Gaming’s Alembic

Making good user interfaces is hard–harder than many people realize.  There are a lot of trade-offs.  How do you balance the need for an indicator to be easily visible against the other demands for screen real estate?  How does one weigh the advantage of making it easy to do something against the risk that the player will do it accidentally, with disastrous results?

Video games have come up with many creative user interface designs, which are often copied or adapated by similar games.  The pieces of a user interface become better as they’re used, because players become more familiar with them, and can use them more easily.

Yet I’m continually surprised that many games refuse to implement some simple interface improvements, even after they become widely known.  Here’s a few things that I think should be included in pretty much every game:

Pause At Any Time

Believe it or not, most of the players of your game also participate in something called “real life,” which occasionally interrupts their game-playing with its own demands.  The phone rings, someone knocks on the door, nature calls, the water boils, whatever.  No matter how engrossing you think your game is, players are going to have more pressing concerns at arbitrary times, not just when the game makes it convenient.

So the player should be able to pause at any time.  That includes when in the middle of intense action sequences.  That includes when analyzing timed puzzles.  It includes tutorials, dialog, and cutscenes.  It even includes loading screens (though “pausing” on a loading screen might actually cause the game to pause as soon as the loading is complete, not actually pause the loading).

There are a very few legitimate exceptions to this; the main one is multiplayer games, where the designer may make the decision that one player shouldn’t have the power to unilaterally stop everyone’s game.  Even in these cases, you should probably allow the game to be paused by the host or by unanimous consent–you might think that pausing a 20-person deathmatch could only be annoying, but I’ve been to LAN parties where we desperately wanted to, for one reason or another.

You can also disable pausing at times when the game is already going to remain in the same state as long as the player does nothing.  Like when the game is already paused, for example.  That’s about it.

If the player can get an unfair advantage by pausing–say, by halting the game timer while he analyzes a puzzle that’s supposed to be done quickly–you can take precautions against that.  You can blank the screen, so the player can’t easily see the game state while the game is paused.  You can even disqualify the player from recording a competitive score if he pauses.  But you should still allow the player to pause the game at any time, and then resume later right where he left off.

Skipping Non-Interactive Sequences

Another common offender is games forcing the player to endure long, non-interactive sequences (such as cutscenes) even when the player doesn’t care.  No matter how awesome you think your cutscenes are, some players will not want to see them.  Especially when they’ve already seen them 20 times.  You’re supposed to be entertaining the player, let them skip to the part they care about.  What, are you worried they’re going to get some kind of unfair advantage by not needing to sit there twiddling their thumbs for the full time?

While cutscenes are the most common offender, this really applies to any game segment where the player isn’t doing anything.  If your characters talk in word bubbles for 5 minutes of important plot exposition, during which time the player’s actions don’t matter, that’s a sequence the player should be able to skip.  Yes, even if you think it’s critically important for understanding the game.  There do exist people who play a game more than once.

You might think that your tiny little 3-second animation is too short for anyone to bother skipping it, but you’d be wrong.  The player who keeps dying and is watching it for the fiftieth time probably does not want to wait even 3 seconds…especially when you factor in that he’s already frustrated at your game because he just died 50 times.

And if your non-interactive sequence takes time to load, it should be possible to skip it before it finishes loading.  There’s no need to take another 15 seconds loading your glorious FMV if the player already knows he’s going to skip it.

Again, there are a couple narrow exceptions.  Sometimes the game needs to pause due to performance concerns (e.g. loading); if you cover this pause with a non-interactive sequence, it is acceptable for that sequence to be non-skippable, since it’s acting as a loading screen.  Also, in multiplayer games, if it’s unfair to let one player start playing before the others, you may require a unanimous vote in order to skip a sequence.  But I see all kinds of games containing long, non-interactive sequences that are unskippable for no good reason.

Skipping is not a Strategy

While we’re on the topic of skipping non-interactive sequences, punishing (or rewarding) the player for skipping them is a stupid idea.  Players who are enjoying your great animations and gripping story should not feel pressured to skip them in order to do well at your game, and players who are sick of them should not be penalized for not sitting through them.

This may seem too bizarre to warrant mentioning, but it often happens by accident, because cutscenes are sometimes displayed with the same engine that controls the normal game, which means that game time may be passing during the cutscene.  Players can often regenerate health, or watch their buffs expire, or suffer the attacks of enemies while they’re trying to follow the story.  I’ve paid attention to plot points in games only to find my summoned minions expiring, my health drained by toxic clouds, monsters advancing into new positions, or precious seconds of a time limit falling away while I was watching or reading.

This needs to stop.  Either pause the game during non-interactive sequences, or fast-forward the game by the remaining length of the cutscene if it gets skipped.  There may occasionally be performance issues with this, but I highly doubt that’s the typical case.

Button Configuration

It’s really not very hard to reassign functions between different buttons (whether on a gamepad or a keyboard), and it can make a substantial difference in how easy and natural a game is to play.  Sure, you can eventually train yourself to use any reasonable button configuration, but it’s really annoying to keep accidentally pressing attack when you want jump (or whatever) when the assignment is arbitrary and it should be trivial to change.

Different people will have different intuitions about what buttons should have what functions (partly from their experience playing other games, partly from other factors).  Different playstyles sometimes make different configurations more convenient.  Some buttons are easier to press in combination than others (or easier to switch between), some fingers get tired or sore more easily, and so forth….and, of course, some developers just don’t seem to be able to come up with good button configurations in the first place. 

Some control schemes are harder to change, and some inputs are not equivalent.  It makes sense (usually) that I can’t have a button do the same thing that moving the mouse up normally does, that gestures with a Wiimote have no joystick equivalent, and even that a binary button (up or down) can’t necessarily take over the function of a pressure-sensitive button.  But basic buttons really ought to be interchangeable.

Some games allow you to pick between a few preset configurations.  This is stupid.  Not only is it unnecessarily restrictive of the player’s options, but the player has to carefully read the details of each of the available configurations in order to figure out what’s different between them and see what his options actually are.  Just let the player reassign different functions to different buttons on an individual basis.  And if the game input device has more buttons than necessary, it should be possible to assign more than one button to a single function.

Missing any of these is (probably) not going to ruin your game.  But they are all simple features that will usually be easy to implement and provide a significant increase in the game’s usability.  These are the kinds of things you should think about when designing your user interface.