Aaron Lawn: Usability…

A play of Small World last week has had me musing on the various impacts that presentation and visual design can have on a game.  To sum up my thoughts on Small World, I think that Days of Wonder has taken a strong game (Vinci) and streamlined the rules noticably.  Many of the rules fit easily into the framework, causing less calculation during play, which has caused the game to speed up in length.  The artwork as a whole is very strong, and taken individually, each piece looks great.  But once they have joined each other on the board, the game becomes a mish-mash of counters with conflicting art and scattered counters.  Overall I would say that the game has clean rules and a messy board.

For me, this conflict has caused me more consternation than I would like.  I want to like Small World unreservedly, but the mash-up of nice artwork has me saying “I like it, but...”

And then I started thinking about other games that do the same thing.  I’ve never been a big fan of the game-implementations of Mike Doyle, who does some very striking and well-done box art, but has also created some very visually conflicting boards and pieces¹.  Gloria Mundi is an almost infamous game locally for it’s obtuse iconography.

So how much should this matter?  Can the graphic design of a game drag great gameplay down so much that a game never gets a chance to prove itself?  Will that same graphic design elevate a mediocre game?  There are obviously multiple thoughts on this - BGG uses a rating/ranking system that requests users to rate games based entirely on their desire to play the game again.  It then provides another vector of game ‘weight’, but doesn’t say anything about the usability of a game, leaving those puzzle pieces to be learned via pictures and comments.  RPG.net uses a rating system that is less granular (a 5 point scale instead of a 10 point one), but in two dimensions, style and substance - or gameplay/gameweight and graphic design.  Years ago I wrote reviews for a retailer magazine that focused on rating a game on presentation/saleability, gameplay, and marketing, which essentially gave some weight to what the box looked like from the exterior - attempting to quantify the exterior graphic design with it’s intended use - i.e. selling the game.

Like measuring and assessing gameplay, graphic design and usability can be very personal.  For me, there are two different dimensions to visual design - the graphical appearance and then the usability.  Graphical design like Winsome games are very austere in appearance, but basic and uncluttered in usability².  Other aspects of visuals are obvious to some, but difficult for others - I’m not colorblind, and I don’t mind small type, but in another twenty years my failing eyesight could make me feel very differently.

As and unabashed lover of information, I’d like to see some quantification of visual design for games - either a general method of rankings like RPG.net uses, or simply definitions of common terms like ‘clean’, ‘messy’, ‘colorblind problems’, etc.  I probably want this just because I want to feel better about my own misgivings when a game dissapoints for reasons entirely unrelated to gameplay.

Which thankfully doesn’t happen that often.

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¹His early redesign of Puerto Rico as a single main board with player buildings was very interesting, but a usability nightmare. (though it should be noted that his recent work has been much better than his early - not surprising.)↩

²ususally.  There were some decisions in Wabash that I never understood - methods of marking that made the game harder to play.  I -think- these were changed in Chicago Express...↩

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