Videogames and UX

I've loved playing videogames since I was a kid. I also loved playing with regular applications to see what would happen. There's something magical to touching a physical device (a keyboard, a mouse, or a gamepad) and seeing the reaction to those inputs immediately¹ reflected in a screen.

Videogames, alongside regular applications, have evolved a fair amount since my childhood. It has become the leading entertainment industry, grossing more revenue ($184 billion) than the music ($26.2 billion) and movie ($26 billion) industries combined. Probably for reasons the industry should be ashamed of: dark patterns and micro payments in "free-to-play" casino-like games disguised as regular games; but that's a topic for another day.

The industry has exploded at a level that there's a game genre to appeal to almost anyone. In the '90s, moms usually despised videogames for several uninformed reasons; now they are the primary target of games such as Candy Crush, with the "Candy Crush mom" becoming a meme.

In the next series of posts, I'll be in UX related to videogames. Although they tend to offer flashy GUI (mostly everyone, as eye candy and to strengthen the branding) and sometimes demand cumbersome inputs to achieve better results (ie: the fighting genre), it's an industry from which we can learn a lot and inspire solutions to application development. Both for good and for bad.

¹ Well, not taking into account input lag.