Videogames and UX, a Love/Hate Story
For someone in the field of user experience, it can be tempting to see videogames as digital products. But they’re also games, art, and personal expression. What are the limits, then, of taking a conventional UX approach to videogames?
I’m a UX writer, so I inevitably read everything from a user experience perspective.
Stuck in the waiting room of my doctor’s office? I look at the signs, the forms, the process, and how they calm or exacerbate my anxiety. Spending hours browsing Netflix? I think about how the streaming service encourages discovering (content you don’t know about) over finding (content you do know about). Flipping past Instagram Stories? I judge them based on how images and text come together to hold my attention from one story to the next.
So, as a lifelong gamer, I bring this UX mentality to my playtime. Videogames, after all, are digital applications. You run them on your computer, console, smartphone, or tablet. They have menus, pulldowns, on-screen buttons, and user interfaces. They show feedback in response to user actions. And beyond the product itself, there’s social media to think about, developer blog posts and patch notes, trailers, the store pages in digital storefronts, the packaging of physical releases — a whole panoply of touchpoints that make up the overall user experience.
In short, videogames have much in common with the digital products, websites, and applications I deal with as part of my job. Yet videogames are a hybrid medium. They’re digital products, in a sense, but also games, art, and philosophical toys. Which means that, as much as they might resemble other apps and software, videogames — or certain aspects of them — escape conventional UX analyses.
When it comes to videogames, it can be difficult to understand where the product ends and the art begins.
Unless they’re training tools or edutainment — both rather niche genres — , they’re usually not useful. You don’t use videogames, you play them. They don’t normally have a concrete reason to exist. They don’t feed you, transport you places, organize your week, keep you in touch with co-workers, or help you maintain a healthy lifestyle. Even when they are useful, this tends to be a collateral effect. (Resident Evil 4 taught me invaluable lessons in resource and financial management, but its main goal was to immerse me in a thrilling, horrifying fiction.)
What videogames focus on, mostly, is conveying an idea or emotion, whether that’s simple fun or profound joy and even sadness. Because of this, typical UX and UI questions — like clarity, consistency, transparency, and usability — are much, much harder to answer. In fact, a videogame, for expressive reasons, might want to be obscure, inconsistent, opaque, and frustrating.
Now, there could be a definition of UX that embraces artistic, negative, useless, and difficult qualities. But that’s not how the current job market sees it.
The Oxford Dictionary broadly defines UX as “the overall experience of a person using a product such as a website or computer application, especially in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use.” UX is associated with— though not limited to — how apps, websites, and digital products can be made to be pleasing, engaging, and usable. (Don Norman, of the Nielsen Norman Group, would find this definition narrow and misleading. He believes UX is “everything that touches upon your experience with the product.” If you buy a computer, UX encompasses the software, the operating system, the assembly of the hardware, the box it comes in, the drive back from the store, and so on.)
Videogames, by contrast, can be hard and displeasing. They can hide their rules and confuse players. They can upset conventions and expectations, and shake up players’ mental models of how stuff should operate. Such a videogame may not sell many copies. But if the developers want to say something — and are willing to court commercial failure — , they can go wild and antagonize players.
This sort of boldness is more common in the independent scene. Before working on Monument Valley — one of the most popular mobile titles out there — , game designer Lea Schönfelder made a name for herself on experimental projects like Ulitsa Dimitrova, a harrowing videogame about a homeless child stuck in an endless loop of hunger, crime, and drugs. It’s janky, repetitive, ugly, extremely short, and depressingly dull — and that’s the point.
Although it’s not a videogame I replay enthusiastically, I haven’t forgotten it since discovering it ten years ago. It made an impact that can’t be measured with typical UX tools. No key performance indicators, no metrics, no polls, no analytics data, no interviews, no usability tests, no conversion rates, no heuristics would get to the bottom of its effect on me. My Net Promoter Score would be a long row of unhappy faces.
Which isn’t to say these UX tools have no place in videogame development. On the contrary: in more commercial contexts, there are many steps in the development pipeline that’d sound familiar to any UX professional. User or player testing, for example, is an obligatory process, employing dozens or even hundreds of testers who attempt, for weeks or months on end, to break the videogame in search of bugs, gameplay imbalances, and technical glitches.
There are also videogame design principles that seem ripped from UX playbooks. Consider the concepts of scaffolding and tutorials: introducing progressively more complicated mechanics and moves, and coordinating words, animations, modal windows, and interaction design to teach players how the videogame works. Or the idea of signposting: using audiovisual cues to lead the player’s eye towards important elements in the game world.
While a videogame, as a whole, doesn’t have to be useful or pleasurable, certain aspect of it perhaps need to be.
For instance, if you’re making a first-person shooter, you might want players to temporarily lose their way inside your virtual labyrinth. If you offer too much direction, too much clarity and transparency, you won’t achieve the desired effect. However, you also want players to eventually find the exit.
This requires a careful balance between intentional obfuscation and subtle guidance, between player freedom and constraint. It’s not easy to find the sweet spot, and though it can be tested and iterated upon, there’s no clear criteria for success.
For how long should players feel lost? When should they finally locate the exit? Are you willing to anger a sizeable portion of your players? How many angry players is too many?
I had these questions in mind, a few months ago, after the release of Black Mesa, a 2020 reimagining of the seminal first-person shooter Half-Life, released in 1998. Although it revamps the graphics and level design, it retains much of the original template. And these old-school sensibilities weren’t to everyone’s liking.
“There are moments in levels where it’s easy to lose sight of where you’re meant to be going, or to find the exit from a combat arena,” says Graham Smith in his review for the site Rock, Paper, Shotgun. “These problems would be solved in a truly modern game via player testing and layout changes, or by a friendly NPC buzzing in your ear to point you in the right direction. Or even by a big quest arrow pointing to where to go.”
Intrigued by this review, I decided to finally play Half-Life.
I had always been curious about it, ever since it revolutionized the medium in the late 1990s. It puts you in the shoes of Gordon Freeman, a theoretical physicist who unwittingly opens an interdimensional rift and kickstarts an alien invasion. The game became famous for its cinematic set-pieces, narrative immersion, and clever environmental puzzles. To progress, you have to understand how the massive Black Mesa science complex is put together. You don’t get a map and no one leads the way. You have to figure everything out on your own. Famously, the game’s tagline was: “Run. Think. Shoot. Live.”
After completing and adoring Half Life — along with its expansions, Opposing Force and Blue Shift— , I looked back at Smith’s complaints. He argues that a “truly modern game” would have ironed out the original’s kinks. It would have, in true UX fashion, added elements like arrows, textual hints, and audiovisual cues to prevent frustration and lead to a smoother, more pleasurable experience.
Yet I believe these solutions would have diminished Half Life. This is a videogame in which you’re desperately trying to survive while running from aliens and hostile human soldiers. The freedom to get lost, fail, and be confused are key to the experience — and to the sense of accomplishment when you solve puzzles and discover exits.
In the comments section to Graham’s Black Mesa review, several readers voiced similar opinions:
“The true joy and artistry of Half-Life, and Half-Life 2, is the immersion,” says one user. “There are no cutscenes. There are no giant arrows pointing you where to go. You are Gordon Freeman, poor MIT scientist forced to live and fight on a really bad day of work.”
Another user recalls, “I just watched a friend play the latest Tomb Raider, and Lara basically tells you what to do in the puzzle bits every 30 seconds. Non. Stop.”
And another user analyzed, “I struggled for months with GTA 5, not understanding why I felt so disconnected from the game world and why I couldn’t seem to remember where everything was (…) Then I realized it was the GPS: not needing to navigate on my own was completely taking me out of the game.”
These elements — the hints in Tomb Raider, the GPS in Grand Theft Auto — served their purpose. They made the experience smoother, faster, less frustrating. Yet for the players above, the success of these elements meant the failure of the videogame as a whole.
You can judge a product, digital or otherwise, by how pleasing or displeasing it is to use. You can test and measure the results, since the product has an inherent purpose it hopes to achieve. With videogames, you can likewise test what players do — but there’s a fundamental difference, because videogames have no concrete purpose beyond inspiring vague emotions, sensations, and the such.
If you’re making an app for hotel bookings, you can say, with a degree of objectivity, that users not finding what they’re looking for is a bad outcome. With videogames? Well, it would be artistically valid — if not commercially viable— to make a videogame in which players never find what they’re looking for.
Since videogames are a business, most developers compromise. But they don’t necessarily have to. Which means the nature of this compromise, what’s frustrating and what’s pleasing, what’s ironed out and what’s preserved in all its roughness, are conundrums that fall in the spaces between user experience, commercial interests, art, and personal expression.