The Princess, the Plastic Guitar, and the Hook Shot

Game require us to learn pretty curious things: how to time a jump precisely, whether to watch TV or study a book on cleaning, how to navigate a three-dimensional space by using teleportation, and so on. We would not learn these skills if we did not have a good reason to, or at least a perceived reason to. Some games do teach us valuable skills we can use in real life, but most games will be regarded by non-gamers and grumpy seniors as a “waste of time”. When playing however, it suddenly becomes vital information that some tubes are inhabited by fire-breathing plants, and then learning how to avoid these plants. Since many skills taught by games are too abstract or removed from reality to appear applicable in daily life, each time a player learns something, he needs some kind of motivation that gives the skills value, or the learning will not be regarded as fun.

Less Interface, More Immersion?

Sometime 7 years ago, Lionhead Studios released Black and White. Black and White was an ambitious god game created by ambitious game creator Peter Molyneux. It was one of the first prominent games to tout a lack of user interface. The amount of “interface-less” games increased over the years, and two recent examples of this trend are Far Cry 2 and Dead Space. Far Cry 2 is a first person shooter released by Ubisoft set in a nameless war-torn African country, while Dead Space is a third person horror/sci-fi shooter developed by EA Redwood Shores. Both these games lack some or most parts of what could be called a traditional user interface.

A Dead Space screenshot without gore.