If you're thinking I put Halo3 in the title of this blog to get your attention then you'd be right. I also put it in there because of the most recent dev footage released about the game.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the usage metaphors and the user psychology revealed during their development process could apply to almost any application development. Most of the video focused on a map that the team was working on. What they discovered was unbelievable.
They found that object placement, variations on existing metaphors, etc... would actually manifest social interaction. As they watched the users play they took feedback, dropped their assumptions, and modified the map. With the changes in the map came changes in the user’s behavior and play style.
Consider this, how different would our development of Web applications be if we could stand behind the user, watch what they were doing, how they did it, and what was their reaction to it - even better, if we could modify the users emotional state and behavior based on what we saw... would we design / develop different?
Could changing a color or moving a textbox really modify the user perception and manifest a social aspect of the app? Is taking a dual-wielding user to a sniper really as simple as replacing a textbox with a dropdown?