两点之间线段最短，也就是说，人们认为最直接解决问题的方法也是最理想的。

尽管新颖的Power Glove和Game Pad于20世纪80年代面世，但最流行的却是那些需要使用D-pad的游戏。操作简单，按A和B键即可做出相应的动作。然而，这种直接的方法并不全都能激起人们的兴趣。

我们当然想知道飞行汽车何日能够出现。我们都期待能有自己的飞行汽车，尽管它们的出现对目前的汽车、道路、火车和飞机来说绝对是个噩梦。

现在我们来看看游戏输入接口。我们期待能有让现实生活更令人激动的方式，用技术使我们的行为充满魔力。因而尽管按B键可能是控制游戏人物跳跃的最有效手段，但人们更倾向于在数年间崛起的模拟接口。（游戏邦注：游戏输入模仿现实动作。）

D-pad

这包括塑料吉他，让你手持网球拍、高尔夫球杆和相同指挥棒的体感控制棒或承载玩家替身的虚拟场地。摄像头游戏控制系统微软Kinect领衔最尖端产品，几乎完全实体化，让玩家能够真正用自己的身体动作模拟游戏中的行为。

对那些不是特别精通游戏的普通人而言，让他了解用手势控制游戏中的行为比学习有相同效果的控制键组合要简单。但是尽管真实模拟或许能更容易让人理解，把这个当成更有效接口的想法却是犯了极大的错误。

3D Web风行

近五年来“虚拟世界”时尚的急速崛起是3D Web风行最为明显的例子。自《第二人生》起，整个行业都围绕着“虚拟事件”发展，人人展望“3D Web”在不久将来实现。

如果这种设想实现，所有人将不再打开浏览器点击那些乏味的网页。商店、媒体站点和社会事业将呈现在3D虚拟空间中，用户用自己的替身做出行动。虚拟世界不再封闭，所有的事物都互相连接起来。用户的替身可以自由漫步在网络中，与其他替身会面，创造艺术作品和买卖交易。你的替身走进熙熙攘攘的虚拟商场中购买T恤，在你穿上虚拟版衣服的同时商家将真实衣物寄往你家。

这听起来很带劲，而且也符合逻辑。在人们变得越来越依赖网络（游戏邦注：从商业到个人社交行为）时，假设他们希望让体验更加生活化和拟真化确实合情合理。

第二人生

但事实在于，真正希望虚拟世界推广的人是早期那些未来主义者和科幻小说读者，他们乐衷于戏谑这些只能像孩童般解读的想法。想法可能确实会让人感到兴奋，但虚拟世界还从未发展得像期待那样大。原因在于普通网民并不想在虚拟环境中制造出自定义替身，走在虚拟的集市上，购买商品时与店主替身交谈。他们反而更愿意登录Amazon.com，点击想要的商品完成交易。实现上述所有模拟很复杂，抽象化的店铺简单得多。

因而虚拟环境的受众只限于那些狂热者或找到将想法个性化具体化应用的人。《第二人生》流行之日已去，人们纷纷涌向Facebook，这种大部分基于文字的接口本质上就是人们互相联系的网络，而且还显得更易实现和有效。

游戏领域的跌宕起伏

纵观视频游戏行业，使用模拟而非抽象接口的产品已被证实是时髦之物，比如基于乐器演奏的音乐游戏。但即使是此类游戏最流行的时候，受众数也比最初设想的要少得多。

Wii获得前所未见的用户基数，通过吸引此前未及的全新受众彻底改革游戏，这是无可否认的事实，也为探索游戏设计新思路提供了巨大的市场。但如果Wii市场达到饱和状态，硬件销售量会急剧下降。软件销售充满种种挑战，尤其当涉及玩家最活跃的市场时。有意见称大量Wii购买者将其当成玩具看待，新鲜感过后便置之不理。尽管这种说法无从证实，但至少有存在的可能。

Just Dance 2

甚至连曾经活跃于休闲软件市场的开发商和发行商现在都觉得这些时日Wii平台的机会渐少。除任天堂自有的Wii Sports外，运动题材游戏销售量迅速减少，音乐游戏热潮也渐渐褪去。Ubisoft出品的《Just Dance》系列游戏所取得的巨大成功让人倍感困惑，因为该类别还从未有人尝试过。

即便数据不足，但模拟接口产品的大起大落甚为明显。最初它利用人们的好奇心获得广泛关注，一旦受众意识到按键比挥舞手臂简单得多，此类游戏就迅速淡出市场。

社交媒体和游戏开发者应当吸取教训

现在社交媒体正如火如荼地从高技术转向普通领域，主流受众正自然地被引向抽象化而非模拟接口，这个过程带来的经验变得尤为重要。

大量新公司涌现，希望能够使用Twitter、Facebook和移动网络等框架找到吸引用户玩乐和消费的方式。除非抽象化概念在用户脑中留存，否则长久吸引任何人的注意力都将是很难的事情。

由于社会化是基本要素，与朋友互动最直接的方式是面对面交谈。或许有些朋友对游戏或数字文化感兴趣，也会有人对此不感兴趣。即便你正与前一类人相处，玩地理定位游戏真能丰富你与他们的互动吗？（游戏邦注：此类游戏中玩家需要完成对抗他人的挑战，获得数字标记或其他东西。）相对来说，作者还更偏向于约人去看场电影。那些较少登录社交媒体的朋友呢？如果你在午饭时不与他交谈，而是登录FourSquare让所有人知道你正坐在餐馆中与他享用午餐，难道他会欣赏你这种行为？

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最终这些媒体不再显得社交化，它们看起来更像是在吸引风投公司的注意力。如果与某人直接联系更为简单，人们就会这么做，而不是使用这些工具。

有时候，数字世界在我们思维中占得比重过大。我们热爱这片领域并在其中生活和工作，忘记这个渐渐融入我们生活的事物不是生活的全部内容。只有当人们选择花时间坐下玩游戏时，游戏设计的想法才能吸引和激发受众。但开发者应该努力将这些内容融入工作和个人生活中，让成就、奖励和联系的想法渗入所有事物中，人们自然会开始适应这些内容。吸引人群的方法多种多样，其中之一便是详细制作出某种接口。他人无需为此接口开发产品或想法有趣的趋势，而且接口执行起来又不易让人察觉。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

Analysis: Gaming Interfaces, Social Media, And The Path Of Least Resistance

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Or, that’s what people say, generally when they mean that the most direct way to solve a problem is ideal.

Although the 1980s gave us novelty power gloves and game pads, the most popular games were the ones that required a D-pad; press A to do this, B to do that. Simple. And yet the direct route isn’t always very exciting.

We want to know where the flying cars are, of course. We were supposed to have our flying cars, despite the fact that their introduction onto the landscape would cause absolute logistical nightmares for existing cars, roads, trains, air travel, you name it.

So we play with interfaces. We’re preoccupied with ways to make real life more exciting, to use technology to make our behaviors feel magical. So while pressing B is probably the most efficient way to jump, the past several years have seen a surge in simulated interfaces — ones where the inputs are imitations of real behaviors.

These include plastic guitars; motion-control wands that let you “hold” tennis rackets, golf clubs and, naturally, wands; or virtual spaces navigated by an avatar. The latest frontier, camera-controlled gaming as pioneered by Microsoft’s Kinect, removes abstraction almost entirely, in favor of letting the player use his or her own body to literally simulate behaviors that will be acted out in the game.

Getting your average person — one not particularly versed in gaming, for example — to understand that a hand wave translates to an in-game behavior might be easier than asking them to learn a controller button combination that has the same effect. But while literal simulation may be more immediately comprehensible, the idea that it’s more efficient in terms of interface is largely fallacious.

The ’3D Web’ Fad

For recent years’ most obvious example, look at the sharp rise and sudden implosion of the “virtual worlds” craze as it was represented as recently as five years ago. Second Life makes magazine covers, an entire industry springs up around “virtual events”, and there are entire schools of thought that envision a “3D Web” in the immediate future.

According to that vision, nobody would simply open a web browser and click around boring web pages anymore. Stores, media sites and social utilities would be represented as 3D virtual spaces that users would navigate with an avatar. There would no longer be “walled garden” virtual worlds; everything would be interconnected, with a “universal avatar” that could freely wander the web, meeting other avatars, creating art and merchandise. Your avatar strolls into a bustling virtual marketplace, purchases a T-shirt, and dons the virtual version while the real version gets shipped to your home for you to wear.

It sounds exciting, and even logical. As people became more and more entrenched, from commerce to personal social behavior, with the internet, it makes sense to assume they’d want to make the experience ever more lifelike, ever more immersive.

But as it turns out, the only real market for virtual worlds was those early adopters — futurists and consumers of science fiction who enjoyed playing with the concepts they could only read about as kids. There might have been a rush of excitement, but the virtual world phenomenon never grew as big as was expected. As it turned out, that’s because your average web user doesn’t want to enter a virtual environment, create a customizable avatar, walk through a virtual plaza and interact with the avatar of a shopkeeper in order to make a purchase. Instead, they can just type in “Amazon.com”, click what they want, and be done. All of that simulation just complicates things; an abstracted “shop” is much easier.

So virtual environments remained constrained to that limited audience of enthusiasts or people who had found very individualized, specific applications for the concept. The Second Life craze passed by; people flocked to Facebook, where a largely text-based interface that was essentially a network of interconnected, glorified bulletin boards turned out to be more accessible and more effective.

Waving At The Games Space

If we look at the video game industry, products that use simulated rather than abstracted interfaces have largely proven to be fads too, as in the case of instrument-based music games. Or at best, the addressable audience turns out to be much smaller than initial reception suggests.

There’s no denying that the Wii reached an unprecedented userbase and revolutionized gaming by attracting brand-new audiences that had previously been unreachable, providing a huge market to explore new game design ideas. But the hardware falloff has been steep once the Wii reached market saturation, and software sales have been challenging, particularly as concerns the most active market of gamers. Although it’s impossible to prove, the theory that some good chunk of Wii buyers bought the console as a toy or fitness promise and then let it gather dust once the novelty wore off is at least viable.

Even developers and publishers that have thrived in the casual software market now feel there’s less opportunity on the Wii platform these days. Aside from Nintendo’s own Wii Sports, sports titles sell less briskly; the music craze appears officially over. It’s arguable that Ubisoft stumbled on such an enormous hit with its Just Dance brand because that particular category had not yet been explored.

Even in the absence of data it’s evident that literal-interface products follow a quick spike and fall-off pattern. It starts with a curiosity that gains strong initial attention, but then loses it once people realize that it’s much easier to push a button than it is to swing their arms around.

Social Media And Gamifiers Take Heed

Now that social media’s migration from the province of the tech-savvy to everyman phenomenon is well underway, lessons in the way that mainstream audiences naturally gravitate toward abstract, not literal interfaces become especially important.

Numerous new companies are popping up hoping to find exciting, engaging ways of using frameworks like Twitter, Facebook and mobile networks to engage audiences in play and commerce. But unless they can keep the abstraction concept in mind, it’s going to be tough to permanently engage anyone on a meaningful scale.

Because socialization is basic. The most direct way to engage with your friend is to turn to her and talk. Some of your friends will be interested in gaming or digital culture and some won’t. Even if you’re with someone from the former group, will it genuinely enrich your interaction with them to play a geolocation game where you have to complete “challenges” against each other in public to win digital badges or whatever? Me, I’d say, “uh, let’s just go see the movie, dude.” And your friend who’s less plugged in? Will he appreciate that you’re not really present for his conversation over lunch because you’re trying to check in on FourSquare to let everyone know that you’re at this restaurant having lunch with him?

Ultimately, these interfaces aren’t “social”, as much as it sounds like they are in presentations to venture capital firms. And if it’s simpler to connect with someone directly, people are going to want to do that — to abstract the interface — rather than to use these tools.

Sometimes the digital world looms too large in our minds. We live, work in and love this space, and we forget that as interconnected as it’s becoming with our lives, it’s not our whole lives. Game design concepts engage and motivate people when they’ve chosen to take time to sit down and play. But try to implement them all over a person’s working and personal life, install ideas of achievement, reward and connectivity all over everything, and people will naturally start to resist. There are a lot of ways to engage people, but creating or elaborating interfaces where none are needed creates a product or trend that’s fun in concept, but has surprisingly little staying power in practice. (Source: Gamasutra)