Honours Thesis Survey

[patphyo]

Hello Guys,
My name is Patrick Win and I am currently doing my honours degree on Computer Science (Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, Australia) with a topic of “Should a PC game User Interface (UI) be modifiable/customisable?” There have been very few researches done on Game related areas probably due to a lot of people perceiving gaming as a waste of time and not worth giving up their time researching about games.
I am holding a friendly survey to get public opinions on your most played game and if that game offers UI customisation options, your general opinion on UI customisation, and other questions like your background gaming experience. There will be around 10 - 15 questions depending on choices you make and will take around 5 - 10 mins at most to complete the survey. Unfortunately, I am not able to offer any incentives due to how ethics policies and regulations work in Australia but your time and input will surely help the gaming community further extend the knowledge on Game UI Customisation.
If you do decide to take the survey, please follow the link below and read the information sheet carefully which can be found on the first two pages of the survey. The survey will close on 20th December, 2015 and the final paper is expected to be released somewhere around June, 2016. The link to the final paper will be posted on this forum when it gets released.
Thank you so much for your time and your contribution would prove the world (and our parents of course ) that gaming is not just for kids and there are a lot of future academic potentials on game related areas.

Survey Link - https://www.research.net/r/PCGameUserInterface

 

[BSim500]

I am holding a friendly survey to get public opinions on your most played game and if that game offers UI customisation options, your general opinion on UI customisation, and other questions like your background gaming experience.

Hi, I had a look at your survey and if you want some constructive criticism, then I think you're going to get some unhelpful feedback asking users to focus on purely their most played game (which to many isn't going to be the one that's the most "UI problematic"). Eg, I play a lot of different games rather than just one, and out of natural "selection bias" the games I like most will be the ones with the good interfaces because if the interface is that bad or frustrating, then I simply won't play them. So a lot of your "yes I like the interface on my most favourite game" answers will involve a certain degree of self-selection bias. Personally I think it's more useful to focus on "most problematic" rather than "most played". I also think you're mixing up different issues. Eg, "perceiving gaming as a waste of time" and "gaming is not just for kids" is more about personal / sub-cultural bias than the technicalities of how well optimized a UI is for any given platform.

Poor UI is one of my pet hates, especially related to consolization. What I mean by that is : PC gaming is still predominantly done with a keyboard / mouse played up close on a monitor / laptop at 2ft distances, whilst console / HTPC gaming is often played on a TV sitting further back (6-10ft) with a console controller. A good cross-platform game will have the option to scale the UI to fit both, ideally via an in-game UI scaling setting or at the very least by customizable .ini tweaks. Bad UI design will "assume" or force everyone to play at 6-10ft distances with a controller simply because it's less "porting effort" for cross-platform games. PC-only "Golden Era" 2ft optimized UI's (eg, Neverwinter Nights, original Deus Ex, etc), can be hard to read (small buttons, font sizes, etc) at "consoley" 6-10ft distances, whilst "consoley" optimized UI's (large buttons & fonts), often look ridiculous up close at 2ft with inventory screens containing giant sized text (see "stock" Oblivion / Skyrim screens) that feel as amateurish as if someone sent you a resume for a job application all in size 36 font...

The need for customization also varies according to genre. Eg, FPS & racing games generally scale well on PC/console. Others like some "old-school" PC RTS's don't need customizing that much as those types of games are predominantly PC-only and mouse driven anyway. You simply wouldn't play Age of Empires or Rise of Nations on a controller at 10ft away even if the UI itself could be customized as that style of gameplay itself is still very much mouse driven. Adventure games scale pretty well and often have simple UI's (left click = activate, right click = select action (look, move, pick up, etc). "Action-adventure" and puzzle games are a mixed bag. Then you've got games which are mobile-first and like consoles need large over-sized UI elements even up close (for touch activation with fat fingers).

In short : Yes, there does need to be some ability to customize / mod many games, even if it's just UI element size scaling. However, not all games need the advanced ability to move UI elements about or reskin them, and even games that do have extreme UI customizability can still be massively screwed up via other "consolization" related game design choices. Eg, nerfing the PC gameplay in a "heavy-weight" RPG that may use 1-0 and F1-F12 to "fit" a controller with limited buttons is not a problem that can be solved just by messing around with onscreen UI elements. This is where a lot of the two-weapon limit, no quick save/load button, RPG mechanic dumbing down stuff in general originates from.

^ I hope this kind of stuff is useful as good vs bad game UI design / modding is often quite a bit more complex than what can seriously be explained in a 5-min questionnaire.

 

[patphyo]

Hi, I had a look at your survey and if you want some constructive criticism, then I think you're going to get some unhelpful feedback asking users to focus on purely their most played game (which to many isn't going to be the one that's the most "UI problematic"). Eg, I play a lot of different games rather than just one, and out of natural "selection bias" the games I like most will be the ones with the good interfaces because if the interface is that bad or frustrating, then I simply won't play them. So a lot of your "yes I like the interface on my most favourite game" answers will involve a certain degree of self-selection bias. Personally I think it's more useful to focus on "most problematic" rather than "most played". I also think you're mixing up different issues. Eg, "perceiving gaming as a waste of time" and "gaming is not just for kids" is more about personal / sub-cultural bias than the technicalities of how well optimized a UI is for any given platform.

Poor UI is one of my pet hates, especially related to consolization. What I mean by that is : PC gaming is still predominantly done with a keyboard / mouse played up close on a monitor / laptop at 2ft distances, whilst console / HTPC gaming is often played on a TV sitting further back (6-10ft) with a console controller. A good cross-platform game will have the option to scale the UI to fit both, ideally via an in-game UI scaling setting or at the very least by customizable .ini tweaks. Bad UI design will "assume" or force everyone to play at 6-10ft distances with a controller simply because it's less "porting effort" for cross-platform games. PC-only "Golden Era" 2ft optimized UI's (eg, Neverwinter Nights, original Deus Ex, etc), can be hard to read (small buttons, font sizes, etc) at "consoley" 6-10ft distances, whilst "consoley" optimized UI's (large buttons & fonts), often look ridiculous up close at 2ft with inventory screens containing giant sized text (see "stock" Oblivion / Skyrim screens) that feel as amateurish as if someone sent you a resume for a job application all in size 36 font...

The need for customization also varies according to genre. Eg, FPS & racing games generally scale well on PC/console. Others like some "old-school" PC RTS's don't need customizing that much as those types of games are predominantly PC-only and mouse driven anyway. You simply wouldn't play Age of Empires or Rise of Nations on a controller at 10ft away even if the UI itself could be customized as that style of gameplay itself is still very much mouse driven. Adventure games scale pretty well and often have simple UI's (left click = activate, right click = select action (look, move, pick up, etc). "Action-adventure" and puzzle games are a mixed bag. Then you've got games which are mobile-first and like consoles need large over-sized UI elements even up close (for touch activation with fat fingers).

In short : Yes, there does need to be some ability to customize / mod many games, even if it's just UI element size scaling. However, not all games need the advanced ability to move UI elements about or reskin them, and even games that do have extreme UI customizability can still be massively screwed up via other "consolization" related game design choices. Eg, nerfing the PC gameplay in a "heavy-weight" RPG that may use 1-0 and F1-F12 to "fit" a controller with limited buttons is not a problem that can be solved just by messing around with onscreen UI elements. This is where a lot of the two-weapon limit, no quick save/load button, RPG mechanic dumbing down stuff in general originates from.

^ I hope this kind of stuff is useful as good vs bad game UI design / modding is often quite a bit more complex than what can seriously be explained in a 5-min questionnaire.

Thank you for a really long reply. Your feedback is really appreciated but unfortunately, I can no longer update the questionnaire since I already got a bit of responses and I don't want to just discard them. I will take your feedback for furthur surveys. Thanks.

 

[DigDog]

once again a ultra-simplistic questionnaire.

 

[patphyo]

Update: Thank you everyone for your support and time. We have now reached nearly 100 survey results and the survey won’t be closed until 20th December, 2015 so there is still plenty of time left to participate. Please tell your close friends and family about this opportunity to help shape the community’s knowledge on gaming and UI customisation.

 

[Fallen Kell]

Hi, I had a look at your survey and if you want some constructive criticism, then I think you're going to get some unhelpful feedback asking users to focus on purely their most played game (which to many isn't going to be the one that's the most "UI problematic"). Eg, I play a lot of different games rather than just one, and out of natural "selection bias" the games I like most will be the ones with the good interfaces because if the interface is that bad or frustrating, then I simply won't play them. So a lot of your "yes I like the interface on my most favourite game" answers will involve a certain degree of self-selection bias. Personally I think it's more useful to focus on "most problematic" rather than "most played". I also think you're mixing up different issues. Eg, "perceiving gaming as a waste of time" and "gaming is not just for kids" is more about personal / sub-cultural bias than the technicalities of how well optimized a UI is for any given platform.

Actually, how do you know the survey really isn't focusing on those very issues, even though it is presented to you as a focus on something else (i.e. game UI customization)? Many things are not what they seem to try and remove biases from people taking the survey (i.e. the study participant is really blind as to what is actually being studied). For instance a group is put into a room for a study on group cooperation, when in reality the study is about gender bias in group leadership selection...

 

[DigDog]

maybe the issue here is that the questionnaire is:
hey, would you like something which has no downsides at all?

 

[werepossum]

I did the survey, but found it somewhat problematic. Single player games are not steady state; the game we most play in January probably isn't the game we most play in October.

 

[patphyo]

Update 2: Thank you everyone for your support and time. We have now reached nearly 200 survey results and to be honest, I really didn’t expect this much responses and thank you once again.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

PC game UIs are sometimes customizable, almost all MMO games allow for extremely fine grain levels of customization. Many other games support mods that allow detailed HUD modification, and many other games sport basic menu options that modify the HUD in some way.

It's something we already have, the question of "should" is really down to the free market, if there's a great enough demand for UI customization then it will become popular to add to games where it's in demand. I don't think there's any right/wrong answer to that.

 

[Subyman]

I think it is an interesting topic. When choosing a game in the survey, I chose the game that I spent the most time with over the last few years instead of what I'm playing right now. My biggest complaint about UIs is that many developers try to overly incorporate them into the artistic design of the game often to the detriment of the UI's ability to present information. WoW is a huge perpetrator of this with their raster graphics covering a large part of the gameplay without showing any relevant information.

 

[patphyo]

Update 3: It has been a while since I last “Bump” this post so I thought I would do it as a last time before the survey closing date. The survey will close on 20th December, 2015 and thanks again for taking your time to read or participate in this survey.