Otaku, Cedric's weblog

A computer should feel the user's angst

I was just reading an interview of Chris Taylor, the creator of the mythic game Total Annihilation, which is still considered as one of the best real-time strategy games of all time despite being released in 1998.  Taylor is working on a sequel to Total Annihilation and he is introducing a set of innovative user-interface features.  The article I read only disclosed one:  watching the frequency of your clicks.

In short, the game will monitor how fast you are clicking your mouse in order to detect the urgency of your commands.  If you want a certain unit destroyed as soon as possible, you are therefore encouraged to click on it multiple times, which will signal to the game engine that it should activate additional firepower and units to follow your command.  This is what Taylor means when he says "A game should understand the player's angst".

It is a very little known fact that games have pioneered a lot of innovations in the user interface area.  For some reason, their contribution has always been very much downplayed but I am a firm believer that a lot of the widgets we use on our desktops today (most of them being incremental improvements of the WIMP paradigm - Windows Icon Menu Pointer) appeared in games first.  You might not have realized it, but there are plenty of subtle improvements available to you on a daily basis, such as:

• Flat toolbars.  There was a time when we were convinced that a button had to be 3D in order to express its affordance.  Nowadays, such interfaces look clunky and antiquated.
   
• Scrollbar thumbs giving hints as to where the document will reposition itself if you release it.
   
• Shortcut tree views.  Tree views have become a central part of any sophisticated user interface and they tend to become quite crowded.  Applications such as Outlook or Eclipse now let you specify shortcut views that only contain the nodes you are the most interested in.
   
• Goal-oriented interfaces ("I want to create a new document" as opposed to "Open / New document").
   
• etc...

Indeed, we are still using the old WIMP paradigm that was invented in Xerox PARC two decades ago, but all these incremental improvements have contributed greatly to making our desktops much easier to use.

Another example of a feature that was first implemented in games is mouse gestures:  keep your right button pressed, draw a "C" with the mouse and the current window will close.  What's fascinating with gestures is that not only can you recognize the geometry of the symbol the user is drawing, you can also analyze their motion to make a decision:  if they drag the mouse in a line from right to left, it means "Back", while dragging from left to right means "Forward".  Mozilla-based and other non-mainstream browsers support gestures, but overall, they are not being used very much.

Taylor's multi-click idea is new to me.  In general, modern user interfaces tend to move away from double clicks because it is difficult to explain to novices, and the confusion is even greater now that so many clicks happen on hyperlinks in HTML documents, which create an immediate response after one click (I set up all my desktops to respond to single clicks everywhere as soon as Windows 95 came out).

Another unfruitful attempt at using multi-clicks dates back as far as Windows 3 (and still supported to a certain extent in today's Windows) where a single click on the upper-left corner of the window shows up the Options menu but a double click closes the said window.

Overall, it appears that basing an interface on double clicks is a bad idea.

Interestingly, I believe that Taylor's idea has better odds of working, precisely because the specification is vague.  You don't need to "click twice within a few tenths of a second", all you need to do is "click several times", and the program will react accordingly.  The human parameter is what makes the difference.

Can you think of any other ways to improve the WIMP interface, either coming from games or other areas?