User Experience Isn’t Objective

If you’ve been following Elden Rings' release you probably heard the controversy that sprang up when other developers were talking about the game on Twitter. If not, I’ll catch you up to speed. It started when Ahmed Salama, a UX director that has worked on several high profile games such as Horizon Zero Dawn made a tweet implying that Elden Ring has bad UX. That’s game design jargon meaning User Experience. A graphics programmer at Nixxes Software by the name of Rebecca Fernandez O'shea and game designer Blake Rebouche who was senior quest designer on Horizon Zero Down replied with the same sentiments on their own fields of expertise.

Whenever I see things like this happen, I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. Twitter is not a great place for any sort of nuanced or complicated conversation, and it’s easy for something to get lost in translation. But this is really hard to see as anything other than sour grapes. Jealousy that years of refining a certain game design philosophy was bested by a game doing things “objectively bad”. Especially when you see stuff like this.

It just comes off as extremely unprofessional and petty. These developers were mostly ridiculed by the Internet gaming landscape and I don’t have much interest in simply piling on. I’d rather use the opportunity to create a teachable moment where a lot of people are going about this wrong. The mistake these developers were making is a mistake I’ve seen in many game designer circles. It’s the idea that game design has “unified theories”. That if we keep refining ideas and keep improving, we will solve certain problems and eventually find objectively good design concepts. Thankfully that isn’t how it works, and I’ll explain why that’s a good thing later. I watched Truthasaurus-Rex (Co-creator of this website) play Horizon Zero Dawn when it came out. I absolutely hated what I saw from the first 5 or so hours of the game. The main character is constantly lecturing the player to use “focus”. Focus is a story element where the main character has a special technology. This is translated into game play by the game telling the player everything they need to do to overcome whatever obstacle they might face by pressing a button. It can show you paths to take, the solutions to puzzles, and enemy weak points. It’s essentially like having a guide built into the game. I cannot stand this, I simply cannot play a game like this. I feel it fundamentally defeats the point of even playing a game. Why am I even doing this if the game is going to give me all the answers? I also find it condescending. Why present a puzzle, then tell me the answer before I can even answer it? Do the designers think I’m stupid? Now imagine Ahmed Salama telling me that this is “objectively good UX”, it’s not going to convince me otherwise. Because it’s my preference. 

Here’s the thing though, a lot of people do like Horizon Zero Dawn. If I tried to say its UX was just bad, I’d be making the same mistake Ahmed Salama was making. I don’t like the game, I don’t like it’s UX, but ultimately, that’s just my subjective tastes. While I might find Horizon condescending in its design, someone else will find Elden Ring to be obtuse and sloppy. I might find Horizons game play challenges pointless, others will find Elden Ring to be aimless and janky. As much as it might not appeal to me, a lot of people like Horizon, it sold well, it reviewed well, and at the end of the day, this is the world of subjectivity. And that’s a great thing. If gaming was objective, we’d find the “correct” ways to make games. We’d get to a point where there would be no reason to make anymore games once we perfected certain ideas. There would be no art to any of it. There is a famous talk from Malcolm Gladwell about this exact idea. Giant corporations figured this out a long time ago. There isn’t a perfect video game, there is only perfect video games.

 The ultimate point of all this is that games discourse would be a lot better if people could simply respect each other more. Games are like food, certain flavors are going to taste great to you, but be horrible for others. You would never disrespect someone for liking vanilla ice cream more than chocolate, so why are we doing that with video games. Good critique is understanding what a game is trying to achieve then explaining why it’s failing to reach those goals. Talking about how a certain game doesn’t match up to your preference is bad critique. The worst part about it is, if we could get past this petty fighting, games will be better for it. Because we can always learn from one another. Games continue to evolve, and instead of simply looking at something you don’t like and hating on it, try to understand why others do like it. You might just learn something.

-MajinSweet