E294 - Designing for Frustration in Games

[00:00:00] Nick Roome: Hello, greetings, and welcome to episode 294. We're recording this episode live on September 21st, 2023. Do you remember the 21st night of September? I sure do. This is Human Factors cast. I'm your host, Nick Rome. I'm joined today by Mr. Barry Kirby.

[00:00:18] Barry Kirby: Hello there. It's been

[00:00:19] Nick Roome: a minute, hasn't it? It has been exactly two weeks since we sat here in these podcasting chairs, sitting about, talking about Human Factors and stuff.

We got a great show for you tonight. We'll be diving into the world of video games, exploring delightful and sometimes frustrating world of user experience and human factors elements within video games. Later on, we're going to be trying something a little different, something new, with a debate on...

Prioritizing intuitive and minimalist UX and UI design, even factors, elements, or embracing detailed and comprehensive design in video games as a companion piece to tonight's article. But first, we have some programming notes, and there's an exciting one for you all tonight. So HFES is just a month away.

We will be there. I'll be there. Barry will not be there in person, but he will be there in spirit and remotely. Heidi and I will be in person, so stop by, say hi. We'll also have members from our lab hanging out with us. Join us as we broadcast live, once again, from HFES, the 67th International Annual Human Factors and Ergonomics Society meeting, straight from Washington, D.

C. That's right. Get front row access. To all the stuff that we're doing, including exclusive interviews, insightful panels, perhaps, and so much more to be revealed over time our team will be there, we'll be located at the concourse foyer, right near registration, so if you're attending the event, swing by, share your conference experiences with us, if you can't make it to D.

C., no problem, we got you covered stay connected with us, we'll get you all the updates, you can tune in with us at 8 a. m. Eastern, 8 That's 8 a. m. Eastern. We're typically on Pacific time, but 8 a. m. Eastern Thursday, October 26th, we're going to do it on that Thursday. Give us a little bit of a lead time with some of the stuff that we'll be covering.

So that way we'll have more. Sampling from the conference for you this year, which I think will be really exciting. The live stream will be accessible on our channels here, anywhere you find the Human Factors cast stuff, as well as the official HFES social media channels. For the leaks, for the weeks leading up to HFES, we are going to shift the show model to a bi weekly release.

So this is the next big announcement and this is just to give us a little bit more time. to help prepare for the upcoming coverage of the event. It's like our Comic Con. We do spend a lot of time and effort putting in resources and time and prep work into this event, this coverage since it is where all us Human Factors geeks get together once a year.

So just to preview the schedule, October 5th, we'll have a show. October 19th, we'll have a show and then we'll do the live coverage. on the 26th at HFES. So be there, be square. Any updates from you, Barry? 1202?

[00:03:04] Barry Kirby: Nope, not really. Nothing much because we've been taking a bit of a summer hiatus and really not having enough time to breathe, nevermind interview people.

So we will have a, an autumn program coming up. Details to be announced

[00:03:15] Nick Roome: soon. So what you're saying here is that this bi weekly cadence is going to be great for giving you two hours back on a Thursday. Yes.

[00:03:25] Barry Kirby: And the rest of it. That'd be

[00:03:27] Nick Roome: great. Let's get into the news.

That's right. This is the part of the show all about human factors news. Barry, what is our story this week?

[00:03:36] Barry Kirby: So this week we are talking about delightful and frustrating UX in video games. So we talked about the impact of human factors engineering in the gaming industry. Did you know that over 40 percent of the world's population are gamers?

That's a massive user base that needs well designed user experiences when they play the games. The author of this article is a UX designer and they admit to spending countless hours playing games and through this noticing the common patterns that lead to both delightful and or frustrating experiences when they game.

The author discusses things like menu screen design, information display and heads up display or HUDs. The best of which the information is visually relayed to players as part of the game's user interface. One example of a frustrating experience is where the game bombards you with overwhelming amounts of information, particularly through its menu design.

So we're going to talk through tonight 12 main examples that they bring out. There's gonna be six frustrating ones and six delightful ones. So Nick, you enjoy a good game. You're a self professed gamer. What are your thoughts on the article so far?

[00:04:38] Nick Roome: So this is interesting, and I thought this article would open up a wider discussion for us.

For me, it's very frustrating as a gamer and to be in this field sometimes. Because I know that things can be done better, and I'm aware, working in software development, what some of those limitations are, and where sort of the people behind the scenes would have not cut corners on some of these experiences that we'll talk about here.

So there are a lot of other factors in game development that prevent a product from being perfect, that being said, I don't think perfect should ever be the enemy of good, and I think this game development is interesting because the product itself is iterative. Where... The design of the product itself is iterative, but then also the entries within a series or across developers or publishers are iterative as well, and you learn lessons from one game and apply them to another.

And games just get better over time. And so to point out some of these frustrating UI things that the article comes up with, yeah, they're frustrating now, but we'll learn lessons from them. And in the future, hopefully those problems will be solved and we can nitpick on those all we like, but this is, these are just some notes I compared.

Gaming as a whole to like complex systems earlier. I'll get more into that analogy later, but the whole thing to me is very fascinating. So Barry, you yourself. Didn't necessarily classify yourself as a gamer, but I'm curious on your thoughts of this whole thing. Yeah,

[00:06:18] Barry Kirby: As you said, I, in some respects, I'm going to be a bit limited because obviously we're going to be talking about some specific examples.

And I've just not played them. I don't, I'm not that gaming person, really. I never really have been. I've I've wanted to get into gaming. I've, By some of the platforms and stuff like that, but they, I know I've got a 360 and and PS4, this is sat on the shelf, gathering gathering dust and cobwebs, but I do spend a lot of my time about, when I'm doing UI design and do system development, I use an awful lot of gamification.

And gamification techniques and I've done lots of research around gamification. So the mechanics of gaming I'm quite familiar with. And so I'm quite looking forward to talking through some of them, but also I've done a lot of work around the the using, either you can either call it serious gaming or the use of simulation for training.

And I've done a lot of work around that. And also observed how we've seen the development of some games and how, let's say some organizations have used the development of gaming in order to reduce their training burden, increase their recruitment, for example, when we talk about military examples later.

But fundamentally, if we're talking about the entire gaming thing, I'm just not that person with one exception and that exception, I do a bit of Minecraft. I will I'll dip into that and play that I do have a realm and stuff like that. And I guess that's because it's, you're basically creating your own game as you go, you're creating your own game mechanics.

What, what is good for you and things like that. So that's interesting. There's another part of this, which I think is really cool as well is around the generational aspect. of gaming and how the generations are changing and evolving. And if you go back, not actually too many generations ago, nobody did gaming because the just the facility didn't exist.

Yet now we've got a significant, we say 40 percent of people are gamers, but then what is a truly, what is a gamer? Is it somebody who is got a platform? They sit and dedicate maybe an hour or so of their time a day to playing a game and enjoying a game its entirety. Or is somebody who's playing a simple app on their mobile phone.

Are they a gamer or are they just, are they something different? I think we're, we've been all inclusive. We bring everybody in, but it's it's interesting seeing different perspectives on what that means. But I echo what you said is that in terms of UI design, I don't really see any difference between developing the UI of a game to any other interface I design, be it for a fast jet or anything like that, because the way I see it, the basics are the same.

You're You need to be able to onboard people. So somebody who's never used something like this before, you've got to be able to bring them in a way that doesn't overload them, but allows them to explore. You've got to be able to make sure they can do the basic elements of what they need to do. But if, as they, if they want to do more complex things, then them sort of things are available.

Shortcuts, all that sort of really good stuff. I guess that the big difference in gaming is you've got to allow people to explore the environment that it's in. You've got to be able to give them the information to work with, but also be able to provide a level of challenge. Because you don't just sit there and just play the game just for the sake of it.

You want to have a level of challenge and therefore you get the enjoyment of beating either the levels or the game or whatever and that sort of thing. I think fundamentally UI pieces is, I don't think it's really that much different. It's the, perhaps the outcome that we expect out of it. And it's you're trying to keep people immersed in, in what they're doing.

For as long as possible and therefore good and bad UI is going to affect that. Does that make sense? Yes, it does. Yeah, sometimes it doesn't. I guess to dig into this into more detail what we've done is list. Each of the different, so the six frustrating ones are the six delightful ones.

And I think almost you take them one at a time because they're actually all of them are really good indicators. And it would be interesting. Again, from the perspective, you've played some of these games. I've not, or we've heard of them. We've seen some bits of stuff. So it'd be interesting to, if you, if one of us have engaged with it.

To understand maybe a bit more about what it is, but would that be a sensible approach for you? Do you think I,

[00:10:15] Nick Roome: Here's what I think we should do. We should go through the list. So that way everyone is aware of what is out there. Some of these I would almost argue is subjective. There are some that are this is obviously the author's opinion.

And I think we, what we do is we just list. The the frustrating experiences that they did, they mentioned will list the delightful ones, and then we can pick apart some of these what makes it frustrating or what makes it delightful at a high level without necessarily thinking about the example that they give, given that not everyone will have played that thing.

If we need to, we can dive into it a little bit to give it some strength, but I think that's what we do. So let's go over the frustrating experiences here first. Maybe I'll do this one, Barry, I'll have you read the delightful ones after. But they list six frustrating experiences here. The first one is on death stranding.

They mention an overwhelming display of information. The second one being Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. There's too many options, making it hard to navigate through the menu. Number three is Gran Turismo. There's inconsistent menu interactions. Number four, Resident Evil 4, the 2023 remake. They forcefully pause gameplay when picking up an item.

Number five is Elden Ring, lack of contrast in menu screens, and number six, Cyberpunk 2027, or 2077 incoherent menu screens. So Barry, why don't you go over some of those delightful user experiences?

[00:11:38] Barry Kirby: Yeah. So the delightful user experiences that the authors bought out is number one, Red Redemption 2, they have a minimal, easy to use menu.

Number two Returnal. New information is stored in a database with a logical information architecture. Number three, Stray. It has a beautiful, minimal UI to compliment the rest of the style of the game. Number four, Dead Space, the 2023 remake, has a themed UI without sacrificing the UX. Number five, Horizon Forbidden West, customization and accessibility settings.

And finally, number six, Resident Evil 4, the 2023, 2023 remake, again, inventory organization. So to look at them, I guess them frustrating ones. The thing that sort of really hits me with all through them with the exception of one, I think it is, they're all about the menu. They're all about how you interact with the menu controls one way or another. In fact, no, there's two separate ones, isn't there?

Out of the six, four of them we're talking about. either inconsistent, incoherent menus or the actual design of them. So you mentioned the Elden Ring, I'm not like a contrast and then also Legend of Zelda having too many options making it hard to navigate through the menu.

So it seems to me that if you have a menu system within a game because any sort of menu interaction is going to take your level of immersion out of the game because you're having to do something that isn't part of the actual environment. And you want to make menu interaction as sleek and as slick as possible.

And so it seems to be that this is why it comes up. I was, I can imagine that whenever you develop any sort of menu system if you don't get it right, it can jar. with whatever else you're going to do. So presumably that's what they're finding in these games as well.

[00:13:18] Nick Roome: Yeah, you're right. And I think this is an interesting take on it because a lot of the frustrating experiences do come down to some of these potentially best practices that we know how to handle and.

In some of them, they're an artifact of the game systems themselves be it world maps or different items or mechanics that you can use within the game, and so the fact that, or information overload even and so there's a lot of things there that we can draw conclusions from based on other things, and this is where I'm getting at the comparison between video games to other complex systems like aviation or medical devices or even just Medical settings, right?

So thinking about all this. And I'm going to go through a list here of comparing these two, three things just to drive home a point of why we're talking about them. The real difference here for me is the consequence of error. In these other domains, you're looking at the consequence of error being life saving events or, life critical events.

Where, obviously, if something goes wrong in an aircraft or in a medical setting, you're, it's not good news. But if something goes wrong in a video game, the consequence is death. But what does that really mean for you? You get to try again. There are some games that punish death a little bit more harshly than others.

But I think this is an interesting take. If only because that, to me, is the main difference between... Now, if you think about this frustration piece, all of it, aviation, medical, video games, all need to be this user centered design. It's all about the players with video games. It's all about the pilots with aviation, or the maintainers, or the doctors, or the nurse practitioners, or whoever else in these hospital settings.

And so if you think about all these things, it's ultimately designed, or it needs to be designed, for the person at the end. I think... Both examples work here. In terms of the Sort of cognitive load piece. This is where it gets really interesting to me because in aircraft or medical systems, you have high cognitive load on users sometimes especially in high stress situations.

And they're the design of a lot of things in these spaces are meant to reduce that cognitive load where in video games, this is a an interesting. flip side where you have this frustration actually being designed. In the sense where you need to design frustrating things for players to overcome to feel good about overcoming those things.

And sometimes these can be, like, challenging players cognitively in terms of puzzles or attention, problem solving or even skill based things where you're platforming on a tight platform or you are engaging in combat that requires high reflexes. Again, like all this is super interesting, but again, you bring up the frustration being primarily with menu systems and the overload of information within these menu systems.

And so what does that say about video games? At a high level from this author's perspective, I think it says a lot to say that video games generally are fun and that the most frustrating parts are the parts that are not fluid with that primary game experience where you're the combat loop or the platforming loop or whatever thing you're engaged in because you have to navigate to a menu.

And so I've seen some examples of this where the, where the menu doesn't necessarily take you out of things where I think there's an example on one of the delightful user experiences about menus and I have to look at the list one more time here to refresh my memory. I think it was. And if you find it, let me know.

Yeah,

[00:17:24] Barry Kirby: the first one, which was a minimal, easy to use menu.

[00:17:27] Nick Roome: Yeah, so well, the rest is all a game. Yeah there's two interesting things here for me. So one is going to be the dead space UI. And that one's an interesting one because it's an actual in game UI. I think there's like a, in, in game element where you're actually looking at a menu on your person.

And so it doesn't feel like you're getting ripped out of that environment. So it doesn't ruin the immersion. The other interesting thing to me is that. A singular game can do something right and wrong at the same time, and that's here, evidenced by Resident Evil 4, where it doesn't do a great job, especially with at least in the author's opinion here, pausing gameplay when you pick up an item.

But, they praise it for their inventory organization the ability to organize that inventory. And so it's possible that it excels in some places and doesn't do so great in others. I just think it's interesting that... You're right. A lot of this stuff is when that primary thing that you are doing within a game is interrupted by needing to do something else.

And how do you make that more fluid? How do you make that more part of the game world? And I'll just say from a VR perspective, one of the most incredible experiences that I had was playing the Batman VR game. And the reason being is because your menu... And your items are literally on your utility belt.

If you need to change an item, you just put one back on your utility belt, you grab the other one, and you have a batarang instead of a, grappling hook. And it's just amazing because it's right there on your person. I think VR really excels at those types of things, where it's harder to do those in traditional...

3d spaces or 2d games where, you have to navigate to something else. I don't know. I've talked a lot. I want to make sure you have an opportunity to comment on some of those things.

[00:19:25] Barry Kirby: I think it's really interesting that we need to look at the UI. So the UI goes one of two directions, which I think you've quite nicely encapsulated.

One is that you have the game that you're playing, which is the environment that you're working in. And the, that menu or any sort of controls that you have that are not part of that environment need to be designed in such a way that they are. There you can either slip through them quite easily.

So you use them the use of the reason is nice and intuitive and it's minimal. So they highlight the, that, the, something's like for user experiences said, any. Any menu you've got has got to be minimal. You only need to do what you need to do and nothing more than that.

Cause what you're fighting constantly, we do a lot of this with when we're using simulation for training, you're trying to, you're constantly got a a motivation versus immersion. Thing around it. So the more motivated you are to do something and the better the graphics, the better the interface, the more immersed you get into what you're doing.

And you're constantly trying to fight them to stay in, to have a high level of immersion. So the more you're bringing them out to that environment to do. Nif, Naf and trivia things, then the more frustrated you're going to be. Cause you're not getting that level of immersion that you are. You talk about around having it.

So the, I think you said it was in dead space where the, your menu is actually part of your character and it's done within a way that is part of the gameplay that's going to help with that's going to make sure that you stay more immersed in what you're doing rather than having to almost come out to that high level.

But you'd almost I do find it quite surprising that the amount of money that is spent on gaming and the amount of people involved in developing gaming the, game design is a serious, legitimate issue. Career in terms of UX, UI development design. It's not just a, it's not just a hobby thing.

It's a multi million pound business, multi billion pound business. And yet we can still get seemingly these type of things wrong. Or potentially incorrect. I do find I guess I shouldn't be that stunned cause we get it wrong elsewhere as well. Or it is done badly elsewhere as well. We just feels if anybody should be getting UX stuff right.

The game industry should be getting it right and almost setting the examples and the trends to the rest of industry. Do you think that's, is that a legitimate

[00:21:47] Nick Roome: criticism? Do you think? Yes and no. I think there's some interesting things going on with the gaming industry that, that prevent that from happening.

So the first thing being, there's just the culture of secrecy around video games is a big one. And so you can't necessarily test some of these things with a wider audience that might be your target audience. It's like friends and family that need to sign NDAs. So that way these things are not released ahead of time because it's, like I said, the culture of secrecy in, in that industry is insane.

And that's why leaks are such a big deal. It's why you don't hear about things for a very long time until a trailer is ready. You might hear rumblings or something, nothing confirmed until you see a trailer. And it's very different from other entertainment media, like movies, where you hear about a movie.

And then sometimes it gets canned even before it makes its way in development. And the expectation is very different for both industries. It's fascinating from that perspective. But I think that culture of secrecy prevents a wider user testing base. Sometimes you'll have these big betas for a popular game and they'll do an extended beta where they're mostly done with the thing and then they're making smaller tweaks.

But some of the like biggest. Pieces within the game are already set in stone and it's more difficult to change those and what types of things are going to, there's all this speed accuracy trade off with development that not everything that gets like if developers, designers, UX practitioners, human factors folks had their way, it'd be a perfect system every time, but because there are realistic timelines that you need to make in order to make a game shippable, Or a product shippable and if it's not a live service game, meaning it's not an extended period of time that game is out and you can't iterate on it there needs to be some level of sacrifice and are you going to fix, a menu system?

Or are you going to fix, a game breaking bug that causes your system to crash and erase all your save data? And I think they would argue that takes a little bit more priority. It's basically instead of saying do you want to... make the plane easy to operate. Let's make sure the plane can fly first.

Is the

[00:24:10] Barry Kirby: analogy there. But it's an interesting that one again, isn't it? Because the, to take it into the analogy of using the plane or any safe critical system is. The outcome is almost really well defined. You want plane to fly from, or the pilot to be able to fly the plane from point A to point B, doing, certainly in the military context, doing something along the way.

And you can almost easily measure, or relatively easy measure the outcome. Were they able to do the task? Yes, they did, because there's a big crater or whatever the outcome of it is that the plane landed in one piece. Brilliant. That's great. And then you can get into, what was the, what was their workload like?

Were they fully situationally aware? Did they think it was a good user experience? So you, our measurement technique there is comparatively simple when you compare it to a game where. You're trying to challenge, you're trying to induce a level of stress but it, but just enough stress to make it a challenge in order for them to accomplish something.

Keep them immersed in the, into a game you're wanting to, because certainly nowadays a lot of the bigger games are around allowing you to tell a story, allowing you to be part of a narrative allowing you a level of interaction, but really whilst you look like you've got complete freedom of action.

actually funneling you down a predetermined path or one of a very small number of paths whilst making you think you can go and do anything you like. Very different challenge there to get to the end of the game. Cause some people think that to be, if you're able to finish a game. That actually the game has failed because you've not been given that level of commensurate challenge to finish other people.

If they can't finish the game, they think they've wasted the money because they couldn't find their way through it. And therefore they've blown the cash. They wanted it. They want to get through it all, have the trial and see the end credits. So it's, having that very broad level of what customer acceptance looks like, or what customer delight looks like is very different from, what I'm used to in, in the normal design world.

[00:26:12] Nick Roome: And that's, that is another fascinating aspect of this because you have the souls like games, which if you're unfamiliar they are essentially really hard games precise combat, you have to parry at just the right time, dodge at just the right time, manage your resources. If you don't, the punishment for death is very high.

You get sent back with none of the resources that you gathered since your last sort of save. You have to trek all the way back to where you died to gather those resources back and hope that you can, get yourself safe or finish off that monster that ended up killing you in the first place.

There's been a large argument, or debate, if you will, around Whether or not these types of games should include things like accessibility settings to let anybody be able to play those at, lower difficulty or whatever. And the sort of counter argument is that that's not part of the core game.

Because you can't, because it's hard by default. Why would you reduce the difficult? And then the other half is yeah, but that game is not accessible to a lot of people. Don't have the time or patience to play it. And then the other counter argument is but that's the designer's vision.

That's. The vision of the game is to be hard. Why should they make it easy for people? And then it's because if they want to make more money, then they would make it accessible to more people and more people would buy it and play it. And they'd make more money. You go back and forth. And so this is a big debate.

In the space and whether or not you're on one side or the other, I think as highlighted by this list that we're looking at here and just this list, we've talked about inventory issues, but we're also talking here about accessibility settings. That's another theme that I'm noticing here.

Customization, accessibility settings. You also have things like lack of contrast being a frustrating experience. There's huge huge pushes lately for some of these accessibility settings, like such as remapping buttons to be more comfortable for you. And being able to engage in sort of these high contrast modes or colorblind modes that allow other users to see those types of things that, you know, for whatever reason they can't or are easier to see for them.

And That's another thing that I'm noticing here, and at what point does the gameplay go from difficult by design to accessible by design, and where is that line, and where should it be? And I think we can get into that with the debate a little later but, it's just another thing that I'm noticing here as we talk about this frustration within video games, it goes beyond the UI elements here that we're seeing, it goes beyond even the video game itself.

Like I said earlier, these are complex systems. You're playing on a system, in the early days of the PS5, when you had versions of games that would come out that were both PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 compatible, you had users on the PlayStation downloading the PlayStation 4 version when their system could handle the PlayStation 5 version and it would load much faster and it would handle graphics much better, and you'd have very different experience.

But they would download the PlayStation 4 version because the store wasn't. Easily understood. You didn't know what the differences were between the two versions. And so that's a system wide thing. And that impacts your enjoyment of the game because you get a different experience with it. And so that's where I'm saying this is not just a contained experience within one of these apps, because if you play a game that's cross compatible on your phone versus on your Steam deck versus on your.

PlayStation or your computer, you're going to have a different experience based on how you get to that thing. Do you access it through a launcher? Do you access it on your home screen? Do you have to put in a disc to be able to play it? All these things contribute to the end experience. And it's just fascinating to see how it all comes together.

And it's amazing in a lot of ways that we can get a tube full of people flying through the air. It's amazing in the same way that all this is working from a software perspective. To if you think about even just the complexity of us talking here, I know we've geeked out about this before.

I have a system on my end. You have a system on your end. We're communicating through this other thing. And that's a whole other experience factor that we haven't even touched upon yet is teamwork and communication.

[00:30:37] Barry Kirby: It's, what is really interesting for me in terms of this. Overall is it goes to what you were saying earlier of what is the intent of the design of the difficult by design or the accessibility by design, because some people have described this in some of the other literature when I was reading around this a bit is that is it software?

Is it something that is meant to be achieved? Or Is it something that somebody has a vision and therefore, you shouldn't mess with that vision as such. They have an absolute right to, in the same way that art is not necessarily accessible, that you have a piece of art just purely because you don't understand what he's trying to say.

But part of what. The value of that art is it's in your own interpretation. It's in your, the way that you access that piece. And I think I've spoken about this before, where I've struggled to understand art in the past because it just, it's just. Blobs on a piece of canvas, as far as I'm concerned, until somebody then explained to me around it's about the journey.

This is why I did what I did. I, this is where I got to, this was my struggle. This was, and this is how it's expressed. That means something very different now. And somebody said that game development, particularly around the really beautiful games are really well thought out. So not just the simple thing on your phone, but the stuff that has a longevity to it.

Is not just a piece of software. It's a piece of digital art that you can interact with. I thought it was an interesting take on it. I'm not necessarily completely bought into that, but I can see given, you mentioned like different types of software engagement, I remember my early days of having a game was on a Commodore 16 where you put the tape in, you waited at what felt like a few days for it to bring up the tape and you got the really simplistic interface that had no style around it whatsoever.

The the aircraft simulator was really basic. All the way through to compared to what you've got now, it has been such an evolution. It's unreal. And again, now you see, you've mentioned already about going into VR and AR, where are we going to be with game play in another 10 years, in another 20 years.

And I reckon that number that we said originally around 40 percent of people being gamers will be vastly higher, if not double, if not nigh on 90, 200 percent of people will be gaming is my, is a prediction I make now when you can come back and listen to this in 10 years time and see whether I'm right.

[00:33:07] Nick Roome: Yeah, we'll bookmark this episode. All right, we're going to take a quick break. Thank you to our patrons and all of you for selecting our topic this week. Thank you to our friends over at UX Collective for our new story. If you want to follow along, we do post the links to all the original articles and our weekly roundups and our blog.

You can also join us on our Discord for more discussion on these stories and more. We're going to take a quick break and then we're going to be back and we're going to try something new live and it'll be really interesting and see how it goes. All right. With that being said, we'll be right back right after.

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Should I just play the, it came from it's not a,

[00:36:29] Barry Kirby: just do it anyway. And then

[00:36:31] Nick Roome: it came from the debate stage. I don't even know what to call this. So just to be completely transparent with all you listening we wanted to freshen up the format a little bit. The, it came from. Let's be honest, we're getting a little stale sometimes, a lot of samey questions after doing this for six, seven, six years, seven years, eight years, no, six, what, a long time, we start to see the same questions come up, and just phrased in different ways, and we wanted to try something new, we're trying this completely We On the fly here.

So join us on this journey as it's probably going to be embarrassing and we're probably going to struggle through it a little bit, but the idea here is that we have a debate topic that is tangentially related to the article topic that we talked about tonight on the show. We'll each take one side.

Of this and argue points for that perspective from a human factor standpoint. And again, this is related to the primary article. So the prompt for tonight, Barry, is should video games prioritize intuitive and minimalist design, potentially sacrificing depth, complex, put complexity Or, should they embrace detailed and comprehensive design at the risk of overwhelming or ostracizing new players?

Barry, you have opted for which argument? I'm

[00:37:55] Barry Kirby: going to be pushing for the intuitive and minimalist. Design approach. So minimalist UX, UI design. And the main reason behind this and what I want to push is that if we have a intuitive minimalist UX, UI design, then it has the greatest chance of success.

The reason behind that is because you can have broad accessibility. Everybody is going to be able to get in and play the game. Those people who are possibly more like me, who is more of a casual user, there is nothing worse than trying to get into a game and do you get overwhelmed straight away with lots of stuff going on.

You have to learn lots of different bits. Lots of you, lots of the instructions on how to use it. I immediately get turned off. I don't want to play so. If you want to get casual users into it, then you need that minimalist design so that you can get immersed into it straight away. And then hopefully if you've done it properly, then you will be able to play keep on going and playing that game.

If you, if it's too complex, you're just not going to start. Therefore everybody loses. You don't quit. You don't create the money from it and nobody plays the game. Nick. So what perspective, obviously that's my first opening gambit on this. So what perspective are you taking and what's your initial thought?

Sure.

[00:39:09] Nick Roome: So I am taking the argument that Video games should be detailed and comprehensive, and I'm going to steal the point that you were talking about earlier in the article discussion that video games are art. I believe that video games are art. I believe that they are a vision, not necessarily of one person always.

Sometimes in the case of indies, you do have a video game that is representative of that one person's image or vision for the product. I think video games are a collective... piece of art that represents the video game team, the design team, the development team, the art team, the story team, everybody that contributed to that singular product.

And I think that in itself should be reason enough for video games to be whatever they want to be, whether that's complex or intuitive. But again, I'm arguing for the complexity here. So what I'm going to say is that in this case with. a piece that is robust, that is, that has depth and complexity, you're going to capture the gamer market.

We mentioned at the top that 40 percent of the population is a gamer. Why are we not capitalizing on that 40%? Let's get that depth. In games and make that comprehensive design cater to that specific demographic. So that is my initial standpoint. I don't know how to do this.

[00:40:37] Barry Kirby: No, exactly. So if we're going to maximize broader engagement base, then two things are important here.

And I'm going to crew about two of my points at points into one, really. Firstly, you've got to get people playing the game. You've got to get people actually from the point of either downloading it. Cause it could be on your phone or, onto your platform. You need to be able to get them using and enjoying the game as quickly as possible.

So the faster you onboard somebody the better it is. The only way you've you onboard people quickly is either through lots of training beforehand. Which we know from complex systems. We talked about it in the main article. You do, you put people in training courses. We don't put people in training courses for computer games.

It's just not done. So therefore the only other way to get people fast on board is to minimize the amount of interaction they need to learn in order to interact with that game. So therefore, in order to get people into the game quicker and therefore enjoying it quicker. You have to have an intuitive and minimalist UI.

It for me it's a slam dunk. I win. Everyone's happy. The second point along with that, though, if you've got a minimalist UI, you've then reducing the amount of cognitive load you need to actually mechanize the game. Which means you can then go back to, and I'm going to steal my own point.

If this game is art, it means that if you're not having to worry about how much cognitive load you're processing on you on developing game mechanics or game interaction game system control, you've then got more cognitive space in order to enjoy the game. The enjoy the experience, make the most of the gameplay itself, and more people can do that going back to the my original point, cause that folds in.

That means more people can access it fundamentally. Therefore you make more money.

[00:42:30] Nick Roome: Okay, let's go back to that first point about onboarding and getting people on. Not all games are intuitive, and I know you're arguing for intuitiveness, but there will still be a subset of the population who will need to go and refer to some guide to be able to play a game.

By making these systems more complex and including more external research, including more resources on how to play the game included in the game itself, it will eliminate the need to go out, look at sort of some of these external guides, look at wikis, forms, YouTube videos on how to do something, and it will be better for those types of players who want all their resources in one place.

Now to get to your second point, it's art and it basically the cognitive load aspect of it. If you make a game more complex, you're looking at supporting potentially more diverse cognitive styles. Not all players process information in the same way. If you have a detailed interface, you can cater To some of these diverse cognitive styles or hell, I'm going to go out even on a limb here and say neurodivergent folks and say, you can offer people multiple methods of interaction for customizing their experience to exactly how they want.

So you could design the game your way, or you, the player can specify how you want to play with this complex. level of settings. Now, I'm not saying that these are not intuitive to use. It's just more complex rather than

[00:44:06] Barry Kirby: minimalist. But I think what you've just explained would absolutely be attractive to a small subset of hardcore gamers, people who are willing to invest time, effort, and energy into immersing themselves into learning what, how to work with that game which is brilliant.

And actually that subset of people will more than likely pay a lot more money. For a single instance of a game, which is fine. However, if we want to be inclusive and bring in a broad range of people, then actually you having that detailed rich onboarding experience, we'll just put them off The other piece around that as well is the more complex your interface, the more that what we've termed richness here, the more options you've got within there, the bigger chance you've got of making errors.

And there's two level of errors here that I think are really useful. There's the first level of error that you want to have in there. 'cause that's the challenge of the game. When you've got the gameplay itself, you want people to fall into the crevasse to get shot by the century, whatever it is, as part of that gameplay, what we don't want is people choosing the wrong option, the wrong selection as part of the game mechanic, sorry, as the game organization, the game control as opposed to a just badly utilizing a game mechanic.

So there is, if you have too much complexity, if you have to really think about what you're doing, you're going to, it can either jar with the gameplay, or it can basically force you to make errors, which will just ruin your user experience your gameplay experience.

[00:45:47] Nick Roome: Okay, counterpoint on the user error.

If you design a system that is more complex, you may be able to develop something that's adaptive in its learning style. If it determines that you have died to this thing five times, maybe it lowers the difficulty of that. Adjusting that information and The things available to a person in a complex UX system within a video game will be largely based on the player behavior.

And so by making it more complex, you're actually making it easier to use, in some way, for performance and behavior. Because you are making sure, especially with adaptive learning situations, that they're, you're making sure that they're always challenged. But not overwhelmed. That's

[00:46:30] Barry Kirby: a stretch, isn't it?

[00:46:33] Nick Roome: All right, with that stretch, I think we got to end it there. This was a test drive. Let us know how you, let us know how you all think of this like debate format. I think it's an interesting take. Maybe we'll source some prompts from you all in the future on some topics, but it was just something we want to try.

[00:46:49] Barry Kirby: I think it was, I don't know about you, I thought it worked better than I, I anticipated it did. Me too. It was quite good from there. What we need is almost some sort of vote at the end of it. Who won? Yeah. If we have a debate, somebody's got to win, clearly. Okay. No

[00:47:05] Nick Roome: poll, but sound off in the comments.

Who won that debate? And if it's not me, that's fine. I, obviously the true answer is somewhere in the middle. I think both Barry and I would agree there. The true, it depends answer, but sound off in the comments. Let us know what you think. Okay. And I think with that, it's just time for one more thing.

So Barry, what is your one more thing this week?

[00:47:24] Barry Kirby: So my one more thing this week is very exciting. Anybody who's been around drones and stuff like that knows, particularly in the UK, things have gotten. been getting a bit harder to fly drones because more people have them, there is invasion of privacy issues etc.

So you now have to fly almost any sort of drone, you now have to get certified. One way or another. So which means that you, there is a effectively a textbook or online textbook that you have to know the ins and outs of the basics of the law. So how close you can fly to people, how close you can fly to buildings, what weights you can fly, et cetera, et cetera.

What, how to look after your drone, all that sort of stuff. I've completed. I've done my learning. I've completed my course. I got my certificates. In fact, two certificates, my operator certificate and my flying certificates, and I bought myself a little secondhand drone. And I went out flying my drone the other day.

Which was hugely exciting because I've had a drone before, like 10 15 years ago, and it was very hard to fly. It was very clunky. The way of flying this thing now, and I paid probably just 120 or 100 110 off eBay second hand drone. What is it like to fly? Absolutely brilliant. The stuff that used to cause you so much hassle, like taking off properly, landing properly, it's all just one button stuff now.

So the stuff that was difficult, like really difficult and could really damage a drone. It now handles automatically. You can still do it yourself if you want to, but you've got one, but if you get into like completely flustered or whatever, and you do that, then it works. So I've now got my drone.

That's really good. What that I hope will give us. Is my longest standing aim here is to then bring that into the business. So we were running some trials the other week and what I like setting up. So if you're doing particular thing, you set up all around cameras to record video, record stills for post post trial analysis.

What I was missing was an overhead shot for this particular thing. And I wanted some, I was trying to work out if I could have mounted a camera up high, I could have done X, Y, Z, but that was like, I could have just had a drone just hovering at that point and recording. Cause it would sit there for 20 minutes and do that.

And be autonomously doing that. Could I do that? Would that be a viable thing to do? So I'm hoping this is my first step to improving my trials capability of having drone overhead shots when I run trials. I'm very excited.

[00:49:40] Nick Roome: Amazing. Hey, when you fly, do you fly FPV or do you fly just

[00:49:45] Barry Kirby: like visual? So it's interesting because in UK law, you are, you cannot fly just FPV.

If you're flying FPV, you've got to have somebody else alongside you eyes on the drone. Manualize on the drones so they can be watching whilst you're flying F P V. Interesting. Because when you're flying F P V, you don't get a full situational awareness of what's going on around you. So it makes sense about why we do that.

Ironically, I was flying there's a picture of me taking a picture of myself whilst I'm look, looking down at my controller, look where the camera is, and you can clearly see that I'm not watching my drone. I, I'd, so I'd have somebody else doing that for me. Because of that thing, it was a really bizarre almost circular argument there.

But then it was quite funny because my son was doing the watching and he's what am I looking for? And I'm just like there's nothing else around, don't worry about it. But, it was you can see putting that out there, it was a weird thing. But yeah, it's fun. What about you, Nick?

What's

[00:50:43] Nick Roome: your one? So I had like many one more things and you chose my number two, which is interestingly enough applicable to our topic tonight. So board games is the topic and I'm now down in my ADHD rabbit hole again of I bought a new board game and now I bought the sleeves for the cards and I'm going to put every single card in those sleeves and I'm like going down all these rabbit holes of like, how can I enhance this and make it like this awesome thing to play?

It's. Star Wars Villainous, and it's basically where you take the perspective of the bad guys, and you try to do certain things so like General Grievous will collect eight lightsabers, Asajj Ventress does missions, and Vader tries to turn Luke Skywalker, those types of things, and it's really interesting because the systems, we were talking a lot about systems tonight, it's complex enough That it offers a variety of different gameplay approaches to these, accomplishing these scenarios, and it's also very interesting playing this game with my wife, where she's not a board gamer, I've played some in the past, but the super complex board games I will probably never touch because there's too many things going on.

Working against my own debate point here, but I think it's just fitting that we're talking about this because as my wife and I were trying this last night I felt like There was just the right amount of learning for this board game where we felt accomplished after we had completed a round.

And it was just a test, right? It was a test game for us to see how the mechanics worked and how, we would interact with all these cards and what they all do and how to play the character. It was just a fascinating experience. And so we're going to try again this weekend, a couple of times with a couple of different characters now that we get the flow of the game.

And it's just. That's very rewarding when you get to that point of not mastering a system, but understanding a system so that you can attempt to start mastering and. That's it. That's my one more thing. And that's it for today, everyone. If you like this episode, enjoy some of the discussion about games.

I'll encourage you all to go listen to episode 257, where we talk about do video games affect your well being? Comment wherever you're listening with what you think of the story and our new debate format, Who Won That? And for more in depth discussion, you can always join us on our Discord community, visit our official website, sign up for our newsletter, stay up to date with all the latest Human Factors news.

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Mr. Barry Kirby. Thank you for being on the show today. Where can our listeners go and find you if they want to talk about Minecraft?

[00:53:48] Barry Kirby: If you want to come and talk to me about anything at all, including Minecraft, then come and find me on X. Do we have to call it X? Basal to Scott K or any of the socials.

Just. Search for Barry Kirby. You'll find me if you want to come and listen to people I interview inter in interesting people around the human factors domain, find me 1202 Human Factors podcast@ohtwopodcast.com.

[00:54:08] Nick Roome: As for me, I've been your host, Nick Rome. You can find me on our discord at and all social media at Nick Rome.

If you wanna talk about human factors, star Wars video games, it's all there. Thanks again for tuning into Human Factors Cast. Until next time it depends.