WIMPing Out: Looking More Deeply at Digital Game Interfaces

As of this writing, Microsoft has very recently announced that its latest generation game console, the Xbox One, will no longer include its motion and voice sensing camera, the Kinect. The Kinect was introduced to players during the previous console generation for the company’s Xbox 360. Kinect had met with some success for select fitness and dance games and Microsoft hoped to build on that success by ensuring that players would have access to the device from the outset by packaging it as standard with all Xbox Ones. Microsoft’s rival, Sony, and its latest generation Playstation 4 game console, did not include any such device in its base model and subsequently sold at a cheaper price. The Playstation 4’s sales were exceeding those of the Xbox One and many pointed to the inclusion of Kinect as the reason for Microsoft’s higher price point and subsequent faltering during the early stages of this generation of the so-called console wars. In spite of these initial stumbles, Microsoft’s Kinect has been part of an attempt to alter the way digital game players interact with their games. The Kinect also represents a potential shift for how developers design game interfaces as well. Whether developers and players have been ready for this shift and willing to accept this interface change remains to be seen. However, in this moment, the Kinect’s future appears suspect.

These types of interfaces embody one compartment of the space Kristine Jørgensen addresses in her work, Gameworld Interfaces. However, as one explores Jørgensen’s work, it becomes readily apparent that she wants to develop a more complex understanding of interfaces than our more conventional notions of interface as that which sits between computer user and machine. More specifically, as the book’s title indicates, Jørgensen’s interest lies in gameworld interfaces. She defines gameworlds as “world representations designed with a particular gameplay in mind and characterized by game-system information that enables meaningful player interaction” (3). Whether the gameworld acts in a naturalistic modality or has a semblance of fictional cohesion matters less than the fact that it is governed by game mechanics, i.e. that set of rules which define and delimit the player’s activity. Game-system information serves as “any representation of the game system that is made available for the player…[that] provide a certain kind of game information to the player, regardless of whether this information is superimposed or made available inside the world environment” (ibid.). This type of careful definition occurs throughout her work as she theorizes the challenges associated with the gameworld and game-system relationship.

At the heart of Jørgensen’s argument sits the notion that the gameworld exists as interface for game-system information rather than as something separate and unique from it. The interface is not merely “window, icon, menu, and pointer (WIMP)” (20), but includes the gameworld. In a claim that appears to echo McLuhan’s famous dictum on media and messages, Jørgensen asserts that players do not access the gameworld through an interface, but the gameworld itself exists as an interface through which players can access the game system and its information. In her formulation, the medium appears inseparable from the message. Thus, gameworld and interface effectively bleed into one another becoming continuous rather than discrete, separate entities.

Jørgensen devotes considerable attention to gameworlds, distinguishing them from fictional worlds, the diegetic worlds of film, and from game spaces. Gameworld interfaces, and the varied ways in which they enable players to engage digital games, become one of the means by which this differentiation occurs. These interfaces may allow players to access the game’s system information in subtle ways via elements explicitly in the gameworld or through more overt ways associated with menu overlays that augment the world. Jørgensen points to examples in the former category where games provide minimal visual or aural indicators of something like an avatar’s health. A first person shooter like Crysis employs a heads-up display (HUD) that functions as something the player sees and avatar theoretically sees. However, what is seen is minimal. As such, games in this category communicate information to players subtly via the gameworld. Examples of the latter feature a much more clearly evident set of symbols that overlay the gameworld. A role-playing/real time strategy game like those in the Diablo series will typically feature a set of bars indicating a avatar’s level of health. The player sees these bars, but it appears that the avatar, and those in the game who interact with the avatar, do not. As a consequence, the bars exist on top of the gameworld. Jørgensen provides several other examples along the spectrum of gameworld and game-system information possibilities throughout the book as many digital games intertwine different expressions of the relationship at different points in the game.

Jørgensen clearly advocates that any gameworld interface must be designed with the activity of play at its forefront. Rather than being achieved via a transparent invisible interface that most closely resembles our interaction with a physical world, meaningful gameplay is more effectively communicated through an interface that does not draw attention to itself, i.e. one that functions to, first and foremost, seamlessly serve the player’s game-play. The interface is there to facilitate the player’s choices, but is not to be screaming about which choices need to be made or how they are to be made. Jørgensen asserts, in its subtlety, that the interface’s alignment with what a player would experience in the physical world ought to be secondary to its furtherance of meaningful gameplay. This question of meaningful gameplay is important throughout the book. The design question of the gameworld as interface and the subtle versus overt expression of this gameworld-interface relation is the issue of what makes the player’s interaction with the game, i.e. the gameplay, meaningful. Gameplay is meaningless if game-system information cannot be communicated to players in an effective way.

As the discussion unfolds, Jørgensen considers how different approaches to game interfaces are perceived by players and game designers and relates these perceptions to the question of meaning and gameplay. Part of this discussion involves an application of Goffman’s theory of frames. Jørgensen takes this notion of frames as a lens through which to understand gameworld interfaces. She notes how players are able to sift through the various frames that simultaneously operate within digital games. These frames include ludic frames oriented specifically around gameplay and fictional frames that are more closely tied to the gameworld environment. Players have the capacity to emphasize one frame over another depending on their perception of this environment, how it functions, and how it subsequently contributes to meaningful gameplay. Players may also provide a frame not immediately present in the gameworld as a way to generate meaningful gameplay as well and/ or blend frames in a dynamic way. Jørgensen provides numerous pieces of evidence from players in support of these claims.

The degree to which this gameplay is meaningful is borne out in those places where Jørgensen cites this player feedback on interfaces in select games throughout the book. It is this point that leads into one of the more valuable dimensions of Jørgensen’s discussion, her consideration of conventions. In various sections throughout the book, Jørgensen speaks to the significance of noting how a variety of conventions shape how players interpret the degree to which their interaction with a game is meaningful. These conventions relate to experience with other types of media like television and computers. They also relate to a player’s previous interaction with specific game genres and their respective tropes as well. A role-playing game will feature a different set of interface conventions than a simulation racing game. Jørgensen makes similar claims with respect to specific game platforms (e.g. Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, etc.) as well. Another digital game convention involves what Jørgensen terms “metareferences,” those expected instances where the game directly addresses the player in ways not expected in other forms of media. As players bring their knowledge of other media conventions, alongside game genre, platform, and metareference conventions, to the gameworld, they experience a kind of comfortable familiarity in encountering what might be an otherwise new virtual space. All of these conventions have the capacity to shape the player’s level of meaningful play.

One of the potentially promising aspects of Jørgensen’s work concerns her inclusion of developer and player voices. In the opening chapter, she makes clear that her study represents “a user-centered approach to interface design” (11). This commitment would appear to emphasize the value of her focus group and individual interview data in the ensuing pages. In fact, they appear vital to her methodology and shine through in the chapters on designing the game interface and the interface as liminal. However, there are a few points in the book where quotes from the developer focus group and player interviews seem to be wedged into the discussion rather than serving as the basis for a more organic argument that would flow from their input. The theory seems established before the interviews rather than vice-versa such that the users appear to confirm rather than center the study. Perhaps a more sustained concentration on this interview data in an exclusively developer/ player-focused chapter would render these designer/user contributions a more meaningful aspect of the argument.

Although certainly useful, Jørgensen’s work, with its focus on gameworld interfaces, may be too narrow for new media scholars interested in interfaces writ large. The interfaces in which she is interested are very much restricted to gameworlds. Also, although Jørgensen provides a helpful section in the last chapter on how her discussion and attendant taxonomy of interface terms might be applied, the book will also likely be too abstract to possess real heuristic value for game designers who might think about using it to create new types of interfaces as part of their gameworlds. To be fair, Jørgensen does recognize this limitation, but it seems unlikely that practitioners would stick with the book long enough to get to its hands-on applied concluding chapter. Finally, it may have been helpful for the author to more directly link her work to the field of media ecology, especially given her discussion of the information environment of gameworlds as ecological. Therefore, in this narrow sense, and more broadly for that matter, Jørgensen’s work would appear to speak to questions media ecologists find interesting.

This being said, Jørgensen’s argument has value for game studies scholars. Those concentrating on textual criticism would be well-served to consider the ways that gameworld interfaces shape the meaning of the text rather than strictly focusing on information the gameworld provides. Jørgensen convincingly argues that interfaces are just as important for understanding digital game content as what scholars often regularly assume as content in the generation of meaningful play.