Human Computer Interaction - Blog 8

Interaction Devices

                This week’s lecture was actually very interesting to me. We learned about interaction devices and how things like keyboards and game pads, and the elements attached to them have changed over time and how they function. By elements attached I’m strictly referring to things like joysticks, buttons, triggers and other things that you can find when playing a game or using any type of digital device these days. Looking back all the way to things like Pac Man and Pong the devices were at their most basic state of simply moving up and down and later left and right. Most of us probably weren’t around for the times of Pong in its prime, so we will probably think it’s not fun. 

                I personally grew up originally playing games on the NES. I’ve told the story before of how I got into video games on my first entry. I’m going to expand further on that story. The story began with me first playing Super Mario Brothers 3 that my brother had gotten as a gift. I was finally old enough to actually play the game with a low skill level and had picked up the forever loved NES controller for the first time. In my mind the game only had the Directional Pad buttons and the B button that allowed Luigi to jump on the screen. My brother really did not enjoy me playing the game so he never told me that I had to have the A button pressed as I walked in a direction in order to run faster and have stronger jumps. This was brought up in the lecture where it actually talked about the console game pads.

Maps

                As a huge fan of the RPG genre of game, maps are a key thing needed to be grasped. In our lecture it is stated that maps cannot be too complex. This is quite true, but in some games I believe complexity can also be established due to size. I’m going to use a game like Final Fantasy X or even the more recent series White Knight Chronicles. The reason I’ve chosen these games to tlak about maps is because I remember playing most of the game looking at the map almost every 5 seconds to see where I was going and what I was doing. It is true that most games do in fact have a mini map integrated somewhere in the HUD. White Knight Chronicles mapping system was extremely complex, it made side quests somewhat difficult to complete because the player would just be dropped in a large area not knowing which direction to head in. A Star was placed at the destination location but this was often ignored by the player who would generally wish to explore. Games like the Dragon Age series are much simpler and easier for players to adapt to… but what does this have to do with interaction devices?

Current Gen Devices

                As an owner of every game console available, I often do think about the interaction differences with the different consoles. I also work at Best Buy in the video game department, so it is a topic that is often brought up by parents who are entirely clueless. Explaining to them how the Xbox and PlayStation controllers have changed from the original NES and Sega gamepads, the new controllers feature more than just the Directional Pad and a couple Buttons. Looking at the PlayStation controller, we have analog sticks, which can also serve as buttons (R3 and L3), Left and Right Trigger style buttons that somewhat work based on how long or how much pressure is applied to the button. The controller also features six-axis movement in which you can actually move the controller to perform actions. My most horrendous memory of this would be when I first purchased the console and had to play Heavenly Sword and aim my each individual arrow at the enemies in order to kill them. This was new to me so it was very frustrating to pick up. The Wii was something different for its time as well, it focused mainly on motion and what I thought was really good about its marketing strategy is that it has such basic games developed in order to draw in people other than gamers. Thinking about this topic right now… Microsoft’s elimination of the gamepad and button interaction with the Kinect sensor is what really pushed non gamers to go out and purchase an Xbox 360. I personally don’t play games where I have to stand up and march around unless it’s a simple WarioWare mini game which I’m sure everyone loves.

Future Gen

                Touch pads and screens these days are really making an impact in the digital tech market. It has eliminated the necessity for physical buttons on a lot of things. This can be seen through infrared keyboards; touchscreens found on almost all major cell phones and tablets, and touch pads used for sliding and mouse-like interaction. I personally don’t think touchscreen implementation is that good for the gaming world since its long term use can really screw up and throw the touch screen of synch. I’m not sure how that works exactly but I often have customers at my job coming back with screwed up touchscreens on their Nintendo DS’s or iPod devices. I have recently switched my inferior BlackBerry Curve device from 4 years ago and upgraded to the new Z10 model for free. Personally adjusting to using the touchscreen and the touch features has become a huge pain and inconvenience. In the recent days I have been somewhat adjusting to it since it has a feature that can predict what words I’m trying to type based on my mistakes. This can really show how software development can assist greatly in the learning curve of these new upcoming devices.

References

[Cellphone Comparisons].Retrieved March 31, 2013, from: URL: (http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2013/02/06/Z10_GS3_iPhone5_screens_610x378.jpg)

[Interaction Devices].Retrieved March 31, 2013, from: URL: (http://gearcrave.frsucrave.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/interface_610x468.jpg)

[Microsoft Kinect Demonstration].Retrieved March 31, 2013, from: URL: (http://gamingirresponsibly.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/kinect1.jpg)

[Nintendo Controller].Retrieved March 31, 2013, from: URL: (http://www.weblogsinc.com/common/images/2634287974241518.JPG.19313260267924226)

 

Human Computer Interaction - Blog 7

Direct Manipulation

                This week’s video lecture topic was about direct manipulation. It was defined in the lecture as continuous object representation and also actions and feedback. In video games specifically my general interpretation of the subject is based on pressing buttons on a game controller, or performing physical movements with today’s gaming technology. When talking about actions and feedback in the introduction three types were listed, they are rapid, reversible and incremental. What does this mean to me? I usually try to think of video game examples from games that I’ve played. When talking about rapid action and feedback I think of games like God of War.

Now I do in fact bring this game up a lot when talking about buttons and game interfaces. In all of the God of War titles, when defeating the majority of the enemies are quick time events where the player must press certain buttons based on a reaction time and sometimes also have to rapidly press a button many times in order for a specific action to occur. Recently playing God of War Ascension I had an issue trying to defeat a certain boss where I had to rip its wings off by spinning the analog sticks on the Playstation Dualshock controller. As I continued to fail and retry I had been practising and gradually increasing my skill in performing this action. This relates to the lecture again where it talks about positive feelings for good user interfaces. Mastering the interface… once I defeated this boss, whenever the same style of quick time event occurred I was able to do it with ease. Now as I am near the end of the game I am quick to react to hitting the buttons to defeat enemies and bosses. 

Use in Non-Gaming Software

                Throughout the lecture many topics regarding word processing and spreadsheets were also brought up. Direct manipulation does not solely relate to gaming. Programs such as Microsoft Word and even Excel take some time to master. A new user to Microsoft Word may not notice that the icons at the top near the font section can bold, underline or italicize text. With the older versions of Microsoft Word, it was much harder to learn. Old fashioned people such as my own parents have great difficulties today trying to use these programs. Whenever I would ask my parents why they were having trouble, they would inform me that the toolbar at the top of the program contained way too many small icons and options for them to perform and this was quite overwhelming to them. In the lecture there were also word processing technologies listed that do in fact improve the overall user interaction. These include, spellcheck, dictionary and thesaurus features. Visual aids such as the red and green underlines can clearly help a user to correct their mistakes.

Problems with Direct Manipulation

As stated in the lecture, spatial or visual representations can sometimes be too spread out. This can relate to what I mentioned before with my parents being confused with too many icons or objects in the manipulation toolbar at the top of Microsoft Word. It does take time to learn new programs and understand graphical representation because sometimes they can be misleading. A lot of icons in Microsoft Word alone will take some trial and error to gain learning, such as the line spacing and indentation icons. I myself have mastered the ability to word process. Not too brag, but I can type very quickly and have the ability to bold using keys quickly rather than using a lot of mouse work. This brings up another interesting point of there being a lot of different alternatives to performing certain manipulations to things like words, letters and sentences in the word processing world. Typing the commands directly is usually faster. When talking about games and complex systems I think of a lot of MMORPG games. Whenever I watch people playing World of Warcraft or games like League of Legends, I am confused to the max about what’s going on and why there are so many different visible icons and numbers popping up in every corner. If I were to play those games for the first time I would probably suck really bad and be manually clicking things slowly to try them out. Looking at some of my friends play the games, I just see them clicking rapidly and pressing buttons almost robotically.

Principles of Direct Manipulation

                In the lecture there were three principles of direct manipulation brought up. These were touched upon briefly earlier in the lecture, where I brought up my God of War example. That would relate mainly to the third principle of “rapid, incremental and reversible actions whose effects on the objects of interest are visible immediately”. The first principle is “continuous representations of the objects and actions of interest with meaningful visual metaphors”. My understanding of this brings up the Assassin’s Creed franchise immediately. Why? Simply because of that crazy map that you have a billion icons representing many different types of missions, treasures, and points of interest. The visual representations are always seen in the top right corner of your screen and you can access them almost at any time. This allows the player to tackle things at their own pace and in my opinion was a good design decision for the game series. 

The second principle is “physical actions or presses of labeled buttons instead of complex syntax”. To me it brings up the previous example of Microsoft Word and excel again.

References:

[Assassins Creed: Brotherhood].Retrieved March 21, 2013, from: URL: (http://oyster.ignimgs.com/wordpress/write.ign.com/6390/2011/03/acb_dlc1_1-600x337.png)

[God of War: Quicktime Event].Retrieved March 21, 2013, from: URL: (http://static.gamesradar.com/images/mb/GamesRadar/us/Features/2010/10/Greatest%20evolutions/QTEGodofWar2--article_image.jpg)

[Microsoft Word Toolbar Icons].Retrieved March 21, 2013, from: URL: (http://colemancountyinstitute.wikispaces.com/file/view/microsoft.jpg/146633399/microsoft.jpg)

 

Human Computer Interaction - Blog 6

UBISOFT 

                So part of this week’s lecture, we had a guest speaker from Ubisoft Toronto, his name was Daniel Natapov and he was part of the companies game user research area. Upon entering the class I had a terrible seat, I believe this was due to people telling their friends about the guest speaker and them coming to see. Mr. Natapov informed us that he was a part of Ubisoft’s upcoming title Splinter Cell: Black List. It is a well-known franchise that a lot of gamers are really excited for. I personally do not really prefer the first person shooter genre of games myself. I believe a lot of those games have too much similarity and not enough unique features that appeal to me. Having this guest speaker can really motivate us and provide us with information and tips that we would need ourselves when we want to go into the industry. 

Group Communication

He also informed us that he had previously worked with Microsoft. During his time at Microsoft, he claimed that he preferred to work in and with larger groups of individuals rather than a small group. This is quite interesting since a lot of people I know personally in our program feel that working with a smaller group allows people to be much more organized and function better. Progress is generally easier to track and maintain as we are currently doing with a lot of our current final projects. In the gaming industry, we know it is going to be quite different. From simply viewing the credits of some of our favourite games we see a massive amount of staff working in groups on different areas of the game. This is something I am actually quite excited to do one day because I personally also prefer working with larger groups. I do not really see myself as a leader, but i do get along well and possess strong social communication skills when working with other individuals. Mr. Natapov informed us that when working with these focus groups, no matter what size or what amount of diversity is present, you must have strong social skills. One typical stereotype that we as game development students all have I believe, is the fear of presentation and speaking out loud in a formal manner. It’s going to be interesting to see how this improves with people I keep in touch with in the future. I noticed a lot throughout the past four years of my time here that during our GDW presentations of the past, though people had amazing looking games to present, they just had trouble communicating the themes, story and overall just explaining what it was. Of course, I am not one to exclude myself from this.

Conducting Experiments

 

During the lecture as people continued to ask questions, he informed us that he used a few of the game user research methods that we learned in class. From what I heard he conducted and organized a lot of focus groups with gamers so that they could provide helpful feedback and find errors. One thing he had the moderators do was make the players in the focus group feel comfortable. They are generally instructed to simply play the game normally without any consideration towards the experiment being conducted. One issue that he came across during his focus group experiments was that sometimes the developers would give him unplayable or extremely bugged versions of the game that prevented the users from even playing the game. Putting myself in that situation, I would probably not know what actions to take, since the process of gathering individuals for the experiment is difficult as it is on its own. He did make a point to inform us that there were multiple moderators so it does take off a great deal of pressure from just one individual. In addition to the focus group research method, Mr. Natapov also claimed that he used the think out loud method. If I remember correctly, this was when participants would say what they are doing and thinking in the game without any real regard to the experiment. From this, the moderators would have to process and collect the important data that they overhear from the person. If any of us do plan on becoming a game user research analyst, it is probably important that we’re able to understand what people are saying and learn to filter out the things are non-applicable to our scenario. Mr. Natapov stated that during this process it is quite common for people to pick on things like graphics and other art assets that are usually not finalized or being thought about at the current time. This is natural because as gamers, the first thing we usually look at when playing a new game is the graphics and how smooth and realistic they are. It is up to the moderators to either inform the users what they are looking for, or to simply just focus on the other things they are saying about the game. This seems like it can be very annoying and tedious, but it is evident that it is an important step in gathering information.

Miscellaneous

                One thing that made me laugh quite a bit about the presentation was when one of my fellow students asked Mr. Natapov about the 10 gaming evaluation heuristics that we have learned in not only this class, but our Social Network Games class as well. He claimed to have never used or looked at them during his time there. It is quite understandable since it is not necessarily in his job description. Most of our lecture theory may not be used in the future anyway, especially when it comes to learning about the human eye like we have done in more than one class. I sometimes wonder if what we learn theoretically in our program will ever apply to us in our future jobs.