Throughout the 70s, UCLA researcher Ellen Langer developed the concept of “The Illusion of Control” studying how people often rely heavily on this unrealistic perceptions fifa 16 coins of their own autonomy. “The argument I’ve been making for the last 40 years,” she said during a talk in 2013, “is that actually, most of us are mindless virtually all of the time.”
And I think this is actually what video games are about. At a very basic, fundamental level, they are simply about providing a sense of control, rather than necessarily about making us feel like superheroes. Video games merely have to confirm us as sentient agents in order to function.
Look at your games console or your PC. It’s a box with buttons on it, attached to a keyboard with buttons on it, and perhaps a joypad with buttons on it. The buttons are all specifically and carefully designed to be comfortable and accessible the concepts of the user interface and user interaction are among the most important in the digital age.
The idea of “perceived affordances” developed by Donald Norman, a concept in which the user must be able to immediately identify the purpose of an object www.utfifa.co or icon by its appearance is central to the work of everyone from Google to television remote-control manufacturers. It’s not content that’s king anymore, it’s user agency.