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The creative talk was originally presented internally to the staff of StreamElements.
Introduction
I’ve been involved in games for over 15 years – creating tabletop RPGs, hosting gaming podcasts, and currently working on commercial video game development. This talk is about game literacy: how games teach players without dumping text on them, and how visual design carries most of that weight.
What is game literacy?
Think of game literacy as the language of games. Just like websites and apps share design conventions – menus, buttons, navigation patterns – so do games. But games add something extra: interaction. This is where “show, don’t tell” isn’t just a writing principle; games go one step further and let you do it instead of being told.
Modern games expect players to know certain conventions going in. Most players know to press “space” or “A” to jump, and understand that red means low health while green means good health. That last one is worth flagging – color associations like this can exclude players with color blindness, which is something developers need to actively think about, not treat as an afterthought.
Visual design in games
Games use visual design to convey information and guide players without saying a word. A few examples worth looking at:
In “Star Renegades,” health and shields are color-coded – red and blue respectively – so players can read their status at a glance. This is common practice, and for good reason: it works. Item quality follows similar logic. World of Warcraft established the white/green/blue/purple/orange rarity scale, and most games since have borrowed it. The system starts to break down when everything is purple or orange, which Destiny ran into – if most items are the highest rarity, the scale loses meaning.
Persona 5 deliberately subverts these conventions, using green and blue for health and shades of red for energy. It works because the game’s visual identity is so strong that players adjust. But it’s a choice that requires confidence.
The barrier for non-gamers
These conventions create a real barrier for people who don’t game. They lack the built-up knowledge that experienced players take for granted. In one video experiment, a non-gamer struggled with basic mechanics not because they weren’t paying attention, but because they had no frame of reference for what the game expected of them.
Beyond conventions, games use visual cues to nudge players in specific directions. In Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, red highlights areas players can interact with – ledges for sliding, surfaces for jumping. The first-person perspective complicates this because you can’t always see all the cues at once, which adds challenge by limiting information rather than adding difficulty directly.
There’s a real design question here about how much to show. Removing hints increases difficulty, but it also risks frustrating players who aren’t stuck on skill – they’re stuck on missing information. The goal is an experience where players can progress without feeling like the game is working against them.
Color coding and intuitive design
In Borderlands 3, yellow areas mark where you can climb, reflecting the game’s increased focus on vertical movement. Dark Siders: Genesis uses red for its hellscape environments and blue to mark climbable surfaces – clear contrast, well-executed. In Doom, green highlights objects you can punch, with an accompanying symbol that reinforces the cue.
Striking a balance between providing enough information and not overloading players is genuinely difficult. Some games solve this by making guides optional – Shadow of the Tomb Raider lets you remove visual hints entirely for a more demanding experience.
Using in-game logic and player knowledge
Survival games like The Long Dark use the environment itself as information. Birds circling overhead suggest a carcass nearby – food, in a world where food is scarce. It’s not a UI element; it’s something that feels logical within the world. That’s a different kind of visual design, and arguably the hardest to get right.
Some games lean on existing lore or player knowledge from outside the game. Skyrim’s “treasure foxes” are a good example – players noticed foxes leading them toward loot and built their own interpretation of a design element that may or may not have been intentional. The Spider-Man games connect the in-game “Spidey Sense” alert to the character’s comic book origins. In Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, textured lines on cliffs signal where you can run along walls – less obvious to new players, instantly readable to anyone who’s played a platformer before.
Diegetic design: when form meets function
Dead Space integrates its health, ammo, and energy displays directly into the character’s suit, eliminating a separate UI. It’s immersive – until you realise the health meter is on the character’s back in a third-person game, which means you occasionally have to tilt the camera to read it. Firewatch and Far Cry 2 use physical maps the character holds in their hands rather than an overlay. More immersive, but also slower and sometimes less practical.
Neither approach is strictly better. It depends on what the game is trying to do.
Technical design: colliders
Every game object has an invisible “collider” that determines how it interacts with the world, separate from what you actually see on screen.
Hitboxes – the area of a character that registers as a hit – are typically larger than the visual model, because tight hitboxes that match the model exactly tend to produce frustrating misses that feel unfair. The problem goes back to 2D point-and-click games like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where pixel-perfect clicking was so tedious it became known as “pixel hunting.” Making hitboxes too small causes frustration; making them too large makes the game too easy and affects balance.
Conclusion
Games teach through visual language more than most players consciously notice. Color, symbols, environmental cues, the shape of a ledge – these carry instructions that no tutorial ever spells out. When it works, players feel like they figured something out on their own. When it doesn’t, they feel lost without knowing why.
The balance between guiding players and letting them discover is genuinely difficult, and different games draw the line in different places. Some remove guides entirely as a difficulty setting; others integrate UI directly into the world. The underlying question is always the same: what does the player need to know, and what’s the least intrusive way to tell them?