UI: The next frontier in game innovation?

Holy Hell! How did I miss Crayon Physics until now?!



This looks just awesome. As a fan of The Incredible Machine, Bridge Builder, and other physics puzzle type games, I can't wait to play it. Love the aesthetic too.

More importantly though, I wonder whether games like Crayon Physics, Little Big Planet, and applications like SketchUp are pointers to a whole new area of innovation for games: UI.

The challenge with any games aiming to support "user generated content", or for that matter, just letting people manipulate the world in less constrained ways - is that controlling stuff, let alone creating stuff, especially in 3D, is HARD.

So how do you make it easy? These apps are pointing the way. I think a great opportunity and challenge in front of developers today is in letting users accomplish unlimited, complicated, beautiful things, and doing so quickly and easily. Easier said than done!