Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design

What Is the User Experience?

User experience: The term sounds suspiciously like a couple of strung-together buzzwords you'd expect to see on poor advertising copy. Obviously, that's an impression we'd rather dispel as quickly as possible, so let's attempt to “debuzzify” the term by describing exactly what we mean.

We define the user experience as the total package presented to the player when she plays the game. It is the combination of three distinct areas of the design—the visual element, the audio element, and the interactive element—and is concerned with their impact on the user interface. The following sections give a brief précis of what we'll be covering in more detail.

NOTE

To read more details on user experience, see The Elements of ...