UX for Business

Games and Gamification

Deep Game Design Is Beyond the Scope of This Book

In this section, I want to discuss a few general principles that are broadly useful when we think about designing games as a business. However, to intelligently compare casual games like Wordle and Candy Crush with serious gaming or esports like Counter-Strike and World of Warcraft, we would need far more space and experience than I have to offer.

Game design is complex in its own right! But if you zoom out far enough and perhaps take a psychological perspective, the principles are not so different from many of the things we have already seen in this book.

Games Are Entertainment, Not Efficiency

As a general rule, the best games are not designed to be efficient solutions to rational problems. They are supposed to be fun! Later, I will give you a big exception to this.

In fact, one of the core ideas in UX is flipped around in games: they have to be difficult enough to be fun! Whether it is a simple mobile puzzle game or a complex set of military missions, the whole idea is to keep increasing the difficulty as you learn and improve! Reverse usability!

Since games are entertainment, we want them to be immersive and to be a place where users can spend as much time as possible. And although they need to ...