Cognitive strain, whatever its source, mobilizes System 2, which is more likely to reject the intuitive answer suggested by System 1. You read this correctly: performance was better with the bad font. The results tell a clear story: 90% of the students who saw the CRT in normal font made at least one mistake in the test, but the proportion dropped to 35% when the font was barely legible. The puzzles were legible, but the font induced cognitive strain. Half of them saw the puzzles in a small font in washed-out gray print. It works in conjunction with other factors, of course - but it matters:Įxperimenters recruited 40 Princeton students to take the CRT. A well-designed text, with a highly legible typeface and appropriate spacing, places a considerably lighter cognitive burden on us than a badly designed page. In his recent book Thinking, Fast and Slow - which is fascinating in more ways than I can tell you right now - Daniel Kahneman explains research that has been done on the cognitive burdens placed on us by various type designs. You allow gamers to get some momentum and confidence by completing easy tasks, which helps them to push through the annoyance and even anger that can arise when a nearly intractable challenge comes their way.īut this problem occurs in other technological arenas too. So game-makers have to learn to split the difference, which in practice means alternating between the easy and the hard. One of the really tough questions to answer in relation to any technology is: When do you make something easy and when do you make it hard? This problem is perhaps most obvious in the realm of game design, since people get bored by games that are too easy and get frustrated by games that are too hard.