1 minute read

In my own mobile app work, published and unpublished, I’ve been focusing on making games. Why? For several reasons:

  • Games are an area where there’s more room for experimentation in user interface but also a strong requirement for usability.

    Unlike a more typical business app whose interface is primarily focused on presentation or access to information, games combine presentation with action in a way that must be fun. If it’s not fun to play no one will play it.

  • Games push the tactile, interactive parts of the touch device to the foreground.

    Interactive touch is the third great interface paradigm of modern computing, after the command line and the graphic interface, and keeping it flowing is hard work. Just a quarter-second lag and the illusion of interaction is gone, a bit more and the user is needlessly frustrated. Games force you to get all the details right.

  • Games allow me to make up new methods of interaction other than tapping buttons, drawing and selecting items from a list.

    I think of a way I would like to interact with the screen and then develop a game from it. For example, I created Twitchbox to explore how to use multiple and independent touches (up to 8) at the same time. (Fun fact: iOS can handle up to 11 simultaneous touches.)

  • Games have rules, and rules about rules. You wouldn’t voluntarily play a game that is obviously unfair (a rule so fundamental even chimpanzees understand it).

    You probably wouldn’t like a game where the second player doesn’t get as many turns as the first. And when you make a move, it should be clear that the move has been made — if there isn’t a reaction of some sort, visible or audible, when you touch the screen, most people will try touching just a few more times and if there’s still no response will quit in frustration. These are rules so implicit that we don’t even think about them unless they’re broken, so one way to uncover them is to create from scratch and see what’s intuitively required.

  • Games are hard. But then it wouldn’t be a challenge if they were easy, would it?

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