Subject: Re: on the strange weakness of Graphical User Interface Languages
From: rpw3@rpw3.org (Rob Warnock)
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2007 01:56:36 -0500
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <IfednQh2a5o51IHanZ2dnUVZ_gmdnZ2d@speakeasy.net>
Rob St. Amant <stamant@ncsu.edu> wrote:
+---------------
| I agree.  I'm told that big games companies can usually rely on an
| army of alpha and beta testers (paid? I don't know) who will spend
| days playing a new game to figure it out.  This approach doesn't
| translate to productivity software like spreadsheets and word
| processors, for some reason :-).  Although I did read a paper a few
| years ago that described a mapping from control room monitoring tasks
| for a factory, or something similar, to a video game interface.  That
| idea has a lot of promise.
+---------------

Yeah, right. Make your games and your real apps *too* similar, and...

    http://imdb.com/title/tt0086567/
    WarGames (1983)
    ...
    Tagline:      Is it a game, or is it real?

    Plot Outline: A young man finds a back door into a military
                  central computer in which reality is confused
                  with game-playing, possibly starting World War III. 


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock			<rpw3@rpw3.org>
627 26th Avenue			<URL:http://rpw3.org/>
San Mateo, CA 94403		(650)572-2607