A Comparison of Menus and Gestures for a Command Intensive Game
By: Erin Spencer
Supervisor: Jeff Wofford
Masters of Interactive Technology degree conferred October, 2010
Thesis / Project completed: October, 2010

The Nintendo DS with its touchscreen offers new game play opportunities, that are not used in many commercial DS games.  This study compared menus and gestures for use in a turn-based strategy game.  Could gestures offer a more efficient and more fun to use interface for these games?  Using gestures may save time since players would not have to scroll through long menus to make a selection.  Would players prefer to draw gestures instead of tapping through menus?

For the interface comparisons a short game demo was produced for the Nintendo DS using homebrew libraries and tools.  It features 3 maps that increase in complexity, and can be played with three interfaces: only menus, only gestures, and free choice of gestures and menus.  This demo also included a profiler system that recorded gameplay data.
The study had a total of 24 participants split between two groups.   Both groups played through the game three times using each of the three interfaces once.  One group started with menus, the other gestures.  At the end, participants filled out a survey where they rated menus and gestures in terms of fun and easiness.

Although the survey results indicated that participants considered gestures harder to use, participants also indicated that gestures made for a more fun game experience.  This is a bit surprising and suggests that interfaces that are easier to use are not necessarily more fun. The ‘fun’ rating was amplified for participants who played the menu-based version of the game before playing the gesture-based version. These players rated the fun of gesture system more highly than did the group who played the gesture-based version before playing the menu-based version. This indicates that proper introduction to a new interface is important.  

Results from tracking the time it took for participants to finish each turn and map in the game indicate that menus were more efficient at first, but after participants played through the game once, the times for the two groups were nearly the same.  The combined interface in which both menus and gestures were used freely performed the best with the fastest map times of all.  The combined interface also allowed users to customize the interface to their preferences with different users choosing different combinations of gestures and menus.   This suggests that this dual menus and gestures interface is the best choice for games in which both interface systems can be implemented. 

Download entire thesis (.pdf)