Videogames and UX: settings and enjoyability

You're going to spend a moderate amount of time in front of your screen while either using an application for work or playing your favorite videogame so, why not make the experience as comfortable as possible? Enter "settings"!

Settings in real life

Products try to offer a solution to the widest range of people as possible, specially physical ones since they can't be easily tailored afterwards (unlike software):

  • You'll be adjusting your phone's brightness regularly to see the screen on the outside and at night1.
  • The first time you use a bike you'll need to adjust the seat's height.
  • The first time you drive a car you'll need to check and adjust the mirrors.

You could get by not adjusting any of the aforementioned characteristic, but your experience would be:

  • Less than optimal (screen brightness).
  • Uncomfortable (bike seat).
  • And even dangerous (car mirrors).

All these tweaks, as material products, a fall under the umbrella of ergonomics.

Settings in software

Settings have been a pivotal feature in software since as long as I can remember. The first one I can recall was configuring MS-DOS to boot in expanded memory. Users did so in order to run some more hardware-demanding software.

Software, as a tool, will almost always benefit of some adjustments. Even though developers will try to design some sensible defaults, in order to get maximum reach, offering options is welcome.

Like the rest of the features, settings have evolved and improved hand in hand with computer power and capabilities in lots of different areas. We have mostly moved on from low level settings to more user-centered ones:

  • Display (eg: color, resolution, density).
  • Audio (eg: from choosing "mono" vs "stereo" to different sound layers volume: dialog, FXs, soundtrack).
  • Controls (eg: key customization, optional peripherals, etc).

Settings in videogames

Since this is not an historical post, we can jump to the most interesting time in videogames: the '90s.2. At that time, videogames could be played in dedicated places (at arcades) or at home (with computers or consoles).

Arcades

Decades ago, people went to dedicated places to play state-of-the-art videogames in cabinets with huge TVs. There are still a few of these places scattered around the world, but most closed years ago once the hardware available at home caught on in terms of computing power.

What's interesting about arcades, however, was the business model around it: players had to pay in order to play3. Users would get "credits/lifes" in exchange for quarters; probably a similar concept to those of the "balls" in pinballs (a precursor to videogames). To ensure a constant stream of money developers made the games hard as nails. Like impossibly hard to win/advance unless you spent quite some money. There was nothing to tweak. Just force the players to "insert coin".

Home videogames (early '90s)

In the console market, producers had two ways of getting inspiration for their games: original products or ports from the arcades.

In this case, the business model was charging users a fixed price for the game; much very like the home movie market: you get the movie/game and you can watch/play it as much as you want.

But, how could they justify charging $50 for each copy of a game which were usually short? The go-to solution was cranking up the difficulty. That way, they artificially increased the gameplay duration, since players wouldn't be able to finish/win a game unless they mastered it.

However, to compensate for that challenge, inexperienced (often younger) players were given the opportunity to adjust some settings. The difficulty selector must be one of the first and most common videogame settings from early on. Other options included giving the player more "lifes" (or attempts to complete a level).

Videogames current era: PCs vs consoles

If you ever played a PC game from the '90s until today, you're surely familiar with menu settings with copious options; specially the previously mentioned technical areas (graphics, sound) and controls (key customization).

Console gamers have traditionally missed this care from developers besides some rare exceptions. But the trend have been changing and developers are giving more options to their players (partially thanks to the influence of PC developers).

In this case, the focus here has been embraced under the umbrella of accessibility:

  • A variety of difficulty related options: more lifes, less damage taken, even infinite health!
  • Subtitles for dialogs: turn them on/off, font size adjustments, stop until a button is pressed.
  • Visual adjustments for visual impairments: color blindness adaptations, disabling motion blur to avoid motion sickness, disabling chromatic aberration, toggling visual cues4...

My experience

As a designer, I like to offer an opinionated set of curated defaults. But I know it's even better to offer the user the option to make adjustments if you want to cater for people with different needs.

As a player, when I was younger I wasn't bothered getting stuck in one level; repeating it until I beat it. Also my shight and hearing was quite good. Nowadays, I give special value to my free time. Videogames are a hobby and should be enjoyable regardless of my personal situation. That means I should be able to optimize the experience for me: lowering the difficulty (done that), activating subtitles (check!), tweaking sound FX to sound louder than the soundtrack (yep!).

Even though my experience is personal, it's far from unique. There are many reasons to give users the possibility to adapt your software to their circumstances, be it productive or a game. The most important is to make your product more enjoyable to use.

Software in general, and videogames in particular, have positively evolved in these terms but, until the day that posts like this one feel like obvious, there's still a lot of work to be done here.




1 At least if you're like me and have had an awful experience with automatic brightness control.

2 This is an indisputed totally objective truth which has nothing to do with casually concurring with my childhood.

3 Does this ring the bell? We'll talk about it in a future post of this series.

4 Yep, this will probably be another post for this series.