Why 3D?
Wednesday, December 6th, 2006I got an email recently (our first to Angled Whiteboards!) from a nice person named Rene. Rene asked “What influenced you to create what could be considered a 3D UI instead of just a regular flat window based one?” and “…was ever a point where gametap had just a regular interface or if it was always what we see now?”.
First, I have to say as a designer, that GameTap is far and away the most fun project I’ve ever worked on (and I’ve been in this interactive media business for about as long as it’s been possible to be. Yeah, don’t ask.) Anyway, GameTap and 3D. For the real skinny, I went straight to the source, Blake Lewin. Blake is the visionary who invented GameTap, and it was his passion for both games and innovative UI that inspired the product we have today. His reasons for 3D (and our mission in design) included:
- On-Air Look
Putting fresh visuals and content around a back catalog that spanned decades was a similar approach to the type of video packaging Turner put around the Hanna Barbera library to make Cartoon Network and the MGM library to make Turner Classic Movies - Make browsing fun (and easy)
Use the 3D space to create an environment that inspires a similar emotional (and positional) response as wandering the aisles in your favorite game/video/music store - Navigate with any device
GameTap had to be navigable using just about any input device - from a mouse to a keyboard to a gamepad to a remote control
Our target audience was, um, everybody (not too helpful, except we had to make it understandable — intuitive, even — for everyone from 6 to 60). The environment needed to be console and genre neutral but still provide an immersive game-like experience. The content, while all game-oriented, is rich and dense. And finally, we were delivering authentic game-play in a way that web-based game download sites can’t.
All those things added together seemed perfect for a 3D UI. You can do things in 3D that you can’t in a flat windows-based app, like stack content in interesting ways and provide far better sense-of-place and continuity.
So, GameTap has always been 3D, but it took on all kinds of different guises before it became what you see today. We had 3D lattices and particle clouds and grids and spirals and this one thing that felt like a tilt-a-whirl (iow, sick making. it had a very short life). We had heads-up displays instead of places and we had rubber-band nav. But at the end, after a lot of testing and trying and comping and testing some more, we ended up with the UI you see today.
Did we accomplish our goal? I like to think so, although with a UI as unique as this one, we aren’t often met with ambivalence. No, there’re usually pretty strong feelings… More good than bad, so far. And, if there is one review that makes me smile every time I think of it, it would be this one at Gamers with Jobs. Yes! Thank you, rabbit! That’s it! You *got* it.
Will GameTap always be this way? Who knows. What I do know is that we’re continuing to build out the inside of the space to better serve our power users - with things like ‘my leaderboards’ and ‘my challenge games’ in My GameTap, with screenname popups and save games, and with some other stuff that’s coming *very* soon that a ton of people have asked for. Nope. Not telling. Mum’s the word. You just have to wait and see. 
All that, while remaining true to the ‘navigate with anything’ rule. It’s challenging. And fun. Oh. I said that already, didn’t I?
Thank you, Rene, for sending us an email. And for any of you out there with a question about GameTap, email us.
