Games meets Interaction Design: War, Indifference or Love?

Do games designers need interface advice from the interaction design community? This was the argument that raged following the formal part of the "Interact! Games meets Interaction Design" event, an InSync and AIGA Experience Design London collaboration. The relationship between the two fields came under scrutiny first from Ben Cerveny, till recently director of experience design at frogdesign, and then from Durrell Bishop, partner in Luckybite and specialist in tangible interfaces.

Cerveny addressed the nature of play and concluded that 'play is the moment that action moves into interaction' and 'games are when you apply cognition onto play', projecting patterns and creating consensual experiences.

From this theoretical starting point, he looked at how games become more than their operational elements as symbolic vocabularies form round them and they act as metaphors for more complex social and cultural contexts. Interaction design can come in and support this process by developing the metaphors that 'sit on top of the operational level' and give guidance about which operational features to develop.

He touched on the differences in types of game, some having a larger compositional component bringing them closer to programming.

Durrell concentrated on the potential of user interfaces to be playful. He looked at familiar games: a pack of cards, chess, Monopoly, a car on a track and a gun as a progression from a system to which rules need to be brought, to ones for which the way they are to be used is self-evident in the representation. He used this as an analogy for user interfaces generated by interaction designers. The interface of a central heating system is usually as obscure as the card game, he noted. Whereas: 'With an iPod, you can't help playing with the wheel, but it is hard to move to more visceral interfaces and there are many boringly implemented ideas from interaction design,' he said. 'No one wants to be a virtuouso in Word.'

As an example of something more inspiring, he showed some of his students' work, including a television that you can tip or slap to change channel.

However, although the speakers had demonstrated the relationship between games and interaction design clearly exists at a number of levels, the debate following the presentations turned to the politics of the industries and how different goals kept them largely separate.

As one attendee put it, the games industry is fragile and desires conservative interfaces so that they know they will work as they try to woo a wider market for their product. Another asked how many people from the games industry were actually in the audience and pointed out that the games industry could afford to ignore interaction design ideas, given its turnover.

But one observer commented on Amberlight's collaboration with Sony on the games manufacturer's novel interfaces and how well this coupling seems to have worked. And another suggested that as the next generation grows up it will expect everything to be customisable, including media and games, and that this will have a knock-on effect on what work is necessary on interfaces.

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