In My Experience... | Key command inconsistency on Xbox Live games. (1244)

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Key command inconsistency on Xbox Live games.
[ Posted by Dan on January 05, 2004 | 3 Comments ]

On our computers we expect that the key labelled "x" will give us an "x" on screen when we push it down. On our Macintoshes, we expect the key combo "command-q" to quit the currently running application, and on our Windows machines we know "alt-f4" will kill the top most window on the screen. These are system wide standards and allows us to work faster by reducing the stream of thought to complete our goals to almost zero.

At some point, hitting "command-s" or "control-s" is second nature and is made even more efficient by muscle memory. Really, you only need to say to yourself "I should save my work" and your hands find their way while you keep your eyes on the screen. There's no need to loop-up the key combo or to think about how to do it, you just do it.

In their interactive menus, Xbox Live games (at least the ones I've bought) do not leverage this fundamental usability concept. All of these games very similar features...

Search for games
Create a new game
Manage your "Friends" list and see what your "Friends" are doing
Quickly join a game without doing a search
Refresh and re-run your search for games
Invite "Friends" into your game
Change the game rules

Not all Xbox Live games have the same feature set and not all games have as many game modes as the others, but all of these games do have the features mentioned above in common. The unfortunate problem is that some games use one button for something and other games use a different button for that thing. For example, Project Gotham Racing 2 (PGR2) uses the blue "x" button to refresh and re-run your search for games. Crimson Skies uses the yellow "y" button for that, and puts the 'friends' menu on the blue "x" button. PGR2 puts the 'friends' stuff behind the yellow "y" button.

Now, take a moment and reflect back on Microsoft's decision to own everything associated with Xbox Live...

[A Microsoft Representative] defended the closed network approach of Xbox Live, in which Microsoft maintains control over the network, even bandwidth used to run titles from third-party publishers. Many publishers haven't invested in network resources and appreciate having Microsoft do the heavy lifting, he said. The unified approach will also benefit customers, as they will need only a single user name and password to access any online game.

More to the point...

"[Microsoft is] giving you a (complete setup) that means you don't have to worry about infrastructure or billing or security."

Shouldn't centralized control yeilds some HCI standards? End users shouldn't have to deal with mismatched methods for doing the same actions within a game. But, does it really matter? Well no, because it's just a video game system and there's more important issues out there, but I find that I have to stop and consciously think about what I'm doing when I'm playing my Xbox Live games, and I kind of feel weird saying this, but good (entertainment) experiences can often be tarnished by making me think.

I'm just recently getting into the Xbox scene, but since its inception, the Sony PlayStation consoles have had similar issues, primarily arising from the developers' locality. Americans tend to prefer [x] as the [action] button, which is in the same location as the Xbox's A button. The Japanese gamers and developers, however, prefer the [o] button, which would translate to the B button on the Xbox, for [action].

Could just be a similiar situation arising from various Xbox developers around the world?

-Posted by Talyn on January 5, 2004 07:23 PM

This is not intended as flamebait but I feel the same way about the Mac. I don't know if it was always this bad or if it got worse in the gap between my 7200/75 and my iBook. Wild inconsistencies and the fact that many menu options don't have keyboard equivalents (which is SO important with a laptop), have basically relegated my $1000 investment to a completely wasted one. I find the system so unintuitive and cumbersome (even with the "accessibility" options enabled) that its not worth booting up except to occaisionally QA a page.

-Posted by Eric on January 6, 2004 02:54 PM

> This is not intended as flamebait
> but I feel the same way about the Mac.

Hehehe, it's not flaimbait when it's very true. There are of course many conventions that are followed pretty well in the Mac-osphere, but there are also three different interface models on the Mac right now (brushed metal single doc interface, non-brushed, multi document interface) and some of those have multiple variations.

You mentioned the pmac 7200 which is a System 7/8 era machine and the iBook is (I'm guessing here) running OSX, which are utterly different.

My pioint about eh XBL game interfaces is that all of the XBL games have VERY similar menu hierachies and features (VERY similar) and one would assume (ass out of u and me) that there would be some guidelines on which buttons should do certain things. The actions you do with the buttons (like refresh the games list) are pretty baisc and fundamental to these games, and just like command-q on the Mac, you'd think (at least I would) that every game would use the same button to do the same action.

It's a bigger issue when you get into games that are fundamentally different and have extra game features (like the mutator set-up in Unreal Championship) and keeping consistant gets harder.

-Posted by Dan on January 6, 2004 03:03 PM

Comment posting has been turned off because I don't have enough time and will to deal with the constant comment spamming. I'm very sorry and will fix this sometime soon (soon = before 2004 ends).