I do talk a bunch about casual games on my blog. Your point illustrates my call for allowing the user to “fail gracefully” if they’re having trouble learning the controls scheme. Many casual games either drop you into the game with little or no instruction and you have to guess which keys to press — or they have boring and tedious tutorials. The key (in my experience) is to layer on controls and complexity as the game progresses in ways that are well paced and fun.

@Dreamhacker: It’s pronounced “sklar”. The “ch” is silent ;)

@Richard Beer: There are qualitative and quantitative ways to cost-justify usability and playability work. In the entertainment industry when you’re selling directly to the customer (gamer), the game must be fun to be successful. Qualitatively, the only way to know whether it’s fun or not is to test with users who are not professionals. If it’s not fun, then you need to make changes and then test again. Yeah, this costs time and money — but nothing’s worse than shipping a product that no one wants. Quantitatively, you can set up metrics that need to be passed or exceeded before the game is released in the wild.

@Markoff Chaney: I use Gamefly (a video game rent-by-mail service), purchase games digitally, and play a lot of online casual games… This means fewer manuals lying around. But, I agree with your basic assertion that manuals make great bathroom reading material ;)

Cheers,

By: IanAetch

IanAetch — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 21:45:08 +0000

@Adam T
You also might want to play DICE’s Battlfield 2. The game has the option of having a commander for your team, who can view the map from top down and see where everybody is, and give orders to the players (if their organized in squads). The players see those orders as waypoints on thier huds.
You can also order up artillery strikes and UAV passes and have vehicles and supplies dropped to your team mates/
The commander is selected from among those who want the job and is picked from those based on past performance.

By: Tei

Tei — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:29:41 +0000

“All of the great designers I’ve worked with crave this kind of feedback. Why? Because the game is still in production and they have a chance to fix it. No one wants to make a game that truly sucks. Fail early, fail often, and fail in front of usability participants who are under NDA as opposed to failing in front of folks who paid $50 to buy your game.”

I am the only one here that think is absolutelly obvius?

By: Jason Schklar

Jason Schklar — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:09:00 +0000

Hey all:

Thanks to Kieron for such a kind write up — and great questions. I’ll finish with a cricket analogy the next time ;)

Apologies for the disabled comments on my blog (I required OpenId). I was having trouble with Chinese Spider Bots posting spam on my blog, so… I obviously over-corrected.

Comments are now open! Hopefully I won’t get too much spiderspam.

I’m dashing between meetings right now, but will post some responses to the thoughtful comments and questions above later on today.

Cheers!

By: Radiant

Radiant — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 17:17:47 +0000

I would love to have read Schklar thoughts on casual games.

For me; something as ‘simple’ as wasd controls on cas. games that end up in front of me drive me up the bloody wall.
Do other devs not realise how complex that is for normal people?

By: aquazombie

aquazombie — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 17:16:56 +0000

@clovus

I wish baseball was that awesome…

By: Radiant

Radiant — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 17:11:19 +0000

I LOVE a good manual.
From cover to contents a good manual always gets me into a game more; when it’s missing or cursory I always feel that something is not really worth my time.

Don’t get me started on those hateful strategy book.
20 quid for something that should be half a quarter of it’s size and in the box already. [Sorry piggyback publishing I still love you!]

By: Rei Onryou

Rei Onryou — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:44:39 +0000

@Adam T: Sounds like you need to play the Natural Selection mod for Half Life. The marines are FPS with a commander playing an RTS, building structures, giving orders, purchasing weapons for the soldiers.

That was a good read. Shame usability doesn’t come naturally to me. It tends to be a roadblock in my design, but that’s why having usability testers is so important. It’s definitely right what he said about not being able to see good design, but bad design sticks out like a sore thumb.