Games UX Summit Highlights

As I previously posted, last month I was lucky enough to attend the Games UX Summit 2017 hosted by our friends at Ubisoft Toronto.

The Games UX Summit is one of the first conferences dedicated to Game UX, and it was great to see so much enthusiasm from the game development community for this relatively new field within the industry and we’re really looking forward to the summit coming to Europe next year.

The quality of presentations and panels was world class and provided a huge number of insights into the challenges that the field faces, and what the future of Game UX and UI Looks like.

Over the course of the summit, it was striking how the panels broke down into these core themes:

The general consensus is that most antisocial behaviour is committed by otherwise well-mannered players, who are simply having a bad day, or game. Those who consistently play in an antisocial manner are very much in the minority.

Developers and designers suggested a number of ways to design systems that, instead of punishing offenders, use intrinsic and extrinsic rewards to promote good social behaviour.

Most of these are centred around priming players for a positive experience, and internalising the results of being an antisocial player

Another unanimous talking point around the summit was that accessibility was a fundamental extension of the UX of any game, and that big gains can be made for a fairly small amount of effort.

Furthermore, that by building games that are accessible we are opening up the market further, as well as improving the experience for those without disabilities.

A key theme through the summit was designers and developers understanding their own biases when developing games with regards to complexity, inclusivity and general user experience.

Meanwhile, as designers we can use player’s inherent biases to encourage certain behaviours, such as priming them for positive social interactions.

There was a lot of discussion around the subject of rewards and their relative value. With many people suggesting that intrinsic rewards (rewards that come from self actualisation or have a social value) are much better at shaping player behaviour than extrinsic rewards (traditional physical or monetary rewards).

There was also a lot positive talk around variable scheduling of rewards with regards to keeping players on their toes and behaving in a positive manner.

Both Bungie and Kabam gave talks on how they’ve moved from the model of UI/UX as a service, to integrating designers within their product teams to great success.

I had a chance to discuss this with other developers at the summit, and many reported they were going through this transition, with varying levels of success.

It was great to see how developers like Kabam and Bungie have a similar approach to UI / UX development to us at Space Ape and it really gave us confidence in the way we have structured our UX Team and how we approach UX as part of the game development process.

Generously, all of the presentations over the course of the Summit have been uploaded to Youtube. As I’ve said previously, these presentations were world class, but here are a few that stood out to me.

Ben Lewis-Evans, Epic Games

Ben Lewis-Evans, User Researcher, explains how we as designers can reduce toxicity in games through the lessons of education, enforcement and engineering from many years of road safety research.

Kari Gaynor & Scott Lee, Turn 10 Studios

Kari Gaynor, UX Lead; and Scott Lee, Art Director explain how they used UX and UI to inject the ‘The Drama of Motorsport’ into a franchise that had a reputation for being cold and clinical.

David Candland , Bungie

David Candland, UI Lead, discusses Bungie’s approach to UI and UX Design for both Destiny and Destiny 2.

Ellie Moon, Kabam

Ellie Moon, UX Director, speaks to how Kabam moved from a UI as a service model to an embedded UI/UX solution for the hugely successful mobile game Marvel: Contest of Champions.

Alexandria Neonakis, Naughty Dog

Alexandria Neonakis, UI Designer, describes how accessibility is a key component of UX and how she spearheaded a push for great accessibility in Naughty Dog’s highly acclaimed The Last of Us and Uncharted 4, with solutions that scale.

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