Eyes and Ears - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 96

that our brain uses to prevent cognitive overload. Trying to focus on
all of those things at once would be maddening; your brain literally
can't handle it all. As a result, things are filtered out. In our games,
as complexity increases without appropriate learning, mechanics of
the game are filtered out as well. This could include the movement,
how to avoid enemies, which fingers to place on which buttons, and
more—it's unpredictable!
Third, and somewhat related to the previous point, information
is grouped based on proximal relevance. Consistent with dual cod-
ing theory, when things are either cognitively “close together” or
cognitively “very far apart,” they are easier to remember. One is useful
to games, the other not so much. Let's start with the useful one—
proximity. Mayer discusses this in the principles I'll outline next,
but suffice to say individuals remember things that are proximal to
one another as a group, or chunk, instead of discrete elements. In an
example from Gestalt Theory,
a . 1, 4, 3
b . 143
You likely verbalize item a as “one, four, three” and item b as “one
hundred forty-three.” So what? Well, Gestalt Theory states that
proximal items are encoded as a group, and based on what we know
about cognitive load and limits on the human memory, that should
tell us something important: it takes less load to remember item b
than item a . In game design, there are a few obvious places for this—
one might be placing the ammo display right next to the gun dis-
play. We will talk more about that next; suffice to say, things that are
(cognitively) closer together are remembered as a group.
The less useful effect in this series is called the von Restorff effect.* *
When an object is cognitively “out of place” among other objects, it
will be easier to recall. While this could be used to some interesting
artistic ends, I'm not sure how it would apply directly to game design.
Essentially, the von Restorff effect illustrates the following: if I were to
give you a list of items that all had a common theme, like “classroom,”
* The classical literature is in German, so check out Fabiani, M. & Donchin, E.
(1995). Encoding processes and memory organization: A model of the von Restorff
effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition , 21(1).