It is an indisputable fact that learning and playing a well-designed computer game is far easier than learning and using application software. Most often the exploratory nature of the game and the exciting challenges make learning a game more enjoyable and entertaining. The exploratory learning techniques employed by most computer games later became the model for the user-friendly features of several applications. Computer games also contributed to several other features of computers, including but not limited to the layout of the keyboard [4].

A good computer game is highly interactive and exciting to the user, while most application programs are more passive. Carroll [2] explored the potentials of exploiting the features of a computer game for finding better designs for application programs.

This project was conceived with a similar objective of exploring a very popular computer game to reveal features that can be useful in designing better user interfaces. This study is an attempt to analyze two different versions of the popular game Warcraft. We studied the game under GOMS and Task Action Grammar (TAG) frameworks for a micro-level analysis of user tasks. In the macro level, detailed analysis was done under the Metaphor model, Ethnography, Direct manipulation interface, Distributed Cognition etc., by conducting user experiments and claims analysis.

This paper is divided into seven chapters. Following this introduction is a brief description of the game, followed by the methodology used for this study, which is followed by the results and discussion. The report is wrapped up with a conclusion followed by references and acknowledgments.