Thursday, April 16, 2009

Tom Chick on affordances (and the lack of them)

"As you play Resident Evil 5, you will occasionally be presented with the option to press X to furtherinvestigate interesting things like mutilated corpses, strange science experiments, and back story. Last night, while exploring an abandoned lab of the sort always present in a Resident Evil game, I was afforded the opportunity to press X. This is what I discovered:

A shelf of files and sketches. Nothing of use here.
Then why did you even bother to put a great big onscreen prompt here for me to investigate this wall?"

http://fidgit.com/archives/2009/03/resident-evil-5-psyche.php

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"Hey, Resident Evil 5, I'm well aware that I'm supposed to throw a grenade into the boss monster's mouth. I kind of got the message from the way grenades keep getting spawned. Then there was the cut scene every time I incapacitated the boss monster, which zeroed in on the thing's mouth. So that's what I've been trying to do for twenty minutes by actually equipping a grenade and throwing it at the boss monster's mouth. I'm pretty sure a couple of them hit, so why don't you give me a break?

Because, frankly, I had no idea you expected me to walk directly up to the boss monster's mouth, at which point I would be prompted to press a button to script equipping and tossing a grenade. Last I checked, a grenade was a ranged weapon."

http://fidgit.com/archives/2009/03/resident-evil-5-proper-feeding.php

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