great doc and Civilization

[Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- FS -dot- COM -dot- AU>]

Melissa Hunter-Kilmer <mhunterk -at- BNA -dot- COM>, wrote about the game Civilization:
> I was amazed!  The manual actually helped me!
>
> I kept reading.  It just got better!  Now I really know more about
> the game -- I know stuff I wouldn't have figured out by just playing
> it! Who'd'a thunk it?
>
> Maybe I'll read more manuals after this.  I'll certainly read anything
> this company produces.

In About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design, says

        "I love (Sid Meier's) games; Civilization, in particular, is
        addictive. I strongly recommend that every software designer
        spend time learning from Meier's work."

        (long passage snipped about visual richness and clever display
        of quantitative information)

        "Meier crams an enormous amount of quantitative information
        into a very small space completely symbolically. Any beginner
        can intuit that more symbols are better, without needing to
        understand the details to successfully play the game. However,
        if you find that you like the game (and who wouldn't?), you
        will play it more and more, and will inevitably find yourself
        wondering about those little lines of symbols. A quick check of
        the manual points out the secret of the gap and how they are
        counted, and you will immediately become a much better player."

I'm not surprised that a game that comes so highly recommended (at
least by Melissa and Cooper) also has excellent documentation. To me,
the essence of good software and good documentation is to present the
right information to the user in the right way at the right time. You
can't do this by planning the docs and the interface in isolation.
Someone who takes the trouble in the user interface to present layers
of information in a concise and usable way is bound to think the same
way when designing the documentation.

It's useful to think of the documentation and product not as separate
things, but as complementary opportunities for presenting information.
As you create your product you should see online help, tool tips, paper
manuals, tables, indexes, text labels, icons, buttons, window titles,
error messages, background colours, menus and so on as tools in a tool
box or colours on an artist's palette.

The manual for SimCity had some information and references on town
planning. I thought this was a nice touch. It didn't directly help you
play the game but it implied that SimCity was more than just another
computer game; not something you could 'win at' then put aside. It
didn't tell me too much about winning strategy -- it was my job to
learn that for myself.

Regards
---
Stuart Burnfield                "I want to lie, shipwrecked and comatose
Functional Software Pty Ltd     Drinking fresh mango juice
mailto:slb -at- fs -dot- com -dot- au            Goldfishes nibbling at my toes. . ."

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