ABSTRACT
The user experience (UX) discipline is fairly new in the video game industry yet is getting increasingly more traction because it is now better understood and its benefits are better known. When I was working in the toy industry in the mid 2000s (developing educational games for infants, toddlers, and young children), satisfying those who were buying toys (parents) carried more weight than considering how educational and fun the experience of interacting with the products would be for the users (children). After all, the ones spending money for toys (adults) are usually not the ones using them. In 2008, I joined the video game industry and started to work at Ubisoft HQ (in France) as they became increasingly interested in understanding how cognitive science could help them create better games. At that time, playtest labs and user research was already part of the production cycle at Ubisoft; they were testing their games in development with external players to help identify issues and fix them before the games would launch. Although a few cognitive ergonomics specialists were working with designers and engineers to help them anticipate issues users could experience when interacting with the interface, the concept of user experience was not really a thing yet. There already was a clear understanding that a game needed to be easy to grasp (game usability) and fun, but this wasn’t formalized. Of course, many developers and academics were individually introducing the new concepts 98of usability, playability, game flow, player enjoyment, or ingredients of fun, and some studios were more advanced than others, but there was no overarching definition of what a game user experience entails or a defined UX framework that could be integrated within the development process itself.
