The Theory Of
Here you'll find discussion of all manner of topics relating to the theory of multiplayer games. As I see it, anyway. A note to commentors: if you stray off-topic or if your reply contains ad hominem attacks, your comment will be deleted.

Sorry, nobody is actually doing all these things in an upcoming MMO.  I'm just going to talk about how they might converge to produce some fascinating user interfaces.

Surface is a Microsoft application of multi-touch technology where you are seated at a table and the top of that table is a graphical display.  You reach out to touch the table's surface and your finger movements are detectable by the computer.  In addition, you can place objects on the table's surface that have identifying marks on their undersides (such as barcodes) that tell the table what they are.

A teaser video of Surface shows how users can set a camera down on the table and the table will detect that and wirelessly download the pictures from the camera.  It then shows the pictures splashed around the camera on the table.  The users can reach out and manipulate the pictures.  It's all rather slick.

Multi-touch technology is an intuitive extension of basic touch-screen technology.  Instead of using a single finger or stylus to indicate a single spot on the screen - like a mouse-click - multi-touch permits users to use as many as all 10 fingers (more, if you've got 'em).  Jeff Han did a great demo of multi-touch at TED not too long ago.  It shows him resizing and sorting photographs, fooling with a weird lava lamp style screensaver, and interacting with a mapping application.  It's all very intuitive.  Well worth watching if you haven't seen it yet.

Stereo displays are accomplished in a variety of ways, but their end result is being able to show 3D images.  Ideally, showing 3D video.  The system that I'm thinking of is the one that uses shuttered stereo glasses.  The idea is that the glasses only let one eye see at a time, and it quickly switches back and forth between them.  When the left eye can see, the screen displays what the left eye would see.  When the right eye can see, the screen displays what the right eye would see.  IMAX 3D uses this technique.

Voice is already employed by MMOs in systems such as TeamSpeak and Ventrilo.  Many of you have far more experience with it than I do.

Now apply all of this to an MMO.  The technique works perfectly well for any game, but this is an MMO site, so we talk about MMOs.

You are sitting at a table, wearing shuttered glasses.  You look down at the surface of the table and see - in 3D - your character and the environment around it.  Ideally, what you are seeing is consistent with the idea that the table is actually a window into the virtual environment of the MMO and you are looking down at the environment.  When you first play, you fight the temptation to reach through the tabletop to pick up your character.

Now that we have the display, we want to play.  For starters, we want to avoid using a physical keyboard and mouse, so everything goes through the multi-touch interface of the tabletop.  If you want to chat with other players, you use voice.  If you must enter text, a virtual keyboard can be used (see the Jeff Han video).

The 2D version of this has already been built as a prototype by Phillips.  Here's a demo of their Entertaible.  The only thing lacking with that system is the 3D element.

With an MMO structured along those lines, the style of gameplay would undoubtedly change.  Instead of driving a character around like a car, the player would probably indicate a destination for the character.  How about defensive strategies?  Suppose you want your character to defend in a certain direction?  You just make a motion on the screen to indicate that you want your character to defend, then draw the arc specifying the space to defend.  Perhaps you want to make sure that your character stays in a certain area.  You indicate that you want it to stay, then drag your finger around the area you want it to stay.

How about crafting?  Wouldn't you like to zoom the screen in on that sword you're crafting and actually tap the screen where you want the hammer blows to fall?  See the heating of the metal in the fire as your NPC assistant pumps the bellows?  You pull the metal from the fire with a gesture when the color of the metal reaches the right shade of orange or yellow.  Then you can only work it until it cools too much.

As you might guess, this permits greater potential for player skill to be expressed in in-game tasks.

Casting spells and combat systems certainly invite such a treatment.  Suppose that casting a spell was an issue of player skill.  You have to make the correct gesture, and it might be rather intricate.  Get it wrong and you might get a degraded effect.  Or none at all.  The same with combat.  A gesture for the tactics that you want your character to use, punctuated by directives for changing priority targets, movement, disengaging, reengaging, and so on.  I wouldn't go with a move-by-move system, but if that's your preference, feel free to try to design such a system.

The key point here is that multi-touch is essentially analog in its input instead of the digital input of a key being in the up or down position.  The mouse lets us do basic analog input, but it's klunky at best.  Developers have tried gesture interfaces through the mouse many times, but they don't catch on.  The mouse is just not precise or natural enough.  Mult-touch lets us input complex instructions in a very natural and intuitive way.  Admittedly, it would be cumbersome or impossible for those with limits on their manual dexterity.  However, if the system could be trained, it might prove more than tractable.

The ergonomics of this system are very nice, though it does have some problems.

1. Your hands and attention never leave the display or controls.  Instead of managing mouse, keyboard and screen, your attention remains fixed on the screen.  There is no 'home position' on the keyboard to constantly return to when mousing is finished.  No looking down at the keyboard to find that elusive key that you need to press.

2. The controls of the game can be as custom as the game likes.  Instead of putting all functions on dozens of key combinations and mouse button presses, the controls can be of any shape and permit all sorts of analog interactions.  Screen toggles, gauges, sliders, springs, and myriad other mechanisms can all be brought to life right under the fingers of the user.

3. Although available today, voice input is badly needed as the standard means of socializing.  Voice uses the audio side-band, leaving our fingers and eyes to focus on the action.  Voice is catching on, but many people still don't care to hear real voices, particularly in a fantasy MMO.  I'm assuming that, in time, we'll all either get comfortable with hearing real voices or we'll get technology that will pleasantly mask our voices.

4. The big ergonomic problem with the system is leaning over a table.  The reason that we sit upright at computers is for our backs.  It's bad news to be leaning over a table for hours at a time, day in and day out.  But it's equally bad to be reaching up to touch a vertical screen as the means of doing all interactions.  It may be that either an angled tabletop will be needed (like a drafting table), or some clever technique will be introduced that lets us look straight ahead while the display is flat and our hands can rest on it.  It may only require a mirror at a 45 degree angle.

5. A possible issue with shuttered 3D displays is that display rates are cut in half.  To get 60 frames per second requires a 120Hz monitor.  I know they exist, but I don't know if graphics cards can display 3D environments at 120 frames per second.

Clearly many people see the possibilities here, and companies are developing the technology.  One reason for bringing this up here is so that you will be aware of the potential (get out the vote!).  Another reason is to point out that games will change as a result of the new interaction techniques.  Things that are difficult to express through the keyboard and mouse today may become trivial when we can effortlessly point to a place in the virtual world and then use a gesture to tell the game what we want to do.

There can be quick and slow variations of gestures.  Single finger and multiple finger gestures.  There can even be game pieces that we can place on the table that we position and move in order to indicate various other things to the game (I can well imagine the game developers wanting to get their greedy little hands on the merchandising possibilities of that).  Applying all these technologies to games will clearly change the games themselves.  The transition to the use of player skill for casual tasks is only one of the more obvious possibilities.  Me, I'd love to be able to virtually skin an animal or fletch an arrow using my own skill instead of pushing a button and waiting for my character to use its 'skill'.

My guess is that within 10 years we'll see this technology applied to MMOs.  It is my fervent hope that when it happens we will be off the leveling treadmill.