Worldbuilding for a Better Interface
When I’m in a Photoshop menu, I almost never encounter warlocks. The Edit menu never seems happy to see me. I click File > Export > Quick Export as PNG and the system behaves efficiently, but it doesn’t encourage me or celebrate me for showing up.
When I navigate through the bazaar to find the warlock called Ikora Rey and seek out missions to undertake, different things happen.
The bazaar bustles with people shopping for rugs, vases, and artifacts. One of the shoppers says, “I want the kind the Hunters use.” Wind-chimes clink and banners flutter in the air. People haggle. In a nearby storefront, people chat over big bowls of ramen, and I imagine the place smells like hot sesame oil. I have to imagine that part, because this place isn’t real and the game doesn’t smell like anything. Not really.
In the world of Destiny 2, the bazaar is part of a place called the Tower, built into the wall that surrounds and overlooks the last safe city on Earth. This place is a refuge for quasi-mystical warriors called Guardians, who adventure, explore, and fight to protect the city. This is where we report in, equip ourselves, and keep our spare stuff.
“I know some Guardians better than I know my kids.”
In the game of Destiny 2, the Tower is a social space. There we roam in third-person perspective, emoting for other players, and interacting with “vendors” who trade us weapons, armor, and other gear that we use in play. The place hosts a variety of activities and pastimes, from a game of “The Floor is Lava” to twenty-some bits of lore to learn by scanning select objects.
Put another way: The Tower is a three-dimensional menu. My character is the cursor.
This heroic refuge is a spatial interface with carefully measured travel times between menus. (We call these menus vendors.) How long does it take you to “scroll” between the submenu for replaying story missions and the submenu for buying scout reports? However long it takes you to run from Ikora Rey in the bazaar to the horned robot, Cayde, in the hangar.
Stashing hidden lore and soccer balls in a menu someplace would be almost unthinkably weird, but the Tower isn’t just a menu. It’s a place we inhabit with other players and while away a few minutes when our friends are perusing their menus. The background characters in the Tower speak up now and again, talking amongst themselves (or to us) such that we sometimes catch snippets of their dialogue. It feels like we’re eavesdropping on lives that stretch beyond our experience. Beyond these menus.
“Quiet! The War Cult might be listening.”
Destiny 2 has a lot of menus. The game’s “character sheet” is a bundle of menus. The interplanetary Director interface is another array of menus. Each one’s distinct style — the bright UI of the character sheet, the stellar-observatory look of the Director — help us orient ourselves in the game and the game world. When we access some of these menus, our Guardian does too, by interacting with our sort-of-a-robot companion, called Ghost.
Whether we’re looking through our Guardian’s eyes at game stats or over their shoulder as they navigate the Tower, the menus have roots in the game world. The Tower could be streamlined down to a more traditional interface, like the game’s Director menus, which is quickly informative and even atmospheric, but it does less worldbuilding despite depicting actual worlds. The Director is about outer space, but it is not a space the way that the Tower is. The Tower is not merely a menu because its form is vital to its function: showing the homeworld that our Guardians are fighting to protect.
Spaces portray. They portray processes, workplaces, daily life. They guide us through ideas like a user interface does, tuning our user experience, because spaces are interfaces.
“Does it look to you like someone cut these wires?”
Game worlds are fictionalized, dramatized interfaces. It’s more satisfying to hit a monster with a “sword” than it is to, say, click Action > Combat > Attack over and over again. But it’s all inputs. (“Press the D-pad to dance.”)
Put another way, how we put things makes a difference. How we show things? That matters. How we portray an interface becomes experiential. It’s not everything, but it’s in contact with everything.
This is ergonomics — the efficiency and comfort of a user’s experience in a working environment. The “work” we’re doing is fantastical play, but the game is working while we play.
The Tower, as an interface, is deeply inefficient but intuitively comfortable. We dash past armed guards and chatting strangers, under tiled arches and wooden lattices, to talk to characters we’ve adventured with. It all supplies context and meaningful atmosphere in a way that slows our actions way down, but makes browsing a menu like Hangar > Cayde > Scout Reports more entertaining.
Tom Clancy’s The Division sports similar spatial interfaces — most notably its Base of Operations, which builds up and changes as you undertake missions in the game. Your Base of Operations becomes a unique expression of your choices, depicted through the game world. Add a Canine Unit to your base, and a German shepherd shows up to sniff the floor in the Security Wing. It’s a great design, also full of talkative characters, that trades the social element for personalized impact.
Destiny 2 develops and changes another social space, called the Farm, during its storyline campaign in a similar way. I’m more familiar with the Tower. When I first visited the Tower in Destiny 2, I got chills. It started with the sound of celebratory strings over a black screen, in the aftermath of the campaign’s epic finale. Then I heard voices as my Guardian materialized, like they all do, into a lively plaza overlooking the Last City — saved from destruction. I’ve never been so happy to see a menu.
Usually, for me, a menu that takes two minutes to scroll through doesn’t sound appealing. But add the wind chimes and the praise of space wizards and it turns out I feel differently about it. This is the magic of UX. This is the power of worldbuilding. To evoke a place that portrays information through dialogue, that shows notions as vivid spaces, and draws us into the lore via the landscape.
I mean, it’s not often that I imagine what a Photoshop menu smells like, but in the Tower, there’s a ramen shop right there.
