Hello adventurer! In today’s quest, we’re going to explore a corner of Psychology that is very important in making games: Cognitive Load. You will learn what it is, how it applies to games, and how you should design for it.
WHAT IS COGNITIVE LOAD
How much information and input can our brains process before we get overwhelmed?
Although there is no one simple answer that applies to everyone, here is an example of this happening in real life: Have you ever driven a car and thought, “I need to turn the radio down, I can’t see where I’m driving”?
Then you have experienced Cognitive Load.
“But what do radios and cars have to do with games?” (I hear you ask)
This is relevant to games because if there’s too much going on in the game, there’s a good chance players feel overwhelmed and miss things in games too.
As UX designers, it’s important to understand how our brains work and react when playing games. This will help you make better games.
WHERE IT HAPPENS THE MOST
For example: when there’s an intense battle happening, and the player is really focused on what to do, if they also get irrelevant messages, too many sounds, hectic or distracting music, UI popups, side mission reminders, low health or other status effects, remembering a code, an overcrowded HUD, too many animating parts, etc, chances are that they:
1) Will not go well in the battle, or
2) Miss all other information you try to tell them and only focus on the battle at hand.
Another time when being aware of the cognitive load you put on players is in the Onboarding and Tutorials. I see so many games trip up with the very start of their game experience, which can make players leave.
But there are some examples to make better Tutorials:
Give the player ONE task to do and learn at a time - and make it really clear.
Keep texts short - This applies to lore, dialogues, and tutorial texts.
Don’t try to teach them everything at once - select what is most important to learn for your game, and make it relevant to what they are doing right then.
Spread out learnings and tasks - you can spread out learning for longer across the game, to a place and time when it’s relevant and ok for players to absorb new info.
TLDR: Too many things going on + too much to remember or learn = you have an overwhelmed player.
Thank you for reading!
What did you think about this lesson? Please give me your feedback and questions through this link:
Check out the Website learngameuxdesign.com for more Game UX updates.