I am very interested in seeing how skills in the UX world apply to board game design. I recently discovered Raph Koster’s article titled Game Design vs UX Design and it obviously rung a bell for me.
His intro about the role of design in UX vs game design is super interesting:
UX design is about removing problems from the user.
Game design is about giving problems to the user.
From: http://www.raphkoster.com/2015/06/29/game-design-ux-design/
UX really is about smoothing things out to remove problems. While the core idea of a game is that the user is presented with problems to solve in a way the game allows. That said, I think both are needed. UX principles can be used to remove problems that aren’t meant to be part of the “game.” For example, remembering which deck of cards in War of the Ring is the Shadow Event Cards vs. the Shadow Character Cards is not easy. They should have simply put text on the back of the cards to make this clear. UX principles apply in this case.
Another aspect that stood out is that the author’s list of goals as a game designer struck me as very helpful as I consider my role as a game designer:
- challenging. Often, we want the game to make the user think a lot.
- explorable. We usually want the user to think there are always more possibilities in there.
- scalable, so that players learn better play as they play.
- crazy juicy, so that players are captivated by spectacle, well beyond the needs of feedback from a UX perspective
- inviting of error. We want players to learn through mistakes.
From: http://www.raphkoster.com/2015/06/29/game-design-ux-design/
