Curse of knowledge
The cognitive bias whereby someone who knows a system intimately loses the ability to imagine what it’s like to encounter it for the first time. Once you know something, you cannot easily simulate the mental state of not knowing it — so problems that are glaringly obvious to a newcomer become invisible to the expert.
In game development
The Gamer’s Brain (book) treats this as the central occupational hazard of game UX. Per Celia Hodent (Chapter 3), designers are “too close to your game,” having spent months or years learning its systems, so they cannot reliably predict how a brand-new player will perceive it — no amount of empathy substitutes for actually watching an unfamiliar player struggle. Her prescribed fix is procedural, not personal: bring in playtesters from the target audience who don’t know the game, rather than trying to imagine their perspective from the inside — she develops this into a full playtesting methodology in Chapter 14 of the book.
Chapter 10 extends the bias to a specific team dynamic: it’s part of why “common sense” UX issues ship in finished games. Developers don’t necessarily lack common sense — they may be blind to a problem specifically because they know the game too well to notice it, or they knew about an issue once and simply got used to it. This is distinct from hindsight bias (believing after the fact that you “knew it all along”), which Hodent discusses in the same passage as a related-but-separate trap.
Notably, Hodent uses “curse of knowledge” repeatedly as a working term but does not attach her own academic citation to it when introducing it — it functions in the book as established design vocabulary rather than a claim needing its own study.
Related
- Celia Hodent — uses the term as the throughline argument for why UX testing (not designer intuition) has to catch these issues
- Game usability — the Seven Pillars framework this bias motivates testing against