Ergonomics

[essentialsaltes]

[Poll #1304253]

Comments

[essentialsaltes.livejournal.com]

In related news, this article on 40-somethings on facebook has me dead to rights (if a little premature) with:

"X is having a late 1980s green, ASCII monochrome flashback via the 'terminal' theme in my gmail."

I've now set mine to graffiti, but it was terminal for several days.

[dustchick.livejournal.com]

I have one of my gmail accounts set to Terminal. It makes me happy.

[essentialsaltes.livejournal.com]

If you click where it says "Poll #1304253", you should be able to select Fill out poll and change your answer. I think.

[ian-tiberius.livejournal.com]

noooooo! then I will be all alone!

[zorker.livejournal.com]

I play differently depending on game type. I tend to play shooters in a different camera style than 3rd person games, which makes switching back and forth a pain.

[dustchick.livejournal.com]

That's waaaaay more functionality that Terminal should be expected to give. I wanna type my emails using vi editor!

[swmartin.livejournal.com]

You left off my answer: Joystick? Yeah, I've seen people use those before.

I could answer based on how I've set mouse controls which control camera angles, but then I'd still need another box to check: I'm flexible, I use whatever the default for the game is.

[hagdirt.livejournal.com]

Just reading the options makes me nauseated. I don't think I should need Dramamine to play video games.

[freudinshade.livejournal.com]

I just do poorly at the game because I never touch the camera control.

[zorker.livejournal.com]

This is a really interesting topic/poll. Camera control is so tricky. People will eventually get used to tricky camera controls, but not necessarily before they stop playing the game and go tell all their friends the camera sucks. A great example of that is Kingdom Hearts.

Then there's hagdirt's comment about dramamine. There are a lot of tricks in programming your camera for minimizing nausea. Nausea varies among players. I am frequently affected by first person games, never third person. And the Japanese market is known for being ridiculously prone to motion sickness from camera movement. A lot of a camera programmer's job is making sure the camera behavior doesn't behave in a nauseating fashion, whether or not it correctly follows the gameplay.

And then, freudinshade commented he doesn't touch camera control. This is very common, especially among kids. Some games the designers don't pay attention to this, and then players who don't use camera just suffer. Running through levels without touching the camera is critical - you need to make sure the spaces are designed such that the camera has time to properly recenter behind the character before you hit something else critical. It's kind of nice when you have something like God of War where the camera isn't even an option anymore - but harder on the developer since you pretty much end up with a couple people dedicated to camera placement.

I liked Halo's camera detection the best - immersing the settings with the game to make them invisible to the player is the best way of handling these things.