The Acagamic Tip Tuesday — Issue #8
Welcome back to The Acagamic Tip Tuesday.
Each Tuesday, I will send you a 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.
Game UX Tip of the week
Use signifiers to indicate the affordances of your game objects.
An affordance is a perceivable clue about what actions an object can afford. This will tell a user what actions they can do with that object. A signifier on the other hand is an additional layer of information that indicates affordances exist, such as a mark, sound, or label.
You should think about your player’s mental model when designing affordances and then suggest explicit actions by adding signifiers to your design.
Three Tweets
Two Links
Affordances in game systems design • Machinations.io — machinations.io
Game system design and the concept of affordances. How they work, what makes them powerful, and examples of how to use them effectively.
Affordances and signifiers. Creating designs, components, and interactions that make sense to users by H Locke — medium.com
In a recent team design review, we discussed the difference between affordances and signifiers, and how we can support user cognition by adding layers of meaning into the design of key components and…
Two Videos
Two Research Papers
Z O. Toups, Igor Dolgov, and Elizabeth M. Bonsignore. 2014. A theory of game mechanic signaling for interface design. In Proceedings of the first ACM SIGCHI annual symposium on Computer-human interaction in play (CHI PLAY ‘14). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 445–446. DOI: 10.1145/2658537.2661318
Ronny Andrade, Melissa J. Rogerson, Jenny Waycott, Steven Baker, and Frank Vetere. 2020. Introducing the Gamer Information-Control Framework: Enabling Access to Digital Games for People with Visual Impairment. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–14. DOI: 10.1145/3313831.3376211
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