Chapter 6. Creating the User Experience

A game is more than just the sum of its rules. It must inter-act with the players to immerse them in the game world. To do this, it must project an aura of involvement that promotes Samuel Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief." Every element that the players' experience must contribute to the whole. From the moment the player loads the software and the first screen appears, he is in your world. Everything that he sees, hears, and feels from that point on ”every audio, visual, and interactive element ”must strive to convince him that the only thing that exists is the game. This is not the easiest of goals to achieve; any slight discord can jar the players out of their illusion. However, the best games generally achieve this level of perfection , or close to it, and the aim of this chapter is to discuss how you can attempt to account for deep player immersion in your designs.

This chapter discusses some of the most relevant aspects of user experience design (and note that by user experience, we're talking about the whole thing: audio, visual, and interaction methods ) for games. Even though we have stressed the relative importance of flashy presentation as secondary to gameplay, we would be foolish to discard presentation entirely. The user interface is the first real glimpse the players will get of your game in action; it's your first chance to suck them into the world presented by your game.

The user interface can make or break your game: It can give it the perfect air of consummate professionalism or the shabby appearance of an amateur effort. Although we would prefer to believe that the gameplay is the most important factor in the success of a game, the majority of commercial evidence seems to indicate otherwise . With few exceptions, two games that are functionally equivalent, with equally effective marketing and differing only in the quality of their user interface layers , will not perform equally in the market. It would be tempting to say that the game with the most visually and technically stunning user interface would sell better ”and we know that would please a lot of developers and artists out there ”but, all things being equal, that is not the case. In fact, given these two functionally equivalent products, the one with the interface that is most fit for the purpose will be the most successful. (Of course, you can publish all manner of tripe if you have a big name license attached to it. Some things will never change.)