Game usability
One of the two halves of Celia Hodent’s Game UX framework (the other being Game engage-ability). Usability is about removing unnecessary friction and confusion from the player’s interaction with a game’s systems and interface — it is not about the emotional pull or motivation to keep playing, which Hodent deliberately assigns to engage-ability instead. She grounds the concept in Isbister and Schaffer’s definition: making a game usable means “paying attention to human limits in memory, perception, and attention; it also means anticipating likely errors that can be made and being ready for them, and working with the expectations and abilities of those who will use the software” (Isbister and Schaffer, Game Usability, 2008, Introduction, pp. 3–5). Bad usability isn’t a subtle problem — per The Gamer’s Brain (book) (Chapter 11), it’s the first thing that can make an otherwise excellent game unplayable, and it’s especially costly in free-to-play games, where a small early frustration is enough to make a low-commitment player quit before they ever see what the game does well.
Heuristic foundations
Hodent’s Seven Pillars sit on top of, and translate into game-development vocabulary, two older bodies of general HCI usability heuristics:
- Nielsen and Molich’s original ten heuristics (Nielsen and Molich, “Heuristic Evaluation of User Interfaces,” 1990, Proceedings of the ACM CHI’90 Conference), later consolidated by Nielsen alone (Nielsen, “Heuristic Evaluation,” in Usability Inspection Methods, 1994) — general-purpose principles like visibility of system status, consistency and standards, error prevention, recognition rather than recall, and aesthetic/minimalist design, originally written for software and web interfaces.
- Game-specific heuristic literature that adapted these ideas to games specifically during the 2000s: Federoff (2002), Desurvire et al. (2004), Schaffer (2007), and Laitinen (2008) — cited by Hodent as the sources for concrete game examples, such as “controls should be customizable and default to industry standard settings” (Federoff 2002).
Hodent’s own contribution is to compress these into a smaller, game-developer-friendly set of seven pillars — not meant to replace formal heuristic evaluation, but to give an entire studio (not just UX researchers) a shared vocabulary for usability problems.
The Seven Pillars
1. Signs and Feedback. Corresponds to Nielsen’s “visibility of system status” heuristic, translated into the vocabulary developers actually use: cues, signs, and feedback. Hodent distinguishes informative signs (communicating a system state, like a health bar), inviting signs (persuading the player to take an action, like a glowing NPC exclamation mark), and feedback (a sign specifically reporting the outcome of the player’s own action, like a hit-effect in a fighting game). Every possible action and state in a game needs signs and feedback attached to it — done well, this can substitute for tutorial text; done poorly, it’s a direct source of confusion.
2. Clarity. Whether signs and feedback can actually be perceived — contrast, font choice, information hierarchy. Hodent reapplies the Gestalt principles of perception (introduced via Wertheimer, 1923, and Johnson, Designing with the Mind in Mind, 2010, in Chapter 3 — see Selective attention’s sister concepts) to interface layout, and invokes signal detection theory to explain why, e.g., overusing red as a UI color (her “red overload” example, from Unreal Tournament 3) makes a genuinely urgent red warning sign harder to detect against all the other red noise.
3. Form Follows Function. Borrowed from modernist architecture: an element’s visual form should intuitively convey what it does. Hodent explicitly ties this to the industrial-design concept of affordance — “a relationship between the properties of an object and the capabilities of the agent that determine just how the object could possibly be used” (Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things, 2013 edition) — and warns about false affordances, where an element looks interactive (a climbable-looking ledge, an explorable-looking horizon) but isn’t, which breaks player trust in the game’s visual language.
4. Consistency. Similar forms should behave similarly; different functions should look visually distinct. Hodent extends this to controller mapping, where repeated practice makes button presses into implicit (“muscle”) memory — so changing a control scheme between similar contexts (sprinting on foot vs. galloping on horseback) creates friction, unless the inconsistency is a deliberate design choice (her example: Uncharted 3’s intentionally tilted controls during a sinking-ship sequence). Consistency with genre-wide conventions (shared control schemes across shooters, say) also speeds up onboarding for players already familiar with the genre.
5. Minimum Workload. Both physical load (button presses, cursor travel — she invokes Fitts’s law, which predicts how long it takes to hit a target based on its distance and size, to justify keeping frequent actions cheap and mobile-thumb-reach-aware) and cognitive load (memory and attention) should be minimized for anything that isn’t meant to be part of the game’s actual challenge. She cites Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think (2014) and the cognitive load theory covered via Sweller (1994) in Chapter 5 (see Working memory) directly: learning is hindered once demands exceed working-memory limits, so alleviate load on incidental elements (an always-visible control-mapping HUD, an egocentric minimap) to leave more cognitive budget for what the game actually wants the player to learn.
6. Error Prevention and Error Recovery. Because of Cognitive dissonance, a confused or frustrated player will rarely blame themselves for an unclear mistake — like the fox in Aesop’s fable (see Cognitive dissonance’s Fox-and-Grapes framing), they’ll blame the game instead. Prevention means spacing apart consequential controls that Fitts’s law says are easy to mis-hit (e.g., adjacent “confirm”/“cancel” buttons), requiring explicit confirmation for destructive actions (World of Warcraft’s type-”DELETE” character-deletion safeguard), and being generous with hit-detection or platforming margins. Recovery means offering “undo” wherever feasible (League of Legends’ shop-purchase undo) or a nearby checkpoint to retry from.
7. Flexibility. Customization and adjustment options — control remapping, font size, color, difficulty — widen accessibility, including for the roughly 8% of men with color blindness and the players covered under the broader ~18%-of-population disability statistic Hodent cites via accessibility specialist Ian Hamilton’s contributed section. She also invokes the Pareto principle (80/20 rule) to argue for simple defaults aimed at the mainstream player, with deeper options surfaced for power users who actively seek them out (World of Warcraft’s addon-heavy UI as the power-user extreme).
Related
- Game engage-ability — the second half of the Game UX framework; usability is the precondition, engage-ability is the motivational/emotional layer built on top of it
- Celia Hodent — author; the Seven Pillars are her synthesis, built on top of Ubisoft’s internal usability training material
- Donald Norman — the Form Follows Function pillar’s affordance concept is his
- Working memory and Selective attention — the cognitive-load and perception research the Minimum Workload and Clarity pillars build on
- Cognitive dissonance — explains why players blame the game rather than themselves for usability-driven errors