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Design a Game to Test the Outer Limits

If you are trying to explain the concept of "Affordances", you can do no better than to encourage people to play the game "The Room" on the iPad.

As this article in UX Magazine reveals, the game is all about providing visual cue to the player as to how certain elements work.

To take it a step further, the article explores how the game was created iteratively.  Even if every knob, texture and irregularity were perfectly designed, the user must also engage with the interface (separate thing!) successfully.

What the article does not cover is the larger benefits of doing anything repeatedly, with different users/audience members, etc.  Personally, I saw this process in theater as a Production Stage Manager. You can talk about an idea as much as you want.  The WORK doesn't happen until you DO IT!  Figure out what is wrong and what is right.  Get it "up on its feet", and especially in front of an audience.  Check in with the audience and see what they are getting out of it.

Ultimately, designers should figure out how to get gamers to test things remotely.  They should be rewarded for repeated attempts.  How can we make UX more like the game that it actually is?  Train users on the basic levels and then challenge designers to fit "new" affordances into the games.  What if the highest levels offered cutting edge technology?

There is a growing and untapped audience waiting to play at the edges of current design and UX.  How can we harness them?

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