This article discusses elements of game interfaces and why some choices work better than others.
Harcore Gaming 101 link added to Game Resources
A great site with a collection of articles of classic”hardcore” games to newer titles. you will also find screenshots, comparison shots from the various platforms and music samples.
Jakob Nielson on Usability Principles
Jakob Nielson is well known for his work in design and usability for the World Wide Web. His website useit.com is a good place to look for more information on concepts like his list of 10 heuristics for usability.
Nielson also wrote an article on the Microsoft Kinect that was covered here.
Fitts Law
From Wikipedia: Fitts’s law (often cited as Fitts’ law) is a model of human movement in human–computer interaction and ergonomics that predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the distance to and the size of the target. Fitts’s law is used to model the act of pointing, either by physically touching an object with a hand or finger, or virtually, by pointing to an object on a computer monitor using a pointing device. It was proposed by Paul Fitts in 1954.
Ask Tog’s quiz on Fitts Law from 1999 is still a useful guide today for thinking about the impact of placement and size on interaction and UI design.
Adventures in Interfacing articles from Hardydev.com
Visually Directing the Player
Joshua Nuernberger wrote this article on using visual cues to direct players in a game and posted it on A Hardy Developer's Journal.
This article answers questions about visual direction, lighting cues, and hotspots. These techniques are part of the interface feedback, directing game action in a diagetic manner, making this an interesting read for Interface design ideas.
http://www.hardydev.com/2009/11/18/visually-directing-the-player/
Realism in UI Design – from UX Magazine
This article looks at the effect of abstraction and realism in UI elements and design. It is a good introduction to the complexity of spectrum of realistic object and how much simplification/abstraction happens to transform how an image is read from a specific “one”, to a symbol meant to represent an action.
Consider this image:
On the left, a specific house.
On the right, a home icon.