Audience: People that make games
Any game maker starts (should be able) to say "I want to make a game about..."
On the other side (the player, or person engaging in the game) they are having a unique experience.
A creator should be able to say "When playing my game, the player should feel...." Creators need to be able to complete this sentence in a meaningul way.
This talk is about the challenge of aligning the purpose and topic of your game with an intended Player experience.
How designers often think of player experience:
- accessibility (getting new players up to speed)
- engagement (making it fun)
These are both really important, but not what we are going to talk about...
Mention of the game Debt Ski.
The game's stated purpose: spotlight the dangers of excessive debt...
There is real meat in the idea of finance and debt management...lots of opportunity. In Debt Ski, they tried to create a fun experience...it is fun, mildly exciting, and feeling instant gratification. The whole thing was interesting, but when I got to the end, it just ended, and it was anticlimactic.
The Problem:
"I want to make a game about spotlighting dangers, challenging people to avoid destructive behavior, spurring action, inspriing financial responsibility" and then have the say, I was mildly amused, and it ended abruptly
We need to create experiences that resonate with our topics.
Games we've played when examining the context:
I want to make a game about cartoon animals
When playing my game, the player should feel fast.
I want to make a game about Indiana Jones
When playing my game, the player should feel extraordinary.
I want to make a game about 6000 years of humanity
When playing my game, the player should feel like they're guiding the course of history.
I want to make a game about war on the front lines.
When playing my game, the player should feel strong, solid, tough-as-nails.
I want to make a game about abstract shapes.
When playing my game, the player should feel like their world is spinning out of control.
(I think this is a bit of an over simplification of what the game is about...)
I want to make a game about building blocks.
When playing my game, the player should feel awe at the scale of the world.
Delving a bit deeper: making games with the concerns of topic, player experience and resonance in mind.
We want to make a game about the Rwandan Genocide
When playing our game, the players should feel powerless in the face of moral crisis.
How did we do this with Hush?
Create sense of crisis out of minimal game elements through contrast and tension. The story and concept was personal and simple, but emotionally charged. It starts with a tutorial on how to sing a lullaby. Then you have to sing your lullaby to your child to keep it quiet as the Hutu were coming by the house. The pacing is very slow, wanting to create tension. The sound is sweet, simple melody vs. horrific background SFX/ The control experience: Slow rhythmic key presses simulating a lullaby. It is simple, but not too simple. It had to be complicated enough that you had to think about it, but not too complicated that non-gamers couldn't do it.
In testing we tried to disempower the hardcore gamer. Tension between gameplay elements. Helped to create the feeling being strived for.
Suits: Devising Elaborate Deathtraps
IWe want to make a game about supervillainy.
When playing our game, the players should feel buried in bureaucracy.
Story/Concept: Dramatic element invites social roleplay. The bureaucracy is used to create interactions with other players, but generate blocks to the play of the game. The pace of play is sporadic and disjointed. We are still working on the "engaging" aspect of the game.
Focus of player attention: Multiple parallel tasks require attention (and limited resources).
Information design: There's a lot of hidden information (especially between players). We were trying to give a "board game" feel/aesthetic. This forces a reliance on other players which introduces social dynamics/politics into the game. If players cooperate with one another they "kudos" which are bonuses.
Players are given asymmetrical goals.
Suits is a facebook game, which sets expectations of the game. The Facebook context creates expectation of asynchronous communications.
We want to make a game about time-traveling duplicates, silent films, old-timey villains and pie.
When playing our game, players should feel charmed.
The art direction is quirky and period.
We want to make a game about zen gaming
When playing our game, players should feel their expectations changed by the impact of a single moment.
We want to make a game about oppressed Muslim women.
When playing our game, players should feel powerful.
Mechanical Incentive: Move quickly like a ninja. Its a brawler platformer, where some of the platforms can not "hold the wait" which make the game move quickly...like a ninja.
We want to make a game about a life story, and delve into the biography of a single character.
When playing our game, players should feel nostalgia and and inviting...undiscovered depth.
A platformer that tells a story. Inspired by the loss of speakers grandmother, and the stories she would tell and share as she progressed with dementia.
"A lifes worth of memories are bigger than any sense of theme."
It's a platformer...simple movement: use arrow keys to move, spacebar to jump.
Balancing between simplicity of interface, with complexity of narrative leaves a lot to think about. We wanted a "short experience" (20 minutes) but support re-playability.
Major change in development was a shift in the way that the platformer worked. The original overworld invoked nostalgia for people who play platformers for platformers, as opposed to creating nostalgia through the platformer.
Question: How do you find a player theme that resonates with your topic?
- Divine inspiration (sometimes good ideas just come...write them down and try them out)
- Know your topic, have some opinions about it. (be aware and don't do it absent ideology but use that ideology)
- Think about the experiences of someone/something embedded in your topic area
- Devour related media (or if you prefer unrelated media...things you want to do, but also things that you don't want to do (movies, books, games, whatever.)
How do I make a game that matches what I want? (That player experience)
Be critical. Look at all different aspects of your game and think about...
Make sure design is someone's job, jot just an afterthought. Content expertise is vitally important, but its not the game design.
Know your scope: Keep some thing simple. pull out things that distract from the player experience. Enhance the things that add to the player experience...
ITERATION...nothing more needed to be said about that...
Play test, and listen to criticism. You don't need to agree with it all, but you need to undersand it.
And of course: Play Games. Be literate in games. In order to understand player experience, you have to have been a player.
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