UPDATE: My suggested communication system was picked as one of the top contributions for the challenge.

Every few weeks, the guys over at GameCareerGuide presents a game design challenge to their readers. The latest challenge is to “Design a social interaction system for a massively multiplayer game featuring friendly characters who can’t understand each other”. I have never felt that I have had the time to participate in these events before, but this time I thought I should give it a try.

The communication system I am proposing sacrifices precision and versatility in favor of speed, accessibility, ease-of-use and interaction feedback. By using a library of universal symbols, accessible through an intuitive graphical user interface, players will be able to convey messages quickly and smoothly.

By pressing and holding a hot-key, a spiral of icons is invoked on the screen. When you rotate the analogue stick the symbols light up and scale up as you pass them. The spiral is repeating, so when you get to the end, the symbol that was first in line will seamlessly follow the last symbol. This makes it quick and easy to browse all of the symbols and there is no limit as to how many symbols you can put into it.

Interface

To choose a symbol, just press the action button. After pressing the action button the symbol is displayed in a specific area of the screen, and you can continue browsing. You can sequence symbols in order to create more complex messages. Because of the intuitive interface, players will be able to put together complex sequences of symbols in a matter of seconds.

The symbols consists of traditional and game related symbols. For example, each area in the game can have its own symbol. These could also have contextual meta actions/features attached to them, like co-ordinates or a marker for that area.

When you have chosen a symbol you can add a modifier to it in order to make your message more clear. A modifier can for example be positive or negative, and when chosen the color of the symbol changes to represent your choice. Instead of color modifiers could also be illustrated with prefix icons, like a thumbs up or happy smiley for positive. You can also add modifiers to an entire sequence, e.g. make it a question.

Exchange

Depending on the number of available modifiers they can either have their own hot-keys, or you could access them through a similar, but smaller, interface as the one used to select symbols.

When you have put together a finished sequence of symbols with modifiers, you press a button and the sequence is displayed over the head of your avatar or in a specific chat window. Depending on the nature of the game, you could also have a realtime system where symbols are displayed after one another as you select them.

Using stimulating sounds and visual indicators, the interaction feedback of the interface can be made satisfying and rewarding. You will be able to motivate players to use the system by simply applying traditional interaction design methodologies to the user interface.

Even though the above description is for console, the system is basically platform and genre independent, and can be modified to work with almost any game.