What is this, the spice girls bus?
Theres an adage commonly attributed to Dieter Rams which goes that "the best design is no design at all". This is a very useful mantra, its this modernist appeal to universality. But as useful as it is for accessibility, it is also quite boring to me. The adage is a dead end to me, I do like illegibility to an extent, miscommunication and bad translation has this rich cultural ability to create new meanings and I don't want to plaster over that. But what does it mean to be too "designed" in this context?
When home computers were first coming out in the late 80s and 90s, they had many design features to make them more accessible to the public. Apple invented mice to provide more embodied and intuitive controls(funnily they've forgotten how to do mice in the years since), ui elements resembled their real life counterparts(this is called skeuomorphism) and Microsoft had a little guy who would help you navigate your computer called clippy(admittedly not as successful as the other two examples). all of these ground the technology in the real world to make it more accessible to everyday people
The metaverse is bad web design, we all know this. According to our mantra, it is unnecessarily "designed". Replacing the UI of the web that we're all familiar with with a sort of mmorpg is not a new idea, its alot closer to the cyberspace imagined in the matrix and neuromancer. A bunch of silicon valley tech bros in the late 2010s wanted to make this a reality and from my memory this peaked during COVID. Much has been said about the metaverse being a bad idea, but the long and the short of it is that the barrier to entry is incredibly high; most people dont want to buy a vr headset to log into the internet and while there are successful(even if dystopian) internet on the market, they aren't the AR that was imagined by technologists of the previous decade. But whats strange is that the imitation of the real world and embodied controls which makes the metaverse bad design also made the first computers good design. It's as if once a critical mass of people we're onboarded to the computers and phones, it became more effecient to abstract controls and visual information.
I recently started driving a new car. My family upgraded from a shitbox out of the early '00s to a more modern car made in the mid 2010s. Its a nice car to drive the engine is alot more powerful and after getting used to it, I ultimately prefer driving it to the old car, so what follows are ultimately minor grievances. But there are still some features that really annoy me; I don't like that it automatically restarts the car after stalling, its really overwhelming. Theres also a feature that I turn off which turns the engine off when in neutral and standstill, which I appreciate probably exists for a good reason, but I just want to be able to control when the engine turns on. There is also an alarm that comes up when you accelerate with the handbrake on which is needlessly sensetive(what is a hillstart?), and the other day it kept complaining that my boot was open despite it being locked. Driving this newer car sometimes feels like arguing with a computer, it feels like the machine thinks it knows better than me and gives me very little options but to just accept it for what it is. The car is badly "designed", because it doesnt allow me to drive it comfortably without being alerted of something every minute or so. Its designed to make my life easier, so according to our mantra its design should be invisible, but as someone who learned to drive on a far older car I found it more intrusive than anything else. But for a car of its age, its surprisingly low-tech, this was designed when cars were beginning to include ipads in their dashboards, and I imagine drivng one of those is like having microsoft clippy on your dashboard.
I've long professed Disco Elysium as my favourite game, but have bounced off its crpg predecessors like Fallout and Planescape: Torment. What I enjoy so much about Disco is exploring Martinaise and talking to some of the funniest and most insightful video game characters put to code. Disco kinda cuts to the chase when it comes to this, most of the game mechanics just jumble the order in which you see things or make the narrative react to your choices. Even though steeped in the rpg tradition its form more resembles a point and click adventure or visual novel than a crpg like baldurs gate or planescape torment. Its largest departure from crpgs is the lack of a combat system, combat is treated as any other skill check, which turns the game loop into reading and exploring rather than the dnd-esque dungeon crawling which I find is handled much better in other video game genres which are much more solely focussed on that. I've said before in a half-joke that action movies shouldn't have any talking, Its an action movie not a dialogue movie. This is the same line of thinking that permeates Disco Elysium, to access the roleplaying, they have cut the minigames and combat systems typical of the genre. Disco elysium automates the non roleplaying elements through its universal dice roll and does all the calculations for you, telling you the probablities for each dice roll, allwing the player to get to the actual fun of the game more efficiently.
I don't want to drive a car that does everything for me, but I also don't want to play a game where I have to do everything myself. We can reframe the "design" from the mantra I discussed at the beginning of our as being an advocation for a stripping of features. In both the example of the car that has the fuckass ipad on the dashboard that automates everything, and the video games where everything has a dedicated system I find they suffer from feature bloat, they are too designed, but this problem manifests in opposing ways. Where in the car, the overdesign works to relieve the user of complexity, in the game it intends on increasing it. I've found that in both cases the feature bloat, intentionally or not, does lead to increased complexity, in the former it is a problem but the latter just personal tase. Whats most interesting is that where in my car, the automation of everything led to feature bloat, in Disco Elysium it solved that very problem.