Brainfold

Now, before you start flaming, let me elaborate on the deliberately flammable title. I love Sid Meier’s game designs. Heck, I just bought Railroads and the Civilization series is among my favorite games ever. It’s just that every game of his has had a more or less bad user interface. I’m saying Sid Meier sucks as a UI designer. UIs in his games are always a bit unorthodox and it’s always a bit too hard to get all the information you need to play.

While unorthodoxy can be great in game design, it’s almost always the opposite in user interfaces. We instantly know how to use a new program or game, at least to some degree, because it’s similar to programs we’ve used before. In UI land, convention is king. While there aren’t as many conventions in games as in “regular” programs since games tend to go for unique visuals, having a completely unique look-and-feel isn’t a virtue. Haven’t we all seen games where “artistic” or “clever” user interfaces have made the experience horribly confusing and unusable? Ok, Meier’s games aren’t that bad, but I’ve always felt there’s something subtly wrong with them.

And about getting information. I’ll take Pirates! (the new iteration, I haven’t played the original) as an example because it has some obvious flaws. The game includes a decently written encyclopedia about everything relevant in the game, but it’s made almost worthless by some stupid mistakes. First, no search! If you want to find out about something you just found, you first have to find the encyclopedia in the menus, then manually find what you’re looking for by slowly scrolling the cumbersome list of everything in the game. Second, no topic categories! If you want to compare two ships, say Barque and War Galleon, first you have to scroll the list of everything to find Barque. Then, either remember or write down information for the ship, because to compare it to War Galleon, you have to go back to the list of everything, click your way to the very last page and find the second ship there! If you forgot what Barque was like, just go back to the list (of everything), click your way back to the beginning and find Barque again! If you’re lucky, the ships are similar and hyperlinked, but usually that’s not the case. That’s not the only mistake I can think of, but it’s one of the worst and should have been found by any usability test.

Granted, there’s no saying who’s actually designing the user interfaces of Meyer’s games (I couldn’t find a UI designer in credits), and if Meier has any say in how they look, but I’m thinking they must be at least mostly designed by the same guy (or gal) because they are all somewhat similar. For example SimGolf and Pirates! make a lot of the same mistakes. Also, Meier’s games aren’t anywhere near the worst in the UI department. Maybe it’s just the contrast between awesome game design and bad UI design that’s bothering me…

I doubt Meier’s ever going to read this rant, but for your next game, please, please hire a decent UI designer.