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How could the designers of Photoshop actually apply this criticism? This is what has always bothered me about gameification, even the "good" kind of gameificati
by macrael 14y ago
How could the designers of Photoshop actually apply this criticism? This is what has always bothered me about gameification, even the "good" kind of gameification this article espouses. When I launch Photoshop, I already have a goal in mind, and it isn't a goal that the designers of Photoshop have any control over. In Portal, the goals, and thus the tools necessary to achieve them, are small and additive and picked by the game designers. When I launch Photoshop, I'm usually thinking something like "I want to make a button that means add a song to a playlist". Could you imagine if, like in Portal, when you first launched Photoshop you only had a paintbrush and an eraser? If the app waited for you to master those tools before presenting others? That's madness.
This kind of analogy usually leads me toward thinking that an app like Photoshop should provide an extensive tutorial where they could teach you how to use the app by asking you to create increasingly complex images with increasingly complex tools. That has the potential to directly apply the lessons gleaned here from Portal, but doesn't actually affect the end design of the product. And it doesn't help me because I have not yet said to myself, "I should put many hours in to learn how to use Photoshop properly" I always come to it with a specific goal in mind. Plus, how is that so different than how things are now? All I see here are guidelines for how to make a great Photoshop tutorial, not design principles to guide the making of a more accessible Photoshop, which for me seems to be what the OP is trying to get at.
Another random thought: a paintbrush is the same tool more or less that a beginner and a master use to create very different qualities of painting. How can that tool be so simple and yet allow for such complex mastery?
- derefr 14y ago> Could you imagine if, like in Portal, when you first launched Photoshop you only had a paintbrush and an eraser? If the app waited for you to master those tools before presenting others? That's madness. Not if everything was locked from the beginning with no recourse--but then, that's bad game design, too. Nobody wants to come over to play a friend's fighting game (or Photoshop) and find that their favorite characters/tools aren't available. Instead, well-designed games have a "story" or "campaign" mode, where things are slowly unlocked, and then an "open play" mode where everything is available.
- eru 14y ago> and then an "open play" mode where everything is available. Games like Mario Kart Wii and Smash Bros. Brawl seem to do well with the the `open play' mode that doesn't have everything unlocked from the start.
- derefr 14y agoThey seem to, but that's really one of the main reasons you won't see those games as much in professional competitive-gaming. As it is, a lot of players have trouble setting up tournaments just because you have to input a password to unlock certain characters; imagine if, say, there were better characters (strictly better, as in "everyone is playing them right now until someone can devise a counter using another character") which were only available as DLC--such a game would probably never get tournament play at all.
- eru 14y agoMaybe. The games of the Smash Bros. series are party games. Nintendo doesn't care about professional competitive gaming for them, and designed them for a casual audience. Mario Kart Wii is similar, though surprisingly hard for such a seemingly casual game.
- wtracy 14y agoThis. Games have it easy because they can manipulate the user's goals and artificially create a linear progression. Most applications have a userbase that is interested in different subsets of functionality. If you tried to lead them through all the tools in order, some will stop early when they've found the tools they need, and others will get frustrated being forced to learn tools they have no use for.