Game UX & Cognitive Science Masterclass (London,UK Dec 12)

Making fun and engaging video games is hard, and with thousands of games being released every year, the competition is fierce. Although there is no known recipe for crafting successful games, some clear ingredients do exist, which game developers can use to make their own successful recipe. User experience (UX) and cognitive science disciplines combined provide developers with those ingredients --across all types of games, platforms used, or audiences targeted-- to guide them along the development process. Experiencing a game happens in the player's mind. This is why understanding the human brain (especially its limitations) while it is perceiving and interacting with a game is paramount to accomplish faster and more efficiently your developers' goals.

This Masterclass, led by the former Director of UX on Fortnite, proposes to delve into how the human brain works in terms of perception, attention, and memory and offers a concrete UX framework and guidelines that developers can apply during the different development stages. The ultimate goal of this Masterclass is to provide tools to significantly improve the experience of the game you are developing, as perceived by your target audience. This Masterclass will offer numerous examples, from video games and beyond, to illustrate each point. This content can also be applicable to companies who want to "gamify" their product or service.

This Masterclass has about 6-7 hours of content total and has 2 main parts. The content can be adjusted to skip some elements while diving into others more, depending on attendees’ requests.

Part 1 - (2.5 to 3 hours) Introduction to cognitive science and psychology to understand how the brain works and, more specifically, how it learns. We will look into the capabilities and limitations of human perception, attention, memory, motivation, and emotion, using multiple examples taken from video games and beyond. We will also cover the 3 main learning paradigms that can be used to onboard players efficiently and in an engaging way.

- lunch break (sandwiches are included) -

Part 2 - (3 to 4 hours) Focuses more specifically on the User Experience (UX) framework you can apply when developing your game, and how it relates to the brain capabilities and limitations. We will breakdown UX into ‘usability’ and ‘engageability’ and detail the important principles within these 2 components that can make, in the end, a great difference for your player and how they will experience your game (for the better!). It will cover how to successfully onboard players as well as how to keep players engaged over time. We will more specifically deep dive into the current theories of human motivation and how to concretely apply them to game and level design. We will also cover player emotion (game feel, sense of presence) and game flow.

Part 3 (if time permits - 15-30 min) briefly talks about user research and analytics, and how to measure what when, depending on what stage of development a project is at. This part also touches on UX strategy and how to develop it both at a project and studio level.

The content of this masterclass draws from my book The Gamer's Brain: How Neuroscience and UX can Impact Video Game Design

Anyone can benefit from knowing better about the brain and about user experience. This Masterclass will however benefit game designers, artists, gameplay programmers, and junior UX practitioners even more.

If you have to pay for this masterclass out of your own pocket (instead of your company paying for it), feel free to use the 50% discount code community2025.

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Host or Publisher Celia Hodent