Games, Design and Play: A detailed approach to iterative game design (2016)
Part I: Concepts
Chapter 4. The Player Experience
In this chapter we look at the kinds of knowledge players need to play games. We look at the five layers of player experience: sensory, information, interaction, frame, and purpose.
In the previous chapter we talked about the different kinds of play games can create for players. But to play the games, we ask more of our players than just using the actions to interact with the objects and other players inside a playspace. Game designers, particularly videogame designers, need to understand a little bit about cognition, a little about hand-eye coordination, a little bit about information and interface design, and a slew of other topics that help them design for people. As game designers work, they need to keep in mind what the interface designer Jef Raskin called “human frailties,” or an understanding of the limits of what people can and cannot do, and what people are and aren’t good at.1 That’s what this chapter sets out to do—help us take into account what we might call “player frailties.” We’ll think of the amalgam of all these ideas and approaches as player-centered design. This includes things like how players perceive the playspace, how much information the game provides and how players process this information, how challenge keeps them playing and developing their skills, and how the game’s context impacts a player’s experience such as where the game is and who is playing and watching.
1 The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems, 2000.
Action Theory as a Framework
The most basic way to understand what a game asks of its players is to consider the principles of action theory. Action theory is a sociological concept originated by Talcott Parsons2 as a way to understand the dynamics of what happens when people encounter a given situation. Action theory proposes the following cycle of interaction:
2 Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, 1937.
Beliefs: A person has a set of prior experiences and belief systems that frame how they understand the world. Let’s use three examples: being hungry, seeing a friend, and playing Super Mario Bros.
Reaction: Given these beliefs, we encounter a situation and we form a reaction—I sure am hungry; look, there’s my friend; oh no, it’s a goomba.
Desire: This reaction leads to a desire—I’d like to eat; I’d like to say hi; I’d like to jump over that goomba.
Intention: This desire leads to the formation of a plan of action—I’m going to pick a sandwich and drink; I’m going to walk over and say hi; I’m going to run toward the goomba and then jump.
Action: With an intention in place, the person then enacts the plan—orders the sandwich and a drink from a waiter; calls out the friend’s name and waves as they walk toward them; executes the moves to attempt to jump over the goomba.
Repeat: With the action completed, we begin the cycle anew, with the outcome of the action causing a response from the situation that requires us to once more react, establish a desire, create a plan, and then conduct an action.
Within the cycle of action theory, we find so many important things to consider about our players: how they understand a situation, what they want from it, what they think they are able to do, what they are able to do, and how they interpret the outcome of their actions. This provides a perfect model for thinking about what we ask of our players anytime they play our games and fits nicely with the action-outcome unit discussed in Chapter 3, “The Kinds of Play”—whether it is the “bird’s eye” view of their learning about your game, what they hope to get from the experience, and then the actual experience they have; or the more detailed process of each decision they make as they play your game.
The best way to think about this is as a layered process through which players interact with videogames. In his book The Elements of User Experience,3 Jesse James Garrett outlines five planes of user experience: the surface (what we see and hear), the skeleton (the information within the surface), the structure (how that information is organized), the scope (the boundaries of what is and isn’t contained within the experience), and the strategy (the purpose of the experience). We can transpose this model onto how a player experiences a videogame (see Figure 4.1):
3 Jesse James Garrett, The Elements of User Experience, 2002.
Sensory (the surface): What the player sees, hears, feels, smells, and tastes when playing the game.
Information (the skeleton): Within the sensory layer, the information the player discerns about the game.
Interaction (the structure): Given the sensory layer and the information, what the player understands they can do while playing the game.
Frame (the scope): The player’s understanding of the game’s space of possibility informed by their experiences as a player and more broadly as a person.
Purpose (the strategy): The player’s goals for the game.
Figure 4.1 The layers of player experience.
The Layers of a Play Experience
These five planes provide us with a model for thinking about what game designers ask of their players. Instead of planes, we will refer to them as layers. This better illustrates the relationship between each—a sequential yet recursive process by which players interact with our games.
The Sensory Layer
Like any other human experience, play begins with our five senses. We see, hear, and feel videogames as the most elemental aspect of our play experiences. Understanding what it means to see, hear, and feel a game is therefore quite important.
Let’s start with one of the more often-used components of videogames: the player’s point of view. The dominant approach in AAA games is a three-dimensional world seen either through the player’s eyes (a first-person perspective) or from just behind the player (a third-person over-the-shoulder perspective).4 These approaches are so commonplace that it doesn’t even seem like there were any decisions to be made about how players see a game. But one of the most important decisions in a videogame’s design is how the player sees the game’s world—2D side view, 3D first-person view, 3D third-person view, and so on.
4 Want a full list of all the kinds of perspective? Read John’s essay on perspective in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, 2013.
Just as important is how the world is represented. Is it with super-simple graphics pared down to a few pixels? Or is it hyper-realistic, with every shadow and texture defined and refined? Or is it a game that uses no images at all, but simply text or sound? Together, the way the player sees the world and the way the world is represented have an impact on how the player perceives their role in the game, determines what they want to do, and interprets their progress toward the game’s or their own goals.
A good starting point here is Alabaster (see Figure 4.2)—a ‘fractured fairytale’ and collaborative work conceived of by Emily Short with contributions by John Cater, Rob Dubbin, Eric Eve, Elizabeth Heller, Jayzee, Kazuki Mishima, Sarah Morayati, Mark Musante, Adam Thornton, and Ziv Wities, with illustrations by Daniel Allington-Krzysztofiak. Alabaster is a text-based game that draws on the conventions of books, or in the digital world, early text adventures like Infocom’s Zork and, more generally, the field of interactive fiction. It is a playable story composed of text and the occasional image. Players take the role of a nameless woodsman tasked with bringing Snow White’s heart to the Queen. Unable to bring himself to kill someone so young, beautiful, and seemingly innocent, the woodsman kills a deer and procures its heart. However, something about Snow White is unsettling. The woodsman begins to question his perception of her and whether, perhaps, she is not as innocent as she seemed. To truly know what the woodsman should do, the player must learn more about Snow White. So, from this point in the game, the player begins to ask questions and engage in a conversation with Snow White.
Figure 4.2 Alabaster.
To move through the world and interact with Snow White and other objects in the game, the player enters simple commands into a text prompt, such as “ask”, “tell”, “north”, and “kick”, which turns these words into sentences like this one: “ask where there is safe haven.” There’s an incredibly rich number of responses from Snow White, authored by the many collaborators on the project.
In the case of Alabaster, the entire story unfolds through a series of still images and text. Outside the still images5 that accompany each major story beat, the story unfolds in the player’s mind through reading the descriptive text in the narrative. Because the player uses cardinal direction to move around, they are likely thinking spatially, and therefore about the setting of the action. But the majority of the gameplay occurs through conversation, and it is here that players try to understand the characters and their motivations and how the story will end.
5 In this case, the illustrations are actually procedural, meaning they are composed with code, providing the player with many unique variations.
Merritt Kopas’s Hugpunx (see Figure 4.3) is an example of how 2D games provide players with a simple vantage point in a game and simplicity in terms of spatial interaction with the controls: for the most part, left and right. The game is quite simple in its premise: move from left to right to “hug” the green people and cats. Successful hugs result in happy, bouncy hug recipients. The implied camera in Hugpunx is alongside the playspace, almost as if it is attached to a tripod just in front of the playspace. There is no depth, as all action takes place in a single plane. The actions available to the player are therefore very simple—move left, move right, and hug.
Figure 4.3 Hugpunx.
In addition to the constrained movement, there is the simple, stylized representation of the game’s world. Hugpunx uses a near-abstract pixel art style to represent the people, cats, and environment. There is no foreground, and there is no background. All of the imagery exists on a single plane on which the action takes place. This allows players to really focus on the interaction and goals of the game, as simple as they might be. Hugpunx uses its player point of view as a way to keep things simple, light, and focused. The decision space it presents is pared down to the essentials, with little extraneous information save the plants in the environment. But even these have a purpose; as they grow they help create a sense of excitement and chaos that builds as the game unfolds.
What happens when game designers want to provide more options for exploring the gameworld and seeing it from multiple vantage points? Generally, this sort of experience comes through 3D game engines and 3D representations of the gameworld. Take Blendo Games’s Thirty Flights of Loving (see Figure 4.4). It combines a 3D environment and a first-person perspective on the world with a blocky, flat-color, visual style to provide a unique play experience. The player takes on the role of an unnamed accomplice in a three-person team of...well, it’s unclear what they are, as you’ll see if you play.
Figure 4.4 Thirty Flights of Loving.
Like all three-dimensional games, the primary actions through which you perceive the game world are looking and moving. Thirty Flights of Loving builds upon these in interesting ways, with most every other action implied rather than carried out. The player can open doors and pick up some objects, but the game really focuses on the idea of navigating and looking as the primary actions in a story-driven experience. The player inhabits a world that is three-dimensional, meaning you can move in all directions, through the x (left/right), y (up/down), and z (forward/backward) axes. This opens up all sorts of new information for the player to take in. But in Thirty Flights of Loving, the space is designed so that there are seldom more than two choices of where to go—back through the door the player entered through, or out through another door into the next space. This allows the player to focus on the environment they inhabit and creates natural changes in scene with every exit and entrance.
In Thirty Flights of Loving, the spaces players can explore tend to be either small and quickly examined or large but without a lot of extraneous information. So the player is able to quickly “read” the space and make choices about how to proceed. The visual style of the game—blocky, simplified representations of people, animals, objects, and spaces—is in line with the overall approach to players moving through and interacting with the world. The two go hand-in-hand.
The way a designer represents their playspace and how they let players move within it impacts what the player will do and how they will perceive the game and make decisions about what they want to do. The more the designer opens up the ways a player sees and moves, the more complex the interpretation of the visual information becomes.
This brings us to the last of our examples in player point of view and player perception, thatgamecompany’s Journey (see Figure 4.5). Instead of being constrained to a single plane or having a tightly constrained space to move through, Journey presents the player with an expansive world through which they can explore.6 The beautifully rendered world establishes the game’s goal—reach the mountain visible in the distance. To do this, the player collects fragments of scarf that give her the power to float across distances otherwise too far to jump. By keeping the challenge straightforward, players can focus on exploring and enjoying the environment and the playground-like atmosphere of sliding down hills and jumping from ledges.
6 The world is not completely open; there are moments in the game when the player must follow a path, and there are limits to the world’s boundaries, but compared to the previous examples, players have much more freedom of movement.
Figure 4.5 Journey.
The game has a stylized yet detailed world full of sand dunes, snowy mountains, ancient runes, and detailed carpets and cloth. This is a big part of the experience of Journey—enjoying the lush world the player character inhabits. Despite all of the details and environments, players never get lost; in each section of the game, the goal—the top of the mountain—is seen in the distance. The use of the over-the-shoulder camera encourages the player to see themselves inside the gameworld, enabling them to experience their small scale in relation to the world, gauge their location when trying to land on elements in the game, and see their progress as the scarf trailing behind them lengthens.
Despite the fact that both of them are relatively easy games in terms of challenge, Journey and Thirty Flights of Loving are still pretty hard games for many people to play. There is a real accessibility issue with the implied camera and idiomatic interfaces we find with 3D games and the WASD keys-plus-mouse or the baroque, 15-plus buttons on console controllers we use to navigate them. The simulation of three-dimensional space is hard to wrap your head around, and getting used to the control mechanisms is even harder. Even Alabaster, with its seemingly simple text interface, still assumes knowledge of basic interactive fiction interaction schemes. On the other hand, the simpler mapping that happens in two-dimensional games like Hugpunx is much more accessible for a wider audience unfamiliar with the conventions of 3D games.
Alabaster, Hugpunx, Thirty Flights of Loving, and Journey help us see how the player’s point of view and vantage point on a game impacts their play experience. They also show us how the visual style relates to this as both part of the experience and as a way of focusing our attention and decision-making.
This leads to questions designers might ask about player point of view and perception to guide their work: How do you want your player to take in information about the game world? And how does this relate to the player’s experience of the world itself? Do you want everything to be clear and focused, with no distracting elements? Do you want the player’s attention to be on getting around in the world? Do you want the attention on the world itself? Or on the goals? Or do you want the goal to be exploring the world? All these are considerations when deciding how to let the player see, sense, and move through your game.
The Information Layer
Here’s a question: what is an assumption we too quickly make about the sensory layer of a videogame? The answer: that players know what they are looking at. There is a difference between seeing and understanding, which brings us to the information layer of the play experience. Within the field of information science, the working model for how people make sense of things is called DIKW—people first take in data, and from this build information, which leads to knowledge they can put into use, and eventually wisdom that allows deeper insight.
To turn data into information, we must first understand how we focus on the bits that are relevant and apply our attention to them. Related to this idea is the study of attention within cognitive psychology and how we respond to and process sensory stimulus. Game designer Richard Lemarchand’s 2011 talk at the Game Developer’s Conference titled “Attention, Not Immersion: Making Your Games Better with Psychology and Playtesting, the Uncharted Way”7identifies reflexive attention and executive attention as two forms of attention that define a player’s understanding of what is currently happening in the game. Reflexive attention is from the back and side regions of the brain and is activated when loud noises, quickly moving objects, or anything novel is presented to us. Executive attention (sometimes called voluntary attention) refers to those things that we decide to pay attention to, such as looking at a health meter, for instance, or reading a sign in the road. Together, they help us understand the kinds of attention we are asking the player to give our game and how to keep track of the number of things we are asking our players to pay attention to.
7 Richard Lemarchand, “Attention, Not Immersion: Making Your Games Better with Psychology and Playtesting, the Uncharted Way,” GDC 2011.
Let’s look at the beginning of Journey (see Figure 4.6) to help us understand this. The player first sees a character standing on a sandy hill. This is a series of data points—there is a figure in a cape, there is a hill, and it appears to be made of sand. The player can intuit that the character is probably the player character by virtue of the camera angle, the position the camera has onscreen, and other subtle but important cues. Once the player begins to move the sticks on the controller, they confirm that the figure is in fact their in-game representation. And as the player moves their in-game character, the sand-like material on the hill is confirmed to be sand by the way the character displaces it as they move. This process moves the player through data to information to knowledge—they now know the environment, who they are in the game, and how they move the character through the playspace.
Figure 4.6 The starting point in Journey.
This opening scenes in Journey utilize both our reflexive and our executive attention. As the game begins, the player hears an orchestral tone begin to rise and sees a field of shimmering sand. The tone activates the player’s reflexive attention, as they use their executive attention to try to discern the image on the screen. A jump cut shows them a wider view of the scene, and more cuts lead to an image of the mountain, the sun, and a comet-like point of light moving across the landscape, all activating the player’s reflexive attention with each cut. Once the game’s opening animations complete, we are brought to the moment described earlier: our character on a sandy hill. Here the player uses their executive attention to begin to decipher where they are and how to move.
At this moment in the game, the player could go in any direction they wanted. But they are given a clue about the direction they should begin to move toward: the mountain visible on the horizon. They always know how to orient themselves, so they choose to move toward it as a goal. In theme park design, the mountain would be referred to as a “weenie,” a term coined by Walt Disney in reference to a boyhood experience luring a dog home with a sausage, and used to describe an important aspect of his theme park’s design.8 A weenie is a large architectural element placed to be visible from many locations, serving as a visual magnet to orient and guide people toward a location. The designers of Journey and many 3D games use weenies to give players a visual reference point.
8 As referenced by Reece Fischer, “The Creation of Disneyland.” The Creation of Disneyland. N.p., 2004. Web. 14 Jan. 2013. http://universityhonors.umd.edu/HONR269J/projects/fischer.html.
Part and parcel with transforming what players see, hear, and feel in the game is making sense of what is being seen, heard, and felt. Questions to ask about how players will turn all of this sensory data into information and knowledge include: Is every object in the game seen by the player, or are some objects hidden? Is the information easy to access, intentionally vague, or does it require lots of interpretation? How much information can players take in during gameplay? How much are we asking players to focus on, and are we providing the clues for players to know what information is relevant? All these questions relate to the information space of a game: the possible meanings a player can derive from a given game.
Take chess (see Figure 4.7) as an example. In chess, the players can see every element in the game. The pieces on the board, their position, and the pieces that have been captured. This is called having perfect information on the game state. Nothing is hidden—except, of course, the thoughts of the other player. In chess, yomi (a concept discussed in Chapter 3) plays a big role in the strategic fun of the game as players try to imagine what their opponent might do on the next turn. As the player examines the chess board, they take in the position of both players’ pieces, think about their short-term and long-term strategies for winning, and how they might get closer to capturing their opponent’s king. They have to think about how each kind of piece moves, where their pieces are on the board, and which piece in particular to move on their turn to advance their strategy.
Figure 4.7 Chess.
That’s a lot of information to think about around a single decision, isn’t it? This is why chess works so well as a turn-based game. Players aren’t in a rush to make their decisions since there isn’t a time constraint on their actions (unless they are playing with a timer, of course). It is also why chess works just as well in person as it does via correspondence. What chess helps us understand is that everything a player sees becomes part of the information they have to process to make decisions about what to do next. Every time something happens in the game, the player has to analyze what changed, why, and how that impacts the state of the game.
Android: Netrunner (see Figure 4.8) puts players into an imperfect information space. In this two-player cardgame, players choose to be either the Corporation or the Runner, each with a different goal in the game. The Corporation has Agendas—cards that they must keep protected and hidden, either in their hand or face-down on the table in front of them. The Runner attempts to hack into the Corporation’s hand or the cards on the table to steal enough Agendas to win the game. The Corporation wins by advancing agendas and applying resources to them before they are captured. Each player has data on the cards in their deck, though not of the order in which they will appear. Each player also has perfect information about the cards in their hand and that they have played. Both players have imperfect information about the other player’s cards beyond those that have been revealed through play. However, some cards allow the player to peek at the other player’s cards, and there is a way to keep some cards revealed, so the information space of the game fluctuates.
Figure 4.8 Android: Netrunner.
In addition to being an imperfect information space, Android: Netrunner is an asymmetric information space. Because each player is playing a different role, by a different set of rules and with different cards, each needs to try to understand the other’s intentions and possible strategies as they are playing. It demands a great deal of understanding—one might say empathy—as players attempt to get inside the other player’s head and anticipate their next move. It also certainly generates yomi, the attempt to guess what the other player is thinking, and what player A thinks player B thinks player A is thinking. Chess does this too, but in Android: Netrunner, the players think differently—as a Corporation or a Runner, depending on your opponent. And like chess, Android: Netrunner is a turn-based game; players can take time to think about and make their next move.
Basketball (see Figure 4.9) is a very differently paced game than chess or Android: Netrunner. Basketball is real time, forcing players to respond quickly to each other’s moves, the location of the ball, and the position of players on the court. The information space is perfect—players can look around and see where everything of importance in the game is and what the current state of the game is, such as who has the ball.
Figure 4.9 Basketball. Photo by Laura Hale. Used under CC 3.0 SA Unported.
The challenge in the game is created by teams executing plays and improvising within them to surprise the other team and gain an advantage in moving the ball closer to the goal. Players feint moving in one direction and take off in another. Or they pass the ball to a player who just opened up because their teammate kept the defense from getting between the passer and the passee. So, while the information available to players is perfect, the real-time nature of the game makes it impossible to fully process all of the possible moves of the other team, making gameplay unpredictable, and ultimately, a lot of fun. Basketball is also a symmetrical information space in that all players have access to the same information about the state of the game—everyone can theoretically see who has the ball, where everyone else is on the floor, what the score is, how much time is left, and so on.
This leads to questions designers might ask about the information layer to guide their work: how much information do you want to provide to the player? What kind of attention will players use to make sense of and react to the information? Will it be reflexive or executive—thought out ahead of time? Will they have perfect or imperfect information? In a multiplayer game, will the information be symmetrical or asymmetrical? Will the game present information in real time, or will it give the player time to consider the information as they take their time to take a turn? How information is presented, how much is presented, and in what kind of time-frame all impact the player’s ability to make choices and understand their next move.
The Interaction Layer
To really make sense of the information space, a player needs to understand how the information works together. In the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom model, this is the step where patterns in the data create information, which in turn enables knowledge on which the player can make decisions and act. This means the player needs to have a working mental model of the game. There is often a gap between how something actually works and how players think it works. This runs the gamut from actions, objects, the boundaries of a playspace, and, most importantly, how broad and deep players understand the space of possibility of the game to be. When a player first plays a game, they are working off prior knowledge to help them interpret the information space. As they continue to play, they slowly develop a more specific understanding of your game until they are working off the information from their prior experiences in the game to develop their understanding of the game’s space of possibility.
anna anthropy wrote an exceptional essay about the first level of Super Mario Bros. to think about how players learn to play a game.9 In it, anna looks at the first thing players see in Super Mario Bros. A figure on the left side of the screen looking to the right (Mario), the ground, and an unbroken view of the sky above. The only thing the player can do—and it is clear from simply looking at the screen—is move to the right. As soon as the player moves Mario, they see the background moving, and a flashing brick with a ‘?’ appears, along with an angry-looking creature. Players learn to jump, and in doing so, learn the primary action of the game: jumping. anthropy’s close analysis of these first few seconds of Super Mario Bros. shows us just how ingenious Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka’s design of the first level is.
9 anna anthropy, “Level Design Lesson: To the Right, Hold on Tight” from her website, http://auntiepixelante.com/?p=465, 2009.
Once a player understands what they are engaging with, they have to understand their role in the game and how they enact it. This takes us to affordances, an important concept in cognetics. As Donald Norman defines them, affordances are “the perceived properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used.”10 In other words, affordances are what we think things do before we actually interact with them. We see a tool with a handle, and we assume we can grip it. We see a book, and we assume we can read it. We see a joystick, and we assume we can use it to navigate something on a screen. These are the perceptible affordances of an object. Affordances also help us make what are called correct rejections—we can tell what something isn’t used for as well. So we can guess a pillow won’t work as a hammer or that an object in the background of a game isn’t of the utmost importance.
10 Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things, pg. 8, 1988.
There are two additional kinds of affordances: hidden affordances and false affordances. A hidden affordance is that which is present in an object but is not obvious from its appearance. You wouldn’t realize you can drink from a hat, but you can; you wouldn’t know a brick up in the air could be hit in order to release a coin, but it will, sometimes. False affordances are misinterpretations of what an object can do. We see a wax apple and think we might be able to eat it; we see a door in a 3D game but cannot open it.
In games, affordances help us understand the complex relationship between what players see, what they understand, and what they think they can do when playing a game. As players look at and listen to our games, they are also constantly assessing what they can and cannot do. The thing is, with videogames, players are almost always dealing with one or more levels of separation between the player, the game’s interface, and the game’s visual and auditory feedback. Videogames are played by looking at a screen and then interacting with the game via a separate game controller (fingers included). And even when there is a direct contact point, as on a touch screen, the gestures seldom directly map onto what happens onscreen. This introduces a gap between our perceptions—what we see on the screen and hear through the speakers—and our actions—the decision-making that results in button presses, stick movements, and finger gestures.
In this screen in Braid (see Figure 4.10) by Number None, Inc, the player character, Tim, has just grasped the key from a precarious position down in a pit with one of the enemies in the game. In this case, the player has learned that the goomba is an enemy to be avoided because of their unfortunate encounter with it earlier in the game. Visually, it certainly has an expression that seems to indicate “stay away.” And that is what the player has learned to do. The key’s affordances are even more clear because of the player’s previous experiences with keys in their life. They open doors and are meant to be picked up. So it makes sense in the game that the key is something to grab and use in doors. In this case there are several doors—one that we came out of, on the left, and a door with a big keyhole blocking the way to another door on the right. It’s clear to the player that they should make their way over to the door with the big lock to use the key they have just picked up. This large keyhole provides the player with the perceptible affordance that the door can be unlocked with the key. Finally, as they have played, the player has learned that they can drop down into pits like this without getting hurt (as long as the enemies are avoided). But how to get back up? Well, yet another clue came to the player earlier in their play session. On the screen, a prompt to press a button on the controller to rewind time was given. After this one-time prompt, the player learned through trial and error how to rewind time. Being able to rewind time is a hidden affordance in Braid, one that we learn only through playing.
Figure 4.10 The affordances of Braid.
Beyond the peculiar reality that is videogame interaction, game designers also have to consider how people will engage with the interface of the game. Gillian Crampton-Smith proposed five characteristics of well-designed interactivity: clear mental model, feedback, navigability, consistency, and intuitiveness.11
11 Articulated by Gillian Crampton-Smith in the foreword to Bill Moggridge’s book, Designing Interactions, 2006.
Clear Mental Model
Crampton-Smith’s five principles start with a clear mental model. In the context of videogames, this refers to the player’s understanding of the basic elements of a game—the playspace, the rules that govern their actions and interactions with the objects (and other players, if there are any), and how all these relate to the stated goals (and those the players bring themselves)—build up to a coherent theme. Do players “get” how the game works?
This extends to the points of contact between the player and the game: the screen, the speakers, the control scheme and how it presents feedback. Is the feedback supporting the player’s mental model of the game? Is it confirming player actions and providing qualitative evaluation of the impact on the game’s state?
Besides confirming player inputs, is the game navigable? This refers to the player’s understanding of how to move through the playspace but also how they engage the game as a whole. Do they know how to access important menus? Do they understand the full range of actions available to them and what impact they have on the space of possibility?
Feedback
What helps players understand a game? “Reading” a game and performing within the players’ understanding of the game’s goals, rules, actions, and objects hinges on the quality of the feedback about their actions. Giving players feedback on a very granular level is important, as the loop between actions and outcomes we discussed in Chapter 2, “Basic Game Design Tools,” is how players connect what they see, what they know, and what they do. Feedback is what allows them to assess what they are doing and how well they are doing it.
A particularly well-done feedback system is found in area/code’s Drop7, a turn-based puzzle game in which players try to eliminate advancing columns of numbers by matching up the numbers of discs in a column or row with the discs found along the top. Every time the player successfully drops a disc to match a column or row, seven unique forms of feedback are provided: a sound effect plays, accompanied by a sequence of visual effects: the impacted row or column lights up, the disc rotates, a particle effect radiates out from the disc, the disc shrinks, the score received appears above the disc, and the remaining discs in the column animate down to the new position. All this works together to convey information to the player.
Despite so many levels of feedback, people new to the game can still have a hard time understanding what is happening. They may understand that a disc was eliminated, but they may not know why. Over time, through repetition, the player will likely begin to learn that a disc is eliminated when the number on the dropped disc matches the number in the row or column. But this can only happen through the repetition of receiving well-designed feedback. This comes back to the data-information-knowledge-wisdom progression of how players make sense of a videogame. The movement from information to knowledge comes by trying things out and building working mental models of the “laws” of a videogame’s space of possibility.
Navigability
The final characteristic of well-done interactivity is navigability. In the most literal sense, this speaks to movement through space. Thinking back to our Journey example from earlier in the chapter, the mountain peak in the distance provides the most general sense of navigability—the player knows which direction to head. But navigability also relates to the smaller scale actions of knowing how to move through the information space. For Journey, this means knowing how to look and move. But what about the more abstract game Drop7? Here, the long-term navigability is knowing the game’s goal (scoring the most points by keeping the discs from reaching the top of the screen), but also understanding the available actions and interrelationships between the numbered discs. And on the micro level, it’s about knowing how to move and drop the discs into the playspace.
Navigability in games relates to players understanding their options within the game’s space of possibility. And related, navigability relates to players being able to form goals, whether they are set by the game’s designer or by the players themselves. For a game to have navigability, it must also have a clear mental model, provide feedback, be consistent in its response to players, and allow the players to develop intuitive understandings of how to interact with the game’s component parts.
Consistency
For a player to understand the feedback received from a game, they need consistent communication. In the case of Drop7, consistency means the game responds to player actions in the same way every time—sliding and releasing a disc over a column always releases the disc; discs always fall until they reach the highest disc in that column; if the math adds up, the appropriate discs break and move through the seven forms of feedback. If the game responds differently at different times, it makes it difficult for the player to understand their role in the game. If, say, sometimes touching on the active disc makes it break, or it immediately falls upon contact or falls while the player’s finger is still touching it, the player would be confused. Players need consistent responses from the game to be able to understand their relationship to the game.
Intuitiveness
Learning how to play a game is not a trivial undertaking. Making it as easy as possible for players to learn how to perform the actions and interactions of the game is important. This leads to the next characteristic of well-designed interactivity: intuitiveness. The more a game can become intuitive for players, the less mental and physical energy they have to spend to simply make the game go. Take basketball as an example. When players first learn the game, every action takes deliberate mental and physical focus—finding the rhythm of dribbling, getting the hang of how to arc a shot to go through the basket, sorting out how to move their feet to stay in front of the other team’s players, and so on. Over time, through lots of repetition, players are able to develop an intuition about how to play without having to spend so much mental and physical attention attempting to perform basic actions. Once players gain an intuitive feel for the game, they are free to focus on their play experience rather than on the mechanical or mental interaction with the game.
In a game like Drop7, the discs behave in intuitive ways. They fall, following the familiar laws of gravity, and then they break, revealing what’s inside—like the inside of an egg, a package, or any number of other things we are familiar with in life. If a disc has broken, it is then weakened and disappears. This, too, is intuitive based on our understanding of the circle of life as well as our possible familiarity with other, similar games like Tetris.
Failure
In addition to Crampton-Smith’s five characteristics, there is one more important concern for the interaction layer—failure. Just because we can see and hear a game, can make sense of the information it is presenting us, and can determine an action we want to perform doesn’t mean we’ll perform it well. It also isn’t a guarantee that it was the right action to perform or that we even really understood what we were seeing well enough to make a smart decision in the first place.
Players often make mistakes when playing games. This is a big part of how we learn them and, for certain kinds of play experiences, where the pleasure is found—overcoming the challenges of understanding and then performing within the game’s space of possibility. As Jesper Juul notes in The Art of Failure, there are three kinds of failure stemming from the psychology-based concept of attribution theory.12 We believe failures are individual flaws of the person who committed the failure (I flapped when I should have rolled in Flywrench), flaws in the thing itself (that procedurally generated level in Spelunky was impossible to get through), or flaws in the circumstance (the subway car jostled right as I was picking a tile in Threes, causing me to accidentally move in the wrong direction).
12 Jesper Juul, The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games. pp. 15-18, 2013.
Juul’s research into failure involved watching scores of players playing games and interviewing them about their experiences. For game designers, one of the most important findings Juul had in this work is that there are some failures that feel better to the player than others. And these are player failures—flaws in the player. Seem counterintuitive? If we think about it, it makes sense. A player feels better about the failure being their own because they believe they can improve their skills with more playing. A player who fails due to a flaw in the game—or a perceived flaw in the game—will likely quit playing the game entirely. As a designer, it is important, then, to recognize that incredibly difficult levels with only one solution may feel like a flaw in the game to the player if they don’t perceive that the level is possible to beat. As Juul points out, failure often leads to players devising new strategies and trying new things in the game to succeed. So designing to embrace multiple strategies, is, well, a good design strategy. Take this with a grain of salt; some games, particularly puzzle games, may have only one solution, and some games may have little strategy or failure at all.
The Frame Layer
Play experiences do not take place in a vacuum. They are part of the lived experience, preceded by everything the player has seen or done before playing, and followed by everything else the player will do after. This is what we call the frame layer. All the time living, leading up to playing a game, creates a frame around how players perceive, experience, and build understanding. If someone has never played a videogame before, they might need some help understanding the basics of how videogames work. (Press this button, and the character on the screen will jump.) On the other hand, if someone is a videogame aficionado, they won’t need an introduction to the basics. Players have come to expect that pushing a button, in fact, pushing the X button, probably gets their onscreen avatar to jump. Frame provides players with expectations, giving them reference points when they first encounter a game.
Beyond time spent playing videogames, time in the world frames how players expect things in the game to work. If a player sees a large anvil poised on the edge of a cliff, they might imagine that it could fall and crush whatever happens to get under it. This could come from their experiences in life with heavy anvils or their mediated experiences of falling anvils depicted in Saturday morning cartoons. Frames of reference for deciphering what the game is asking of players come from a variety of places: daily life, movies and television, books and stories, and, of course, games. In addition to understanding the basic physics of a precarious anvil, these frames might come from the player’s own values, philosophies, and cultural contexts to help them interpret the information the game is giving them.
Let’s look again at the game Perfect Woman by Lea Schöenfelder and Peter Lu (see Figure 4.11). The game plays off cultural framings of female gender roles, generating some unexpected juxtapositions of identities and interesting choices for players. Players are confronted with choices such as, once reaching the age of 60, becoming a foreign minister or a call girl. This choice can be further complicated by what they were before. If they were a street kid leading a gang, it may become impossible or very hard to be an MIT professor. As a child worker, an easy path may be found taking care of the player character’s brother during the war or becoming a suicide bomber, but the player might want to challenge themself to be an eager student. Difficulty is based on how challenging it is to maintain and switch poses that match the player’s onscreen female identity. Perfect Woman offers up both gender stereotypes and anti-stereotypes with a continued commentary on how our life choices provide us with varying levels of difficulty and struggle—all deftly modeled by asking us to contort our bodies to match with the woman we have become. It questions common framings of gender roles and asks players to open their minds to the diversity of experiences being a woman is in varying places around the world and stages of life—providing new frames of reference for female roles.
Figure 4.11 Perfect Woman.
Sometimes games surprise us and lead us to question the frames we place around them. An example of this is Brenda Romero’s gallery game Train (see Figure 4.12), from her “The Mechanic Is the Message” series that depicts different historic events resulting in human tragedy. In Train, the player is presented with the task of transporting wooden player pieces from one end of the board to the other by cramming them into train cars. Some clues are given through the materials of the game. The board we are playing on is a broken window. The train tracks sitting atop this go only one way to their terminus. And the rules we are given are typewritten, with the last page still in the scroll of a vintage German typewriter. When we complete our task, the meaning of all of this is revealed, and what at the start seemed like an innocent game of transportation logistics is quickly flipped on its head. We won’t give away this ending; but suffice it to say that you have just participated in something that you would never have imagined. At the end, our frame for the game has zoomed out to include what we know of history and led us to question the idea of following rules and orders and how our early framing of the game was naive.
Figure 4.12 Train. Photos by John McKinnon.
Games are interpreted through experiences and references that frame our understanding of them. Perfect Woman plays off of these frames, subverting our notions of female roles and life stages. And as we see with Train, they can also provide us with new frames around our understanding of history and human experience.
The Purpose Layer
This leads us to the final of our five layers of player experience and to the question, why? Why has the player decided to play this game? What do they hope to get from it? And what do they actually get from it? Players bring all sorts of intentions to their play experiences. In the three previous chapters, we spent a lot of time talking about goals from a game design perspective. But players have their own goals, too. The game designer Richard Bartle looked closely at players of early text-based multiplayer adventure games (called MUDs, or Multi-User Dungeons) to come up with four core player types: achievers, explorers, socializers, and killers.13 While Bartle developed these against a particular kind of game, they provide a useful model for thinking more broadly about what players look for in a play experience.
13 Richard Bartle, “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs” http://mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm.
Achievers
Achievers are interested in setting and obtaining goals in a game. Sometimes these players focus on the stated goals—win, collect all the coins, complete every optional mission. In this case, we could think of these players as “completists,” as they want to experience everything the game has to offer. So in a game like Tale of Tale’s The Path, an achiever would not only play all six characters (plus the unlocked seventh character), but also make sure to collect all 36 objects scattered throughout the game, but also 144 flowers found throughout the environment. Or in anna anthropy’s Queers in Love at the End of the World, an achiever would play until they’ve moved through every possible combination of decisions within the story.
Sometimes achievers set their own goals for a game. This is where things like speed runs of Derek Yu’s Spelunky, no-kill playthroughs of Dishonored, or permadeath plays of Far Cry 2 fit. Other times, players set more intangible goals for themselves. In Dona Bailey and Ed Logg’s Centipede, a player could attempt to clear out all the mushrooms, which is within the space of possibility of the game for sure but isn’t an established goal. And then there are the legions of seemingly impossible things players have done with Minecraft, all of which were player derived.
Explorers
Explorers like to understand the full breadth of a game’s space of possibility. So if an explorer plays Proteus, they want to walk the full expanse of their island or simply wander the woods in the University of Southern California’s Game Innovation Lab’s Walden, a game based on Thoreau’s On Walden Pond. Where achievers often seek validation or measurement of their goals, explorers are content to simply understand the game more fully. Another way to think about this is focusing on coming to know the people, places, and spaces rather than the stated goals of a game.
Explorers also want to know the full potential of the actions and objects within a game. In other words, they are really interested in understanding the full breadth of a game’s space of possibility. They want to know every possible direct outcome of an action, but also every indirect outcome. They want to know what happens when you spend too much time on the frozen pond in Walden, the underlying logic deciding the next tile in Threes, or the limits of swimming in the ocean in Proteus. They want to play Spelunky over and over until they have seen as many configurations of the environment, objects, and enemies as possible.
Socializers
Socializers are less interested in the actions and objects unto themselves than they are the other players. This category of players above all enjoy interacting with other players. They will do this inside the parameters of the designed communication channels, but also within the broader space of possibility of your game. Let’s take a game like Portal 2. The co-op campaign is designed to encourage player communication—without it, completing the challenges will be really hard. So the game is designed to encourage socialization among all players. Similarly, Leah Gilliam’s tabletop RPG Lesberation is designed to get players talking, planning, and acting as a unit.
Players who seek out socialization in games will find it in games that on the surface don’t seem appropriate. Basketball, when played in a more casual manner, is a great way to hang out with friends. Dungeons & Dragons is a perfect way to spend an evening chatting and snacking while unfolding a legendary story. Local multiplayer games like Jane Friedhoff’s Slam City Oracles similarly encourage people to spend time in one another’s presence.
Killers
The last group in Bartle’s model are the killers—the players who like to impose their will on other players. Sometimes this takes the form of help, but more often, it takes the form of attacking, thwarting, or otherwise disrupting other players’ experiences. These are the players who not only want to win, but dominate the game. So in Dog Eat Dog, if killers are on the indigenous people’s team, they will try to control the decision-making process.
Of course, killers also want to mess up other players. So in basketball, they want to keep the opponent they cover on defense from ever scoring. If they are playing Johann Sebastian Joust, they will not rest until they outdo everyone else—sometimes to the point of embarrassing the other players.
Beyond Bartle’s Player Types
Each of these player types—achievers, explorers, socializers, and killers—might be tendencies players have as individuals, or they might represent the changing goals of a single player in one game as they continue to play. The important lesson for designers is to understand that not everyone will approach your game with the same mind-set. When designing, imagine how each type will approach your game and how these tendencies can be leveraged to strengthen your design.
Of course not all play experiences can be neatly captured inside Bartle’s achievers, explorers, socializers, and killers. And not all designers create games thinking about the expectations or wants of different kinds of players. Particularly with more authorial games like Porpentine’s Howling Dogs or Molleindustria’s The McDonald’s Videogame, players have a role in the game, but not necessarily in defining the kind of play experience they will have. Think of reading a novel or comic—we have no expectations that we can explore the novel in unexpected ways. Instead, we settle in for the experience the writer provides. The same can be said about certain play experiences. Playing Kentucky Route Zero is more enjoyable if we play to experience what the gamemakers created rather than trying to pigeon hole a particular play style into the game.
Summary
To really understand the design of a game, you have to consider what that game asks of its players. How does a game draw on a player’s senses? What kind of (and how much) information does the game provide a player? How does a player understand their role in the game? What other life experiences and knowledge are likely to inform a play experience? What kinds of expectations will a player bring to their play experience? These questions are best understood by taking into account a series of theories drawn from sociology, psychology, information science, and related fields.
Action Theory: The sociological understanding of what happens when people interact with things. People have beliefs that shape their understanding of things, which lead to reactions to what is going on around them, which lead to desires, around which people create intentions that lead to actions.
Layers of Player Experience: Players move through five different interpretive acts when playing a game: the sensory, or what the player sees, hears, and feels; the information, or the data the player takes in about the game state; the interaction, or what the player understands they can do; the frame, or the broader interpretation of the play experience; and the purpose, or the goal of the play experience.
Attention: Many things draw on a player’s attention during gameplay. Executive attention is what we are intentionally focusing on while playing. Reflexive attention is caused by things that grab our attention away from our intentional focus like loud noises, visual distractions, and similar phenomena.
Information spaces: Games have information spaces that we explore as players. Perfect information spaces are those in which everything to be known about a game is visible to the player. Imperfect information spaces are those in which some information is hidden from players either by the game itself or by other players.
Affordances: The perceived properties of a thing that suggests to people what that thing is used for. Affordances break down further into four subcategories: perceptible affordances, or what we assume a thing does; correct rejections, or what we think it doesn’t do; hidden affordances, or what a thing does that isn’t obvious; and false affordances, or misinterpretations of what a thing does.
Crampton-Smith’s five characteristics of well-done interactivity: A set of five properties present in all good interaction design: mental model, feedback, consistency, intuitiveness, and navigability.
Mental model: The way a player perceives a game to work, both in terms of what they should do to play, but also what their actions mean within the game’s space of possibility.
Feedback: The game provides reassuring feedback so that the user/player knows they have affected change in a meaningful way.
Consistency: Consistently and logically builds upon the commitment the player makes to learning and playing the game.
Intuitiveness: Allows the player to focus on the play experience rather than the mechanical inputs required to play.
Navigability: A clear and well-designed path through the play experience.
Failure: There are three kinds of failure encountered through gameplay: individual flaws that are perceived as the player’s fault; flaws in the game that are perceived to be caused by a bug or error in the game; and circumstantial flaws caused by an external force.
Player Types: Richard Bartle’s four kinds of players are achievers, explorers, socializers, and killers. Achievers are interested in obtaining a game’s or their own goals. Explorers like to understand the breadth and depth of a game’s space of possibility. Socializers play games to interact with other players. Killers want to impose their will on other players.
Beyond Player Types: Not all games are designed to enable play styles within the space of possibility of the game. Particularly in authorially driven games, the purpose layer is simply having the experience planned by the gamemakers.
Exercises
1. Choose a simple game like tic tac toe or jacks to play. Use the principles of action theory to consider your play experience.
2. Choose a videogame and imagine what would happen if you changed the player point of view. If it’s top down, how would the gameplay differ if it was side-view? 2D to 3D?
3. Pick a game and consider the mental model you have for how the game is played.
4. Watch people playing a challenging game. Create a log of all the moments of failure that happen. Categorize each instance of failure as either individual flaw, flaw in the game, or circumstantial flaw.
5. Pick a multiplayer game you like to play. Play it four times, each time modeling one of Bartle’s four player types.