Thanks for checking this out!

Thanks for reading!

I see that. Holding off on the design here obviously isn't meant to be dramatic. More so, it's meant to make sure that as many points can be agreed upon and understood before discussing the design just to keep the conversation from wandering off into 'what ifs'.

The fear I have about putting the design right up front is ignoring the work that went into the product/design decisions. I think constraining the conversation to limited feedback is likely to be more productive, assuming the designer has a good understanding of what feedback they need to move forward.

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading. I'd also be interested in hearing how freelancers think about this.

Do you happen to play on PC?

Android version. https://dribbble.com/shots/3751774-WhatsApp-Text-Status-Android

Hey Jon, thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts.

1. You totally need a Switch and if you liked HZD get ready to have your mind blown by Breath of the Wild.

2. Games do have a tricky position of making things easy enough on the player to understand and progress, but hard enough so they are challenging and fun to figure out. When working on interfaces that are for communication, commerce or productivity things always needs to be as easy as possible. Something that interests me is where game designers introduce friction in order to make the experience more engaging.

3. I know what you are saying about games and tutorials. Breath of the Wild is an interesting game because it seems like there is no obvious tutorial, but actually the entire game is a long tutorial that teaches the player a library of actions that they end up having to use in new and interesting ways.

Cheers!

I agree with that definition of skeuomorphic design. The way I am using the term here may seem a bit abstract, but a town offers you a series of non-linear options of things you can choose to do. A menu is a series of non-linear options of things you can choose to do. It's not as closely related as a calculator UI to a real life calculator, but I think you would agree 'walking your character to the lobby to join friends in a game' is more skeuomorphic than 'selecting a lobby and friends from a menu list.'

I think that is a strong way to describe the 3D menus. I still feel the thing that ties all the examples together, both 2D and 3D is the skeuomorphic elements. Mainly because the sense of space on a 2D plane isn't as obvious as the representation of movement between 'physical' locations. I agree 'skeuomorphic' doesn't explain the paradigm in full, but for me, it tied the article together.

Yes I agree 'immersive' works well for the 3D examples, but it feels less defined and doesn't work for the 2D examples. To me, the interesting element of these menus are their relationship to real life actions. You visit the options of a menu to do things, you visit the places of a town to do things. That paradigm seems to encompass all the examples, even though it's not what we classically think of as skeuomorphic design.