Overwatch's Sound Team Aimed for 'Play by Sound.' Why Does Typing on Glass Feel Like Guessing?

"overwatch patch notes" showed up in Google's daily trending searches in the US this week. Blizzard's official patch notes show Season 5, "A Grim Doctrine," kicked off on October 6, and the mid-season patch notes went up on November 3, with hero balance changes. What people want to know is who got stronger and who got weaker.

This post doesn't cover the patch. A patch changes numbers like damage and cooldowns. What you actually feel in a match are signals: did that land, who's coming, did my input go through. How those signals are designed is a problem that reaches well outside games, all the way to the keyboard on your phone.

At GDC 2016, Blizzard's Scott Lawlor and Tomas Neumann gave a talk called "Overwatch - The Elusive Goal: Play by Sound." The session description opens with: "Early in production we were given a clear, but challenging goal by our game director, 'Play by Sound'."

Coverage of the talk reported that every character in Overwatch has their own footstep sound, and that enemies who are looking at you or aiming at you get pushed up in the mix, even from farther away. The point was to give players as much information as possible so they could play better.

The takeaway: sound there isn't decoration, it's confirmation. When your ears tell you first, your eyes are free to look somewhere else.

At CHI 2008, Eve Hoggan, Stephen Brewster and Jody Johnston of the University of Glasgow published a paper on tactile feedback for touchscreen keyboards. They compared a physical keyboard, a standard touchscreen and a touchscreen with vibration feedback, both sitting still and on the move.

The paper found that adding tactile feedback significantly improved touchscreen typing, bringing it close to a physical keyboard. In a university news release that year, Hoggan said touchscreen keypads were less accurate than a standard keyboard, and that without being able to tell by touch when a key had been selected, errors rose significantly.

Glass has no key travel and nothing to catch your finger. So you confirm each press with your eyes, and mistakes slip in while your eyes bounce between the keys and the text. What Overwatch's sound team handed to your ears, a phone keyboard can hand to your fingertips with sound and vibration.

The research above shows how feedback affects accuracy. Whether fun feedback makes people type longer or happier is not something that study measured, and it's not something we can measure yet either. From here on, this is our hypothesis.

We think the reason wax crush ball and bubble wrap videos keep circulating is that the loop itself is satisfying: press, and sound and feel come straight back. Typing is a press you repeat countless times a day. What happens if every one of those presses gets the same loop?

Tap a key and it cracks. Keep going and it shatters. Leave it for a moment and it sets again. Each texture has its own recorded sound and vibration.

No sign-up, no ads, no analytics. What you type is never stored or sent, and the internet is used only for Play purchases and product checks. A keyboard sees everything you write, so we settled that rule before any of the fun.