i definetly like that about “Dr. Kawashima – Brain Training”, which has also controls that are on the one hand super intuitive and feel not “new”, but are very non-standard compared with most other games.

but i feel that there is another very bad point about reusing standards from other games, not only is the design expecting the user to have a pre-knowledge, but also is the player expecting the game(designers) to have a preknowledge.

if you use elements from other games, players allways expect further elements from other games, too. and feel bad when you “forgot” to include them in your game. and this is especially so with interface and controlls. and there are often a lot of things from other games that you either don’t want to include or can’t. can’t because of the limited space of features – many players want a game to include “everything”, which is not what the designer wants.

Internally there has been a lot discussion about this post. It was triggered by a bit harsh critique, which I wrote. I must admit that it was inapropriate.

Still, I would like to keep track of the things we discussed about:

- I think the similarity to the oil-thngys fits well. How do you call them, does anybody know?

- It was my guess that Loco Roco is also intentionally quite similar to Katamari Damacy.

- I had some problems with the term “unsusual” since it is a bit vague. Hopefully, we can get more detailed in further posts.

- I had the impression that at some points we were comparing apples to oranges. Is Pax Imperia realy compareable to Street Fighter and Loco Roco? If yes, what is the conclusion?

- The differences in the controls of the games are based on the ammount of the actions a player can perform. While Daniel explicitly chose not to take this into account, for me it might be a very interesting topic, which I will adress in some next post.

Although I haven’t been playing Loco Roco yet, it is yet another PSP Title, wich might bring me to actually buy the System some day. A the momment, the other two are Katamari Damacy and Wipeout Pure. All of them feature a quite unique visual language, which for me is also a very important aspect of successfull game design. Here, I fully agree with Daniel.

According to Norman’s recommendations (which he explained very convincingly in the whole book), using standard interfaces ist only the second option (if not the third, have to look it up), if it’s not possible to achieve s natural and intuitive mapping by other means.

Using tried and proven standards isn’t a bad idea in an established genre but that also means the design is expecting the user to have a certain degree of previous knowledge.

What do you think?