The Attention Budget Rule: why tutorials should teach maximum 3 things at a time

We sit down with Katie Madding (CEO, emhanceAI, ex-Adjust CPO) and John Hobson (founded user research at Bungie and Blizzard, 20+ years on Halo, Destiny, WoW). The conversation walks through two real case studies — a Skullgirls Mobile playtest and a creative comparison — using emhance AI's facial-emotion analysis (0.89 ROC AUC, basically "lie detector" precision). The findings are uncomfortable. Skullgirls' tutorial pauses combat to teach mechanics players don't need yet. Every level ends with 5 passive screens stacked back-to-back. And the creatives with "near-death experience" hooks within the first 4 seconds genuinely outperform — not because Chinese UA teams said so, but because the emotion data shows it. If you build games or ads for mobile, this is required viewing. The link to the report is here: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0v1sLM0 Peaksel case study: https://www.emhance.ai/success-stories/peaksel-emhance-case-study ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Cold open — designing the engagement curve 01:30 Welcome + Katie and John intros 03:48 How AI facial-emotion playtesting actually works 07:57 Skullgirls case study: the first 15 minutes broken 11:25 The attention budget — what it is, why it caps at 3 17:14 High vs low engagement moments in Skullgirls 24:13 Creative case study: Cat Match Two vs Sheep Swipe One 29:52 Why "near-death experience" creatives win — confirmed ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 📌 KEY TAKEAWAYS — emhance AI uses facial-emotion analysis (0.89 ROC AUC, "lie detector" precision) to identify exact moments of high and low engagement during playtest sessions. Engagement = emotion + attention combined. — Skullgirls Mobile tutorial findings: pausing combat to teach optional mechanics players don't need creates frustration. Players come away thinking the game is shallow because the tutorial fights are too easy and the text walls killed momentum. — John's "attention budget" rule: teach maximum 3 things at a time, then give players space to digest. From his Halo days: pop up a tooltip → if used, snooze 5 minutes → if not, repeat. Snooze 15 minutes after second use. — The "5-stack of boring screens" problem is universal. Win → victory animation → reward screen → loading screen → cut scene → talking head → finally back to gameplay. Nobody designed this stack on purpose. Real playtesting reveals it. — Why 6 out of 7 AI ads still suck: the concept is right ("save the character") but the small execution details matter enormously. Emotion data lets you identify which 4 of 15 things in a creative actually worked rather than throwing out the whole concept. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🎙️ HOSTS Matej Lančarič — User Acquisition consultant Jakub Remiar — Game Design consultant Felix Braberg — Ad Monetization consultant 🎤 GUESTS Katie Madding — CEO, emhance AI (ex-CPO, Adjust) John Hobson — Game user researcher, ex-Bungie/Blizzard, 20+ years on Halo, Destiny, WoW This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let’s not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously. Panelists: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jakub Remia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠r,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric⁠ Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-3bckldvr8-8PXvzciMWdheOzED9hq0SA --------------------------------------- Matej Lancaric User Acquisition & Creatives Consultant ⁠https://lancaric.me Felix Braberg Ad monetization consultant ⁠https://www.felixbraberg.com Jakub Remiar Game design consultant ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiar