As the designer, the artistic source, the Creatrix of Kokoro Wish, it is my intention to not merely invent a game that passes the time, but to innovate, and to also demonstrate the best of what I have learned in my fifteen plus years as a designer of games. In computer years I am a Methuselah, ancient, and therefore not to be listened to. Worse, I have committed the gravest mortal sin of the games industry, I have not been incredibly financially successful. This alone assures my unimportance to the major players in the gaming world. I have failed as a professional because I suffer a grievous flaw: I absolutely consider computer games to be art. I value heart and soul over flash, and I consider a well-told story more important that technological advancement. Now you know the true evil of my ways, and the depth of my criminality.

However, even being so tainted, I submit that long experience can bring wisdom, if a person but bothers to make use of what has been learned over the years, and the information considered and thought about sufficiently to upgrade it. I dare to attempt to create still, on the grounds that I may yet possess value by virtue of my absence of virtues. I, and Accursed Toys, have always been a cult institution, and I never, ever, give up. Welcome to the sordid world of niche games.

The design for Kokoro Wish has undergone a long and convoluted history, and has involved a great deal of mutation and evolution. The actual game now called Kokoro Wish has been an Accursed Toys project for some 15 years. Originally sold to Activision in 1984 as "Multiverse", the game was cancelled and never made. Pitched to companies over the years as "Alternity", "Elsewhere", and many other names, my dream project has known only defeat and endless waiting.

Under a new name, and a completely new design, this long term dream of mine also has what is the 46th interface I have designed for the project. The proposed gameplay of a game creates demands which must be filled by the interface, and the interface defines the final gameplay in return.  Interface is everything to a game, and a poor interface cannot save even the most brilliant or technologically advanced of software. Interface literally IS the game.

This is easy to understand if one bothers to examine what the actual process of playing a computer game actually is. A user manipulates a control device, be it a joypad or a mouse, a keyboard or even electronic maracas, while staring at a display, such as a computer or television screen. Everything that there -- in reality -- is about the virtual experience comes though sight, sound, and the manipulation of a control device. That is everything, the sum total of our current (2000 C.E.) ability to enter the common user's virtual world. When it comes down to it, any game is nothing more than a pattern of clicks, a handful of button presses, or a sliding mouse, used in various ways. However, exactly how these simple things are used, makes all the difference in the world.

Interface design is both an art and a science, but the science of interface design is not well codified.  It should be, because far too many game designers and programmers, from arrogance or from laziness, create simply terrible interfaces -- at least terrible to the common game player, if not to the hardcore gamer. This behavior is both an abomination, and a recipe for marketplace death. It is an unforgivable sin.

Understanding this, I decided to try to codify basic game interface design, and so developed my Holy Laws Of Game Interface design...

I will illuminate these five holy laws for a bit.

The first law, INTERFACE DEFINES GAMEPLAY, should be fairly obvious from the above, in that the interface has been explained to be the entirety of our interaction with the virtual world. If an interface is easy, intuitive, and fun, the game will benefit greatly, and if the interface is difficult, clumsy, and complicated, then not even the greatest game technology can be appreciated. In a very real way, the interface IS the game, and without question, it defines how a game is experienced.

The second law, ONE PLAYER, ONE CONTROLLER, ONE INTERFACE, is something obvious to the console game designer, but unfortunately not so obvious to most PC game designers. The console designer is forced by the hardware to make a game work with a very few controls, and must make every control count. The lazy PC programmer sees dozens of keys on the keyboard, and finds it ever so convenient and lessening of their workload to assign functions as needed to every available key, and when that vast supply runs out, combinations of keys. This is  sometimes called 'Programmer Syndrome', and it is a case of a person who has become so comfortable with a complicated task (touch typing) that they can no longer imagine anyone of worth failing to find simple what they themselves now find easy. All those buttons! It is an arrogant and fatal error of judgement and feeling.

Ever wonder why such games as Starcraft, Warcraft, and Age Of Empires continue to sell incredibly well, even though their technology and look is ancient in computer years, while such technologically advanced, incredibly beautiful, and exceedingly over-hyped games like Myth are now but a dim memory, a lost cause, out of print and gone to data heaven? The answer is interface. Bungie, despite my constant warnings to them, insisted that people simply love using mouse and keyboard together, and anybody who could not get the hang of both in unison really did not matter anyway. Bungie broke the Second Law of Interface Design, and used a split interface. The reality is that only a few hardcore gamers, and programmers, and the odd typist, are capable at touch typing, typing without looking at the keyboard. The vast majority of humans, of gamers, find they have to look down at a keyboard to find a given key, and that act kills immersion instantly. Anything that causes the player to look away from the screen destroys immersion. Games like Age Of Empires can be played entirely with the mouse alone, without ever, even for saving and loading, exiting to the main screen, or exiting altogether, or doing any other function whatsoever, having to touch the keyboard. This allows the player to settle back like a couch potato and play the game without ever looking away, or noticing the outside world. Like becoming buried inside a book, or lost in a television program, all that needs to exist is the game, and control occurs without thought, an extension of the player, so easy that the player no longer even thinks about the process. Most importantly, this access to immersion is made available not just to the hardcore type who finds a keyboard as natural as breathing, but to the vast, overwhelming majority of game players, who find it just within tolerances to wield a mouse well. Those same people, lacking hardcore skills, are also the people with money and any company that becomes too arrogant to value that little fact, will see even their most advanced product vanish forever. Meanwhile, Starcraft, with it's dirt simple mouse-only interface continues to dominate.

The third law, AN INTERFACE EXISTS TO SERVE THE PLAYER ALONE, is sometimes forgotten not due to incompetence, as in the case of the second law above, but commonly due to aggression. When I was in High School, tabletop RPG games, such as Dungeons & Dragons were all the rage, and the game master, or DM, acted as a living human computer to run the adventure for the players. In far too many games, the immature jerk who might be the current DM for a game would forget that they were there to facilitate the fun of the other players. Instead, an adversarial attitude occurred, where the DM would make the players into an enemy, and attempt to destroy them at every opportunity. When RPG games moved onto the computer, this immature attitude sometimes followed (at least in American computer RPGs) and some games had interfaces designed to baffle or 'fight' the player, rather than serve them. The great game designer must not fight the player, in interface or in level design, but rather make love to the player. The player is never the enemy, the player is the game designer's best friend, closest lover, dearest heart. The player is the reason for making the game at all, the player pays the bills, the player is the whole point of everything. In short, the player is god, and the great game designer serves them with fanatical love and devotion.

The deepest art of game interface design is embodied in my fourth holy rule DO WITH ONE BUTTON WHAT OTHERS WOULD DO WITH TEN. It is my personal favorite. Great interface design is marked by one thing: simplicity and depth. The interface must be as simple as possible, yet allow the greatest freedom of action and control. This, clearly, is not very easy to do, and for some, not even easy to imagine. In this, however, is the highest art. Recently, I have been enjoying the games of my age, and one of them leaps to mind, Mario Tennis, on the Nintendo 64. Back in the old days of computer gaming, which pretty much means the 80's, the Commodore 64 had its share of sports games, some using a joystick, but others using the keyboard alone. The PC also, in its infancy had sports games, commonly played with keyboard only. Alas, a tennis game from those times might use dozens of keys...a key for a slam, a key for a backhand, a key for a smash, keys for movement, keys for every type of move or action. Playing such a game required being part octopus. It was more work than reward, in retrospect.

Mario Tennis uses, in addition to the requisite analogue stick, exactly two buttons. Everything that could ever be done in a real tennis game can be done with only those two buttons alone. Nothing more is needed, though the game does offhandedly throw in a button to cancel, and a button for magic use, in the more fantastical Bowser Tournament.

The secret, on a console, to using only a few buttons instead of many buttons, when faced with a complex subject matter is a straightforward process. First, analyze exactly what is possible, or needs to be included. Once this is determined precisely, then break down all possible activities to a minimum of base classes, or categories, of action. Determine which of these depend on environment, position, physics, and the nature of the game universe itself, the 'background-' or 'world-' related functions. This leaves those few things which are unique, singular, or exceptional actions. Allot a button (or two, or if you must, three) to manipulation of the 'world', and allot a button (or more if there is no other possible alternative) to that which is an exception to the physics of the game universe. If this is done with full effort, there is literally no endeavor that cannot be represented in under six buttons plus one directional device (joypad, say).

On a PC, where the mouse is the Goddess of interface devices, the point is....to point.  Point and click, to be precise, and onscreen panels and symbols and pictures and icons...buttons....can be as numerous -- to a point -- as desired, because they are all onscreen (and thus need not destroy immersion), and because in reality, to a mouse interface, the world is nothing but buttons. By this I mean to say that anything that can be clicked upon is a button, really, but it need not appear as a button. In Diablo 2 the mouse can control everything in the game, because all the armor, weapons, monsters, and world is conceptually a mass of buttons. Because this is so, it can be seen that the physical, real-world, literal buttons of the mouse, of which there are only generally two, are plenty, indeed more than enough. There is no excuse for any PC game absolutely requiring more than the buttons on a conventional mouse. Once this is accepted, the same rules given for the console example above can then be applied to the mouse interface, which is -- in effect -- an upside-down joypad with even greater versatility.

 The last holy law, THE SUPREME INTERFACE WILL NEVER BE NOTICED, is a measure of success. You will know you have created a decent interface only if few players ever know there even IS an interface. If the player simply plays the game, picks it up as though they were born to do it, and never realizes that anyone worked hard to make a superior interface, does not even struggle enough to remember learning how to play, but simply plays the game without a second thought, then you have succeeded. If the player notices the interface, must struggle to master it, if the interface is in any way itself a challenge, then you have failed. It is as simple as that.

The interface is the gateway to the game. The gateway must be so open, no person even knows there is a gate to be passed.

I should note one last thing about interface design, that is not a part of the five laws above, but instead is part of my laws of actual game design, because it is relevant to all the fuss I have made about simplicity. Simplicity is vital, yes, but it should never be at the expense of activity. The value of any game is that it is a vehicle for the player to make meaningful choices and decisions. The depth of meaningful decisions and choices must never be simplified when simplifying an interface. This shortcut is destructive! Never take away a chance for the player to decide, choose, select, or construct. A game is a set of choices and decisions. Simplify the interface, yes, but make certain that the player is constantly making decisions, even simple ones.

Now let's take a look at the Kokoro Wish interface, project interface number 46!

ONWARD WE GO......     

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