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User Experience

As someone that works on a website, user experience is something that I have to be concerned about.  Thankfully, I work with a designer that focuses a lot on it so I just have to follow what she says.  Makes my job a lot easier.

Even though it's a part of my job, it was actually a video game that has me writing about it.  A lot of games have an easy mode for people that are either bad at games, or rather not get frustrated while playing them.  I tend to skew towards the later one, but I'm not the best at playing games either.

The games that I am the worst at is fighting games.  I've always sucked at them, even when I was a kid playing Killer Instinct and Mortal Kombat at the arcade in the local mall.  The only one that I've been "good" at is the Dead Or Alive games, but that's because button mashing can get you far in those games.

It's also why I don't play fighting games online.  I have better things to do then get destroyed by people that are even slightly good at whatever fighting game it is.  This doesn't stop me from playing them though. 

I've found a few in recent years that I've enjoyed playing.  DoA5 as I mentioned was a game that was fun to just beat the AI up in.  Killer Instinct is similar and is one of the few fighting games that has a feature that lets you button mash and still pull of cool moves. 

Injustice 2 is the most recent good fighting game that I enjoy.  It has a lot of single player content, the gear component is fun, but it has something that most fighting games don't do.  It lets you have the AI fight for you.

Now this isn't for everything in the game.  There is one section that is devoted to it where you just pick your team and they go off and fight another player's team of your choosing.  You can even fast forward through the fights. 

But the Multiverse game mode which allows you to fight different scenarios also lets you have the AI fight for you.  Now, I'm not great at the game, but with the gear feature I'm able to win by just having better gear.  But having the AI do the fighting for me allows for me to complete things and get the rewards for it.

Sure, I'm not really playing the game, even though I am actually playing the game right now.  It comes back to the user experience though.  Why make things difficult and unfun/unusable to the person that is using it, when you want them to use your thing?  The goal is to make sure the end user is enjoying their experience and comes back to use it again.

Some times the best user experience takes you by the hand and guides you.  It doesn't have to do everything for you, and sometimes if you hold  a person's hand too much it gets frustrating.  But to give the user the ability to be helped so their experience is better is the goal.  You always want them to come back.   That's how you make money.  If they don't come back, then what's the point?

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