On Cognitive Load in Game Design

You ever have that moment where there’s a game you really like, you’re about to pick it and then you just put it down because playing it sounds exhausting? Ever play a game and at some moment your brain just sort of locks up or you just don’t feel like you have the mental capacity to play right now?

That’s because the game is placing more of a cognitive load on you than then you can deal with at the moment.

Where that line is is different from person-to-person and even day-to-day, but, whenever designing a game, one of the things a designer has to wrestle with is the cognitive burden the game places on the player…at every point in the game. I’ve spoken before about depth vs complexity but cognitive load balancing is slightly different. At its core, it’s simply asking the question, “How hard do you have to think at any given moment in a game?”

How hard should you have to think?

There is no right answer to this.

It’s going to be different if you’re making something like the old Avalon Hill games, only meant for people who are prepared to really strain their little gray cells, versus making Candy Land, which involves absolutely zero decisions and can literally be played without thinking about it. Both these are valid games, but you need to know the general space you’re targeting when you’re building your game.

So how do you figure that out? You do that by understanding your game’s

• Minimal Cognitive Load
• Optional Cognitive Load
• Optimal Play Cognitive Load
• Cognitive Load Spiking

Minimal Cognitive Load

Minimal Cognitive Load is the bare minimum the player can be thinking about a game and still play it. I’m sure most of you have played a game on your phone with the TV on in the background. This is a pretty good stand in for playing at Minimal Cognitive Load. How distracted can you be and still have a satisfying game experience?

Taking the “playing while watching TV” example, you’ve probably observed that the games you’re playing fall into one of three categories:

1. You can play them totally fine. Being distracted has no impact on your play. Idle games, hypercasual games, games where you’re doing a nearly memorized action (like your daily quests) or ones where you have such a huge margin of success that you’re going to win without really trying are good examples of this.
2. You’re playing noticeably worse, your win rate (or whatever the game's success metric is) is down, but you can still play and enjoy the experience (Slay the Spire 2 is this for me…).
3. Games where you eventually turn off the game or the TV and just focus on one because playing the game with distractions is too frustrating or is impacting the quality of your play so much that you can’t enjoy the experience.

What causes a game to fall into one category rather than another is the Minimal Cognitive Load.

When playing highly distracted, we use simple heuristics and memorized play patterns to play. If a game can be broken down into such heuristics or play patterns it lowers Cognitive Load. As a game designer, you can include some of these to lower mental strain and let players use their mental energy on the most engaging bits.

In Cyberpunk Legends, while the leader’s first play can be the most mentally taxing, getting a lot of numbers into the Plan is always at least a decent play. So if the team isn’t communicating or the leader isn’t sure what they want to do, they can always just pick the card in their hand with the most numbers on it and toss it in.

We’ve built cards that enable this and serve to teach the player this heuristic so they have this play pattern fall back, rather than just locking up, when they don't have the energy to work through the possibilities or figure out what the true best move might be.

Minimal Cognitive Load is important because it’s the player’s rest state. It’s incredibly draining to be operating at maximum mental capacity all the time. We need to give players moments of rest in our games. Even highly taxing games like MOBAs have built-in moments—like walking back from base—that are less demanding.

This doesn’t mean that the low Cognitive Load parts of your game can be boring though!

I often run into game designers in the early stages of their careers who think that engagement is directly related to the number of decisions you’re making or the depth of the calculations you’re doing. It’s not. There are plenty of ways to keep your player engaged with your game even in your low cognitive load moments and you should always make sure to build those in. A cutscene in a videogame can give your brain a moment to rest while still engaging you with narrative, visuals, audio and so on.

Optional Cognitive Load

You can think of Optional Cognitive Load as all the player controlled Cognitive Load sliders we build into our games. The ideal game has a wide range of Cognitive Loads it can be enjoyed at and a lot of ways for the player to adjust the Cognitive Load for themselves.

Let’s look at Magic the Gathering as an example. A red-white ‘turn everything sideways’ deck doesn’t create the same cognitive burden that a blue multi-card combo deck does. But the player gets to choose which they run. After work (Ha! What a concept!) if it’s been a long day you may decide to draft something a little easier or play your most straightforward Commander deck, rather than trying to dial the complexity up to 11…which is great because if that wasn’t an option, when exhausted like that, you probably just wouldn’t play the game. In fact Magic needs to give you these options because of all the other ways it increases your Minimal Cognitive Load by simply being a collectable card game.

Importantly, though, that doesn’t make any of these deck types “better” or “worse” or “the real way to play the game.” They’re just different tools the designers have given the player to play the way that suits them best on any given day. 

Optimal Play Cognitive Load

While it’s important to understand your game’s Minimal Cognitive Load it’s also important to understand the Cognitive Load ceiling of your game. How much mental effort does it take for a player to be playing at the highest possible level of play? This is what we call Optimal Play Load.

Understanding this helps you understand the range of play players can have. Tic-Tac-Toe for example can be played optimally by a well-trained chicken. On the other hand, a master player can look at a Go board and spend days pondering the next move.

Your Optimal Play Cognitive Load is useful to understand, so you can build scaffolding for players to get there.

Take the Go example. I dabble but am what I would politely call “dismal” at the game. There is very literally no amount of mental effort I could expend that would allow me to determine the optimal move on a complex board of a master level game.

The Go master, on the other hand, has a number of tools for breaking down and understanding that board that enable them to come to grips with it. It’s not just that they are incalculably better at thinking about the game than I am, it’s also that they’ve learned techniques and practices that the Go community has developed over thousands of years that help them parse the problem in front of them, reducing the cognitive load to a human manageable level.

But, rather than just have those all be community developed, in modern games we try to build those things in. In Cyberpunk Legends, you’ll notice that a lot of the early Obstacles can be hit by making a straight. This is because we noticed that for a lot of players (especially if they didn’t have a lot of poker experience), they wouldn’t really be thinking about straights and so wouldn’t realize that some cards or card combinations were great for hitting straights.

By putting the player in situations early on that are low threat but where there’s some incentive for making a straight, we’re getting the player used to what cards are good for doing so and so. Later on when this skill becomes more important, rather than having to stare at their hands and try to figure out if they think making a straight is in the cards (ba-dum-cha!) they’ll be able to immediately see if they have the tools and probably will have even developed some language to communicate which of those tools they have to the other players…

That way, they can focus their whole brain on how to do as much damage as possible.

Cognitive Load Spiking

The other major thing to be aware of when building is Cognitive Load Spiking. A Cognitive Load Spike happens whenever some part of the game dramatically increases the cognitive load on the player.

These can be mandatory or “opt in” spikes.

If you’re playing a tabletop game and it’s got something in it that you can’t opt out of that says “Every enemy with an odd number on it takes damage equal to half their health”, you’d better believe that that’s going to be a mandatory Cognitive Load Spike (and should probably have never been made…). All of a sudden you have to figure out which enemies are the odd numbered ones, then you have to divide their health by two, then you probably have to go back to the rulebook to remember if you have to round up or down…that’s a lot layered on top of normal play.

It’s not uncommon for mandatory Cognitive Load Spikes to be an exit point for some players (we’ve all had a ‘let’s figure this out tomorrow' moment). It’s also common for a play group to foist all this load onto the most engaged player, which creates a scenario where one player is doing all the calculations while everyone else is sitting around, goofing off and getting progressively less and less immersed in the game.

This is a disaster, but sometimes you can’t avoid mandatory Cognitive Load Spikes, you just want to make sure the result they cause in the game is so awesome that they’re worth it. Still, every time you create one, ask yourself “is this really worth it”...and be harsh with yourself when you do.

Optional Cognitive Load Spikes on the other hand are a bit more cut and dry. The “Do I have lethal?" moment in Magic the Gathering is a good example. For those of you not familiar, there often comes a moment in games of Magic where you have to figure out every way you could possibly deal damage, then add all that up, then figure out exactly how much of it your opponent could prevent and, finally, check to see if the number you reached is higher than their life total. This is entirely opt in, you don’t have to do it, but for players really trying to maximize their win percentage being willing to overcome that cognitive brick wall often very literally determines whether they win or lose.

If you’re really engaged, you can do it, and it creates a very satisfying moment when you realize there’s a way to win a game you were going to lose on the next turn. But if you’re not that engaged and just having a lark with your friends you don’t have to do it. Sure you’ll win 5% less but that’s not what you’re there for anyway.

Some of you might ask though, “But is it really opt-in if opting out means you lose?”

And this is the problem with game structures that create cognitive bottlenecks: even the ones that aren't literally required for play tend to occur at critical junctures in the game or offer a major strategic advantage to the player willing to opt in.

That’s not a bad thing, but it is a thing that, as a designer, you should be intentional about. You need to identify these in your game and, for each one, ask yourself ‘how much value is this providing’. There will be plenty that you decide are worth it for the play experience they create, but you get to keep those in there by identifying and eliminating the ones that don’t meet that bar.

A Note About Turn-Based Games

You don’t want the player’s Cognitive Load to go to 0 when it’s not their turn. The player should still be engaged and thinking about the game while other players are taking a turn.

If the player basically checks out while other people are playing, that’s not a Minimal Cognitive Load rest moment, that’s them ceasing to be part of the game…

Where Does Cognitive Load Come From? 

Game design is still as much an art as it is a science, which is why I didn’t lead off with this section. There’s no set of definitive sources of cognitive load I can give and no scoring system to evaluate how much cognitive load some part of your game is creating. You’ll learn this from playtesting, but there are a few places to look.

Calculations, Options and Planning

The three most common causes of increased cognitive load are calculation, options and planning.

• Calculations are any time the player has to do math (whether it be mandatory or to optimize their play).
• Options are just that, options. The more options a player has—the more different directions they could go with a turn or with their choice—the higher the cognitive load. Options have an almost multiplicative effect on cognitive load: Once you reach a certain point every new possibility the player has to sort through to make a decision creates an outsized effect on their mental burden.
• Planning is just how far ahead into the future they need to think. If this is a strict “figure out the optimal logical sequencing” style of planning it carries a much higher burden than if it’s a more nebulous ‘here are some goals we should aim towards’ style.

If you’re aiming to reduce the player’s cognitive load, simplifying and streamlining any of these three areas is the place to start.

And with that I’ll wrap this ramble! I hope this has given you all something to…think about.

—JP

 

Hero image: "Tender Hands of the Cyclops" by Aurél Lázár for Cyberpunk Legends / Night Crew Games.