Main conference presentation

Extending the gaming experience to conventional UI’s

John Ferrara

Sunday April 13 2008, 9:00 - 9:45AM

The video game industry produces an enormous volume of highly innovative user interface experiences, but this rich source of creative thinking is largely unseen by communities dedicated to conventional software or Web design. As gaming becomes a ubiquitous activity among a vast worldwide customer base, its direction and conventions will become not merely relevant to HCI design, but indeed impossible to ignore. The vast market penetration of gaming systems also offers a large-scale laboratory for researching new directions in interactivity.

This presentation will explain the gaming experience and discuss its significance to the design of conventional user interfaces. It will further:

• Provide an overview of game-based interaction spaces, and the shared characteristics of all games. The presentation will posit applications to non-gaming UI’s, and review real world examples of gaming resolutions to interface problems.
  
• Discuss emerging interface standards in gaming, with an eye toward crafting analogous experiences in dissimilar applications.
  
• Review collaborative and competitive gaming interfaces used for synchronous play.
  
• Survey innovations in nonstandard video game user inputs, and speculate about possible applications to conventional software interfaces.
  

This presentation will be of greatest interest to user interface designers who have the opportunity to rethink broad paradigms for interactivity in software or Web development, or for those who are interested in integrating gamelike components into a UI.