Aesthetics

What this element is

Aesthetics is the combination of visuals, sound, animation, hardware and even the physical way players move — everything that presents the game's values and gives the experience its meaning and mood.

Why it carries values

The designers in the study treated aesthetic choices as moral choices, not superficial embellishment. Aesthetics can make players feel welcome, secure and respected — or rejected and threatened. Every register of the sensory experience carries a value: whose faces appear on screen, whether failure sounds harsh or gentle, whether a hazard looks like a person or a prop.

Patterns from practice

Visual

Visuals are repeatedly linked to belonging, safety and representing the learner's real life. The learner driver game uses local flora, fauna and road signs deliberately: "when they fire up the simulator and it's got eucalyptus trees, koala signs and other familiar things, they start to feel a lot more at ease, like they're in their own backyard" (P4). Authenticity isn't photorealism — it's familiarity. Even the weather is a value choice: bright, cloudless skies, "meant to make you feel pretty safe and calm and happy" (P4).

Medical and agricultural simulations lean towards photorealism because the learning demands it — trainees must distinguish NPC patients by specific symptoms, and agricultural learners judge slight changes in appearance. But the medical developer questioned whether exact replication is necessary for education, distinguishing hyper-realistic marketing from simpler pedagogical needs: "we've compromised on visuals in the past... but it's always something that we consider" (P1). The right answer balances budget, audience and learning outcomes — sufficient fidelity, not maximum fidelity.

The physiotherapy team hit the inclusivity trap: avoiding gendered or niche themes to keep games open to everyone can over-neutralise them. "Sometimes I think that means that it doesn't really appeal to anyone, and sometimes it's better to create games that are more heavily themed..." (P2). Aesthetic choices decide who is being invited in — and whether excluding some players is an acceptable price for genuinely resonating with others.

In disability services, representation is overtly about dignity: the service used photos of its own clients, arguing "there's no point in having people in the game showing emotions if they can't see people like themselves in there" (P8). Whose faces are seen, and whose emotional lives count as worth modelling, is a values question wearing an art-direction costume. Youth services designers test art styles with young people themselves, balancing dark storylines with inviting looks so heavy themes stay approachable.

Audio

Sound sets the emotional and ethical tone. The medical training developer considers realistic soundscapes — patients, family, helicopters, genuine declassified radio chatter — necessary for an authentic clinical experience. The space VR game encodes fragility sonically: "tinkling kind of chips and stuff scattering" (P6) communicates vulnerability without a word of explicit messaging.

The learner driver game goes the other way: deliberately "more positive sounds", failure sounds that "weren't too bad" (P4) — gentle correction and psychological safety in audio form. The designers also admit their success cues are "quite cliche for people from western culture" (P4), often echoing old TV game shows: audio carries embedded cultural norms about success, failure and shame. And audio can steer the team itself — a hilariously layered crescendo of zombie screams in a physiotherapy prototype produced an "emotive reaction" (P2) that inspired a whole game.

Animation

Animation signals who matters and what's acceptable for the audience. Some physiotherapy creature animations were cut as too "creepy" for patients even though they were "really interesting" (P2) — emotional safety over aesthetic experimentation. The learner driver game makes its hazards deliberately artificial: "the NPCs are props, quite obviously like a cardboard kind of made like a cardboard cutout" (P4). Avoiding realistic children as hazards is explicitly about not traumatising learners — the hinged, non-organic style broadcasts this is a safe training artefact, not a proxy for real harm. Meanwhile the same game's AI-driven traffic expresses a different value: "doing a lesson over and over again, it's never the same thing" (P4) — variability and adaptability over rote memorisation.

Hardware

Physical kit carries aesthetics too. The physiotherapy team wanted their balance board to make people exclaim "Wow, this is really nice" (P2) — texture, finish and form factor signalling that therapy is worth investment and effort, and respecting both patients and therapists through tactile quality.

Physicality

In live workshops, aesthetics extends into the choreography of bodies. The circle game where players place fingers in one another's imaginary dinner plates "looks great" (P3), with a fluid rhythm that tips everyone into laughter at once. The visual of everybody synchronously ruining each other's dinner is what gives the game its sense of community, playfulness and openness — the aesthetic is the social value.

Questions to ask your team

1. Will players see their own world — and people like themselves — in this game? Who's missing?
2. Are we chasing photorealism because the learning needs it, or because it demos well? What's sufficient fidelity here?
3. What do our failure sounds teach — gentle correction, or shame? Whose cultural norms do our success cues assume?
4. Could any visual or animation stress, creep out or traumatise our actual audience, even if it's artistically interesting?
5. Have we neutralised the theme so hard that it appeals to no one? Would a bolder style serve more players than it excludes?
6. Does our hardware and packaging say "this matters" — or "this was cheap"?
7. Have we tested the art style with the real audience, not just the client?