How to make the world a better place: The true challenge of UX in video games - Part 02: A Game Design story

In the previous article dealing with the reasons for the confusion between UX and UI , I left you with an idea of how UX is more a question of design and it is therefore this point that I will develop today.

Just a design story

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When I started learning Game Design, I knew right away that this was what I was made for. And for me, even if the industry tends to segment the different disciplines, design is still design.

When we talk about UI design, Level design, Economic design, Narrative design or UX design… We are just talking about different ways to bring different answers to different problems, we can just consider them as different tools from a big toolbox.

I tend to compare design to cooking (and I think I'll use this analogy several times in this article because food speaks to everyone!), firstly because I love to cook, but also because a game director once told me that a good designer is a good cook. So why limit me to using only a tiny fraction of the ingredients available? If my dish is too bitter, I know I can use sugar to balance it out, if it's too salty, I'm unlikely to make up for it and I'd better start again, reconsidering when I ruined my dish.?

That's why I define UX closer to Game Design, with a holistic and cross-functional view of game systems. And many times, in my career I have been forced to make a choice, either you do UI, or you do UX or you do Game design! But why limit me? Because that's the way the world is, we put people in boxes, it makes everyone reassured. Reducing UX Design to ergonomics is like reducing art to the drawing discipline.?

UX is about how to provide the best experience for everyone and represents the ultimate gaming experience and the logical evolution of Game Design. An ethical Game Design, where the human factor and therefore the player is placed at the center of one’s thinking.

There are so many other ways to make a system intuitive and understandable that are much more interesting and relevant than UI which risks both creating a cognitive dissonance reminding your players that he is not in reality and therefore taking him out of their immersive state, but also overloading their brain with visual information.

I'll give you some examples of design approaches that will make your systems intuitive, immersive and relieve the cognitive load of your players which is, for me, the quintessence of UX.

The discourse of mechanics

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There are several other design approaches that can both inform and guide the player while maintaining immersion and cognitive overload.

One of my favorite ones is called Procedural Rhetoric. It's a rather complicated name to describe a fairly simple concept. Procedural Rhetoric is a Game Design concept mainly developed by Ian Bogost and widely used and democratized by La Molleindustria and its socio-critical games.

The idea is that there is a discourse in the mechanics and systems of the game, independent of the designer's intention, and that it is important to be aware of this. When you are aware of that, then as a designer you can use that mechanism to deliver messages to your players. It's a kind of artistic introspection that requires you to constantly question what you're proposing and take responsibility for it. Everything we create has a meaning and mastering this process will be the added value of your design.

Let me illustrate the concept with a simple example. If one of your game's thematics is "dehumanization", then you should take that into account in your design intentions. For example, the player will not be able to choose a name while creating an avatar. No need for texts, icons, popup... You pass on this idea without them even realizing it, you are improving immersion and saving time and resources. That's where good thinking beforehand saves money in the long run!

Approaches as interesting as procedural rhetoric are multiple and can even be combined to increase the immersion while lightening the cognitive load of your player. Environmental storytelling or diegetic elements will have the same positive effect on your experience.

The best example of how to use these three concepts is Ghost of Tsushima and its emphasis on wind and animals mechanics. The wind and animals serve both as a diegetic guide replacing the mini map, while being naturally integrated into the virtual environment and thus perfectly illustrating the concept of environmental storytelling. These gameplay elements are an integral part of the game mechanics and convey the sense of freedom, nature conscious and poetry at the heart of the experience and are in this sense a good example of procedural rhetoric. This is a perfect example of how to optimize your player experience while enhancing immersion and lightning players cognitive load, that's an effective UX approach.

Narrative and wording are also crucial and working with the narrative team is also a good UX approach. No one can ignore the power of words, along with images and sound, they are vehicles for meaning and instant understanding. The wording of your game elements, the names of your characters can convey so much.

How many times have I seen misleading menu titles or category names? It's also the role of the UX Designer to make sure that the different feedbacks make sense. The right word, the right sound, the right image can be so meaningful and avoid many explanations.?

The previous examples illustrate how, by focusing on design intents and thinking about how the mechanics, can serve as a vehicle for messages we want to convey to players. Therefore, it is so important for the UX designer to be involved in the design work and to act upstream.

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Getting to the root of the problem

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Hiring a UX designer at the end of production and asking him to fix hundreds of problems of player understanding is already obsolete. The User Experience Designer is not a magician, he cannot make the incomprehensible comprehensible.

I opt for a more osteopathic medicinal version of UX, one that adheres to the idea that ‘prevention is better than cure’!

What if the secret was in the roots of the design processes? Work with the game direction team to define the pillars of the experience we want to offer and think about how to integrate them into the experience in an immersive way; Rely on innovative forms of transmission to increase immersion; Involve User Research and therefore players earlier in the design process in many ways, such as: Design thinking methodologies, user scenarios, personas, affordance testing... Rather than wait for the playtests sentence; Create User Centered design processes and methodology to fight against the lack of objectivity and guide all the designers to our shared objective: Players.

Because that's what it's all about, how the player's knowledge should become the keystone of the overall thinking and how to turn this knowledge into a design tool.

The third part of this article, to be published tomorrow, will offer some UX methodologies and user-centered approaches can support game design teams.