An obvious but surprisingly under-practiced design principle is to “embrace the medium.” Applied to software, this means building applications that take advantage of the strengths of the platform instead of trying to mimic the strengths of another platform.
iPhone and Wii games provide many stark abuses of this principle. Call of Duty is perhaps the single best franchise on the XBox and PS3, but the Wii version is almost unplayable. They basically just did a straight port of the game, with worse graphics and using the Wiimote as a shaky aiming device. It’s not an accident that the best Wii games are made exclusively for the Wii (and that most of those games are made by Nintendo itself).
iPhone games are perhaps even worse violators of the “embrace the medium” principle. Recently I was thinking about downloading Madden 2010, but as soon as I saw the screenshots I knew I’d hate it:
You can see they are trying to force the XBox/PS3 control scheme onto a device with completely different set strengths and weaknesses. The iPhone’s strengths are: touchscreen, gestures, accelerometer, networked, always with you. Its weaknesses: no buttons, small screen, poor graphics/processor (compared to consoles). The best games – Flight Control, Spider, Rolando – are designed from scratch to take advantage of the iPhone’s strengths. Take Flight Control as an example:
You guide the planes by mapping their routes with your finger. It’s such a simple, elegant and fun game, and one that could only exist on the iPhone. It embraces the iPhone-ness instead of fighting it.
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Yep. Another Flight Control addict! Another perfect iPhone-embracing and incredibly addictive game is Canabalt.
Cool, gonna download it now! Thx!
Another great example of Embracing the Medium would be the mobile games of Mr. Goodliving's “Playman” series for java phones.
Not even with touch screen, just a dozen or so tightly packed buttons and the way they extract complexity and playability from so little input is masterful.
If you have an old Sony Ericsson (K800-style) or similar javavm phone, Playman Beachball, Soccer and Summer Games are some of the best examples of converting gaming concepts to a limited-input platform.
yes, canabalt is already awesome.
Another e.g. that someone else blogged about Yahoo Mail tries to mimic a desktop experience and makes it seem cumbersome while Gmail plays with the strengths of the web medium and feels more light weight…
It's worth noting that there is a very iPhone-embracing part of Madden 2010 which is awesome – while passing you just touch the receiver you'd like to throw to. It's easy and works really well.
Yeah, i saw and liked that.
Combining this thought with your previous post about career path, I got to thinking about using this principle in ones life. Why try to be an accountant if I'm not a numbers guy.
Embrace the platform I was given in my DNA, don't fight it.
Another one is Eliss. The gameplay doesn't have much in common with either, but if you're into Rez or Fantavision on PS2 you'll probably love it.
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Great advice….this also applies to devices…not just software. Stated another way – its about respecting the inherent limitations (form factor, I/O, etc) of your device.
Many of us in the watch industry have ignored this advice. We're constantly building watch-like devices that mimic cameras, phones, TVs, etc…none of which succeed with consumers or commercially. We succeed when we stick to what watches do well – providing actionable info at a glance.
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No- you want to understand the medium versus the media
Fight it, fight its repercussions. Then embrace it.
And in total- the first step is embracing the body as the beginning and endpoint: Drives me crazy when people don't realize that. Personal Pet Peeve, sorry.
What you are really writing about here is how touchscreens have no give and that they are fully extensible of eyes and hands. In reality, if you are going to design around touch screen input, imagine you are deaf. You can see you hands and with your eyes. And that's it.
And remeber- the screens right now don't give back. So when you press, you don't know- Your eyes are extremely important.
You can choose to embrace an either/and/or experience with the Iphone and touchscreens- You can emphasize the touch side or the eye side or try to do both:
What's failing with these games, is that it is extremely difficult to do both, because when you want to do both, you want to use some sort of secondary aspect of the hand, namely actual touch- and the Phone has no give. Hence it fails.
I will write up something longer on this eventually, after I do some Bachelors work
Full Disclosure: I'm a Fine Arts student- from a figure drawing background, who is moving into what they call “new media” work. I have a heavy theory background as a result of why things work versus don't work.
hehehe. the gameplay + music = if my investors find out how much I've been
playing it, I'm fired.
I've written a couple of iPhone games that were for the likes of EA, I even did a madden port to mobile phone from a console, part of the problem is that its not the design or the device that's overlooked. This is an often thrown out there thing but we're well aware of the limitations and how to design around them, it isn't a design problem but a 'what worked before works again' history, the publisher generally is in ultimate control of what happens with the game, if you're doing an original title for a new platform, you design it around that, then you pitch it. So i just looked at the iphone App stores top 25 grossing games, there are 3 games from EA in there madden,nba and fifa. None of the other games you mentioned are there, or that i could see in the top 50. The publishers look at this as well and see that it didn't fail, possibly it could do better, but no one is willing to take the risk, they go with what they know. If you turn up with a wacky cool idea, you're a lot less likely to get through the doors than with something that is proven. Madden is a fairly complex game, and you're going to introduce an entirely new control method that the legions of madden users from console are not familiar with, those are the primary customers, thats a problem.
Hey Chris,
You gotta check out the israel (AMAZING) startup called : PrimeSense (http://primesense.com) their the one's behind microsoft's Natal project :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oACt9R9z37U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HluWsMlfj68
Very cool – IF it works… these kinds of interefaces can be really
frustrating if they only kind of work…
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Chris Dixon | hunch.com | Cell: 1-917-282-0854 | 54 W 21st St #1001,
NY NY | cdixon.org | @cdixon
Very cool – IF it works… these kinds of interefaces can be really
frustrating if they only kind of work…
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