Zack Hiwiller wrote a fantastic piece at Kotaku about over-designing digital experiences, video games in particular.  Zack re-imagined the original Super Mario Brothers as if it were a website launched today.  In his mockup, the user’s hand is held firmly and safely in place as every mystery, question, and point of the experience is mapped out in clear, bullet-pointed text.  The first scene, where a first-time user is dropped into the world and left on his own is met with the following welcome:

Mario!  Welcome to Nintendo Presents Super Mario Brothers!  Press Right or Left to Walk!

The original Mario Brothers was intuitive and that made it so interesting (I knew I loved it when I first got it).  The point of a game is not always to solve it – the point of the game is to play the game and the point of playing is to not have a point.  The concept of making the web simpler has invaded a space that was doing just fine, thank you.  The web should be confusing in some circumstances.  Let’s not breed a generation of web users that depend on instructions, please.  We can overdesign every experience into a useless gesture – like telling two chess players what moves to make.  Eventually, they stop playing the game and start moving the pieces.

I know why we’re doing this.  I’m guilty of it myself.  There is a glut of step-by-step instructions living online.  They’re ugly.  They’re confusing.  They’re everywhere.

New sites are streamlining these lists with friendlier presentations.  Foursquare is the latest hottest newest coolest thing.  They don’t even have landing pages on their site!  I went there to grab their how-to list and found a video instead:

What am I getting at here?  I don’t know, man.  This whole thing is just an exercise for me to just write anyway…  Foursquare has to be defined – it takes a long video to do it and the answer I get to this question: what is foursquare?  Is: a thing that makes you happy.  Which is probably a good answer, because, when I ask myself as if I wasn’t answering this question: what is Super Mario Brothers?  I say: it’s a game, shut up; just keep moving to the right and you’ll save the princess (and isn’t the dungeon music awesome?).  But SMB didn’t require a 2 minute video to define the product.  Not because anyone knew what the thing was – but because nobody needed to be told about it.

Why didn’t they need to be told about it?  Because they were too busy playing it to ask.

♣ Post Script ♣

Check out this interview with Shigero Miyamoto & Satoru Iwata – the top dogs at Nintendo, Miyamoto being the originator of SMB – about their work and how they “trained” users to know the difference between a turtle, bad, and a mushroom, good, without telling the user.

http://us.wii.com/iwata_asks/nsmb/vol1_page4.jsp