Accessibility and Usability

Previous Post: The Hook

In the previous posts, the Lens of the System of Expeirence; something that has been built up over the course of this series of posts, has been applied to the Game Design concepts of The Magic Circle, Communication, Presentation and The Hook.  In this post, this Lens is applied to two different design concepts for the purpose of comparitive analysis, in terms of how they relate to Experience and what design decisions might be considered when evaluating them.  Everyone should feel encouraged to join the discussion and comment on or debate the assertions presented. All relevant comments are welcome and appreciated.

Accessibility and Usability

Accessibility, as an experiential element, could be defined as the general relevance of novel concepts as presented; a measure of potential Understanding of the designed Experience.  Usability could be defined as the potential interconnectivity of a set of novel concepts has to established audience Experience, which would yield Prediction of affordance and provide context for Perception of feedback.  They are definitely not the same thing, yet both terms deal with the same relative interconnectivity the Presentation concept has with existing audience Experience.  In the same way that an Experience surrounding a narrative theme about aging might not be accessible to a teenager with the stereotypical view of invincibility, a typical real time strategy game will not be as easily usable to a player who is only familiar with another genre, such as first person shooters, fighting games or platformers.  For both these situations, the effect and remedy are the same: they will inhibit Reliability and likely give rise to Stress; which can lead to boredom, for example, if no valuable Efficiency tradeoff is predicted by the audience, or they can be presented as the means by which greater Understanding is achieved, if presented as intriguing Hooks.

Next Post: Difficulty as Crisis and Opportunity

Sentiology?