Rich Kids and Cognitive Load

Your puny mind can’t handle all of this

In 1999, I bought the original PlayStation.

This was 5 years after it came out because I could finally afford it. I saved up my allowance money, holiday money, and birthday money to buy the gray box of my dreams. Sony had dropped the price to $99 (a huge amount for a seven year-old, but doable).

Each time I visited Costco or Office Depot, I’d scrounge through those game sale bins and buy a $5 game here or there. To this day, I still own only one Spyro game because the series kept its value pretty well and was never cheap enough.

A year later, I went home with a friend of mine whose family was much wealthier than mine. I walked into his living room and saw that he had a PlayStation and a Playstation 2 with just about every game that had ever come out for both. I couldn’t believe it!

I asked every question I could, quizzing my friend on every detail of the many objects I didn’t have. “Wow how cool is that Spyro game? Don’t you love how that ended?”

“I never got to the end.
The new one came out and I just played that.”

“Woah, what new powers do you get in that one?” I shot back like I’d missed so much. “I don’t know, my brother stepped on the disc after a few days,” he responded. “And anyway, I’ve moved on the the PlayStation 2. Do they make Spyro for that?”

Broke the disc!? Not using the Playstation!? Not knowing all the possible games you could buy!? Something inside me snapped. How could you treat something so valuable and amazing with such little care?

In my world, each game disc was so precious and more valuable than the last. Not only did I play each game to its full extent, but I also cleaned and cared for the discs because I knew I wouldn’t have the money to buy another.

I was jealous of him. But I’d come to learn he owned so many things that he couldn’t see a single game for everything it was. He could only see his library.

The more things you have to think about, the less you can care about each individually.

Just as Dunbar’s number proposes that there’s a limit to the amount of stable social relationships a person can have, there exists a similar limit on the amount of items one person can keep in consideration at one time. It is called Cognitive Load Theory.

As a designer, this affects me every day. How complicated the project is, the more meetings I have to take part in, the more projects on my plate at once, or even concerns I have in my personal life, the less I can think about in my designs.

(Difficulty - Experience) × (Tasks + Extraneous Info)
=
Total Cognitive Load

I’ve written about how successful social products have initially been simple. Social products and human nature in general are complicated moving targets. By keeping concepts simple, you lower the difficulty and extraneous information for yourself and your users. This benefit allows for faster experimentation and fine-tuning on core ideas before a larger scope makes your cognitive load higher.

This of course applies to more than design, it applies to everything you do. If you ever want to do something well, removing all other cognitive tasks from your way allows you more memory to think about the task at hand.

This past month, I purchased the new PlayStation 4. I have more money than when I was seven (one would hope). If I wanted to, I could buy every game released for the system. As this thought fired through my brain, I flashed back to my conversation with my wealthy friend 13 years ago.

I bought one game and I care for it a lot.