Following my post on how we need to stop touching and start talking with our machines I want to emphasise the fact how this is done in videogames. Videogames have a lot of elements which can be useful for our day to day interfaces. A little game called ‘Scribblenauts’ for the Nintendo DS is a great example. The object of the game is simple: You are a little guy called Max and your goal is to get a ‘starlite’ which is placed in a level. Boring, you might think, but the fun part is you can spawn any object you can think of in order to get this starlite! You have to ‘talk’ (type in words) to your Nintendo DS and the game understands you. In one of the first levels a starlite is stuck in a tree. An obvious choice would be a ladder, but why be so uncreative? Why not spawn an axe? Or a chainsaw? And why should you do all the hard work? Type in ‘lumberjack’ and all you have to do is wait untill the lumberjack takes down the tree so you can get the starlite. The more creative you are the more points you get.

This game is revolutionary, not only for the game industry but in the way we interact with machines. Scribblenauts gives you so much freedom. Imagine if Scribblenauts was purely touch-based and you had to scroll through all the available objects (which I guess must be thousands). First of all the game would be less fun and second of all it takes a long time to find the right object. Sribblenauts gives us a little peek into the future of how great games (and interfaces) can be.

(P.S: If you ever play Scribblenauts first spawn ‘God’ and then ‘Satan’ and see what happens!)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 at 9:07 pm and is filed under games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.