Column: 'Blogged Out: GUIs, Moore, Niches'

n another of today's main features, regular columnist Jim Rossignol presents this week's 'Blogged Out', a news report that looks at the world of developer blogging and the conversations being had with the community at large. This week, the column looks at multiple subjects, including the importance of game GUIs, some game developer-related talk on Moore's Law, and some insights into niche gaming. In this extract, Rossignol quotes Wyatt Cheng's weblog on World Of Warcraft and adds some comments: "[Cheng comments]: "A typical screenshot of a player's screen in WoW consists of large amounts of scrolling chat text, a huge number of action bars (that are filled with brightly colored, highly saturated icons that are visually noisy - a property that is almost unavoidable when trying to make distinctive looking icons), health bars for raid members, flying text for combat events and much much more. I need user interface Feng Shui." It's interesting to see how few games manage to do away with a complex GUI. Some have tried, but can we really say there have been any great successes? Black & White was probably the closest, but such innovative approaches are disconcertingly rare." You can now read the full Gamasutra column on the subject, which also includes more information on these three key blog points of the week (no registration required, please feel free to link to the article from external websites).