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Ryan Moncrief
Level Design
Undercutting Overload : Best Practices for Mitigating Cognitive Load in Games
For my thesis , I worked on a small , international team to develop a simulation game that incorporated a real-world simulation engine with the goal of educating on how to formulate a response to a pandemic . Working with my team , I designed the game with modularity in mind so that many different models could be loaded into the engine and the game can be used as a platform for many different kinds of games , even beyond pandemic data .
My list of practices approached presentation from several angles , including the layout , quantity complexity , and rate of information , as well as using non-textual forms of presentation . I implemented these practices into the design of the simulation game , so even once I am done working on it , the information presented in the game could be easily understood by anyone .
Because the game would be presenting a lot of information to players , most of which I wouldn ’ t even know about , I needed to create the game in such a way that any information that was given to the players could easily be understood by the players . With that in mind , I constructed a list of best practices for how to present information within games to minimize the cognitive load needed to understand it .
62 LEVEL DESIGN