Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design

Components of the User Experience

So far, we've briefly covered a potted history of the user experience and how it has been implemented in game development. The trend has been toward increasing complexity and detail scaling with the capabilities of the hardware and the increasing sophistication of the game design. As the games become more complex, the required interface for the game has also become more complex. The only games that are released nowadays that use the original up/down/left/right/fire paradigm tend to be remakes of the old classics, such as the remake of Ms. Pac-Man, shown in Figure 6.17.

Figure 6.17. Ms. Pac-Man: Quest for the Golden Maze.

This increase in complexity is not just limited to the software. As the presentation layer ...