People like simplicity
I was reading this article on how the Wii is busting a cap in everyone’s ass, well not everyone’s just Sony’s and Microsoft’s. What I take away from such an article is that people really like simplicity.
In this example I think most people are tired of all the increasing complexity of games. It’s something I began noticing almost a decade ago when games started becoming more and more complex. You had to know short cuts, create macros, memorize all sorts of keys or combos. You needed to read a thick rulebook. Game designers kept adding on new and crazier rules to change around their gameplay. It was tiring to keep up with and there was a huge learning curve and I just couldn’t be bothered. And they just kept getting more complex and focused on more polygons and more shading and more buttons on the controllers. Really, who cares?
My favourite game? Spectre. It was a vector outline game, you had 4 directional controls and the space bar to shoot. Instantaneously, you understood how to move and within a very short amount of time you stopped thinking about the controls and were just thinking about what you wanted to do, it was completely internalized. The craft didn’t look like a tank, it looked like a little bit of line art. But you know what? It was incredibly fun, it was networked so you could play your friends and it was endlessly challenging.
There’s always going to be a small set of hardcore gamers that want photo realism and want the game to be as complex as possible using as many buttons as possible and if there’s not enough buttons they’ll add macros, but that’s a tiny portion of society. Now that the Wii has hit the scene, with their cool controller and games like brain age or nintendogs, I hope that the industry starts to understand that they don’t need to make endlessly complex games. They can make simple ones and everyone will play it, not just the hardcore gamers. They need to innovate in the ui of games so that they don’t need to keep adding more buttons to controllers and so that people don’t need to memorize a thousand things to figure out how to play.
And just because it is simple doesn’t mean it’s easy or doesn’t have a lot of exciting game play. Simple controls does not mean simple game play. For real. And in this age of the internetworkings, playing against someone else makes every game different and challenging.
And I think this notion of simplicity works beyond the gaming industry. People are busy now in everything they do, whether it’s games or websites or whatever, there’s generally a ton of options so it’s easy to go somewhere else for whatever it is they hope to find. If your, say… web application, isn’t immediately obvious it’s super easy for them to go somewhere else for the same thing. If your barrier to use is higher than their barrier to leave, they’ll leave. For most people for most things, the barrier to leave is very low - from finding the same thing somewhere else to simply not needing whatever you are offering, people can be very fickle. And even though your app may be the best and most full featured, if the UI is too complex, people simply won’t use it.
