MMO Gaming

I mentioned this briefly before. Talked about only for a moment and in the more strict relation to newcomers to (MMO) gaming. Still, with recent talk of raid interfaces I am forced to re-look at where I stand on the issue.

For the record, I stand exactly where I did in that post. Too much information is given all the time that is unnecessary. And, in fact, this information may not be helping people raid better, it may in fact make it harder.

I am always appalled by most people’s raiding screenshots, even my own from my time spent in WoW. I’ve got crap all over the place. Don’t get me wrong, I believed that I needed all that crap to be effective, but the truth is, I probably didn’t. I’ve played both a healer and a tank in raids, as both I had every group open to me all the time so I could monitor health. Pretty much every raiding person does that. But why?

I mean, who actually needs to do that? Why does a hunter need to know the exact health of every raid member? What is he going to do with that information? Bandage? It seems silly. So much clutter for so little payoff. I’d argue a good fifty percent of the information we surround ourselves with is something we can’t help out with anyway. And, on the off chance there is something we could help with how often do we miss it because of the huge amount of information we try to show ourselves?

The real problem is no one has spent sufficient time developing an interface that is intuitive enough so that it presents information at the right time. There is only “all information” or “no information” and no in between really. The other problem is the current MMO design paradigm seems to be interface equals boxes on screen. I hate that most of all. The interface I am presented in a game should not be made up entirely of boxes on a screen. The world is my interface.

Don’t get me wrong, boxes on the screen have their place when they need to be there, but they don’t need to be available all the time so why detract from the beautiful world that was built? Use them when they are necessary but don’t just throw them up there in order to stick yet another box on the screen. This does no good for the player or the developer.

I’ll have to talk a bit more about this at a later point in the month, even now I’m noticing some activity in the back of my mind. This can only mean I’m getting an idea. Or my head is going to explode. I guess you’ll have to wait and see if I post tomorrow to find out which it actually is.

mmo, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming, game interface, interface design, game design, raiding