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.

Human Computer Interaction - Blog 5

Final Project!

                The end of the semester is around the corner and it’s about that time of the year when we get swamped with final projects and assignments. After discussing many areas of Human Computer Interaction and all of its related topics, I can say that I have learned a great deal. In last week’s lecture we looked at three different themes that we would have to choose for our final project, they were: Change, Glance and Time. This is quite interesting because in groups we will be all working on accomplishing very different goals.

Change

                Looking at the first theme of change, I often think about a person’s behaviour or attitude towards something. Change can mean many things, it can be physical, emotional and mechanical or almost anything that alters from its original form. For the purpose of the assignment the groups who will be working on this particular theme will have to focus more on an individual’s behaviour. Some of the examples that a few students were describing in class would include exercise or learning games, where a player changes either by improving an existing skill or learning a new skill. Some examples I can think of in today’s gaming world would include games like Brain Age or a more physical game such as Wii Fit. Working in video game retail and seeing children purchase the Nintendo DS and buy Brain Age, I’ve often had to explain how it helped them learn skills. A game like Brain Age starts at an extremely low level so that children are able to adapt to it well. Children of the lower elementary grade levels can also learn skills such as math and spelling. Wii Fit brought something quite remarkable to that generation of gaming because it was the first time we were able to play an exercise game on a console. Women in their mid-20s-30s found it extremely interesting and would often be the consumers of this game. They would talk about how they were able to set certain goals and the game would track their progress. For the sake of this final project, I believe groups that are using the Kinect Sensor would probably find this to be the most suitable hardware to work with. The amount of things that we can do with the Kinect’s technology can bring change in almost all physical and mechanical forms.

Glance

                The theme of glance, at first I had no idea what this even meant. After talking about glance in our lecture I gained the understanding that it had a lot to do with the player’s eye movement and the screen of viewpoint of the game. Things such as the User Interface and more specifically the HUD would be in my opinion the focus of this theme. Thinking of game like the Nintendo 64 title The Legend of Zelda – Ocarina of Time, the dashboard and HUD were quite complex. It was one of the games that in my opinion introduced complexity in a games user interface. Having the C-buttons mapped out on the top of the screen with a start menu opening the ability to see many different items was quite complicated. This theme would be quite difficult to complete in my opinion. The mission for the students involved in this project is to design a personal game user interface tailored to their needs using novel technologies as stated in the project outline. Once again I can only really think of people using the Kinect hardware to do this. I do this imagining some playing an FPS game with the characters hands and or gun on the screen moving to the movement of the player with the Kinect sensor. I wonder to myself how this can be done through a brain sensing hardware, what are some existing ideas? And how is it even possible to tie in the connections with both the player’s brain waves and physical virtual code. Seems a little too simple? But I say this with very little thought involved. After all, the theme that my group has is Time.

Time

                Time is a broad term that can be manipulated in many ways both complex and extremely simple. When I think of times in some of my favourite games, I think of the nerve wrecking puzzles of games like Prince of Persia on the Playstation 2, where I had to pull levers and climb to the top of buildings in a short period of time. Such an easy task that I had to do under pressure. Or perhaps in a more recent one of my favourite games, Sonic Generations, I had to complete one of the levels known as the Green Hill Zone in under one minute. It was the first and easiest level of the game, but even a time challenge like that could take hours to perfect. I personally hate being timed when I have to complete a challenge. In my preferred game genres, I prefer to explore and understand and search every nook and cranny. Since I am in fact doing the theme of time for my final project I have to think about how my group and I are going to implement it using our hardware. We were given the hardware that uses the brain as its sensor. Something I still fully don’t understand nor do I have a clue about how to work with. It will be interesting to use these things. In previous video lectures we were given video links that showed how Human Computer Interaction can change in the future in regards to how we play games. We’ve already gained the technology to play games without controllers and use our physical motor skills with the Kinect. Most devices these days have eliminated the use of buttons have all become voice activated or touch activated. Based on some of the design inspiration questions we were presented with I think the sleep based game would be pretty interesting. I personally have sleep issues and think that this could actually help maybe kids and be developed to be some sort of serious game used in the medical industry.

Image References

 

[Ocarina of Time HUD screenshot].Retrieved March 5, 2013, from: URL:(http://isaiahnewbold.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/zelda-ocarina-of-time-15.jpg)

[Sonic Generations – Green Hill Zone Classic].Retrieved March 5, 2013, from: URL:( http://press2reset.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/SonicGenerationsScreen1.jpg) 

[Wii Fit Screenshot].Retrieved March 5, 2013, from: URL:(http://i-cdn.apartmenttherapy.com/uimages/unplggd/2008_04_29%20wii_fit.jpg)