Lenses for the Player

The Game is Made for a Player §

• Remember that the game is made for an audience, a particular demographic. *To create a great experience, you must know what your audience will and will not like.

• The aim is to be empathic. Understand the game from the perspective of the player. Immerse yourself in the target demographic.

• Players and Why We Play Games is a good reference to consider for this.

• Relevant lenses: The Player, Pleasure

The Experience is in the Player’s Mind §

• The player puts their mind inside the game world, but the game world only exists in the player’s mind.
• The mind is the place where the game experience begins.
• There are four mental abilities that make gameplay possible .
  • Modeling - games are models of the real world that are easy to absorb and manipulate.
  • Focus - what we focus on at any given moment is determined through a blend of unconscious desires and conscious will. We enter the flow state.
    • In particular, we can control pacing to introduce cycles of tension and release.
  • Empathy - we empathize with the mental models of things. As exercises in problem solving, emphatic projection is a good method for problem solving. We become other characters to solve a problem.
  • Imagination - not the creative sort, but the mundane sort that lets us extrapolate from inputs. Leave some things to the player’s imagination.
• Relevant lenses: Flow.

The Player’s Mind is driven by the Player’s Motivation §

• Motivation is tied to the magic circle and the lusory attitude. Models of Human Needs are useful to apply here.
  • Perhaps the most important level for game design in Maslow’s hierarchy is self-esteem. We want the game to judge
• Another thing to consider is where Motivation comes from.

  • Extrinsic Motivation - not of one’s own volition to do it for its own sake

    • External - for payment.
    • Introprojected - “Because I said I would”
    • Identified - “Because I think it’s important”
    • Integrated - “Because I’m that kind of person”

  • Intrinsic Motivation - because I feel like doing it for its own sake.

  • The act of adding extrinsic motivation to something that is already intrinsically motivating slides it towards externally motivating, draining the intrinsic motivation.

  • We can also distinguish pain avoidance from pleasure seeking When a game becomes motivated by pain-avoiding, it tends to feel less fun.

	Pain avoiding	Pleasure Seeking
External	Avoid punishment	For rewards
Internal	Avoid shame	For fun

• Another motivation is novelty. In particular the novelty that makes us think in a new way.

  • Note there is such a thing as being too novel — being too much ahead of its time without having something familiar to ground it on, and relying solely on novelty and nothing else.

• Relevant lenses: Needs, Motivation, Novelty, Judgment

Some Games Are Played with Other Players §

• The Social Reasons for Play are important to consider in our design. Social Play as a schema also applies here.

• One risk of games in particular is cheating.

• Rule of thumb: A multiplayer game will take four times the effort and expense to create than a single player game due to balancing.

• Relevant lenses: Spectation, Cheatability

Other Players Sometimes Form Communities §

• A community is a group of people with a shared interest, purpose or goal who get to know each other better over time. Communities have:

  • Membership to define its members
  • Influence to give its members power over something
  • Integration and Fulfillment of Needs to give the members something
  • Shared Emotional Connection where members can share emotions about certain events.

• As game designers, we may want to form communities because:

  • It feels a social needs
  • It allows the game to spread by recommendation.
  • More hours of play. A game that can engender a community will get played for a long long time, no matter how lacking its other qualities may be.

• Tips for strong communities.

  • Foster friendships. Friendship is the glue that holds communities together.
    • A friendship requires three things — the ability to talk freely, someone worth talking to based on the player’s interests, and something worth talking about — something derived from the game itself.
    • Friendships have three distinct phases that games must support
      • Breaking the Ice — make it easy to find and engage with the kind of people the player would like to be friends with
      • Becoming Friends — give players an opportunity to chat after an intense play experience. Give a ritual such as adding people to a friends list
      • Staying Friends — friends must find each other again.
  • Put conflict at heart. Either conflict against other players or against the game.
  • Use Architecture . Create places where people are likely to see each other again and again and still have time to talk.
  • Create Community Property. Encourage players to band together by owning an item or status shared by the collective.
  • Let players express themselves. Expression conveys status.
  • Support three levels of experience. At minimum we have three levels
    • The newbie who is learning to play the game. Design the game to be easy for them to learn, especially through interacting with more experienced players. Incentivize experienced players to teach newbies.
    • The player who understands the game and are immersed in the game activities.
    • The elder who has mastered the game and unlocked all its secrets but are still retained by the game. They are the experts who can often teach you how to improve it. They stay because
      • The game is difficult to the point no one can consistently master it.
      • The game gives them governance privileges (being moderators or dungeon masters)
      • The game has mod support, allowing the elders to add content to the game.
      • They manage and organize guilds.
      • They are encouraged to teach newbies and are rewarded for doing so.
  • Force players to depend on each other. When you create a game that can be mastered while playing solo, you diminish the value of a community.
  • Manage the community via community managers to encourage the community to grow.
  • Obligation to others is powerful. Create situations where players can make promises or favors to one another. This gives incentive to play the game on a regular basis.
  • Create Community Events.

• Griefing presents a challenge to game designers. One approach to this is banning griefers but this is not necessarily elegant. Another approach is to remove systems that make griefing easy while not adding to the main loop or focus of the game

  • Player vs Player
  • Stealing
  • Trading — this gives the potential for unfair trades or misrepresent items.
  • Obscenities.
  • Blocking the Way (i.e., player collision). This also includes the ability to push players around.
  • Loopholes.

• Relevant lenses: Friendship, Expression, Community, Griefing