Arkham Horror Mythos cards

Last night I played a new-to-me board game, Arkham Horror. I had a good time, but the rules were some of the most complex for a board game I've ever played. Once we had gone around a few turns and stopped numerous times to consult the rulebook, we started to understand it and the game began to flow.

Eventually it was my turn to draw a Mythos card and share with the group how it impacted our characters and the game board. I began to read from the top of the card down when my wife stopped me. She said I was doing the tasks in the wrong order and showed me how I was supposed to interpret the card.

The card looked like this:

A Mythos card from Arkham Horror

I assumed that I would read the card top-to-bottom and perform the actions in that order: Headline, Clue, etc. However, my wife was right; the rulebook shows how you are supposed to read the card:

Selection from the Arkham Horror Rulebook explaining Mythos cards

I do not understand why the card is laid out this way. You have to read in this zig-zag pattern to play it right:

Same Mythos card but with lines showing what eye movements are necessary

For the rest of the game, every time I drew a Mythos card I wasn't 100% confident I was playing it right, just because the order of events I had to do made no sense with what the card looked like.

The cards would make more sense if they were laid out in order, like this:

A mockup of the card with the ordering of data changed, made with the Balsamiq mockup tool

Norman doors in a church

I was standing by a set of doors a few days ago that were a bit unusual to me. After watching a few people interact with them, I realized I was staring at a set of Norman doors.

It was a set of double doors, and the door on the right had the typical flat metal panel associated with pushing doors open. On the left there was a small metal square with an open center.

These doors were in a church that was hosting a concert with groups from North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, so very few people going in and out were familiar with this building. Five people went up to these doors and tried to push open the door on the left, which didn't budge, before moving to the right and pushing the right door open. To open the door on the left, you have to curve your hand like you are going to pick up a glass and hook it into the opening of the panel to pull the door open. So why did people in this building for the twenty minutes I was around go 0/5 at the left door?

Maybe it is because both doors have flat metal panels we associate with pushing. In the picture above, you can see a door against the wall through the glass that has a handle instead of the flat-front pulling fixture. I witnessed a few other doors leading to other rooms in the church also had those same handles. These people may have expected the same handle fixture on this door if they were supposed to pull it open. It also could be these people didn't know that the black part on the left door was actually a hole.

Another question I thought about was why did these five people push the door on the left first instead of the door on the right to begin with? The left door has a much larger window build into it - maybe they were using it to see that no one was on the other side before trying to push the left door open first.

The usability of these doors would be improved by replacing the fixture of the left door with a more traditional "pull" fixture like a vertical bar. I do wonder if the existing fixture is more common in other areas, just not in this part of the country and therefore gave these people trouble.

Guild Wars 2: New guild mission options need better tooltips

Almost two weeks ago, a new gameplay element was added to Guild Wars 2 called guild missions. When I got home that night I fired up the game to see what the deal was. Since my guild had upgraded the Architecture category of bonuses for our guild the farthest, I checked that first and found new upgrades had been added to the bottom of the list including Guild Puzzle Unlock. I hovered over it and a tooltip explaining the upgrade and the requirements to build it appeared.

The Architecture category of a guild's Upgrades tab

Close-up of the tooltip for Guild Puzzle Unlock

The tooltip shows two icons, but no text to describe or identify them. I was pretty sure the first one with the green up-arrow meant I needed to upgrade the Architecture category to at least the next level. I had no idea what the second icon, the orange shield with a lock on it, was for - it was a symbol I had never seen in the game before. I started searching through all the options in the Upgrade tab and eventually found the upgrade with the matching icon in the Art of War category menu.

The Art of War category of a guild's Upgrades tab with Guild Chalenges Unlock highlighted

It's frustrating that I had to root through all the new upgrades in all the categories to find out that Guild Puzzle Unlock under Architecture has a prerequisite on Guild Challenges Unlock under Art of War. These are the first upgrades that have dependencies outside their own categories, so it was even harder as a user to figure out what the dependencies were. The more time I spent trying to find the upgrades with matching icons, the harder it was to remember what upgrade I was trying to learn about in the first place.

To improve the UI, more information should be in the tooltips. They should say what the icons stand for, and if the required upgrade is outside the currently selected category it should say which one the requirement is in.

Tooltip for Guild Puzzle Unlock with icon descriptions added

A player who recognizes the icons can quickly see the requirements for an upgrade and move on, while a non-expert player can spend more time reading the text to understand what requirements are needed. Adding text will also ease the mental burden of the player - they won't have to remember which upgrade they are learning about and what the icons of the dependencies look like to try to match them up by browsing the other categories.

Trahearne in GW2

I've been playing Guild Wars 2 since the game launched. So far, only one of my characters has completed the main story path of the game, which includes pairing with an NPC named Trahearne. I enjoyed playing the story arc through to the end, and didn't have any strong feelings one way or the other about Trahearne.

However, some players have very strong feeling about him. A sub-reddit just to complain about Trahearne even exists.

The most common complaints I've seen are that some players feel Trahearne takes the credit and receives the recognition for the battles and achievements by the player's character. These players want to be recognized as the hero of the land and the one who killed the rampaging dragon, not as the second-in-command to Trahearne who stands aside and watches him accept the credit and praise for the victory.

For these players, their experience is ruined. They feel frustrated and cheated at not being the greatest hero in their own story. I never felt this way, but I can understand how someone expecting to be biggest force in the narrative would be caught off-guard.

Of course, there are people on the other side of the issue. Some players have said that after creating a sylvari character, the same race as Trahearne, and seeing him in their character's story much earlier gave them a greater appreciation for the character.


The lead writer of GW2 responded to players on the game's official forum, saying that they are listening to user feedback and looking at how they will handle the Trahearne character and others in future content. He also made a point I think is very important (emphasis mine):

...Trahearne was intended to fill a very specific role that, in terms of both gameplay and story, the PC could not fill—an order-neutral character with extensive knowledge about Orr and the magic of undeath who could coordinate a global war effort and make the necessary plans, thus leaving the actual gameplay up to the player.

Trahearne was set up the way he was so the player didn't have to act like a manager but actually play the game; instead of choosing objectives to meet or who to assign them to, the player goes out and achieves those objectives him- or herself. If Trahearne's role in the story was any different, it would have negatively affected the gameplay.

The role Trahearne filled in the plot was necessary to keep the game fun to play, but the execution leaves some players feeling that their contribution to the story is not recognized. Editing Trahearne's dialogue to shine the spotlight more on the player's character or giving Trahearne more depth regardless of the player character's race may help resolve the issues some players feel exist in the main story. The GW2 team has been very open to the game community's concerns since the game launched, so I am interested in how future content will be shaped as the team takes in feedback from their players.

UX that worked - iPhone contact forwarding

A while ago, my wife needed the phone number of a friend that I had saved in my iPhone that she didn't have in hers. We were texting at the time, so I looked up the friend's contact information and was ready to either memorize the number or write it down to text it back to my wife.

When I found the friend in my contacts app I saw a button I never noticed before, 'Send Message,' on the contact info page. When I tapped it I was able to forward the contact, with all the information I saved on the person, to my wife like it was a text message. It even included an icon that made it recognizable as a contact and not just a text of the friend's name.

This is the kind of thing that makes me excited. I had an action I wanted to perform, and while trying to figure out how to execute it I found a feature I hadn't noticed before that let me do exactly what I was trying to do easily and quickly. I was impressed that I could tap a button or two instead of trying to hold the phone number in my memory long enough to type it up in a text or having to write it down so I could make sure I gave my wife the right number. It's not the fanciest feature, but it made my day a little easier.

UX in games - includes emotional reactions?

Warning: This post contains major spoilers for the ending of Half-Life 2: Episode 2.

One of my hobbies is playing video games, and as I've become more and more interested in UX and HCI I've wondered how much of the video game experience is considered the user experience.

Two games I've played in the last few years stand out in my mind. One is Alan Wake, a survival horror game about a writer who's wife is kidnapped by a supernatural force and his attempts to rescue her. At the beginning of the game, it's explained that Alan's wife suffers from a fear of the dark. The couple arrive at a lakeside cabin, and while Alan is outside the power is cut to the cabin and his wife begins screaming in fear.

At the time I played the game I was engaged, and I could relate completely to the situation. I mashed the sprint button, running Alan back to the cabin to check on her and as I did I could feel that I had become tense and anxious. The game had triggered an emotional reaction in me, and I had only played it a few minutes.

The second game is Half-Life 2: Episode 2. In the game's final scene, Eli Vance is grabbed by an alien creature and murdered on-screen while the player's character is pinned to a wall, unable to move or stop the alien.

I was shocked at the death of the character, but my wife was choking back tears. She told me that she had liked the character of Eli because he reminded her of her grandfather, so his death had a much greater emotional impact on her.

In both these cases, life experiences caused a dramatic scene in a game to have an even greater emotional impact on my wife and myself, the players. To me, that's one of the highest goals a game UX designer could hope to achieve. Because these two moments triggered such emotional reactions within me they remain two of my favorite gaming moments. I see no reason why emotional responses to games should not be included or considered part of the user experience of them.

Usability in Metroid: Other M

This post contains spoilers for Metroid: Other M

The ending of the main story arc of Metroid: Other M was very frustrating to me, and I think the blame lies in the poor usability of one of the final boss fights of the game.

The game begins with a tutorial which teaches you the button combinations for Samus’ attacks. One of the moves is the Power Bomb, and once you leave the tutorial this move is disabled. However, you still have the regular Bomb attack. Towards the end of the game, you fight a Queen Metroid and roll down into the creature’s stomach in Samus’ morph ball form. As the morph ball, your only attacks are to lay bombs.

When I reached this point, I began laying as many Bombs as I could but did not see the monster’s health dropping. However, mine was falling while inside the monster’s stomach and I eventually died. The game let me restart right before I entered the monster’s stomach, but with only about half my health. This time I rolled around trying to lay bombs in as many places as I could, trying to find a weak spot that would let my bombs do damage. With my health much lower, I had less time to lay bombs and died again. I repeated this a few more times, using what little time I was given each restart to look for some weak spot that would damage the queen.

After dying over and over, my wife checked online to see how I was supposed to beat this monster. She told me I was supposed to use the Power Bomb attack. I had to look up what the button combination was because I did not remember it from the tutorial, which I had played through at least a week before. When I restarted again and used a Power Bomb, the monster immediately was killed. It was at that point that the game showed the Power Bomb ability being unlocked and reminded me of the button combination to perform it.

This was not a boss fight designed with usability in mind. The game required me to use a move the game told me previously was not available and only reminded me of how to perform the move after I had to use the move. Since the other abilities in the game would be shown as being activated when they became available the same thing should have been used here, probably when the player performed the action to jump down the monster’s throat.