Defining "experience"

In many posts on this site, I deal with the subject "user experience" in games. However, I have said little about the term "experience" per se. And I believe that a brief discussion about this topic is essential to expand possibilities in the gaming field.



Different words, terms, expressions, and ideas are so common in our daily lives that we rarely stop to pay attention to their meanings; “experience” is one of them. Much because we live in a world in which this word is used in excess, we end up not paying attention to what it means. Today, we talk about "gastronomic experiences", "entertainment experiences", "educational experiences" etc. We can find "experience" everywhere.

However, if we have a dictionary in hand, we will find that the word “experience” is related to two great fields: the scientific and the philosophical. In the scientific field, “experience” is a term directly correlated with an experiment to prove a hypothesis. We have – for example – experiments in laboratories to scientifically prove something that arose from an empirical hypothesis. In this sense, “experience” derives from the Latin “experientia”, which is the action and effect of experimenting with the aim of discovering or proving certain phenomena.

But the word “experience” analyzed under a philosophical bias has a slightly different meaning. This meaning defined by the Oxford dictionary says, “any knowledge obtained through the senses”. In the game design field, we discuss both definitions, as they are good points for us (game designers) to architect memorable experiences for game users through experiments with prototypes, wireframes, beta versions and so on.

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