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Why I Play Computer Games
Jul 11, 2005
I often get asked how I got started in customer experience work. Previous jobs and graduate school played a part, as they do for many practitioners, but for me the real answer is games.
I played lots and lots of games growing up, starting with Pong in 1979, moving on to Atari, Coleco, and Intellivision - the consoles that ate several years of my life. I was and still am a fan of card and board games, too, but somehow computer games always exerted a special pull on me, making the hours fly by like seconds.
Playing a thousand computer games, if nothing else, gives you an innate sense of user interface design. The games require engaging with some interface, which creates some experience. And that's how I spent much of my childhood: on Apples, PCs, and mainframes; in arcades, on couches, and at computer desks; with joysticks, steering wheels, and trackballs; for quarters, tokens, or free; and just before college, via a modem in BBSes on a very young Internet. All of these began my education in experience design.
I finally got paid to make games in my first job, helping Seth Godin start Yoyodyne Entertainment here in New York. I had spent the previous two years, between college and grad school classes, playing the best Unix-based games ever made - Nethack, Netrek, and Xconq - and I came to Yoyodyne ready to make games for the Internet. It was there, through trial and error in online game design, that I learned some important insights into successful customer experiences.
But it didn't stop there. Even when I struck out on my own to found Creative Good, I continued to play games, and I still do today. This is essential exercise for me, and I'd recommend it for anyone serious about learning good experience.
Games are the whetstone for keeping my "interface sense" sharp. New games show the latest advances in interface design, as they have throughout the history of the computer industry; and like Shakespeare or Homer for literature fans, classic computer games like Nethack and Netrek still have lessons to teach.
It's a happy coincidence that the business of computer games has gotten a real boost in the last few years. Some industry metrics show computer games getting more investment, and payout, than many Hollywood blockbusters. A few games, like the recent "Halo 2", receive a level of acclaim that only Harry Potter could dream of.
But while it's nice to see the success of the games business, the market is not my primary interest. Instead, I want to know where the good games are, regardless of whether they've made ten million in revenue, or ten cents - or none at all. In fact, come to think of it, sometimes the free games are the best of all, because you can start playing right away, without having to deal with logins and purchase codes. The quicker and easier it is to get to the good stuff, the better. (I'll note that Nethack is a quick, absolutely free download at www.nethack.org.)
It's with all this in mind that I point you to my new website, Good Experience Games, which lists some of the best free online games that I've come across in the past several months.
If you want to learn more about good experience, I'd recommend investing some time in playing games. (And let me know which ones you learn from.)
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For more reading:
This New York Times article (June 26) spotlighted what it called "casual games".
For geeks ONLY: surrealist comics based on Nethack. Oh, YES.
http://www.nicolaas.net/dudley/archive.php?f=20040402
http://www.nicolaas.net/dudley/archive.php?f=20050610
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P.S. Announcing Good Experience Games
I've always been surprised that there's no filtered list of good online games, so I went and made one myself.
Today I launched a new Good Experience website: Good Experience Games.
It's a list of links to the best online games I've come across. It's sortable by name, date, and duration; and I hope to make additions occasionally as I find new entries.
These are online games that, in my opinion, offer a "good experience" - good game design with an overall attention to quality. Unless otherwise noted, they're available for play with no fee or login requirement.
If you know of a game that fits these criteria that's not on the list, feel free to let me know about it.
Enjoy!
