In the Head

"Knowledge in the head" implies that the game world doesn't actively or persistently give players the information necessary to perform an action. Instead they're expected to intuitively know, remember, or figure out how to do the task without help or reminders.

In a game's GUI, you might be able to leverage the player's preexisting knowledge by:

• Following established standards that the player will recognize, such as drop-down lists and scroll bars
• Giving it an appearance and behavior of something from the real world that a typical user would already be familiar with, like a button or a folder tab
• Labeling controls with familiar pictures/icons to jog his memory

In the game world itself, it's dangerous to rely on your players' preexisting knowledge; if he doesn't know what you expect him to know then he'll have trouble executing core tasks.

Many games "pre-load" the player's head with necessary information during a tutorial phase, and that's a good start, but problems arise if the player forgets what you've told him or else skips through the tutorial without paying much attention, which unfortunately seems to be commonplace.

Many contemporary games are so complex that players can't memorize all the necessary information until they've logged many hours of play.

You can also frustrate players if you require them to frequently retain new pieces of critical knowledge that are difficult or impossible to re-learn it if they happen to forget:

• "Yeah the scientist told me the combination to that blast door. But I haven't played since last June, and now I've forgotten what he'd said!"
• "Do I really have to click-click-click into the Unit Stats screen just to get a reminder about this tank's attack rating?"
• "That boss monster just killed me a dozen times in a row. This sucks -- what am I doing wrong?"

In order to cope with these problems, we should provide accessible, abundant knowledge in the game world to alleviate the need to memorize, or we should provide reminders at key points to spark the player's memory. Some ideas that could help with the above examples might be:

• Provide a way to store important information that the NPCs have given to the player (a Notes screen, a Quests menu, etc.)
• Provide a popup with a visual stats summary when the player hovers his cursor over a unit, or offer a sidebar to show a stat overview for all units currently on-screen
• Detect when the player is repeatedly failing a task, and then offer a helpful hint or make existing hints even more obvious

Conclusion

For every development cycle, game teams spend a lot of time revising and re-revising in-game actions to make them easier for players to understand and execute; often, the problems have stemmed from users not having the knowledge necessary to successfully perform a desired action.

If the developers can make an effort to bake as much knowledge as possible into the game world -- especially knowledge that facilitates the completion of Norman's Seven Stages of Action -- you'll find that players navigate more easily and get confused and frustrated far less often.

With these simple design tools, we can build more intuitive interactions and help our games go from "this sucks" to "hell yeah," all the time, every time.