Notes on: How Video Games Inspire Great UX



My notes on: https://jenson.org/games/ which I found via: https://youtu.be/1fZTOjd_bOQ?si=kCGSE2uNczIJjiQ-

Alan Kay quote is hard to understand until an insight from a user test “changed my perspective”.


First learning (on the surface, we go deeper and beyond it) pretty soon:

Games have the ability to force situations, such as running into a canyon and having nowhere to go but up a ladder. Apps on the other hand, usually have the opposite, offering a broad toolkit of choices. Games, I thought, can exploit narrative to force situations which made their life easier.

However this does not mean that games have it easy, on the contrary most games fail:

You have to design a great game to get people to have the confidence that practicing is worthwhile.

And we start going deeper right away now:

Raph convinced me to forgo any quick and easy ‘cookbook of tricks’ approach to this problem and go deeper and understand better how games are built, from the bottom up

Fist bit of wisdom:

Most apps today will just “throw” 5 new features into an app with little connection between them.

Oh my god, this is so true it almost physically hurts.


TBH I still haven't internalized the fractal part, so I'll skip it here. It might very well be that I am trying to discover a deeper meaning but it's really all at the surface level.


The learning loop is more interesting (to me) as it applies a pattern that I love (incrementality), with its app anti-pattern:

Each feature is in isolation, how it is done usually has little relation to other features (other that using a style guide).


The next section is better started by taking a short detour and explain what affordances (source) are to the non-designers (me):

The term affordance refers to the properties of an object that imply how the object can be used. Affordances give clues on how an object can be used to carry out an action. For instance, the slots on a vending machine are affordances, they show you that you can insert something, perhaps a coin in order to make a purchase. The possibility of inserting something into a slot, is its affordance.

This section on affordances really resonated with me, as I can clearly remember this being a major cause for the use of javascript animations in early 2010. For example the highlight effect in the venerable script.aculo.us.


And we finally get to the last point: pacing (AKA where to start when I log into an app or game?).

The classic example here would be World of Warcraft, a very complex game that ultimately has dozens of commands for you to learn. But you start with just 1 attack spell. There isn’t much to learn and it starts off pretty easy. As you level up, things are gradually added so you grow into the interface.

What do most Apps do?

They show you EVERYTHING at the very beginning hoping you’ll get it all in this one shot. Of course, we all know what happens: skip, skip, skip….

A great read, after which I've ordered A Theory Of Fun.

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