I know this might sound like a bit, but there’s something thst i have been studying for a long time in the area of UX… It may have even been a factor in my divorce. I am not quite sure how to write about it, but roughly speaking, it’s Gamer Privilege.
It’s a phenomenon that if you’ve been playing videogames your whole life, you take for granted how dense, unfriendly, confusing and culturally ideosyncratic videogames actually are. controllers went from having 1 button to 36: there’s no entry
hud
mount
Minmax
Mob
Multiplayer
Multiplier
Nerf
Noob
NPC
Noscope
OP
Overworld
list of things experienced gamers have learned that new non experienced players haven’t:
pressing combinations of buttons to perform certain actions. e.g. super mario running and jumping while moving.
using two analogue sticks simultaneously.
the assumption to move right
jumping on enemies heads hurts them in mario, but running into their side hurts you. but running into the side of coins collects them: which objects hurt and which help when you collide with them is a learned skill.
your dragon died of dysentery
your inventory contains: the optics of bipartisan cooperation
games that shame you for not playing, instead of being kind and reminding you what’s going on and what you should be doing to progress
the gamer words
no one asked, but the divorce thing: I wanted to figure out how to design more inclusive games and she thought that was a capitalist and exploitative impulse.
like being inclusive and accessible is just a play to extract more money from the population. It’s kind of a baffling accusation since it’s not like my base personality is about being an extractive capitalist- catering for underserved audiences is a spectacularly unprofitable endeavor.
but, is there something colonialist in here?
from a very young age it’s what I decided I wanted to do with my life was figure out how to make electronic interactive art- not games but the broader category of interactive experiences.
I can’t say I have succeeded in learning *how* to do it. Not even close, but I keep trying.
it’s still always worth questioning our assumptions and one of mine is that this is something worth figuring out
@zens I've heard this take a lot too, that usability is inherently exploitative in some way. That ez to use software is necessarily going to be serving a purpose other than offering utility to the user.
IMO its one of those things that is obviously not true, but might as well be true in the world that we live in.
I think its more accurate to say that software development is difficult and expensive, but some people manage to do it as a hobby or for the public good. HOWEVER, software development *including usability testing* is at least 10X MORE expensive, and practically no one has ever managed to come up with the scratch to do it outside of a commercial context. So all the effort tends to go into making it intuitive to buy loot boxes
