Pushing Counters

Posted on January 10, 2011 by Scott Jennings| 12 Comments

Somewhat relevant: how hard-core wargames actively alienate potential customers through having painful UI.

Imagine this scenario. You are the Supreme Allied Commander for Allied forces in Europe during World War II. You walk into your office and your aide-de-camp says “Good morning, General Eisenhower. Your general staff awaits you in the conference rooom to discuss Operation Overlord.”

“Excellent. I’ll be right there.”

“One moment, sir. Before that, you should be aware that Fox company of the 506th has run out of condoms in their survival kits.”

“Uh, well, get them replacement kits.”

“Very good sir. Also, a truck was destroyed in the Ardennes. Should I requisition a replacement?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll get right on it. A number of toothbrushes have gone missing in a training camp in North Carolina. How many staff sergeants would you like to assign to investigate the crime?”

At this point, in real life, Eisenhower would court-martial his aide-de-camp for being a Nazi spy.

There is important information, and there is unimportant information.

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  • http://Website ikel

    Yeah, just like I always said. Lets remove that annoying depth thing. Who needs it anyway, it just destroys the ballance, making some people win more than others. Elitists pricks. Can’t just lose like everyone else.

    —————————-

    Skill ceiling can be lifted up by increasing micro diffculty and/or macro difficulty. Increasing macro makes vast boring maps, battles of attrition and uninteresting games for observation. They are fun to play, but can’t expect any tournament spotlight. Increasing micro breaks fingers and, as seen here, forces bad players to whine. “Creatively”.

    Pretty normal for the industry these days is to give small corridor maps with no micro. Next step is automatic reinforcement, automatic retreat when low on hp, automatic focus fire on most dangerous or most damaged enemy and automatic “/all gl hf”; “/all gg” messages.

  • http://Website Al Swearengen

    Greg Costikyan calls this “Grognard Capture”.

    http://www.costik.com/weblog/2003/08/grognard-capture.html

  • http://geldonsgaming.blogspot.com/ geldonyetich

    There’s a fine line between pointless micromanagement and excessive nibbling details, and that line will be subjective.

    Good 4X games implement AI advisors/senators/ect that allow the player to choose to offload micromanagement. Of course, in many cases, this backfires spectacularly when the AI you’ve entrusted to run a particular part of your empire ends up undermining it from within.

    Most of the entry talks about obtuse GUI design. A good tutorial can help with that. However, you can only remove so many function buttons before it’s a lesser experience.

  • http://Website Gx1080

    Weeeee, go in Chirstmas vacation and miss A LOT of stuff:

    In order:

    Bioware “racism”. People saying that are usually SWPL-hipsters trying to look more “progressive” in their status jockeying. Fuck them.

    Being professional when you are the guy sended in the monkey cage is hard, yo. But you are getting monies for it, so yeah.

    NotWoW:

    I have to wonder about SW:TOR. Part of me says that it will crash and burn, but will see.

    At least is not the Microsoft half-hearted bet in Vanguard.

    Developers and Forums:

    They don’t mix.

    Kinect:

    Hey, let’s take the Wii Avatars and change the names on it! Shigeru Miyamoto must be pissed. Besides that, having the cyberpunk no-controllers enviroment come true should be fun.

    Shiny game laptop.

    The uber-DS. A niche market (since most people use their desktops for gaming), but awesome looking.

    Search terms:

    Amusing. Nerd rage and sex mixed. Only on The Internet.

    DC Online:

    Rookie programming mistakes wouldn’t happen if studios didn’t hired and burned through starry-eyed college students. Nah, that would mean less money.

    Anarchy player with GM powa:

    Don’t ask for your players to vote that your game is awesome when you just fucked up, FFS. Have the dignity to at least pretend to believe that they aren’t stupid. If only that was something new.

    Finally, wargames UI.

    Whoa. And here I thought that a custom WoW UI was complex.

    As a rule, if I have to go to forums and YouTube videos to learn how to even play your damn game, chances are that I will not be playing for long.

  • http://Website mitha

    The author of that article makes some simple suggestions, which you cant disagree. There is simply no reason to put 20 buttons in your Interface, all the same size, if you only use 4 or 5 in a normal round. Putting the others behind some drop down menu or some extra “advanced” screen would be rather easy and greatly enhance the UI. Without sacrificing any of that precious skill.

    I was kinda expecting a reference to the civ-series. Though not exactly the same genre (I think) the designers there thought about their interface a bit.

  • http://Website Vetarnias

    @ Gx1080

    “Don’t ask for your players to vote that your game is awesome when you just fucked up, FFS.”

    I was thinking just that. And I don’t really see the point of all these popularity contexts anyway. There is no methodology involved, contests can be rigged by whoever has the more active (and activist) player base, and nobody can be held accountable at any stage of the process, from the nomination to voting to divulging the results.

    All that you’ve managed to prove was that it’s a popular game. Doesn’t mean it’s good. I still remember the comparison to the 11 million Germans who voted for Hitler in 1932. And I still remember when the WoWites, in early 2009, were willing to march on MMORPG.com, Torches of Greater Burning +2 and Pitchforks of Sanguine Impalement +4 at the ready, when the LOTRO expansion won instead of Wrath of the Lich King: http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/45/feature/2579/Best-Expansion-Winner

    Now, to return to the subject at hand:

    I think the article linked to is right, some of those military strategy games are impenetrable, even, I suspect, to students of military tactics. Reminds me of the time I picked up “Hearts of Iron: Platinum” in the bargain bin, in early 2007. The game had long been superseded by its sequel, so there was a relative paucity of information available online, and the manual did a shoddy job of explaining how it all fit in. As a result, I was forever playing on the sidelines (playing a second-tier nation like Canada or Australia didn’t help), without really making an impact.

    I think that the difference between a good and bad game, in the case of one where the UI is lacking, is that it will be possible to understand the good game through trial and error. A bad game will instead send you meandering through the same mistakes, without really giving you the opportunity to understand what you’re doing wrong, let alone why it’s wrong (even if it’s just a case of Programmer’s Whim), because you might not even know how do do the right thing in the first place. Not to mention cases of games where an early screwup will remove any chance of winning the game much later on. Not to mention games where only one way to play can ensure victory.

    Good game with a deficient UI: Dwarf Fortress. Enough said.

  • http://Website Guy

    That’s a great article.

    I fear that maybe some gamers feel that the super-dry obtuseness of things like the text turn report is part of the military bureaucracy experience, or an appropriateness level of seriousness. Hopefully a very small minority.

  • http://Website Guy

    Why do the last two comments have an age of “about -1 years ago “…?

  • http://Website dartwick

    One of the problems is that their is a large segment of the strategic game population that will happily micromanage to extremes to obtain perfect efficiency.

    So if you automate the those aspects of the game to replace what they would do in person you get bizarre results that the realism seekers cant stand.

    The answers arent simple.

  • http://Website pharniel

    To be fair Dwarf FOrtress from the outset tells you they have a craptastic UI and happily invites you to get a 3rd party add on to make it better.

    They actually acknowledge that thier UI is sub-par and have a to do list that addresses it.

    The grognard guys think the UI is fine, it’s just the player that’s the problem. See comment #1.

  • http://Website Bob

    From having talked to some guys who have worked on wargames I would suggest two possible reasons why UI’s are so craptastic in these sorts of games.

    1) Small studios with limited resources that place an emphasis on coding the AI, over graphic design.

    2) Engineers doing graphic design because they can’t afford to hire an actual GUI expert.

  • http://gamingbyear.com Wyrmrider

    That’s a great article, thanks for linking.

    The screenshots given did look like pretty clear examples of limited resources, there certainly wasn’t any sign of an “interface designer” or “usability expert” at work. But even supposing the studio would need to spend more money to improve the UI, it strikes me as pretty arrogant NOT to do that.

    Further reading: Tobold says hardcore gamers shouldn’t develop games (http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ToboldsBlog/~3/DDVPukUqMf4/dont-let-hardcore-gamers-develop-games.html), and I disagree. (http://gamingbyear.com/2011/01/13/easy-to-learn-hard-to-master/)