Designing for Adoption: What Can we Learn from Video Games?
This week I’ve been thinking a lot about the human attention span, and what we are capable of keeping in our working memory. This has been a key part of the lectures and readings, and at about the same time I started playing this game. So here we go:
Chameleon is an auto-run platform game. I tend to love games like this. They utilize a portion of my brain that deals in quick-thinking, automatic response. It is not a cerebral exercise, so I can easily play a game like this while listening to an audiobook and find the occupation helps me absorb the information I’m listening to even better.
Let’s start with adoption. Enticed by the free trial of Apple Arcade, I dug in on a highly rated runner I’d seen on other platforms, but ever tried. Chameleon.
The game kicks in with a first-run callout tutorial that is also level 1:1.
The game has incredible simple controls, things any modern smartphone user would be at home with. Left and right touch. Hold to extend your jump. And that’s it. The game forces the forces you to react at high speed to the the stimulus around you.
Many of the levels then increase in complexity and difficulty, but slowly enough to onboard the user.
By the time I’ve hit three, I’ve committed levels to memory — playing some 100+ times before mastery. My runner is zipping through platforms, changing color with ease, and I can keep multiple obstacles and locations of diamonds in working memory as I seek to improve my time.
The human mind, on average, can keep seven items or less on the “scratchpad” of working memory. The game designers seem to understand this, and created a game that increases in difficulty and quickly establishes new goals for “power users” who want to compete with tens of thousands for the best times.
All this made me think, to what degree were the game designers aware of all this? Do they watch people play early prototypes of the game and adjust difficulty and tutorial sections? What can we learn from this as we design websites, applications, search portals and, well, any interactive with a learning curve? These are my musings for this week based on the lecture and readings.
