Madeleine Frister

University of York

Madeleine joined the IGGI programme in 2020, after obtaining a master’s degree in psychology and cognitive neuroscience from the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. Her PhD focuses on how visual characteristics influence gameplay and player experience. In 2021, she co-founded UX studio Vanilla Noir where she works as an independent designer and developer on website, app and game projects.   

Video games rely heavily on central aspects of human information processing, including perception, attention, and memory. The human mind is severely limited in the amount of information it can process, and a key factor for successful information processing is resisting distraction. Consequently, most user experience guidelines recommend eliminating any unnecessary information to avoid cognitive overload. Yet, in the case of video games, the presence of task-irrelevant items does not seem to compromise player experience, considering that there is an abundance of popular video games that are very high in visual complexity. On the contrary, inducing demand in the form of perceptual distraction may even be desirable in order to introduce challenge which can in turn increase enjoyment. The current project aims to deepen our understanding of perceptual distraction and its effects on game difficulty and player experience, with a specific focus on perceptual similarity between target and distractor items.