Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Path: news.duke.edu!newsgate.duke.edu!news-hog.berkeley.edu!ucberkeley!newsfeed.stanford.edu!pln-w!extra.newsguy.com!lotsanews.com!uunet!ffx.uu.net!world!buzzard
From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: Zork Nemesis: my perspective.
Message-ID: <G2xo7D.B3w@world.std.com>
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2000 12:04:24 GMT
References: <39E6C6E8.1034D8DB@millcomm.com> <39F56E2D.6B88C0FD@informatika.si> <G2xMC2.E46@world.std.com> <39F5764F.847B2B13@informatika.si>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Lines: 80
Xref: news.duke.edu rec.arts.int-fiction:80044

Matej Frece  <matej.frece@informatika.si> wrote:
>I sense some negative waves in your answers. Seems this game
>really eats your nerves out...

I sense an evasion of my criticism which I wasn't going
to call you on until I saw the ad hominem ending.

>> >Return to the starting location [snip]
>> This part that you seem to think is trivially easy
>> was what made it a problem for this particular player
>> at least.
>
>Nobody said RTZ is easy. Au contraire. Some people are up to
>the challenge,
>some are not. It can be frustrating, I grant you that.
>Still, the solutions
>to puzzles are not so abstract to start flaming the game all
>over. IMHO at least.

In other words, you're not disagreeing that knowing that you
could return to the starting area was necessary for being
reasonably able to solve the puzzle, and that if you hadn't
figured it out, the puzzle would seem entirely unfair.  Lots
of people seemed to find the puzzle unfair.  I still don't
know how to do it, and indeed the game let me get pretty far
without ever knowing how.

>> >No need to
>> >start the game all over... so, people complaining about this
>> >particular puzzle are indeed unjust to the game.
>> Reconsider given the fact that I hadn't yet figured
>> out how to (or if it was even possible to) do the above?
>
>I can't help you with that. I don't recall icon interface
>complicated. I actually liked it, because it wasn't just
>use-talk-look-walk interface. Compared to other similiar
>interfaces, RTZ probably has the most complicated one, but
>the
>advantage is that it gives you much more freedom. Of course
>that
>freedom of action can't compare to text parser, but RTZ was
>released in
>a time when such icon interfaces were a must
[snip]
>For some icons are too limited, for others, like
>you Sean, they are too complicated.
>Read the manual or something.

As I said with my explict criticisms in the other post,
the problem was that their particular technology combined two
particularly unergonomic approaches to an icon based interface.

First, by making the location of the icons context-dependent,
they prevented the player from having "muscle memory", much
less plain old memory, about what command was where when it
popped up.  You had to stop and look for it.

Second, by making the icons animatable, they deviated from
the entire UI design methodology intended by icons, which
is that they be simple, abstract, and instantly recognizable
(after learning, possibly).  Instead, some icons were
indistinguishable from each other for some frames, so you
had to stop and stare at each icon and wait for it to animate
to decide "is this the icon for the verb I'm looking for"?
(Yes, I'm only talking about tenths of seconds here, but it
added up.  The animation time for some of the icons was probably
at least half a second, though.)

Note that neither of these complaints suggests I'm unsatisfied
with a pop-up iconic interface; just a bad one.  It's not
a question of "too complicated", indeed, since you could
infer from my post that I'd have preferred a text interface,
and since RTZ used an iconic interface because text interfaces
are supposedly "too complicated", your comment seems quite
off the mark.

So, to speak to you in kind:

Why don't you go read a manual on UI design before responding to
UI design criticisms next time?
