Myopic Viewpoints

        My optometrist told me today that the amount of near-sightedness in young children is up 40%.  You can likely guess what the experts are attributing the change to -- hand-held games are changing the way young eyes are developing, largely because they are significant uses of young kids' time.  I'm not getting all preachy on this.  When Pete Townsend's hearing went south he asked is doctor if he should turn the music down.  The doc's response was that he should spend some time learning to read lips instead.  Myopia isn't a catastrophe and with a bit of moderation in kids' habits it probably won't be so big a problem in the future.

        But this raised a subject that I've written to here a couple of times and that came up just recently when a first-time designer asked me to have a look at his game from a form-factor perspective.   The overall look and feel was very nice from an artistic perspective, but the smaller card size he was using to save on printing costs meant that the text on them was difficult to read.  This wasn't thematic text; I needed it to play.  I put a web cam on myself for a couple of turns so I could count the number of times I had to transition from looking through to looking over my glasses.  At times I was transitioning six or eight times just to make one decision in the play, cards in hand vs. board on table.  Playing the video at 4x speed afterwards (which I recommend for anyone doing usability assessment) made me look like a bobble head doll.

        It used to be that I would respond with something like, "I'm in my mid-forties, and if you want to target me as a potential buyer you need to get the contrast and print size up on your components, or the game will have the aroma of hassle on it."  But if kids are more likely to be myopic in the coming generation this will be sage advice for anyone looking to publish games at all, regardless of their target audience.

        Difficult to measure, difficult to describe for most users, lack of usability can be a noose around otherwise good design.  As best I can tell people use the word "fiddly" when what they mean is that the components involved do not intuitively or cleanly execute the rules.  Information exposition is harder still.  Energy spent decoding game state from poorly designed components is energy not spent on strategy and tactics, and makes an otherwise good play feel tedious.  Like it or not, your players' shortcomings are part of the requirements your product needs to consider, and your success is completely dependent on their success.

                  S.