The Case of the Murdered Memories, or Why Your Game Design Became a Crime Scene

I. Preface: Grand Hotel «Memory»

I have a funny professional reflex I’ve developed over a few years. As someone standing in both trenches of the games industry — in the dev foxhole and in the designer’s chair — I respond to the word “memory” with a clarifying question:

«Which memory are we talking about, exactly?»

Most of the time we mean the usual suspect — computer memory. RAM, gigabytes, load times, polygon streaming, and all that technical splendor that makes our games look and run the way they do. It’s a tangible, measurable, perfectly concrete resource we developers wrestle with, trying to stuff the un-stuffable and optimize the un-optimizable.

But there’s another kind of memory. The one that hides behind the dry stat of “concurrent players.” Behind every powerful PC, behind every gigahertz and teraflop, there isn’t just hardware. There’s a person. And this article is about that person. About a human whose memory, unlike a computer’s, behaves a little less predictably. It’s moody, selective, emotion-driven — and it can “freeze” under overload. And yet, believe it or not… it’s still predictable enough!

Understanding the rules of this memory — the human kind — is what separates a good developer from a true architect of play. So let’s start with a tiny game. Ready? What word did I use to describe my reaction to the word “memory”? Hint: it starts with “re” and ends with “flex.” Remembered it? Great. Didn’t? Even better!

Now a quest for the whole article: remember these three words — marshmallow, gravity, Sisyphus. I’ll check at the end!

In many psychology textbooks (and, to my surprise, in game design!) you’ll find mention of a “multi-store model of memory.” Don’t be alarmed — its actual name is «Atkinson — Shiffrin Model», a name mainly for the especially erudite. For simplicity and a touch of elegance, let’s imagine our player’s memory as a grand, slightly enigmatic, three-story hotel.

Grand Hotel «Memory»!

Allow me — your doorman for today — to give you a brief tour. Guests arrive constantly. Any piece of information, whether a screen flash, a line of dialogue, or the rule of a new mechanic, is a guest trying to check in. Our tour includes:

• First floor — the spacious, perpetually bustling lobby. Here, guests crowd the entrance, lingering for mere fractions of a second. At the front desk stands a stern but fair concierge named “Attention”. It’s their job to decide which of the hundreds arriving are worthy of passing deeper, and which remain a fleeting impression, lost behind the revolving door.
• Second floor — the lively lounge. Think of it as the hotel’s working office. Only selected guests who passed “Attention’s” face control get here, and they’re now handled by the Bartender and the bouncer “Stress”. They can stay for a bit, mingle with others — and, crucially, residents from the upper floor come down here to discuss pressing matters. Information is actively processed here, but capacity is strictly limited. If the lounge gets too crowded, some guests are politely — and sometimes not so politely — shown the door.
• Third floor — the rooms. Endless corridors with countless doors. If a guest reaches this level and checks into a room, they become a resident. They might stay for days, years, or a lifetime. The catch? Finding the right room and coaxing that resident back down to the lounge for a chat is no small feat.

Sounds secure and well-guarded, doesn’t it? There’s a twist. In our Grand Hotel «Memory», murders happen all the time — quiet, invisible ones. Guests vanish without a trace. Critical details you were just holding evaporate. Our job as Game Designers is to identify the killers, learn the hotel’s internal bureaucracy, and escort our most important guest — the player’s core experience — safely to the most reliable room upstairs without losing them on the way. Paradoxically, HOWEVER:

We need to remember what must be remembered!

Alright, enough formalities. May I take your coat? Let’s head to the first floor, the lobby. The investigation begins!

II. First Floor: The Lobby.

Welcome to the lobby! Don’t mind the hustle — it’s always like this here. This floor, a.k.a. “Sensory Memory,” is arguably the most straightforward and least mysterious part of the whole hotel, yet it’s also fascinating!

Guests don’t linger here. They pour through the revolving door in a stream of hundreds of images, sounds, and sensations, spend sometimes less than a second, and immediately spill back onto the street. This isn’t storage — it’s a passageway, a primary filter. But don’t let that fleetingness fool you. Right here, in this chaos, the hotel’s fastest employee is on duty — the concierge named “Attention”. And he is damn good at his job!

There’s a legend that one day a very important guest tried to slip into our hotel incognito — information about an airplane model (you can read about this “incident” here: «How many frames per second can the human eye see?»). He was camouflaged in a crowd of 220 other frames and flashed at the door for just a fraction of a second. And yet our concierge, Attention, not only spotted this “guest,” but instantly read the baggage tag: model, class, even the tiny details.

What does that mean for us? Simply that the brain — our player’s brain — is an incredibly powerful scanner, capable of parsing a continuous stream of information at lightning speed. A player might not consciously know why they hit the parry button in Sekiro at the one correct instant, but their sensory memory did. It picked up that glint on the enemy blade, that single frame that screamed: “NOW!” Its job is to deliver raw, unprocessed data about the world — instantly.

But wait a second, you might say. Isn’t the juicy headshot sound in Counter-Strike, or the bright flash from a successful parry — the end result of our actions — also just sensory input? And I’ll say yes! Here lies the elegant duality of our lobby. It runs both ways. First, like a sentry, it registers a threat or an opportunity (a spawning enemy, a wind-up for a strike). Then, milliseconds later, it also registers the outcome of your action (the hit sound, the block VFX). This lightning-fast loop worth remembering:

«Signal → reaction → feedback»

Played entirely on the first floor, this is what we Game Designers call “responsiveness,” “impact,” or that elusive “game feel.” The lobby isn’t just an entrance — it’s also a counter of instantaneous feedback, where the game answers the player right away, without bothering to climb up to the second floor.

You’d think that with such a powerful scanner at the door, what problems could there be? If the player reads everything this fast, surely they remember everything? Oh, if only.

And here, in this bright, ever-humming lobby, the oddities begin. Guests don’t exactly die. They… just vanish. They fall right through the floor! You saw them at the entrance a second ago; glance away for a fraction and there’s only emptiness. The thing is, our lobby is excellent at seeing but terribly bad at remembering without orders from above — without sending the guest up to the second floor, to the lounge of short-term memory.

The first culprit behind these disappearances is a classy yet devious trick called “Flicker Paradigm” (a profile of this “devious” trick can be found here: «Change Blindness Flicker Paradigm»).

Imagine: a guest in a top hat enters the lobby. Suddenly, the lights go out across the hotel for a split second. When they come back on, the guest is now wearing a bowler hat. Will you notice the difference? With 99% probability — no. That tiny blackout fully resets the lobby’s state. As far as it’s concerned — nothing happened! Small, sometimes medium, and only rarely BIG changes just get ignored by our brain under such conditions. We are literally blind to momentary changes if there’s even the tiniest gap between them. And yes — this is exploited!

An old mobile-game trick: you’re shown a bright pop-up “BUY CRYSTALS!”. You get distracted; it consumes most of your attention for that second, and then you close it. Are you sure nothing changed on the main screen while you were away? The “deal of the day” icon could easily have swapped — and you wouldn’t notice!

Think you’re safe if the lights never go out? Not quite. There’s an even subtler way to outsmart our concierge. Picture this: while Attention is focused on the front door — on that most intense stream — another guest starts moving a huge palm tree very, very slowly, inch by inch, from one corner of the lobby to the other. No one notices. The change is so smooth and gradual that the brain refuses to register it as an event.

This phenomenon is called “gradual change blindness”, (don’t take my word for it — try it yourself here: «Gradual Change Observation | Witness Change Blindness Test» and a more overused classic in «Selective Attention Test») — and it’s the best friend of racing-game developers.

They figured this out long ago: during a race at 200 km/h, your concierge Attention looks EXCLUSIVELY and ONLY at the center of the screen — the road, the rivals. He couldn’t care less about the edges. Designers shamelessly exploit this to save resources! They don’t even need to “hide” anything or move it inch by inch. While you’re locked onto the track, the trees on the periphery can be flat 2D textures — you’ll never notice. Your sensory memory, concierge Attention, won’t bat an eye as a grand piano is carried right under his nose!

Dossier: Concierge «Attention»

Ladies and gentlemen, let’s recap to lock a few things in. The lobby — Sensory Memory — is an executive mechanism. And we, Game Designers, are the ones issuing the orders. Our key job is to be a competent manager for concierge Attention, clearly explaining how to handle each type of arriving guest.

All our work on this floor boils down to three kinds of directives:

1. «HANDLE IT ON THE SPOT!» — Our most frequent order here. It covers everything foundational to the core gameplay loop — footstep sounds, a parry flash, the feel of a jump. We literally train the lobby to process these “regulars” instantly and autonomously, without distracting the managers upstairs. This is the realm of reflexes, “muscle memory,” and pure game feel.

2. «IGNORE IT!» — The order for our small, criminal sleights of hand. This is where we work magic by using perceptual blind spots. We distract the concierge with a bright flash at screen center while our accomplice programmers carry a grand piano out the back — i.e., stream assets or swap models to cheaper ones. This is a directive for smart optimization and seamless experience.

3. «SEND IT UPSTAIRS!» — The most important and delicate order. It concerns all new, critical guests — a hint about a new mechanic, a key environmental detail, an important line of dialogue. These are guests the concierge should pass through almost without looking, issuing an immediate pass to the second floor. We must prime him for them — just like with the airplane model example above! If he starts scrutinizing and trying to “handle it on the spot,” he may misclassify them as “background noise” and throw them out. Our task is to highlight these guests so they bypass the primary filter and reliably reach the lounge for further check-in.

If we condense our observations into a short staff memo for the hotel (and for us) it would read like this:

• RELY on sensory memory for instant feedback. It’s the foundation of your game feel.
• USE its blind spots for smart optimization. Players won’t notice what they aren’t looking at.
• DO NOT TRY to convey complex information through it. A tutorial text in a skippable pop-up that disappears in half a second is a guaranteed ghost.
• DO NOT ASSUME the player will notice two quick but unrelated changes. Their lobby won’t have time to process and connect them.

And what happens to the lucky few who receive a pass upstairs… we’ll discuss that as we climb the stairs.

III. Second Floor: The Lounge Bar.

Alright, this way please. Let’s leave the lobby’s hustle behind — the vibe here is different. Quieter, but I’d say far more tense. This is the lounge bar or — in the language of our investigation — Short-Term Memory.

The Lounge: Short-Term Memory.

Only those guests whom concierge Attention deemed worthy get upstairs. But here’s the twist: under the lounge sign, our hotel hides two establishments at once. The first is the hall itself — a place for guests to stay briefly (that very Short-Term Memory). The second is the bar where the real work happens: idea-cocktails are mixed, negotiations happen between new guests and long-term residents, and decisions are made. That’s Working (or Operational) Memory.

Behind the counter rules our prime suspect: the Bartender. Perpetually fidgety, with tired eyes and a nervously twitching mustache, he juggles a shaker, an order pad, and an old rotary phone that never stops ringing. He looks like someone who hasn’t had a vacation in ten years and is desperately trying to hold a thousand details in his head at once so the whole hotel doesn’t fall apart. Don’t let the shabby vest and sour face fool you. This man is the most important big shot in the entire hotel. More on that later.

Right now we care about his workstation, because that’s where this floor’s main oddity hides. Look closely. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… 6, 7! 8? Oh, 9! Yes — the counter has only 7±2 stools. Sometimes, if luck is on our side, the Bartender pulls out a couple more from storage; on a truly hectic day, two might be removed altogether “for sanitation.”

Why so cramped? Sadly, it’s not our quirk. They say the secret of the stools was first cracked by a meticulous detective named Miller (you can skim his case here: «The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two 1956»). He found that our Bartender, no matter how hard he tries, simply cannot hold and properly serve more than 7±2 guests at once.

Think the manager is just lazy? Then allow me, your doorman, a small investigative experiment. I’ll ask you to read the next paragraph carefully — but only once. Try to remember as many digits and first letters of key words as you can. After reading, don’t peek — jump right to the question below. Play fair!

Cat ate 8 blue Fish and 2 Meatballs. Train number 74 rushed north at 9 miles per hour. Zebra bought 5 Watermelons and 16 Mandarins.

Now, please — without peeking — try to write down or just say all the numbers and first letters you remember. Take a minute.

Done? Counted? Unless you’re a photographic-memory genius (or cheated), your list will have about 7±2 correct items. You can check. Such is the harsh truth of our hotel: the bar counter in your player’s head is tiny. And our poor Bartender proves it daily. Anything beyond those seven stools gets dropped, mixed up, or flat-out refused.

But don’t write the Bartender off yet. He has a few crafty tricks tucked into that frayed vest — enough to do real magic with just seven stools. For instance, I’m sure you’ll struggle to remember this number:

1–7–7–6–3–1–4–1–6–0–9–2–5

«Ugh, why would I? It’s meaningless gibberish! My Wi-Fi router password looked like that — I changed it!»

You’d be right! Seen this way, those thirteen lonely guests have ZERO chance of befriending our serious friend. He’ll just shrug and point to the door.

But magic begins when we, the architects, give those nameless guests a shared story — we group them. When we turn nonsense into meaningful “chunks.” Look again:

1776 — Declaration of Independence.

3.1416 — the pi number.

09/25 — the month and year of this article’s publication.

This trick is called “chunking” (grouping).

(For returning readers: don’t confuse this with affordances. An affordance is a property of an object that “suggests” how to interact with it — say, a button that screams “PRESS ME!”. Chunking is a purely cognitive trick — binding disparate elements into a single meaningful group to cheat the memory limit. Those same buttons might become a tab in Settings!)

And this trick is one of the more interesting tools in our kit!

• How do you remember the pickaxe recipe in Minecraft? You don’t memorize “one plank top-left, one plank top-center”… and so on. No! You retain a single image — one chunk — the silhouette of the pickaxe (with a dash of affordance here — heh). Nine crafting-grid cells collapse into one gestalt.
• How do you navigate hundreds of spells in Baldur’s Gate 3? You don’t keep them all in your head. You think in chunks: Evocation school, level-1 spells, ritual spells. The UI itself helps you group information so our poor Bartender doesn’t explode.

Now he has a chance not only to serve everyone but to give each guest proper attention — maybe even befriend someone and escort them to the third floor. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Even with these tricks, second-floor service is never guaranteed.

Imagine you load our Bartender with a complex task — mixing an exotic cocktail from a convoluted recipe. While he’s sweating bullets to solve it, one guest gets up and leaves, and another takes the seat. Our Bartender, fully absorbed in the work, doesn’t even notice the switch and serves the drink to the newcomer! (Here’s the CCTV footage of the phenomenon known as «The “Door” Study»)!

Brazen? Yes. But that’s reality. If some guests demand too much attention, others will get up and leave.

• Think chess! While you’re engrossed in calculating a tricky knight fork three moves deep, you completely miss that an enemy bishop on the far side is already eyeing your queen.
• Or in an RTS: while micro-managing in the heat of battle, you might totally miss that you’ve run out of a crucial resource. The guest “Watch your gold” was shoved aside by the louder “SAVE THE ARMY!”.

And right here, in the bustle at the counter, is where that nasty feeling is born — the player thinks the game tricked them. And who will they blame? Not their exhausted Bartender. Oh no. They’ll blame the hotel — poor service, unclear rules, hidden small print, chaotic guests! Players rarely admit their own inattention. Our advice to staff: don’t let it come to this. Unless, of course, paranoia and a sense of “I’m missing something” is your venue’s intended signature.

So how do these disappearances differ from those in the lobby? The first-floor ghosts are guests the concierge never even noticed. Here, in the lounge, the guest was sitting on a stool — they WERE being processed! — but got pushed out by a louder, needier one.

Ah, and one more staffer I almost forgot. See that bruiser in the corner pretending to read a newspaper? That’s our head of security — Stress. Many Game Designers fear him and keep their distance, thinking he’s a source of frustration. In truth, he’s a great guy.

He just takes the boss’s failures too much to heart. To him there are no shades of gray — only triumph or disaster. When he senses the Bartender is about to panic, he “rescues” him the only way he knows — by tossing everyone out. He literally forms a wall at the counter, barring new guests from even approaching the stools to give his boss a second to breathe. That’s the exam moment when you stare at the ticket and your head goes blank — Stress simply won’t let anyone near the Bartender.

But when they sync up… oh, it’s pure art! Think of that clutch round in a competitive game — one versus five. Heart pounding, palms sweating. Stress steps up to the counter. He glares at the freeloaders — “thoughts about the score,” “fear of losing,” “what chat will say” — and they go silent or leave. He imposes order in front of the bar so the Bartender can focus on the essentials: “Aim,” “Listen,” “Move.” And then… the last enemy falls. Victory. The team screams in voice chat. Euphoria floods you.

And Stress? No handshakes. No thanks. He quietly retreats to his corner, straightens his tie, and lifts the newspaper again. His job is done. He doesn’t join celebrations — that’s not his place. His only reward is your elation — that brief flash of pure triumph. As for the cocktail of adrenaline and dopamine now coursing through your veins… consider it his parting gift, a drink he leaves on the counter before anyone starts fearing him again.

Okay — I nudged the narrative a bit to make him look like an underrated outsider! In game design he’s actually well-loved, just under a different name — “tension.” The whole drama is the classic “tension → release” cycle, one of the strongest tools for engagement.

(There are tons of great videos on this, for example «Tension vs Stress in Game Design», and these two are like twin brothers covering it from different angles: «How Games Create Tension» and «How Do Video Games Create Tension?»)

As one quote from those videos puts it:

«Tension is created when the players have enough information to formulate questions but not enough to fully answer them, resulting in a situation where the player is left anticipation of a resolution to those questions».

Drop the metaphors and the whole stools-and-bouncer saga boils down to this:

Short-term memory is the bottleneck — the player’s key cognitive constraint. Our job as designers isn’t to break it, but to guide information through it wisely.

We must respect the 7±2 limit and structure data whenever possible using every trick we have (including “chunking”!) — via UI, grouping abilities, and clear patterns. We must understand that any new, high-priority task will inevitably evict older, low-priority info from this buffer and design feedback accordingly to avoid frustration. It’s a temporary store, nothing more. And for active work with it…

… we need a backstage pass.

Allow me to take you behind the counter — into the “kitchen” where he preps sly mnemonic “snacks” to keep the most important patrons from leaving, and from where he dials up long-term residents on the third floor using that old rotary phone. Because right here, in this tight little nook, is his actual office.

Behind the Bar: Working Memory

Working — or operational — memory isn’t just another label. It’s the elite subspecies of short-term memory that lets us not only store things briefly, but actively process them. And now I’m taking you where ordinary guests aren’t allowed. Peek behind the counter, into the inner sanctum. See our Bartender? Quick as he seems, he’s got, like the rest of us, only two hands, two feet, and one head on his shoulders.

Let’s watch him at work. I’ll ask you to add two numbers in your head: 2953 and 569. No rush — we’ve got time.

…

Well then, if nothing distracted you, during this seemingly simple action your own Bartender pulled off a full operation. You had to keep the original numbers “on the desk” while performing arithmetic on them. The thought process might have sounded like this:

— «Okay, 2953 plus 569…»

— «Ones first: 3 plus 9 makes 12. Keep the 2, carry the ten.»

— «Next: 50 plus 60 makes 110 — don’t forget that carry. Total 120. Great, we’ve got… 22.»

— «Now the hundreds: 900 plus 500 makes 1400 — plus the hundred from the previous step. 1500.»

— «And the remaining 2000. Put it together… 3522. Done!»

If I now ask you for the original numbers or the final result, you’ll likely recall them easily. But here’s the question: what was the sum of the hundreds before you added the carry from the tens? You’ll probably stall. That’s normal! Intermediate results get wiped the moment they’re no longer needed.

It’s always like this. We remember the beginnings and endings of trailers, films, and books better than the middle. That holds for an entire work — and for a level, a quest, even a single dialogue. This quirk of our Bartender is both his greatest strength and his curse.

As you can see, space behind the counter — in this “kitchen” — is tight. If the bar stools can seat up to seven guests, the Bartender can actively juggle only three or four tasks at once. While he’s dialing a third-floor resident on the phone, pouring whiskey for a new guest so they don’t leave, and trying to introduce two others — he’s already at the limit. Add one more task and something will go wrong: the drink spills, the phone message garbles, the guests start bickering.

This memory type is the organizer — it handles complex cognitive tasks and plays a key role in controlled attention and logical reasoning. Which is why we must understand its limits. To fully grasp them, we have to open one more nesting doll.

Because we only have two tools at our disposal — two stores for different kinds of information. First, his visuospatial notepad, where he sketches everything he sees: maps, guests, furniture layout. Second, the old rotary phonological loop phone, through which he receives and subvocally repeats all auditory information: names, dialogues, melodies.

Give him a literal notebook and phone, or treat them as his eyes and ears — same idea. He has only two hands, and he CANNOT use both tools equally well at the same time if both demand complex work.

Now, let’s see what happens when a professional con artist drops by. He shows our Bartender one thing, but whispers something different in his ear — the whole system freezes for a heartbeat. They say this trickster who loves stumping staff is named Stroop. (You can read the dossier on this swindler here: «Stroop Test»).

Let’s torment our manager — and you — once more. Below is an image with a pile of color words. Your task is to not read them, but as fast as possible say aloud the COLOR they’re printed in. Ready?

Feel that… grind in your head? The gears catching for a split second? That’s the conflict. Your phonological “phone” reflexively reads the word “purple”. But your visual “notepad” simultaneously sees it’s written in red. Your poor Bartender receives two contradictory commands at once and stalls for a moment, trying to decide which to trust.

This little experiment shows what happens when two processing channels come into direct conflict. But that’s not always the case, right?

Julius Caesar bragged about doing two things at once. Many still do. Truth is, we’re all roughly the same here. If I turn on your favorite song and you start singing along (loading your “phone”), you can still draw, wash dishes, or drive a familiar route (using the “notepad”) without much trouble.

But as the task gets harder, the system starts to fail. If you’re driving on an unfamiliar road, your “notepad” overloads and you’ll instinctively lower the music to free resources. If your boss calls with an important task mid-drive, your “phone” is busy and you’ll slow down to avoid overloading the “notepad.” And if I ask you to sing along and read a different text aloud at the same time, either the song becomes mumbling or the text turns into word salad. One phone, two lines — that’s not how it works.

What’s happening in our hotel then? When the Bartender is overloaded with “notepad” work, he simply stops picking up the “phone.” Important guests can’t even get through. And vice versa.

Crucially: these aren’t the lobby’s ghosts — the ones never noticed. Nor the guests who got pushed off a stool. These are guests the Bartender consciously ignored because he was up to his eyeballs in something else.

• Think Red Dead Redemption 2. You’re riding through the woods, admiring the scenery, tracking the mini-map, trying not to hit a tree — all loading the “notepad.” Meanwhile, characters deliver a sprawling conversation about their plans. If you’re not near-native in English, your “phone” can’t keep up. You either miss half the dialogue or you hit that tree.
• Or — heaven help us — Overcooked. Your “notepad” is panicking, trying to track three ticking stovetop timers, two new tickets at the top, and the treacherous absence of clean plates. Right then your “phone” explodes with your teammate yelling: “NEED A PLATE! CHOP TOMATO! MEAT’S BURNING!” Your poor Bartender drops EVERYTHING. He cannot watch the fire and follow commands at once. Guests blush, tremble with rage, and storm out! The timer TICKS, tomatoes DROP, meat BURNS, plates are GONE, your partner YELLS… AAAAAAA!

Oh! My apologies, monsieur. Seems we caught the staff in the midst of, uh… an operational crisis. Let’s leave our Bartender to his… duties. This way — we’ll step into a quieter corner of the floor. We could all use a breather.

Because beneath all this clatter — the shouting and charred steaks — lies a simple, inexorable truth. Bottom line: true multitasking is hard for us, and we’re bad at realizing just how hard. The Bartender’s attentional resources — his workspace, the stools, and the man himself — are finite, which is critical for working memory. And that directly affects how well a guest will be remembered — whether they’ll get a pass to the third floor at all.

From a memory-formation standpoint, only one thing matters: the more actively and diligently our Bartender works a guest’s “order” in his kitchen — the more transformations he performs — the higher the chance that guest will not merely leave, but become an honored resident.

That’s why learning by doing is more effective than memorizing a handout. When a player performs a real action — jumps a gap, combines items, uses an ability — their working memory, our Bartender, is firing on all cylinders. He pulls out the notepad, picks up the phone, cross-checks the data.

And what happens when we just show a wall of rules text? The player’s task is to press Y to acknowledge. That requires no deliberate impulse. For our Bartender it’s a trivial job. Accordingly, that guest’s priority is zero. He’ll nod, let it pass by his ears, and forget it immediately. Why did that guest even show up? Who was he again? Huh? What? Where were we?

I’m sure you feel it too: we’re much more willing to spend time on an energetic, charismatic guest with a gripping story or… ooooo… (mysterious music should play here) a cloaked stranger speaking in riddles — than on a dreary door-to-door salesman with a manual under his arm. Our Bartender is no different. He remembers the one who made him work, think, be surprised — the one who was interesting.

Dossier: The Bartender’s Notes

So, monsieur, we’ve inspected the second floor. And as you’ve noticed, it’s the narrowest and most important choke point in the whole hotel. Here, in the hands of our weary yet vital Bartender, the fate of every guest is decided: will they become a fleeting memory, or earn a chance at eternal life on the third floor? Our job as Game Designers is not to be yet another irritant, but a competent, empathetic manager.

All our work with him boils down to a few simple, ironclad directives:

1. «DO NOT OVERLOAD THE BAR!» — This is the prime rule. Our Bartender has only 7±2 stools. Anything beyond that — UI elements, active quests, win conditions — will either be ignored or will shove something else off a seat. Our job is to clear his counter. Push information outside his head: into readable icons, a quest log, a mini-map. Don’t make the player carry what can and should be displayed on screen.

• And here I’ll add a personal, purely practical observation I stumbled into — my ”two-thirds rule”. In short: regardless of how many stools are occupied, whether three or all nine, no more than two thirds of them are ever in our Bartender’s immediate, active focus. The rest sit in an attentional “blind spot,” and switching to them takes deliberate effort. You won’t find hard science for this beyond my experience. But since you’re reading this article, feel free to adopt it — or better yet, challenge it in practice and tell me in the comments!

2. «GROUP THE GUESTS!» — Lonely, unconnected guests are the Bartender’s worst nightmare. He confuses and forgets them fast. Our task is to meet them at the door and form meaningful parties right away. That’s “chunking.” Don’t hand the player 20 separate spells — give them 4 magic schools with 5 spells each. Don’t dump 50 crafting components — sort them by category in the inventory. It’s the best help you can give your overworked staffer, freeing precious mental resources.

3. «DON’T OCCUPY BOTH HANDS!» — Our Bartender has only two tools: a visual “notepad” and an auditory “phone.” Don’t force him to sketch a complex blueprint and hold a crucial call at the same time. Separate critical information. If a tense fight demands full visual focus, don’t deliver key plot beats via dialogue. And vice versa. Let him focus on one channel, or he’ll drop either the notepad or the phone. At any given moment, you as the designer must decide clearly which channel — visual or auditory — has priority.

4. «GIVE AN INTERESTING ORDER!» — And finally, the most important thing. The Bartender remembers not what he was told, but what he worked on. A simple instruction read and dismissed with a button press is a dull order he’ll forget in a second. Don’t expect players to retain a rule from a passive tutorial. Make them apply it, fail, try again, and finally succeed. That’s the most reliable way to turn a temporary guest into a resident.

Once again, if we compress our observations into a short staff memo, it reads like this:

• SIMPLIFY the interface and information flow — don’t force the player to juggle more than 5–7 active elements at once.
• GROUP related items (in inventory, skill trees, quest logs) so the player can process them as a single whole.
• SEPARATE channels of perception — don’t make critical audio and visual cues compete for attention.
• ENGAGE the player through doing — the best tutorial is an interesting problem to solve.

And what happens when our Bartender likes a guest so much that he decides not just to serve them, but to issue a permanent pass? Well, for that we’ll have to climb to our hotel’s final, most mysterious floor.

IV. Third Floor: The Rooms.

There’s only one elevator up here — very quiet. Our investigation is essentially nearing its end, because all the important guests, including you, have made it here — to Long-Term Memory. The information has settled. But… remember I mentioned murders? Real murders. The ghosts and the guests pushed off their stools were minor offenses. The real tragedy unfolds right here. It’s time to learn who our Bartender keeps calling so desperately — and why those calls so often go unanswered.

There’s no staff on this floor. No concierges, no bouncers. Only endless corridors and countless rooms. The Bartender’s calls from the second floor go straight into these rooms.

Our long-term memory is a system storing all kinds of information: from the sequence of moves for driving a car to the name of your first pet. And whereas sensory and working memory are bound by strict limits, long-term memory has, so far, shown no hard limits of time or capacity. In other words, potentially we can keep an unlimited number of guests for an unlimited time!

Whoa… do we really have that many rooms? But let me repeat and emphasize — potentially! Before we talk about how to keep our guests safe and sound, I need to tell you about two kinds of rooms in this maze.

In the Archive Wing (Explicit Memory), the guests who can be described in words take up residence. This is memory for facts and events. It includes the names of characters from your favorite RPG, Elden Ring’s tangled lore, your Path of Exile build, plot twists of the last game you finished, and that moment you beat a tough boss for the first time. In essence, that’s memory for facts (semantic) and for events (episodic).

In the Procedural Wing (Implicit Memory) live the guests that can’t be put into words — only shown. This is memory for actions, which doesn’t require conscious recall. The muscle memory for perfect parries in Sekiro, the key combos for calling stratagems in Helldivers 2, the skill of driving, or the instinct to reload after a short burst in a shooter.

So, super briefly so we don’t drown in terms:

• Explicit memory is what you “know.”
• Implicit memory is what you “can do.”

And we’ll go through them quickly now.

Left Wing: Implicit Memory

Let’s start with the wing most interesting to us as architects of hotels and game worlds — the Procedural (Implicit) one. Here our residents don’t just sit in their rooms; they constantly interact, forming invisible connections and habits. And there are two tricks we can and will use all the time: so-called “priming” and “implicit learning.”

The first trick — priming — is as simple as two plus two. Speaking of simple: the moment you read “as simple as…”, your brain was ready for the rest. Let’s test that again. Here are a few phrases — finish them yourself (and if you’re not a native English reader, feel free to recall the equivalent “winged phrases” from your own language — the point stands):

• No pain, no…
• The early bird catches the…
• May the Force be…

Notice it? You didn’t even think — your brain filled in the missing word. This mechanism is similar to old T9 on phones and to what modern AI does so well — we’re great at predicting the next word in a familiar context. Hear “bread,” and your brain readies “butter.” If you played word associations as a kid, you know exactly what I mean. And it’s incredibly useful in game design.

• Think of the hit marker the Call of Duty series popularized. Today, booting up almost any new shooter, you subconsciously expect that visual and audio feedback. Your brain is primed by years of play. Same with controls: seeing W move you forward, your fingers instinctively find A, S, D; to crouch you’ll hunt for CTRL or C. We don’t need a tutorial for the basics because the industry has been priming us for these standards for years.
• Throughout a level you fight small spider-bots. Before attacking, they emit a distinctive chirp, and their mandibles flash red. You learn to react to this dual signal. Then you meet a giant boss and, mid-fight, it emits that same chirp, its massive claws flash red. You don’t need a tutorial. Your brain, primed by earlier skirmishes, instantly puts two and two together: the attack pattern will be the same — just scaled up.

Honestly, even I — telling you all this — keep priming you by bolding key terms so your brain subconsciously tags them as important. But there’s a darker, deeper trick — the one that turns simple associations into reinforced reflexes. Its name is “implicit learning”.

Behind that odd label hides something painfully familiar. You know how associations work. In the morning you reach for coffee to finally wake up. A bakery smell on your commute briefly throws you back to childhood. Sitting at your desk, you reflexively put your phone on charge and turn on music.

All of these are little bells that trigger our residents in the Procedural Wing. For them, they’re calls to action. The coffee ritual calms and sets your mood. Scents evoke memories. Pre-work actions prep you for upcoming tasks. It’s the power of habit — and if harnessed carefully, it’s magic.

Many know Pavlov’s experiment: the dog salivating at a bell, anticipating food. That bell rings in your player’s head constantly. And using this essentially manipulative method… Game Designers can find it scary.

Here I must pause, as your doorman, and point to the moral dilemma. Using such powerful psychological tools — and design in general — places huge responsibility not only on the player but on us. A true doorman uses knowledge of guests’ habits to make their stay richer and kinder. He doesn’t slip them drugs or run cons.

But some cross to the dark side. They use this knowledge to build a casino disguised as a hotel. That’s the fundamental difference between Balatro, where the joy of building hands is the reward, and a real casino, where the same dopamine loop exists only to drain your wallet. This step over the line is what enraged many developers (even more than players!) during EA’s lootbox scandal. Half the mobile market runs on these tricks pushed to the extreme.

So before we go on, I’ll simply say — please be careful with this knowledge.

Alright — the essence is simple! The difference between priming and implicit learning is fundamental, even if not obvious. Priming is a contextual cue. It tunes the player, creates expectations based on prior experience, but it doesn’t forge new automatic behavior. Implicit learning, on the other hand, is conditioning at the reflex level. It’s the process of building a strong, unconscious link between a specific stimulus (a sound, a color, an animation) and an immediate outcome (danger, reward, failure).

Priming whispers:

«Be ready — a boss might be near.»

Implicit learning yells:

«ALERT! TAKE COVER RIGHT NOW!»

Accordingly, these reflexes let us do things like:

• Think Metal Gear Solid. That alert sound when you’re spotted. The first time it’s just a sound. By the fifth, it’s a panic trigger. Your heart speeds up, your fingers reach for “prone,” your eyes hunt for cover. No text taught you this. The game simply paired that sound with negative consequences over and over.
• Or the opposite — the coin pickup chime in Super Mario. That short, cheerful “ding!” isn’t just feedback. It’s a micro-dose of dopamine tied directly to the action. The game doesn’t say “collect coins, that’s good.” It trains you to enjoy it at the most basic, reflexive level.

To cement it: these residents are the ones who stay with us the longest. As they say, “once you learn to ride a bike, you don’t forget.” But this is delicate stuff — working with this memory type carelessly yields nothing. You can’t build a complex RPG system or a branching narrative on reflexes alone. This tool suits fundamental, constantly repeated actions.

So, please, remember one thing:

Implicit memory isn’t about the player knowing what to do. It’s about them feeling what to do.

On that note, we can leave the Procedural Wing in peace. Of course, there are many more tricks and habits there, but we care about the big picture. And as you’ve noticed, almost no one dies here. Residents either live forever or simply move next door — to the Archive Wing (Explicit Memory). And here, paradoxically — in the literal final part of our journey — we’ll have to talk not about clever tricks, but about… inevitable losses.

Right Wing: Explicit Memory

As you’ll remember, this wing houses knowledge. Facts, events, names, rules. To summon a resident from a room, you have to dial the full number, wait for them to pick up, and politely ask them to come down. And here, if we don’t want to doom our residents, we have just a couple of ways to avoid a tragic end.

See… another detective was here before us. A dour German named Hermann Ebbinghaus. And, as the dusty reports on the desks show, he uncovered a terrifying regularity in this wing. He called it the «Forgetting Curve». This — I don’t fear the word — catastrophic graph is one of the most important pieces of evidence in our entire case.

And I assure you: depending on how long you’ve been reading, you’ve already forgotten at least some of the words I asked you to remember at the very beginning. The text is roughly a half-hour read, but I know many of you are reading in chunks. And in truth… I! just now, with my own hands, killed those three guests in your head — unless you save them. You have…

5…

4..

Time is running out!

2!

1!!!

DONE.

Congratulations. You just freed up a couple of rooms — if you didn’t recall that I meant marshmallow, gravity, and Sisyphus. But I don’t blame you! And please don’t blame me. Frankly, those residents… just stopped being useful to you.

Time is relentless, and our brain never stops working — which means it never stops forgetting. We simply cannot keep our focus on one object for too long. So that graph tells us the following.

Within 20 minutes of checking into the Archive Wing, about 40% of guests vanish without a trace. After one day, that figure exceeds 70%!!! SEVENTY PERCENT!

It’s worth noting, though, that this “forgetting curve” looks so scary mostly when we talk about meaningless information learned without purpose. In a well-designed game (which is what we’re building) it will look different. If the material evokes emotion, demands deep processing, and repeats across contexts, the odds of forgetting drop dramatically. But — and this is important — even in ideal conditions, pushing long-term retention above 50% is a titanic task.

Moreover, some information types stick more naturally than others. New material embeds better if it’s associated with something already known. Simple is easier than complex. Organized is easier than chaotic. These are simple truths we, ladies and gentlemen, should already have absorbed!

We’ll apply all of this with one last piece of knowledge — the tool that puts a final period in our investigation: the spacing effect in design (or, the polar opposite of the “Forgetting Curve,” our good friend the “Learning Curve”).

There’s a problem: our guests disappear from their rooms. How do we fix it? DON’T LET THEM DISAPPEAR! Yes — it’s that simple. We’ll design service such that residents have neither the chance nor the desire to leave our hotel. Everything we’ve learned boils down to one thing: to check in, check out, and summon the right guests and residents to the lounge at the right times.

A sense of measure and tact matters — it’s… good doorman manners. No matter how hungry you are, you wouldn’t swallow a whole burger in one bite. Zero pleasure. The “fill the stomach” function might be met, but the process — the experience — is gone. Books? Have you ever tried to gulp down a dense treatise in one evening? I have. Know what I got from it? Exactly — nothing.

Likewise, as architects, we must NEVER put the player in a situation where all information is dumped at once, never reinforced, never sorted, violating every rule of our hotel. True masters know WHY the player needs information, WHEN to present it, HOW to present it, and WHAT to accompany it with.

For instance, many Nintendo games teach extremely well. Take any classic The Legend of Zelda:

• First you learn to swing a sword (A). The game feeds you bushes to cut for rupees (A1), then a simple, sluggish enemy you can just click down (A2). Mechanic A is reinforced in two contexts: exploration and attack.
• Later you get a shield and learn to block (B). An enemy appears who shoots at you; you reflect their projectiles while standing still (B1).
• You use the sword again to hit a wall crystal switch (A3).
• Then the game throws in a shielded enemy. You can’t just hit (A). You must wait for their windup, block with your shield (B), and then, in the brief vulnerability window, strike with the sword (A).
• Thus the game makes you combine two learned mechanics into a new tactical sequence (BA1).

Together, this forms an ideal learning curve: steady reminders via practice, at tuned intervals, that not only reinforce, but engrave the mechanic into memory.

But here’s the snag: your player still has a dozen unplayed games in Steam; friends are dragging them into a new co-op; tomorrow is Monday and there’s work; the boss has an urgent task — and… the stomach growls; dinner won’t cook itself!

Reality always wins. Our job is to figure out the ideal session length during onboarding and design — whether 20 minutes or a couple of hours — and build around it. Sure, these bounds can blur in development, but by mapping the route early you can pre-plan convenient stopping points.

I love quoting Huizinga, so I won’t resist now. The “magic circle” that games create is powerful yet fragile. It’s a circle — it has boundaries. Thoughts from the outside world seep in less often, but the circle itself won’t keep tapping your shoulder amid real-life bustle. So never blur that boundary into haze or wall it off entirely. Our goal is a comfortable setup where the player isn’t afraid to step out — and, crucially, wants to and can easily step back in.

The player’s session will end sooner or later. Better that you choose where it’s comfortable to pause — with save points and clear chapters — than drain their memory resources by making every moment critical.

Also, controls are even more prone to being forgotten. After your strategy game, the player might hop to a shooter, then switch from PC to console. So as odd as it sounds — however “standard” your layout — keep gentle reminders of key actions close at hand.

Everything in moderation. Don’t cram a thousand pop-ups — but don’t abandon the player either. Care for them the way you’d want to be cared for. Beyond that line is no longer care, but overprotection — the very “design out of fear” we’re not fond of here!

These “ifs” and “buts” aren’t to leave you hanging. On your project, you’ll face these dilemmas — and you’ll have to decide. There’s no universal recipe. But remembering two things is vital: your tools, and the dilemmas your player faces. How well you understand both determines the quality of your game’s designed experience.

Everyone chooses the weapons they can afford. Some track how long a player’s been away and choose which hints to show. Others temporarily make enemies a bit weaker so the player can get back in shape. I’m sure you’ll invent a couple of mechanics tailored to your game to help players not forget something very, very important! In any case, I want to end on a line I adore:

All of this is UX in service of the player.

And with that… we close our final case file.

Dossier: The Clockwork Killer

So, monsieur, the case is closed. We’ve found our killer. He’s elusive, invisible, utterly merciless. His name — Time. His weapon — Forgetting. He doesn’t storm the hotel with a gun. He simply waits. Waits for us to look away, for our Bartender to be busy, for the player to quit the game. Then, quietly, one by one, he leads our Guests out of their rooms and erases any mention of them from the register. To resist this silent horror — and strengthen our security department — the hotel staff has only three directives:

1. «MAKE THE GUESTS INTERESTING!» — We can’t just check a Guest into a room and hope for the best. We must turn them into a welcome Resident. Link new information to what’s already known. Wrap complex rules in simple images. Turn facts into feelings. And above all — reinforce what the player knows (Archive Wing) with what they can do (Procedural Wing). Don’t let a rule live only in a manual — make it part of action.
2. «REMIND THE GUESTS!» — This is the very “spacing effect.” You can’t introduce a mechanic in Act I and expect the player to recall it in Act III. We must periodically, at well-tuned intervals, summon our Residents to the lounge bar. Bring back old mechanics in new contexts. Set tasks that require combining old and new knowledge. Don’t let the player forget what you’ve already taught them.
3. «DON’T LOCK THE HOTEL DOORS!» — This is respect for reality. The player will always leave our hotel. Our job isn’t to stop them — it’s to make their return as comfortable as possible. Design clear save points, keep a quest log, create gentle reminder systems. Don’t punish players for taking a break. The scariest enemy of memory isn’t time inside the game — it’s time spent away from it. Convenient saves, concise catch-up summaries, subtle control reminders — all of it tells the player: «We remember you and we’re waiting. Your room is ready.»

We’ve reached the final chapter of our staff memo. It’s the most important one — because it’s not about greeting a Guest, but about making them love our hotel and stay forever.

• LINK new knowledge to existing experience. Information without a memory “hook” is the first candidate for oblivion.
• STRENGTHEN learned material through spaced repetition across contexts. A mechanic shown once is a mechanic forgotten.
• TURN passive knowledge into active skill. A rule applied in practice is remembered an order of magnitude better than a line in a tutorial.
• DESIGN for returning, not just first-time play. Remember: the chief enemy of memory isn’t difficulty — it’s the break between sessions.

With that, our long — and hopefully not too tiring — investigation comes to an end. But before I leave you, allow me a few parting words.

V. Conclusion: Handing Back the Room Key.

Phew, that’s it… I’m taking off this stuffy tailcoat, tossing the monocle, and dropping the manners that aren’t really mine. Time to lay the cards on the table — but first, allow me a bow for making it this far! Huge thanks!

With all these metaphors, I — your humble servant… ugh, there I go again…

Anyway: Slepok, the author of this blog — I’ve been trying the whole time to prevent you from forgetting this piece and what’s inside it. This hotel, the doorman’s silly outfit, the detective story — all of it serves one purpose: to help YOU remember how memory works, just a little better.

I know some will find this text childish or convoluted; I’m sure a few will throw a stone at neural nets, saying most of it reads this way because I shamelessly kept smashing “send” in a chat. But that’s far from the truth — and the truth is simpler: I just wanted at least one out of ten readers to be able, someday, to tell someone about memory as if it were a fun detective story.

Game design is like that. Or at least, that’s how I want to see it.

Now a peek backstage. Most of this text was rewritten… countless times! Since this was more of a “breather” from other, more “serious” pieces, it’s probably the most tortured material of them all.

And, to be honest — albeit post factum — a lot draws on Celia Hodent’s «The Gamer’s Brain: How Neuroscience and UX Impact Game Design». In places I didn’t hesitate to paraphrase whole paragraphs. Still, there’s a big share of my own reflections and field notes — for two reasons.

First, I wanted to structure this knowledge for myself, so I can explain it better later — to my team, and to myself.

Second, to write something both USEFUL and INTERESTING.

I still feel the whole hotel-and-staff story is a bit ornate, BUT. I couldn’t not try! I often memorize things as logical images. For instance, when explaining to my parents what a Game Designer does, I always reach for a playing-cards metaphor:

If the developer is the printing press that produces 52 physical cards, and the artist is the one who draws the patterns on them, then the game designer invents the rules for “poker” or “war” — or maybe for a brand-new game no one’s seen yet!

They say a person dies twice: first when the heart stops, and second when their name is spoken for the last time. So let me end with something slightly counterintuitive:

I genuinely feel for the developers of Concorde, for the team behind Anthem, and even more for the lone indies whose games were never noticed among the thousands released on Steam every day. I feel for the old games that each year get harder to emulate or find in working shape.

Don’t get me wrong — a commercial flop is often deserved. But I’m sure no artist, no programmer, no designer ever woke up thinking:

«How about I make something today that everyone forgets in a week?»

The tragedy in these projects isn’t just the money lost. It’s the thousands of hours poured into crafting an experience that never spawned valid, valuable memories. When a game is forgotten, the work poured into it is, in effect, erased from cultural memory.

And that’s the point. The only medium we truly record our game onto is the human mind. All our work — the sleepless nights, the fights, the strokes of genius — exist in one place: the player’s head. The moment they turn the game off, all that remains is a memory. Good, bad — or worst of all, none.

We don’t design for computers. We design for people. And people… people forget.

See you where the secrets are even deeper → t.me/slepokNTe 👀

— The End —