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The Unexpected Souvenir: What a Samurai Game Taught Me About Creating Meaningful UX
Becoming artists of experience.
I bought a sword last week.
This isn’t something I ever imagined writing. I’m not a collector. I don’t have display cases of memorabilia or prop replicas adorning my walls. I’m a UX practitioner with limited free time, a family that keeps me busy, and practical sensibilities about spending my money.
Yet there I was — dropping $350 on a katana sword replica from the video game Ghost of Tsushima, carefully positioned in my home office, a physical reminder of a digital world that somehow managed to breach the boundary between my screen and reality.
It’s been two weeks since I completed the game, and I still can’t shake it. While my kids were asleep and my work was done, I’d slip into feudal Japan, becoming Jin Sakai, a samurai navigating moral complexities while defending his homeland from Mongol invaders. But unlike most games I’ve played that entertain me and gently fade from memory, this one stayed, lingered, and changed something in me.
The question that keeps circling my mind as a UX designer is simple yet profound:
What did they do to me?
