I just read a great article written back in 2011, but most of the principles it discusses are still very current with our understanding of the brain and what makes us tick. In
The Seduction Secrets of Video Game Designers, Guardian editor Keith Stuart summarizes some of the ways video games tie into our intrinsic desires and motives. Taking notes of important things helps me learn, which is the purpose of this blog and blog post, so I'll give here a re-cap of my notes (some is verbatim, but again it's notes for my own learning) from the article with some of my own thoughts sprinkled throughout.
Games are fun because they teach us interesting things and they do it in a way that our brains prefer –
taught through systems and puzzles. Effective teaching and
learning encourages failure. In game theory, this is often spoken of as the 'magic circle': you enter into a realm where the rules of the real world don't apply – and typically being judged on success and failure is part of the real world. People need to feel free to try things and to learn without being judged or penalized.
The most successful games are the ones that provide us with interesting tools such as weapons or magic (or even angry birds) and allow us
time to experiment with them. Stuart uses the game
Portal 2 as an example and I observed this but a few days ago as my children played this game. When starting, players get to "play" absent adversaries in a smaller constrained space, simply to learn basics before progressing on into the game. The game
Halo works the same way. It is an "
acquire, test, master" model that is now central to games. There is room to experiment and to figure things out through intuition. On the other hand, learning is often frustrating in the real world because you don't always get to go at the pace you want to go and often don't immediately see the application of what you're doing.
Games offer
autonomy, to have control and power that most of us don't have most of the time, that's liberatingly godlike (which gets noticed byt he game, which often we lack in real life as well). This helps players define their own play. There's an emphasis on the pleasure of choosing and planning. We've moved quite dramatically away from the action games of the 80s and 90s, where the primary mode of engagement was reaction to events. Shooters still have this core of fast, reactive action, but a game such as
Crysis 2 is also about approaching a situation, making a solid plan and then defining the template for this reactive mode, depending on your preferred play style. It involves curiosity. Behavioral economist
George Loewenstein said, "
Curiosity is the act of wanting a thing without knowing what it is." We find something narcotic in the sense of tension and the resolution. There's a lot of that in video games. Failure can provide this because if failure is players' own fault, it's just another indicator of the player's agency in the world. This can also simply be fun, interesting... when urban driving game Burnout was released, the design team immediately realized that players loved crashing the cars because of the breathtakingly realistic destruction animations, so for the sequel, they added a mode that encouraged and rewarded dramatic collisions – it was a massive success.
The best studios are also designing their titles around
established reward systems. A good game will have the expected progression at the end of each level, but it will also provide surprise rewards halfway through. It's a principle that's based on workplace psychology. One of the best ways to reward employees is to enhance predictable annual bonuses with little treats added in every now and again – buying all your staff an iPod, for example. It keeps people much more motivated. In a game, you're essentially pressing the same buttons and doing the same things over and over again, so you need those
elements of the unexpected to stay compelled.
Stories are becoming important to games - and again, these are stories you don't simply watch but that you interact with and control, which amps the story power. There's
much to be said about the power of stories which I'd like to write more about later. Narrative games have their own version of Hollywood's three-act structure, designed to keep us utterly hooked. A shorter final act is often used to give a sense of acceleration towards climax. It's all about communicating the player's position on the arc, so they have a strong motivation to keep playing. Opening levels also tend to be brief, because this flatters us into thinking we're making quick progress.
This reminds me of when people tell stories about their greatest game moments, they often revolve around
nearly dying. In games, what's really special for people is not, 'I killed the bad guy and I was perfect', it's, 'I nearly died, but I just managed to kill the bad guy.' This has definitely been my own experience. It's a rush. It's a social moment, retelling it "with the guys" and laughing about it. It's a storytelling moment either in that context or alone as a fond memory where I was the star in an adventure story - the type that are unrealistic and the good guy always wins vs. unreasonable odds and situations. The
social aspect alone is an important one to many games today and is a large field of study itself.
Another important part of games is
disproportionate feedback, in which players are hugely rewarded for achieving very simple tasks. In many games, when an enemy is shot, they don't just collapse to the floor, they explode into chunks. In casual puzzles, titles such as
Zuma and
Peggle, a completed level is accompanied by pixelated firework displays, sparkling rainbows and messages declaring: "Ultra Extreme Fever". These contrasting forms of graphical over-elaboration aren't just there for window-dressing, they're a charm offensive on the brain's pleasure centers:
you're good, you're a success – you're powerful. Doesn't this really just harness much of what
positive psychology has taught us and really expanded upon in the last couple decades? Disproportionate feedback is an endorphin come-on.
In summary, Stuart's article said,
"That loop of agency, learning and disproportionate feedback is at the heart of something very important. And very, very seductive."
