Only a fool breaks the two second rule
While working on the game design for the current exhibit I’m currently finishing off for the Science Museum, quite a few unique design challenges have presented themselves. Most of these have centred around play-session length. As with most museum exhibits, the idea is that you dip in for a couple of minutes to interact with the content and absorb information directly/indirectly. In the context of a simple touch-screen controlled kiosk this doesn’t present a problem, but in this case it’s a driving game in an urban environment. Within the 90 second period, the user has to pick up the controls, comprehend the objectives, orient themselves in the environment, achieve some of the objectives and take in the educational content. On top of this, it needs to be designed so that users of all ages and gaming experience have an enjoyable and engaging experience.
From learnability perspective, you really need to make it something that maps directly onto mechanics and interfaces that people have already had considerable experience with, or if possible to make the controls utterly intuitive (for example whack-a-mole or a light-gun game take no explaining). In this case, we were fortunate that you put a steering wheel in front of people and they pretty much know what to do, but other circumstances would certainly produce a greater challenge - this is not the place to implement new mechanics or interface or to explore mechanics with considerable depth.
How to make it enjoyable and engaging? This is a slightly woolier question. One method that I’ve tried to use when designing the layout of the city is to use the “two second rule” (or perhaps it should be called interaction density?) . Basically this involves presenting the user with an interesting and meaningful choice (or interesting event/spectacle to gaze at) every two seconds of session time. So for a 90 second session, this would be 45 unique events or choices. In the context of a racing game, this could be a junction or corner (where you can choose direction), something to pick up/drive over/drive through, something to avoid, or an interesting spectacle to drive past. By trying to mentally follow this rule whilst driving around the city, you should really pick up on areas that need tweaking (say for example if you are driving along a simple straight bit of road for 5 seconds you have no real choices and could very well just let go of the steering wheel). This also applies to the other end of the spectrum, in that you dont want the user to be overwhelmed with choices at any point in the experience.
Its been a great project to work on, hopefully lots more posts on this soon! The Science of Survival opens in early April at the Science Museum, London.