An interesting article in the relatively new journal “Artefact”. It examines the evolution of matching tile games (e.g. Bejeweled, Zookeeper etc.).
When refering to his own experiences in designing a similar game, Juul notes how players from different backgrounds appropriated the game in different ways:
During testing, it became clear that players understood the game very differently based on their experience with other games: Players who had played Bejeweled understood High Seas as a variation on this game, and instinctively started manipulating the fallen tiles at the bottom of the screen, but players with no knowledge of modern matching tile games understood the game as a variation of Tetris, and tried manipulating the tiles that were falling from the top. We have not encountered a player who did not know Tetris.
This is a fine example of how the development of usage schemes during our interaction with various artefacts influences -for better or worse- our interaction with the next generation of artefacts. Another instance of such a case is the use of the Wiimote. With the Wiimote the action is controlled notthrough an analog stick or D-pad (which is also present on the Wiimote), but through moving and pointing the Wiimote itself. While observing users, who hadexperience in using other video game consoles, approach the Wiimote for thefirst time, we noticed that they tried control the action using the D-pad eventhough they knew that the Wiimote didn’t function that way. This behaviour canbe analyzed in two levels: the D-pad presents an obvious affordance that is complementedwith the user’s previous experience – but the instrument “D-pad mentality +Wiimote†leads to breakdown.
I have worked with this notion in the past (or Papantoniou et al, 2003), but the study of the genre evokes the even wider notion by Hoftstaedter (I think) that our mind is a jukebox and new music just presses keys that evoke memories of music past: and this is an insight that works for both Cage’s “4′33“, sampled music, puzzle games, everything! The problem is that humans are peculiar animals: we cannot dictate or predict which memory fragment or usage scheme they will consider relevant in a given interaction depending on the context: familiar or boring? innovative or difficult?
Another interesting thing was the paper’s borrowing of the iconic chart by Barr. I feel Juul’s discussion is greatly enhanced by its usage.
References
Hofstadter, D. R. (1979). Goedel, Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid: Penguin.
Juul, J. (2007). Swap adjacent gems to make sets of three: a history of matching tile games. Artefact.
Papantoniou, B., Nathanael, D., & Marmaras, N. (2003). Moving Target: Designing for Evolving Practice. In C. Stefanidis (Ed.), Universal Access in HCI: Inclusive Design in the Information Society (Vol. 4, pp. 474-478). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
technorati tags:games, ergonomics, design, hci
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