The Gamer’s Brain excerpt: Good UX is key to crafting fun

Creating video games can be hard, and creating a fun and engaging experience is a real challenge. While there is no clear recipe for developing successful games, there are known ingredients. The Gamer’s Brain: How Neuroscience and UX Can Impact Video Game Design is a book about using knowledge in cognitive psychology as well as guidelines and methodology from the user experience (UX) discipline to help game developers identify and understand those ingredients so they can craft their own successful recipe. This is an excerpt from one of the chapters dedicated to developing a UX strategy in a game studio.

Chapter 16: UX Strategy

Having a user experience (UX) mindset is not only about offering compelling experiences to your audience, it is also about good business (Hartson and Pyla 2012). UX practices can help developers ship a game that contains less friction points and is more engaging and that will be more likely to reach a broader audience and make more revenue. Moreover, the earlier UX issues are identified, the less it costs to fix them. Therefore, user experience should have a strategic position within a project—across the development stages and at the studio level. Striving for a great user experience requires coordination. UX is not just about art, design, engineering, defining and implementing the experience; it’s not just about marketing defining the target audience and what makes them tick; it’s not just about business intelligence defining the monetization strategy; and it’s not just about executives defining business goals and company values. It’s about all of this. UX should be at the intersection of all of these disciplines and should be the concern of everyone. Because, in the end, it is how your audience will experience your games, products, and services that will matter. It is your players’ perception, understanding, behavior, and emotion that will count. This is why merely having a separate UX team in the organization—although constituting a good starting point—likely will not make enough of an impact. UX practitioners can help provide some invaluable insights and methods, but these tools need to be embraced by everyone in order to reach a common goal. (…)