Mario Karts for Rocket Scientists

One big rule in game design is that you shouldn't have to be a rocket scientists to play a videogame. In fact, you should even have to be that smart. Game should just sort of work the way you think they should, and gently coach you along as you learn their more complex features.

Then there is the example of my friend Brian and I playing Mario Karts Wii online.

MK Wii is a pretty great game, even if it is great mainly because it's a lot like previous Mario Karts games. And the prospect of playing against your pals over the Internet just sounded like something too good to pass up.

But even thought Brian had already been playing Karts online with his brother in another state, the effort it took for he and I network across town was almost enough for me to give up and play by myself.

In order to enjoy online with their pals, Wii gamers have to exchanged a friend code. There is really no way to exchange these codes using Nintendo tools, so you pretty much have to know the person in real life to swap codes. And while this probably makes parents happy to think that weird men living with their mothers won't be able to select head-to-head racing matches with other people's kids, it also means you have this big step you have to take before you can play with your friends.

So, after about 10 minutes on the phone, we finally got our codes to connect and could select a race.

Since we couldn't quite figure out how the whole thing was suppose to work, we just picked the obvious and ended up in a series of individual races against each other. Cool. But not the multiplayer race action with strangers we had hoped. After getting tired of our two-man races, we couldn't figure out how to get out of our current set of races to join bigger events, so we just quit the game and started over. After another five minutes of getting logged back in, were were able to get into the same race and run some laps against strangers.

All the while, I had my cell phone in my lap on speaker phone. The Wii doesn't offer any sort of voice communication. So, the only way to really make things work is use your own phone.

Sure, it all worked. But compared to the effortless set and play of most Nintendo products, I was ready to stop playing and go back to something easy, like working.

The lessoned learned--the future of videogames is playing together. Making playing together easy should be the hard problem that the videgame design rocket scientists should work on more.