UI Fatigue

The long-session degradation of a player's ability to read and process UI information accurately, leading to missed indicators, misread values, and errors that would not occur in a fresh session.

In games, this means

A player three hours into a dense strategy game will misread resource counts, miss warning indicators, and overlook UI elements they navigated correctly at the start of the session. This is not a failure of attention, it is the physiological cost of sustained focus on information-dense screens. UI fatigue is distinct from cognitive load (a moment-specific measure), it is the accumulated cost over a full session. The fix is UI that requires as little active reading as possible: colour, shape, and spatial position over numbers and text.