Chapter 1. Games Aren’t Cool

A friend holds out a phone and says, “This game is really fun. Take a look.”

What is the first thing you say when you see the screen? Nine times out of ten, it is this: “Oh… it looks like that other game.” Your friend insists it is fun, but your interest dies in the blink of an eye. You do not even bother swiping to the next screen.

“At some point, games stopped being cool.” When we hear this, we usually blame the games. Games these days all look alike, we say. They are churned out from the same mold. They no longer move us the way they once did. But is that really true? Are games genuinely being made worse?

The truth is precisely the opposite. Games are more sophisticated and spectacular than ever. Launch a game from thirty years ago today and its pixels look enormous, its controls stiff. Today’s game graphics approach cinema, and the phone in your hand is faster than the supercomputers of that era. By every objective measure, games have clearly become more impressive.

And yet they do not feel impressive. Why?

The answer is not in the games. It is in our eyes.

The games have not grown old. Rather, people’s eyes seem to have become too exacting at first glance. I will explain shortly why I say “seem.”

Everything Rides on the First Few Minutes

Let us begin with why this problem matters. Depending on how they are counted, the major app stores and game databases contain anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of games. Even when a user makes the considerable effort to choose your game from that ocean and install it, many leave within minutes of seeing the first screen. Deleting a game costs nothing. If it is even slightly confusing or boring, two taps make it disappear, and another free game takes its place.

In other words, the fate of content built over many months is decided in the first few minutes the user encounters it. A first experience is not merely “nice to have.” A brilliant boss fight, a painstakingly crafted story, and an intricate progression system can reach the user only after passing through the gateway of the first experience. Whether anything prepared beyond that point ever gets a chance to be seen depends on this gateway. Content that fails to pass through it might as well not exist.

One User’s First Two Minutes

Follow one scene. On the subway home from work, someone holding a phone in one hand is intrigued by an ad, installs a game, and opens the app when the download finishes. A company logo appears, followed by an unskippable intro video. In the meantime, the passenger beside him has watched three short-form clips. When the video ends, the game asks him to agree to the terms of service, then to create an account. He has yet to play the game for even one second.

Throughout those two minutes, his thumb hovers over the Back and Home buttons at the bottom of the screen. We have a few dozen seconds at most to hold him, yet the first thing he learns is not “this looks fun” but “this is a hassle.” The real fun we prepared lies beyond those two minutes, but he never reaches it. Designing the first experience means turning those two minutes to the user’s advantage.

Worn-Out Eyes

Why, then, does the user leave so quickly? Open an app store and scan the “Popular Games” list from top to bottom. The thumbnails look frighteningly alike. Whenever one game succeeds, dozens of imitations appear within months: identical-looking match-three puzzles, idle RPGs framed in almost the same composition, and ads that taunt you with question marks in an endless line. A user sees a new game and reflexively swipes past it: “This again.”

Outside games, the competition is fiercer still. Think of every screen your finger has swept past today: dozens of YouTube thumbnails, dozens of short-form videos, social feeds, webtoon panels, and product pages. Every one of those screens was made by some of the smartest people in the world using the most expensive data, all in pursuit of a single goal: seize attention at a glance. We pass through this barrage of first impressions hundreds of times each day.

To eyes trained this way, almost everything looks familiar. Open a new game and the first response is, “Oh, this looks like that one.” Earlier I said that our eyes “seem to have become too exacting” at first glance. Now we can be precise: the standard for novelty has not risen; the ocean of familiarity has widened. Before users ever reach your game, they have already seen too much.

That ocean will not shrink on its own. When a game succeeds, following its grammar is an economically rational way for creators to capture proven demand. Calling imitation lazy will not make it stop. As rational choices accumulate, the ocean of familiarity keeps expanding, and no one else will solve our problem of standing out at first glance within it.

This leads to the first and most important sentence in this book:

What hinders us is not ignorance, but familiarity.

We Suffer from the Same Condition

There is a more difficult truth. Users are not the only ones afflicted by this condition of familiarity. We who make things suffer from it too. After looking at the same first screen every day, nothing on it feels unfamiliar to us. The meaning of that tiny icon and the reason to press that button seem self-evident. We already know every rule and every source of fun in the game, so it is impossible for us to view the first screen without that knowledge. Thus, a creator can never see their own game’s first impression for the first time. Every act of first-experience design begins by accepting this uncomfortable fact. A little later, we will break down exactly where this condition blinds us into four mechanisms.

Games Are Now “New Content”

This book therefore uses a slightly different name for games. Rather than treating a game as an isolated “game,” it calls it New Content. The time a user spends on a game does not materialize in a vacuum. It is time that could have been spent watching YouTube, scrolling short-form video, or reading a webtoon. Our game’s real competitors are not merely other games in the same genre, but every form of content competing for the user’s thumb.

This changes the rules of the first experience completely. Users judge our game’s first screen not by “the standards of games,” but by the standards of whatever they were consuming a moment ago. It must move as fast as short-form video, read as instantly as YouTube, and let the finger advance as naturally as a webtoon. The moment we think of games only as games, we lose sight of the yardstick users actually bring in their hands. That is why the term “New Content” appears in the title of this book.

One more implication follows. The person this book seeks to retain is not the “gamer.” Gamers willingly spend time managing resources, overcoming difficult gates, and calculating the optimal move toward a goal. Even if the first screen is somewhat unfriendly, they are likely to dig in anyway. But there are far fewer of these people than we imagine. The people we truly need to win are ordinary non-gamers, whose habits are closer to entertainment consumption. They do not arrive resolved to “play a game.” They simply drift in while looking for something to fill the two minutes of one subway stop, an elevator ride, or the wait for a cup of coffee.

So an ordinary user does not ask about depth on the first screen. Put that user back in the two-minute scene and the questions are roughly these: “Can I start right now? Can I finish something within three minutes? Can I play without paying?” If the experience cannot pass these questions, the two minutes we borrowed return at once to short-form video. Designing the first experience is not about satisfying gamers more deeply. It is about wresting two minutes of an ordinary person’s time away from other content.

Let us be clear about the scope of this book. It is for games seeking mass-market expansion—for New Content that must bring in people from beyond the gaming audience. A game designed from the outset solely for core gamers is different. There, genre conventions may be an admission ticket rather than a burden, and unfriendliness may be an identity rather than a flaw. Some prescriptions in this book must be read in reverse. The gamer/non-gamer divide is itself only a provisional hypothesis; Chapters 6 and 7 will split it into multiple layers.

Why This Book Deliberately Makes the Familiar Strange

To stop something that familiarity has made invisible and question it again as though seeing it for the first time: this is defamiliarization. A good designer brings in a new user, asks them to launch the game for the first time, and watches without offering any help. Where does the user’s finger hesitate? Where do they frown and ask, “What is this?” By borrowing a first-time user’s eyes, the designer reconstructs the “first” that the team has lost.

This book performs that exercise on paper. We cannot seat a user beside us at every moment, so instead we revisit three words we use every day and mistakenly believe we understand. We ask about them as if encountering them for the first time:

Who is the user? Are they really a single person?
What is an experience? Is pressing a button an experience?
What does first mean? Is there only one first moment?

These three words are hidden inside the phrase “FTUE (First-Time User Experience).” We use the term so often that we feel we already know it. This book peels away that assumption one layer at a time and leaves a tool you can use in each place it exposes.

Words are not the only things to question afresh. Tutorial, quest, reward, level, and inventory are as natural as breathing to gamers, but to ordinary people they are unfamiliar signs whose meaning was never agreed upon. No one ever taught them that a yellow exclamation mark means “there is something to do here.” This book therefore disassembles not only the term “FTUE,” but the inherited conventions of game genres themselves, viewing them with first-time eyes. Each chapter selects one or two gaming conventions tied to its subject and asks again: “Is this a convention everyone knows, or only one that gamers know?”

What You Will Have When You Close This Book

Vague resolutions do not become designs. This book therefore turns the vague into something tangible, one piece at a time. Follow it to the end and you will have a map that separates the supposedly singular “user” into layers of identity; an immigration map marking whom to bring into our world; a list of one hundred first impressions a user encounters; and an instrument panel that unifies every decision under one question: “What are we trying to increase?” The vague becomes a list, and the list becomes a design. That is the whole of this book.

How to Read This Book

The main text is meant to be read. Complex tables, checklists, and fill-in worksheets have been collected at the back of the book in the appendices so that they do not clutter it. You have only one task in the main text: complete the “Design Notes” at the end of each chapter. Work through them one chapter at a time and, by the last chapter, the accumulated fields will form your own FTUE design document.

There is no need to hurry. This book is not an answer sheet, and only you know the answers that fit your game. What it provides is not an answer, but a sequence that lets you proceed carefully without leaving anything out.

So let us settle the point before we begin. Games have not become less impressive. The first experiences we must create have simply become that much harder.

We are no longer teaching beginners. We are deciding what experience to make “first” for people who already possess too many experiences.

That is the problem stated. Now we will break down how our enemy—familiarity—blinds us, mechanism by mechanism.

First, let us make one more distinction clear. Which is more dangerous, ignorance or familiarity? Intuition suggests ignorance: if people do not know, they cannot act. From the perspective of first-experience design, however, the opposite is true. Ignorance is comparatively easy to handle. Someone who does not know is willing to learn. Explain, and they listen. If they get stuck, they ask. They follow slowly.

The truly difficult opponent is the person who feels they already know. They do not intend to learn. They are less like a student entering a classroom for the first time than someone leaning back with folded arms and saying, “All right, show me what you’ve got.” At a glance they decide, “I know this,” and even if that judgment is wrong, they never look again. Most of the people standing before your game are of this kind. We will now separate into four mechanisms exactly where that familiarity blinds us.

Mechanism 1. The Expert’s Curse: What Is Obvious to Us Is Invisible to the User

One scene repeats endlessly in game development. The larger the studio, the more likely it is to bring in outside newcomers for a “playtest” before launch. There, a first-time tester wanders around unable to find a Start button or next-step indicator that seems “obvious to anyone” on the development team. Behind the monitor, the developer stamps their feet. “It’s right there—a huge button in the middle of the screen. How can they not see it?” To the tester, however, it is merely one graphic among many. It looks unmistakably like a “button” only to the developer, who has pressed it thousands of times. The company deliberately borrows a fresh pair of eyes because it knows that insiders can never see a first impression.

This is called the curse of knowledge: once you know something, you can no longer imagine what it feels like not to know it. (In one psychology experiment, people tapped out the rhythm of a song in their heads and expected about half their listeners to identify it. The actual success rate was 2.5 percent. The song in my head reaches someone else as nothing more than irregular tapping.)

Those of us who make games are in exactly this condition. The entire finished game is running inside our heads, so every tiny icon on the first screen has a clear meaning to us. To a first-time user, it is merely an indecipherable picture. Remember: a creator can never see their own game’s first impression for the first time.

Mechanism 2. Invisible Design: The Better It Works, the Less We See It

Remember searching forever for a menu in a game, or pressing icons at random because you could not tell what they did. Everyone notices experiences like these immediately. Bad design irritates us, so it is easy to see.

Truly good design does the opposite. It helps without drawing attention to itself. Designer Don Norman makes a related point: a well-designed door never makes us stop to wonder, “Do I push or pull?” It feels so natural that we are barely conscious the door is there.

Think of sending money to a friend through Toss or Kakao. It is so easy that if someone asks, “Why is it this easy?” you may struggle to answer. Because the experience was seamless, none of the many design decisions that made it seamless became visible.

Games work the same way. The opening tutorials in games we call masterpieces rarely feel like tutorials. The first screen of Super Mario contains no instruction saying “Go right.” Yet Mario stands at the far left, while the open space, blocks, approaching enemy, and reward to the right all lead the user in that direction. Players naturally move right without being told because the composition of the screen silently points the way. The best teaching does not look like teaching. We glance at that first screen, think “There isn’t much design here,” and move on—past the very part that was designed with the greatest care.

This produces the paradox confronting first-experience designers: the better the FTUE, the harder it is to analyze. Think of the first five minutes of a game you love. It is difficult to say precisely what made them so good because their success made the design invisible. You can launch that game a hundred times in an attempt to copy its first experience and still miss what matters. We must deliberately stop the things we usually pass through without friction. This is why the book insists on defamiliarization.

Mechanism 3. Users Do Not Arrive Empty-Handed

The third and fourth mechanisms produce this chapter’s conclusion. First, the third. Games were once an isolated medium accessible only by visiting an arcade, buying a console, or going to a PC café. A game’s first screen was then almost the sole entrance into its world. With few other screens to compare it with, users arrived relatively empty-handed.

Today, everything is different. Games are no longer an isolated medium. Until the instant before users launch your game, they have passed through YouTube’s rapid cuts, the immediacy of short-form video, likes on social media, vertical scrolling in webtoons, comparisons and reviews in online stores, and dozens of other games. All those experiences judge your first screen in advance.

This book calls the phenomenon New Content relativity. Your game is not evaluated in a vacuum. It is placed beside, and compared with, the other media the user has just left. In concrete terms:

Even a three-second load feels frustrating because TikTok serves the next video the moment the user lifts a finger.
A registration screen shown at launch is judged as coldly as an online store’s checkout: “Do I really have to sign up for this?”
An unskippable thirty-second intro feels like thirty years to eyes trained on short-form video.

But familiarity has a welcome reverse side: it is also an asset we can borrow for free. Use a ▶ Play icon, pull-to-refresh, or a heart-shaped Like button that users already know, and there is no need to explain it. They understand on their own.

For example, let users refresh a game lobby by pulling down on the screen and they will perform the gesture without a single line of instruction. Social media and email apps have already taught it to their fingers. Chapter 5 will examine this technique—letting one familiar shape replace an entire paragraph of explanation—through the example of a collection screen.

The same technique appears outside games. Duolingo, despite being a language-learning app, is frequently cited for not placing registration at the very beginning. Open the app and, instead of a sign-up form, it first gives you a short exercise. Account creation waits until after the user has had a taste. By moving the cost of entry back and the first moment of fun forward, this sequence holds the newcomer’s finger. A game’s first screen confronts the same choice: put registration and terms first, or put the first taste of fun first?

Strictly speaking, then, familiarity itself is not the enemy. The enemy is familiarity we let pass without noticing it. Familiarity we inspect and deliberately choose to borrow becomes an asset; familiarity that flows in unchecked becomes an enemy that blinds us. Deciding what to borrow and what to introduce as new is half of first-experience design. (Chapter 5 develops a full method for handling this asset.)

Mechanism 4. The Curse of Genre: Game Genres Are Prisons of Familiarity Too

The curse of knowledge repeats itself inside games as the “curse of genre.” To an RPG designer, a yellow exclamation mark above someone’s head is a convention that needs no explanation. It instantly reads, “Go there and talk to that person to get something to do.” To an ordinary person who never learned this convention, however, the exclamation mark may resemble an advertising badge or an unread notification. They may avoid it for fear that tapping it will open a payment screen. What the designer reads as “context,” the non-gamer experiences as “visual noise.”

The exclamation mark is only the beginning. Games design their first screens around an entire dictionary of conventions accumulated over decades: a larger Level number means greater strength; an Inventory bag exists somewhere; red potions restore health and blue potions restore mana. This dictionary is an asset shared across the whole game industry, so no one is even conscious of using it. That is precisely what makes it dangerous. If the expert’s curse exists in one person’s mind, the genre curse afflicts an entire industry collectively. One playtest will not catch it, and colleagues who share the same dictionary will not filter it out in review. Whenever this book stops to examine an element on the screen, it will therefore ask: “Is this a convention everyone knows, or only one that gamers know?” Every chapter’s act of disassembly includes that question.

▶ Three questions to apply to your own screen

Does this first screen look impressive to a gamer, or is it legible to an ordinary person?

Are we mistaking familiarity for style?

Can someone seeing it for the first time tell “what this is” within three seconds? If you cannot answer all three with confidence, the first screen is still impressive only through its creator’s eyes.

FTUE, Then, Designs the “First Judgment,” Not the “First Input”

Mechanisms 3 and 4 provide the conclusion. Because users do not arrive empty-handed, we must design their first judgment; and the gamer-only dictionary among the things they carry must be inspected at the gate. Mechanisms 1 and 2 explain why we repeatedly miss that conclusion. When we hear “FTUE,” we generally think of tutorials, arrows, and pointing-hand guides: “How do we teach the controls at the beginning?” Once we accept that users do not arrive empty-handed, however, we see that their judgment is already complete before they touch the controls. And we fail to see the moment that judgment occurs. The expert’s curse blinds us, while good design becomes less visible the better it works.

A user flips through three store screenshots, declares “Looks boring,” and never installs the game. Even after going to the trouble of installing it, they may see a spectacular first screen for three seconds, say “Looks complicated,” and close the app. The mood of the first loading screen alone may tell them, “Oh, it’s one of those mass-produced games,” so the tutorial we labored over never even begins.

Picture two games in the same genre side by side. One launches into an unskippable company logo, followed by a thirty-second intro video, terms to accept, and an account to create. In the other, a character hops onto the screen the instant the game opens and can be touched immediately. Even if the two main games are equally fun, the user’s “first judgment” has already split. The first game has postponed its own chance to be judged for thirty seconds, but the user has no duty to wait. The second has planted a good impression within those same thirty seconds. Designing the first judgment means deciding whose side those thirty seconds will serve.

Clash Royale is often cited as a representative example because it gives the player an early taste of practical combat instead of a long explanation. The details of its onboarding change from version to version, but its direction remains consistent: offer one bite of fun before explaining every rule. It tilts the user’s first judgment toward “Oh, this is fun.”

One more point: this first judgment is not an absolute evaluation, but a comparative evaluation. Users do not grade our game in isolation. They grade the difference between it and whatever they were just viewing. Before polishing the first screen, then, decide one thing: first decide which content your game will sit beside. Put the ad in a short-form feed and the comparison is short-form video. Place it in a store recommendation list and the comparison is the game next to it. Put it in a friend’s hand and pass it over, and the comparison is that friend’s excitement. The same first screen receives a different grade when its comparison changes. The design of the first judgment therefore begins with the design of the comparison set, before the design of the first screen. In Chapter 3, we will meet the path by which users reach us again under the name “threshold.”

The core of FTUE is therefore not teaching the “first input,” but designing the “first judgment” that occurs before it.

The controls come later. If the judgment ends at “not for me,” every design beyond it loses even the chance to be seen.

A Common Misconception

“Our game is new, so we have to explain everything.”

Novelty cannot be transmitted through explanation. The longer the explanation grows, the more readily the user falls into the most familiar judgment of all: “This looks complicated.” Novelty must be felt, not announced. Borrow whatever familiarity you can to reduce explanation, then let the user feel the one thing that is genuinely new with absolute clarity.

Reference Content

Examples from other media that reveal the concepts in this chapter.

Video Games

Super Mario Bros. 1-1: A model of invisible design that uses screen composition alone to make the user walk right, without instructions. (See the Chapter 2 references for a closer look at teaching through placement.)
Half-Life: The opening tram ride is controllable rather than a cutscene. It imprints the world by letting the player look around without taking away the camera. Study it as first-judgment design that grants control from the first moment instead of forcing an intro video.

Real-World Work Practices

Usability testing / playtesting: A field practice grounded in the fact that insiders cannot see a first impression. It is a response to the expert’s curse.

Everyday Apps

Toss and Kakao instant transfers: They borrow familiar patterns to make the friction of first entry disappear.

Machines / Appliance UX

Norman doors: Bad affordances that make people wonder whether to push or pull. Good design removes the question itself.

The remaining references are collected in the “Chapter 1 Appendix” at the end of this chapter. (In the print edition, they are grouped in Appendix D.)

Design Notes ▶ Try It Yourself

This chapter asks you to fill in two fields in the Design Notes. They face in opposite directions.

First field: “Ten things about our content that I take too much for granted.”

Take out a sheet of paper—or use the blank space in Appendix A—and list the things in your game you left unexplained because “anyone would know this.” Where is the Start button? How does someone choose a character? What does the first screen communicate? Anything is acceptable. Write ten things that may not be obvious at all to the guest who has just entered the room—the first-time user. Then mark which of the ten come from gamer knowledge: things such as quest markers, levels, and inventories that make sense only after playing other games. These are the items this book will concentrate on dismantling, and this list is the opponent you will fight throughout the book.

Second field: “Twenty things the user learned to recognize elsewhere before ever seeing our game.”

Now reverse your gaze completely. Consider your genre, screens, controls, and rewards. List what users already “feel they know” from YouTube, short-form video, social media, webtoons, and other games. For example: “Vertical scrolling is familiar from webtoons”; “I have seen character draws in other games.” Place one label beside each item: “BORROW” for what you will reuse as is, and “BREAK” for what you will deliberately overturn. Then ask one more question beside the label: “Is this a convention only gamers know?” If so, it is not familiarity you can borrow for ordinary users. It is a new burden you must explain. In Chapter 5, this list will grow into the “Prior Analogous Experience Borrowing Table.”

In one line: Games have not become less impressive; our eyes have been worn down by familiarity—users’ eyes and creators’ eyes alike. Familiarity blinds us through four mechanisms: the expert’s curse (creators cannot see what they made), invisible design (what works well goes unseen), New Content relativity (users do not arrive empty-handed), and the curse of genre (we mistake the gamer’s dictionary for common knowledge). FTUE therefore designs the first judgment, not the first input. Next chapter: We begin by dismantling the term we most mistakenly believe we understand: the belief that “FTUE is a tutorial,” and the differences among FTUE, NUX, OOBE, and UX.

Chapter 1 Appendix: Reference Collection

These examples extend Chapter 1’s argument beyond games: familiarity blinds users and creators alike, and the contest is decided by the first judgment, before the first input. They are grouped into five areas—video and board games; film and content; publishing, comics, and music; mobile apps and services; and offline life. Read each example beside the four mechanisms from the main text—the expert’s curse, invisible design, New Content relativity, and the curse of genre—and the conclusion of “designing the first judgment.” Ask which mechanism each case demonstrates.

Video and Board Games

Portal: Valve’s 2007 first-person puzzle game makes the opening sequence of test chambers the tutorial itself. Players internalize the rules through play rather than coercion, and even the guiding voice, GLaDOS, is integrated into the world. What to examine: when the teaching section is indistinguishable from the main game, each chamber shows how the user’s first judgment begins with “fun,” not “study.”
Dark Souls / Getting Over It: Dark Souls (2011) confronts the player with its first demon boss while poorly equipped, then lets them escape through a door on the left, obtain a proper weapon, and return. Getting Over It (2017) makes a fall that can erase all progress after a single mistake central to its identity. Both deliberately break the familiar expectation of a “friendly tutorial.” What to examine: alongside the main text’s scope condition—that unfriendliness becomes an admission ticket rather than a flaw when targeting core users—observe which users read this first experience as a challenge.
Mega Man (Rockman), Cut Man stage: In the first Mega Man (1987), the cursor on the stage-select screen defaults to this introductory area. Enemies in narrow passages and the placement of ladders let players practice movement, jumping, and shooting without coercion. What to examine: the invisible tutorial that teaches through enemies and terrain instead of instructions, and how one default on a selection screen predetermines the path of the first experience.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Great Plateau: The 2017 game turns its starting region into a miniature version of the full game. Players must gain four essential abilities from four shrines to receive the paraglider and leave, but the game tells them only where to go, not how to get there. What to examine: the devices that keep a closed starting zone from feeling like a compulsory training camp, and how freedom of route coexists with clarity of purpose.
Half-Life 2, Ravenholm: Shortly after players acquire the gravity gun, this area fills the stage with explosive barrels, saw blades, and zombies. Their hands learn to throw the environment as a weapon without explanation. What to examine: when a new mechanic is taught through stage arrangement rather than text, how every prop serves as a practice problem.
Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion / Pandemic’s introductory design: Jaws of the Lion, a companion game to Gloomhaven, turns its first five scenarios into lessons that open the rules gradually. Rather than making players finish the rulebook, it starts the first session immediately and teaches through play. Pandemic lowers the burden of the first session with an introductory setup that uses fewer cards to determine difficulty. What to examine: the same prescription works in board games—reduce explanation in the rulebook and reorder the experience to bring the first session forward.
Arcade attract mode (demo screen): While no coin is inserted, the machine repeatedly shows a play demonstration and high-score table to stop passersby. What to examine: an ancestor of the “playable ad,” placing a first judgment through display alone before interaction begins.
Steam Next Fest: Steam’s recurring event gathers demos of unreleased games and makes them free to play for several days. Developers can observe reactions to the first few minutes and wishlist trends before release. What to examine: when the first judgment moves ahead of the purchase, the demo’s opening screen effectively becomes the store page, and the demo’s first five minutes are graded before the main game.

Film and Content

Up, the “Married Life” opening: The 2009 film compresses Carl and Ellie’s life together into roughly four and a half minutes of music and montage without a line of dialogue, capturing the audience’s emotions in the opening alone. What to examine: a model of first-impression design that makes viewers feel without explanation, placing emotion before information.
WALL·E’s opening: The 2008 film proceeds for roughly its first twenty minutes almost without dialogue, like a silent film, conveying both the world of a devastated Earth and the protagonist’s character through movement, sound, and direction. What to examine: how far first-impression design can go by removing explanation and simply showing, and what fills the resulting space without boredom.
Raiders of the Lost Ark (Indiana Jones), cold open: The 1981 film imprints its protagonist through action alone—crossing temple traps, escaping a rolling boulder, and losing the artifact to his rival Belloq—without explaining who he is. What to examine: how action without explanation designs the first judgment, and how even failure becomes part of a character’s appeal.
Hollywood’s “first ten minutes rule” and cold-open convention: The industry belief that a film is lost if its opening does not capture the audience is so established that screenwriting manuals teach the placement of events in the first ten minutes separately. What to examine: an entire industry sharing a deadline for the first judgment. Only the length of the deadline differs from the design of a game’s first session; the structure is the same.
Television cold opens (Breaking Bad and others): A pre-title scene draws viewers in before they can change the channel. Breaking Bad (2008) expanded such openings into independent short stories, as with the crashed RV in the desert and Walter standing in his underwear. What to examine: when the opening scene favors the hook over information delivery, what it deliberately leaves unexplained.
Netflix autoplay and Skip Intro: Autoplaying the next episode and the Skip Intro button have solidified, through interface design, a viewing habit that treats waiting as taboo. What to examine: the process by which one service’s convenience feature becomes a new baseline every other piece of content must pass—New Content relativity taking shape.
Netflix title-thumbnail personalization: Netflix has described in its official technology blog a system that maintains several thumbnails for the same title and selects different images according to viewing history, because a single first-impression image can determine the decision to watch. What to examine: personalization of the first judgment, presenting a different first screen for the same content according to the viewer.
YouTube ads and the five-second skip: As ads skippable after five seconds became standard, advertising grammar itself reportedly reorganized around placing the brand and hook within the first five seconds. What to examine: the moment viewers gain the right to leave, the design of the first seconds changes the grammar of an entire genre.

Publishing, Comics, and Music

The opening-line “hook” in fiction—for example, Moby-Dick’s “Call me Ishmael”: The craft tradition of capturing readers in the first line is so long that famous opening sentences are discussed as a category of their own. What to examine: readers close a book for different reasons at each stage from cover to opening line and from opening line to first chapter. Follow that far and the example meets Chapter 3’s funnel reading.
Pop hooks and shortened intros: Designing the first seconds to catch the ear is an old craft, but intros are said to have grown shorter and choruses to have moved forward in the age of streaming and short-form video. What to examine: the causal chain by which a medium’s counting method—the standard for registering a stream—changes the design of the content’s opening.
Weekly Shonen Jump-style reader surveys: Readers submit their favorite series each week; rankings influence both placement within the magazine and whether serialization continues, and low-ranked works are often canceled. Former editors have said that discontinuation may be considered after as little as three weeks. What to examine: in a structure where the response to the first installment determines survival, what creators pour into Episode 1 reveals the full weight of a first impression.
Free first webtoon episode + vertical scrolling: Making the first episode free reduces entry cost to zero, while familiar vertical scrolling eliminates the need to learn how to read it. What to examine: the design borrows familiarity with price (“free”) and operation (“scroll”) at once, reducing friction in the first judgment from both sides.
Web novels, “Episode 1 abandonment,” and fast openings (regression, possession, reincarnation, cathartic payoff): Capturing readers in the opening of the first episode is treated as standard craft. Familiar premises such as returning to the past, inhabiting another body, or reincarnation let the story skip explanation and bring gratifying developments forward. What to examine: the compression of an opening by borrowing the reader’s prior experience—genre grammar—which leads directly to Chapter 5’s discussion of borrowing.

Mobile, Apps, and Services

TikTok’s “Continue as guest”: The app shows videos first and requests login only when interaction requires it, moving the cost of entry back and the first enjoyment forward. (For Duolingo’s delayed registration, see the Chapter 2 references.) What to examine: merely changing the order of entry steps can turn the first judgment from “a hassle” into “fun.”
Ad pretesting for hypercasual games: In the mobile hypercasual industry, developers are said to produce several ad videos before completing a game, measure the cost per install, and develop only concepts that receive a strong response into full products. What to examine: an extreme case in which the first judgment—one image in an ad—is graded before the product, showing that the design of the comparison set discussed in the main text has already hardened into an industry process.

Offline and Everyday Life

A play’s opening scene: The first image and first sound are carefully constructed to command the audience the moment the curtain rises. What to examine: even a medium with neither Skip nor Pause treats its first moment as decisive. A first impression determines the attitude of even an audience that cannot escape.
A new employee’s first day of onboarding: In human resources, the welcome on the first day and the readiness of equipment and workspace are widely understood to affect retention and engagement. What to examine: organizations design first experiences too, and small arrangements such as who shares lunch with the new employee shape the first judgment.
Apple unboxing (OOBE): It is often said in the industry that even the air gap is designed so the lid descends slowly under controlled pressure. What to examine: design that attends to the first impression of “the moment of opening” before the product itself, moving the start of the first experience ahead of the product screen.
“Plug and play” appliances: A design that works as soon as it is connected and removes the need to read a manual brings invisible design into everyday life. What to examine: recall an appliance you began using without instructions and verify the paradox that the better something works, the less anyone notices.
The IKEA effect: People value furniture they assemble themselves more highly than equivalent finished products; in one experiment, participants assigned a higher price to objects they had built. What to examine: a user’s first act of touching can lead to attachment, supporting the shift of a first screen from “showing” to “letting them touch.”
The 0.1-second first-impression experiment: In a 2006 study by psychologists Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov, people judged qualities such as trustworthiness and attractiveness after seeing an unfamiliar face for only 0.1 seconds, and longer exposure changed those judgments very little. What to examine: if the first judgment is closer to a reflex than deliberation, the first screen should be designed not as an argument but as an impression legible at a glance.
Perfume and cosmetics on a department store’s ground floor: Placing perfumes and cosmetics on the entrance floor is a long-standing industry convention. Their scent and brightness are said to define the impression of the entire store at the moment a shopper enters. What to examine: spaces have first screens too, and deciding what occupies the first point of contact is a design problem in every industry.