The Acagamic Tip Tuesday — Issue #7
Welcome back to The Acagamic Tip Tuesday.
Each Tuesday, I will send you a curated tip from the world of UX Research & Design for games. At my website The Acagamic, I focus on training people to become better researchers and designers for games and beyond.
Each tip will only take a few minutes to read.
Tip of the week
Avoid putting too much cognitive load on the player when engaging in game actions. People are bad at multitasking.
If you want present complex information to players it is usually best done during a break or pause in the game or after a match. If you are not building a game with real-time actions (like turn-based strategy), you can choose to present more information to players because they have more time to process it before deciding on a move.
Three Tweets
Two Podcasts
GUR Cafe on Apple Podcasts — podcasts.apple.com
GUR Cafe is hosted by Lanie Dixon of Ubisoft Montreal. GUR Café podcast was created as a place to chat about all things Games User Research. The hope was to create content discussing topics we wish more people in Games User Research were talking about. Join us each month for new episodes! #games…
Game UX Podcast on Apple Podcasts — podcasts.apple.com
A podcast about the people behind interface design and development, and their journeys into the video games industry.
Two Links
Can’t Unsee — cantunsee.space
A game where you need to pick the design that is most correct. Test your attention to details!
Introduction to UX in Game Design — uxdesign.cc
For over a year, I’ve been working as a game designer in a studio that develops VR multiplayer experiences for arcade rooms. In this role, one of my biggest challenges was to design these experiences…
Two Research Papers
Assessing Players’ Cognitive Load in Digital Games with a Time-Based Resource Sharing Memory Model | SSRN
Supported by ever-evolving technology, digital games are becoming more complex, including tasks and challenges that often defy players’ cognitive abilities.
Measuring Cognitive Load Using In-Game Metrics of a Serious Simulation Game | Frontiers in Psychology — www.frontiersin.org
Serious games have become an important tool to train individuals in a range of different skills. Importantly, serious games or gamified scenarios allow for simulating realistic time-critical situations to train and also assess individual performance. In this context, determining the user’s cognitive load during (game-based) training seems crucial for predicting performance and potential adaptation of the training environment to improve training effectiveness.
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Until next week,
Lennart Nacke
