The Impact of Visual Style on User Experience in Games

The visual style in a game is an aspect of user experience that is often neglected in user experience studies. Visual style is reflective of the tone that a game designer intends to convey or the assumption of what the intended audience would prefer, and it is an important aspect of how a player experiences a game. This paper reports a study that investigated the effect of two elements of visual style, e.g. form and color, on user’s moment and memory-based experiences (engagement and enjoyment). While the impact of color and form on experience is inconclusive, visual preference by a player does appear to be indicative of whether or not the player will be engaged and enjoy an experience. In order to control the experience, the game being used for this study was created by one of the authors.