Don't Flip the Table Yet: A Framework for the Analysis of Visual and Cognitive Ergonomics in Board Games

Abstract

Board games provide immersive and enjoyable experiences for players, but they can also pose usability challenges. This article presents a comprehensive framework for analyzing board game design, focusing on identifying the elements that make play inadvertently difficult or fatiguing. The proposed framework analyses board games as a user interface between the players and the board game mechanics, thereby focusing on the presentation aspects without altering the underlying rules. The intent is to preserve the deliberate design challenges that enhance gameplay while pinpointing the elements that affect the game experience negatively. We employ a methodology that begins with the observation of players’ behavioral cues to infer internal states such as cognitive or visual fatigue. These inferred states serve as a basis to identify problematic features in the game components or presentation. We illustrate the framework through a series of case studies, providing practical examples of the analysis process through an idiographic approach.

Keywords

board game ergonomics cognitive load visual fatigue board game design board game analysis

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Anderson

J. R.

(2005). Cognitive psychology and its implications. Macmillan Publications.

Bergström

(2010). The implicit rules of board games: On the particulars of the lusory agreement. In Proceedings of the 14th international academic MindTrek conference: Envisioning future media environments (pp. 86–93). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/1930488.1930506

Ericsson

K. A.

Kintsch

(1995). Long-term working memory. Psychological Review, 102(2), 211. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.102.2.211

Feresin

(2023). Progettare giochi da tavolo – Vol. 1: La struttura dei giochi. Independently published.

Heron

M. J.

Belford

P. H.

Reid

Crabb

(2018). Meeple centred design: A heuristic toolkit for evaluating the accessibility of tabletop games. The Computer Games Journal, 7, 97–114. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40869-018-0057-8

Hinton

(2017). Becoming a user interface and user experience engineer. The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc.

Kalyuga

Plass

J. L.

(2009). Evaluating and managing cognitive load in games. In Ferdig

(Ed.), Handbook of research on effective electronic gaming in education (pp. 719–737). IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-59904-808-6.ch041

Léste

J. V.

(2021). The informational ergonomics of tabletop games’ rulebooks. An analysis on informational hierarchy and organization (1916169/CA) [Masters dissertation], Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. Maxwell database. https://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/53646/53646.PDF

Nakamura

Csikszentmihalyi

(2002). The concept of flow. In Snyder

C. R.

Lopez

S. J.

(Eds.), Handbook of positive psychology (pp. 89–105). Oxford University Press.

10.

Norman

(2013). The design of everyday things: Revised and expanded edition. The MIT Press.

11.

Norman

D. A.

(1983). Some observations on mental models. In Gentner

Stevens

A. L.

(Eds.), Mental models (pp. 7–14). The Psychology Press. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315802725

12.

Saariluoma

(1989). Chess players’ recall of auditorily presented chess positions. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 1(4), 309–320. https://doi.org/10.1080/09541448908403091

13.

Sanders

(2016). Emotional response to gaming producing Rosenblatt’s transaction. In Tettegah

S. Y.

Huang

W. D.

(Eds.), Emotions, technology, and digital games (pp. 115–136). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-801738-8.00006-3

14.

Sato

de Haan

(2016). Applying an experiential learning model to the teaching of gateway strategy board games. International Journal of Instruction, 9(1), 3–16. https://doi.org/10.12973/iji.2016.912a

15.

Schell

(2008). The art of game design: A book of lenses. CRC press.

16.

Suits

(2014). The grasshopper: games, life and utopia. Broadview Press.

17.

Wan

Bolton

M. L.

(2021, October). A taxonomy of forcing functions for addressing human errors in human-machine interaction. In 2021 IEEE international conference on systems, man, and cybernetics (SMC) (pp. 3134–3139). IEEE.

18.

Wilhelm

Hildebrandt

Oberauer

(2013). What is working memory capacity, and how can we measure it? Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 433. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00433

19.

Yearsley

(2021). ‘Root’: A usability postmortem. In Board game design summit (a subsection of Game Developers Conference). https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1027411/Board-Game-Design-Summit-Root

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.81 MB

34.57 MB