Five examples of terrible game UX
Enraging your inner neckbeard
Games: the final frontier.
When it comes to experience design, games occupy a whole other world. Most game designers are not experience designers, and this is something that actually applies to most works of art. Movie directors, book authors, game designers, musicians, they are generally not focused on designing their experience, and that is the Achilles heel of so much art. They are more interested in telling their story rather than creating your experience.
This is an oversimplification, of course, but it holds true across the game industry because all of the UX principles and heuristics that are applied to practical software have alter egos in the world of video games (and movies, and books, and music).
This deficiency in the game industry is an opportunity for me to expand the territory of Bad UX Roundup into gaming. That’s right. I’m going full neckbeard today. This is the first episode of Bad Game UX, but it won’t be the last.
This series will cover games old, new, and everything in between. It will cover casual games and simulations, beat-em-ups and RPGs, easy and hard, PC and console, and even virtual reality.
So, m’ladies and gentlesirs, bust out the Doritos and Mountain Dew, because here we go.
Mega Man Maverick Hunter X: That voice announcing every time you fire a special weapon
I need to start this series off strong, and if this isn’t strong, I don’t know what is. This is some Blue Shell grade dumbfuckery. Rather than describing it, why don’t I just let you witness for yourself:
Seriously, how many times do you have to be dropped as a baby to think that’s a good idea?
If you couldn’t be bothered to watch the video, just know that every time Mega Man shoots a special weapon, he announces loudly the name of the weapon he is firing, such as “Homing torpedo! Homing torpedo!”
And if, for some reason, it isn’t immediately apparent what is wrong with this, try imagining a U.S. Marine in the middle of a firefight, yelling “M249 SAW!” every two seconds.
Ok, so it’s not realistic, but we all know that most video games do some frankly stupid shit in service of the “rule of cool”. The problem is that there is nothing remotely cool about this. It doesn’t make Mega Man sound like a badass. It makes him sound like a jackass. It’s one thing for heroes to refer to their own weapons occasionally. But yelling the name of your weapon doesn’t make you sound like Dirty Harry. It makes you sound like Gomer Pyle.
Besides failing the realism and badass tests, M3HX’s spazzy weapon exclamations also harm usability. They are so distracting and grating that they can throw you off your game. Voice announcements are cognitively expensive because your brain has to process language rather than simple sounds. The appropriate time for voice announcements is either:
- when the message to be conveyed is complex and specific beyond what non-verbal communication can handle, or
- likely to get tuned out among other distractions, and thus warranting a greater demand on your cognitive resources.
Given that there is no practical, game-specific purpose for these voice announcements, and it doesn’t add realism, nor is it in any way badass, but to the contrary is dweeby and embarrassing, it has no right to be mucking up a classic game. Of course, for that matter, neither do those horrendous music remakes. WTF did they do to the Storm Eagle theme?
Important lessons
- Usability (playability) should be your primary concern in any game design, realism should come second, up to the point at which suspension of disbelief is maintained, and then, if you are able to, you can strive for badassitude.
- If you’re trying to make your game badass, look for inspiration in movies like Escape From New York, Dirty Harry, Pulp Fiction, and Rambo.
- Voice announcements are cognitively expensive for the user, so only use them when the message is specific enough to overload non-verbal channels, or important enough to preclude ambiguity.
ArmA Series: The disastrous action menu
I don’t get it. Half-Life and the Thief nailed contextual actions in the 90s and Bohemia Interactive is still screwing the pooch in 2018. Half-Life had a very simple scheme with a single action button (everybody knows it’s “E”) that would perform tasks ranging from accessing computers, opening doors, getting into vehicles, and talking to people. Thief highlighted any object that the player looked at, and right-clicking the mouse would manipulate or grab the object in question.
Both systems were fantastic. They were easy to learn and impossible to forget, and the chances of fat fingering were nonexistent. The detection zones for actions were properly calibrated too, emulating the arm’s length of your character.
Although both of these games involve a much simpler set of actions than ArmA, there is no excuse for ArmA’s ham-fisted approach to actions. If I’m being fair, I will give Bohemia credit for finally adding an expanded set of hotkeys for many of the functions. In the not so distant past, the vast majority of actions were in a single menu that looked like this:
In the first game of the series, Operation: Flashpoint, that loathsome menu was the only way to do anything more complex than fire your rifle. You even had to use it to climb a ladder. Then, in 2006’s ArmA, came the contextual action icon.
It would have been a nice, if too-little-too-late, first step toward actual usability, but that was pretty much all the evolution that happened. The contextual action icon still sucks pretty hard, and here is why:
The detection angle and radius are broken.
You have to be standing at the exact right spot, facing in the exact right direction to summon the contextual action icon. Moving a step away, or turning a couple of degrees could make it disappear, and then good luck finding it again, because it was prone to move. In the heat of battle with bullets flying around, it is likely you’ll get shot before actually doing what you were trying to.
Below is an illustration of the problem. If your guy is standing by the rear door of a Humvee, and he is pointed and positioned exactly right, the game will give you the option to get in. If you change your angle or position (the grey footprints), the option will disappear.
Oftentimes the detection radius caused problems that were completely out of my control. For instance, I once tried to get out of a damaged helicopter after crash landing, and the available action kept switching between “get out” and “engine off”. Before I could actually select “get out”, the helicopter exploded.
It is ambiguous.
The icon that appears in the dead middle of your screen only gives you a vague idea of what will happen if you engage the action. If you are in proximity to more than one door, you have no idea which door you’re about to open. If you’re standing by a vehicle with a “board” icon, you can’t be sure which seat you’ll end up in (not that the game will even let you choose). This could be so easily solved by highlighting the exact object in the environment you are interacting with, similar to what Thief does, but Bohemia lacks the brains for that, apparently.
Below is my idea of what the interface should look like:
It is used for too many things
Here are just a few examples of the insane variety of actions compressed into this stupid menu.
- Setting off bombs
- Weapon selection
- Accessing your inventory
- Climbing a ladder
Horror stories arising from this bad design include accidentally setting off bombs, grabbing a missile launcher instead of getting into a Humvee, or dying because the user was unable to climb a ladder. Say what you will about Half-Life’s ladder behavior, at least climbing them was easy.
It uses the single worst button ever invented for a computer.
I am referring to the mouse wheel button. Talk about a button that should never have been invented. It is bad enough that you must select between wildly diverse actions like climbing a ladder and setting off bombs — which in real life use an entirely different set of muscle movements, and are impossible to confuse — using a little wheel, but the icing on top is the fact that you must then press that wheel down in order to actually select the action.
It is already a test of your fine motor skills to press down on the mouse wheel button without also rotating the wheel, but imagine trying to do that in the heat of battle.
“Match between system and the real world” is one of the ten heuristics developed by Jakob Nielsen. It means that the way things work in an interface should mimic the way things work in the real world. By this measure, ArmA’s action menu is a cataclysmic failure. It was moronic and inexcusable in 2000, making it downright embarrassing today.
For more on this topic, see this video.
For a mod to alleviate the problem, check this out.
Important lessons
- Never employ the mouse wheel button.
- Every action your character can take should be initiated by a user action that physically resembles the real-world action as closely as possible. If this is not possible, then space out the controls according to the similarity of their real-world equivalents. For instance, the hotkey for “open the door” should be close to the one for “grab the item” but far from the one for “call in airstrikes”.
- Refine the hell out of your detection radii. This applies to everything, not just contextual actions.
- If you have contextual actions, always make it unambiguous what they are, and when/where they are available. In real life, we have our arm’s length to make that judgement, so you need to simulate that in your game.
Half Life 2: Characters explain important things just once and will not repeat them for you.
Remember the old RPGs where you can talk to every bit part character you encounter? It seems like they all have something to say to you, and furthermore, it’s so important for them to say what they have to say that they will repeat it to you as many times as necessary.
- They might share a pro tip, like “I hear lava grinches are vulnerable to water magic”,
- or a narrative prod, like “King Æthelfart needs to speak with you in the throne room.”
- Maybe they just need to tell you that “mountains’re nice”.
Whatever they might have to say, you only need prompt them and they’ll tell you again if you missed it.
Though this practice occasionally produced silly results, it was nonetheless practical and useful. You never had to worry about missing an important piece of information because you accidentally skipped a line of dialogue. Too bad this lesson is entirely lost on Valve. In Half Life 2, if you miss a line of dialogue, that sucks for you, because the game characters will never repeat themselves (except for irrelevant banter, that is).
In one instance, you are told by a member of the Resistance that they “dropped a crate of rockets coming across the plaza” and that “if you can make it there,” you will be able to defeat some War of the Worlds-style tripod mechs. But if you missed what he said due to adrenaline from the intense battle you had fought just moments before, or the background gunfire and explosions, fat chance he’ll tell you again. While his description of where the rockets are absolutely sucks (a blunder in its own right), even knowing that there is a crate of rockets might prevent you from being lost. A hazard-laden battlefield terrorized by killer robots is a bad place to be lost.
This problem is ludirously easy to solve. Simply having the characters repeat the entirety of what they said, or the portion essential for completing your task, if you press the action button while facing them would make this problem go away, but they certainly never issued such a patch during the service life of Half Life 2. There is no excuse for this. This was a solved design problem for literally decades, and Valve willfully flouted a useful convention because who knows why. Remember, this is the same company that made us wait for a Half Life 3, and then decided to not make it after all. I don’t give them much credit.
Important lessons
- Do not make the game more difficult by lack of realism. It is not realistic that a person would not be able to ask for directions to be repeated.
The Harley Davidson: King of the Road arcade game does not have countersteer.
There is a certain amount of realism that can be sacrificed for the sake of reducing difficulty. It happens in otherwise immersive video games, and even hardcore simulations might shave down some details in the name of mitigating drudgery. How much unrealism a player is willing to tolerate is a function of the genre of game, and how smart and savvy the player is. As it so happens, arcade games are usually designed for lowest common denominator.
In the case of Harley Davidson: King of the Road, there are plenty of concessions to playability that I (grudgingly) acknowledge. I can see that giving Harley Davidson cruisers the ability to drift through turns like supermoto bikes, and absorb head-on crashes like bumper cars, might be required so that the game is not impossible, given the level of over-the-top stunts the player is expected to perform, including jumping over trains. Fine.
But one fundamental rule of game design is that real life skill should translate to skill in the game. People who are good drivers are better at driving games. People who know history are better at Civilization games. Even the steaming turd that is any Call of Duty game rewards players who have some understanding of combat and squad tactics. So, one might think that someone who rides motorcycles in real life might have at least some advantage playing King of the Road.
Not so much.
One thing even a novice motorcylist understands, indeed even any self-respecting bicyclist, is the concept of countersteering, in which the rider turns the handlebars the opposite direction from where they want to turn, causing the bike to lean away from where the handlebars went, thus turning where the rider wanted to go. Once you have learned to ride, this becomes second nature.
So imagine my surprise when, playing King of the Road, I turned the handlebars to the left and the bike in the game started going left. Even more ridiculously, the mock-motorcycle that the player sits on actually leaned to the left too. Feeling the bike leaning in the same direction in the same direction I turned the handlebars was so disconcerting that I found the game unplayable. It was back to pinball for me.
Given that this game is a branding and marketing vector for an actual motorcycle company, it is surprising that such a fundamental part of the riding experience was treated with such contempt. It’s crap like this which harms the Harley-Davidson brand. That and selling slow, overpriced motorcycles.
Important lessons
- If a player is good at a real-life activity, they should have an advantage at the simulated activity, no matter how shallow that simulation may be.
The NES Classic Edition’s uncomfortable, retro controller
Get out the Preparation-H, because butts are about to be hurt at an industrial scale.
The original NES controller sucks ass. It sucks. Get over it.
Just look at it:
What human hand is shaped like that? Where are right angles present on the human body at all?
The NES controller was a product of its time. Video game ergonomics were just not that well developed in 1983 when the NES came out, so we can partially excuse its design based on that. Those ergonomics developed by leaps and bounds over the next few years and by 1990, the new Super Nintendo sported the ergonomic masterpiece we know and love to this day:
The rounded shape made the controller much more comfortable. When you play Super Nintendo, it just melts away, and you become unaware of it, better engrossed in the game. By comparison, you never quite forget you are holding the NES controller. Its corners and awkwardly arranged buttons constantly remind you.
This fact was not lost on Nintendo in 1993, when it produced updated 8-bit NES consoles with a different appearance, but more importantly, better controllers:
Nintendo introduced the rounded surfaces and diagonally arranged buttons of the SNES controller to the old NES, and it was glorious. Gamers could enjoy Rad Racer, Bubble Bobble, Excitebike, Star Tropics — and every other game for which a better equivalent hadn’t been released in 16-bit form— with the same advanced ergonomics that the SNES boasted.
That brings us to 2016, when Nintendo introduced the NES Classic Edition, an all-new piece of hardware that emulated the old NES, but with a built-in library of 30 games, eliminating the need for those cartridges that you (didn’t actually) need to blow in.
Notwithstanding the inexplicable decision not to allow the user to purchase and download more games, it’s a cool idea. People have been playing emulators of old consoles for decades now, so it was an opportunity for Nintendo to monetize that action while improving the user experience. Too bad they missed a huge opportunity for improving said user experience, because they brought back the shitty 1980s controller:
And don’t for one second think you could just plug your old “Dog Bone” controller into the NES Classic Edition, because the new system uses a different port. You’re stuck with the rectangle.
I’m actually not surprised Nintendo did things this way. They are pandering to a bunch of nostalgic dorks who are more interested in re-living their childhood rather than actually having a good gaming experience. In the 1990s, Nintendo was more willing to re-write history, not only re-designing the NES controller, but re-making the first three Mario games in 16-bit for the gem that is Mario All-Stars. As it is, the latter does not even appear on the SNES Classic Edition. If you want to play those Mario games, you’re stuck playing them in their crappier 8-bit form.
Important lessons
- Do not harm the user experience to appeal to hipsters and dweebs.
- Design your input devices for ergonomics, which means rounded contours rather than right angles. I’m looking at you, Apple.
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It was the best of times. It was the blurst of times.
