computer games as bad ui
2025-03-17 19:56:10.319855+01 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
From a thread about ChatGPT is the ultimate gaming tool - here's 4 ways you can use AI to help with your next playthrough...
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange
@pogmommy @gamingonlinux There’s a chapter in Jef Raskin’s The Humane Interface where he talks about computer games as bad UIs. Most computer games have a simples set of tasks to accomplish and the entire game is about making them hard: some information you need is not presented early on, you need to do things in a specific order, you need to hit buttons rapidly in a sequence, and so on. You could replace most games with a simple one-button UI labelled ‘win’ and have that button pressed automatically when you start the game and it would be more efficient. His point is that we don’t design games like this because they’re optimised for fun, not efficiency, and we shouldn’t design UIs like games because they should be optimised for efficiency. A lot of the discourse around LLMs makes me think that there is a more general form of his point.