IDEA #395 — Designing the Digital World

Game Experience and User Interface Issue #395 serves as an experimental visual review of the history of UI (user interface) in digital games, under the editorial direction of game developer and AI researcher Youichirou Miyake. Since the dawn of the computer gaming age in the 1970s, digital gaming has evolved across different hardware: arcade machines, PCs, video game consoles, hand-held consoles, and now smartphones. The industry has become massive, with the trial and error of countless developers and creators propelling gamers to find their way through complex aggregate game information—which players experience as stories, characters, and sounds. Games have evolved beyond the category of mere entertainment into a form of media that has captured hearts across the globe. In this issue, Miyake suggests that the evolution of the design of game screens has a relationship to information organization in graphic design and to the user interface (UI) or user experience (UX) methods of applicat