Celia Hodent from Epic Games provides a broad view of the cognitive mechanisms involved in games in her talk from GDC 2016 entitled “The Gamer’s Brain, Part 2: UX of Onboarding and Player Engagement.”
Please see the following description from the GDC Vault: “Engaging your audience within the first minutes of play is a delicate endeavor, and has become a critical aspect of development in the era of free-to-play games. If the developers fail to captivate their audience’s attention quickly, there won’t even be any retention challenges to care about. This talk will cover the common onboarding pitfalls, provide guidelines from User Experience (UX), and discuss best-practices by using knowledge of how the brain learns. It will provide examples from various titles (including insights from the development of Epic Games’ Fortnite) to help you improve player engagement during early exposure with your game.”
