Don't hate the HUD

There's an idea gaining traction in the game community that heads-up displays -- the health bars, ammo counts, maps, and other info that's always on the screen -- are bad for games. The idea is HUDs pull you out of the game and that getting rid of them will make for a more immersive experience. In this post, I explain why rampant video game conventions and cliches are a far bigger problem, immersion-wise, than HUDs.

There's also a case to be made that HUDs are good, and Clive Thompson makes that case at Wired today. I think he's right: HUDs provide a huge amount of information in an unobtrusive way. Sure, their presence constantly reminds you you're "just" playing a game, but there's no getting around that.

Thompson says that in King Kong (which has inexplicably been hailed for not using a HUD), he sometimes forgets how many bullets he has, which yanks him out of the experience. I had the same response when Adrian Brody's character says "That's okay, I have enough bullets" each time you press the inventory button. And the game's repeated, cliched "puzzle" -- kill a monster to get the fire to light the bush to get the lever to open the door -- is a more annoying reminder that it's just a game than any HUD could be.

So let the HUD alone. I think people are just latching onto that as an easy way of complaining about derivative, boring games. It'll take far more than losing the HUD to fix video games' problems.