Miller's Law
The average person can hold approximately 7 (plus or minus 2) items in working memory at once. Design that exceeds this limit causes overload and errors.
In games, this means
Skill trees with 40 unlockable nodes visible at once exceed working memory capacity. Grouping skills into branches of 5–7, or revealing nodes progressively, keeps the system comprehensible.
Tags
Psychology
Information Architecture
UI Patterns