Game Design

Article: The elements of player experience

2011-04-10T00:42:25Z

I've written a new article for UX Mag that's adapted from the upcoming book. Building off of Jesse James Garrett's elements of user experience, it proposes a similar model for game experiences. Feedback on this piece is really valuable to me, so please feel free to leave your comments!

Read the article on UX Mag

Interview with Jesse Schell

2010-08-10T00:52:52Z

Last week I spoke with game designer Jesse Schell, the highly influential author of "The Art of Game Design", professor at Carnegie Mellon, and CEO of Schell Games. His presentation from the 2010 DICE Summit, in which he mapped out a future where gamelike experiences will be integrated into everything from toothbrushes to bus rides, went viral and sparked widespread controversy. We talked about the presentation, the promise for games to do good in the world, and how UX designers should approach game-related projects.

The second chapter of your book is dedicated to discussing games as enablers of experiences. Why the emphasis on that idea right at the beginning of the book?
It's important because people who are trying to design games are so quick to go to anything tangible. They want to talk about the particulars of the design right away, how it works and what it looks like. But what the designer's actually doing is building an experience, and we should never lose sight of that. That's the real goal.

Your DICE presentation predicted that in the future gameplay will be thoroughly mashed into everyday user experiences. Do you envision the impetus for that coming from the game designers, or from the designers of conventional user experiences?
I see it coming from both directions. Reality and games are really reaching out to each other right now, and meeting in the middle.

So what core competencies would conventional user experience designers need to develop to game up their interfaces?
Core competencies isn't the right way to think about it -- it's not learn a little about this or that. You'd first need to make a fundamental shift in your perspective, and then you'd need to practice. You'd need to turn away from efficiency and toward entertainment. So for example, if I were to give you a tax application with just one big red button that you pressed and boom, your taxes were all done, that would be ideal. If you did the same thing for Gears Of War, that would be the worst game ever. So people who are gameifying conventional interfaces can get themselves into trouble.

What advice would you give to someone who's thinking about incorporating a gamelike experience into a conventional UI?
You can't just say "Hey, people like games, therefore people will like this." That isn't necessarily true. And people don't necessarily want a user interface to be a game per se, but to have gamelike qualities. There are many things that games are especially good at. They can provide clear feedback, the possibility of success, mental and in some cases physical exercise, the opportunity to satisfy your curiosity, a chance to do problem solving, or a feeling of freedom. So you should be asking "What are the elements of games that people find pleasurable?"

Some of the reaction to your presentation has seemed fearful, with speculation of Orwellian implications. Did you anticipate that response?
Well I think there is some reason for concern, and I really wanted people to have that discussion. This is something that's definitely going to happen and it can be a very good thing, but it can also be misused. For example, you start getting into a lot of ethical problems with advertising because games can be such a powerful medium to influence buying behavior. It's one thing when you use a compelling game mechanic to create an experience that you really get into, but it's another if you're using it to get people to buy something that could be damaging to their health.

Can games can be used to achieve positive social ends?
Absolutely. Certainly educational. If you have the ability to ability to influence behavior in a negative way, then you also have the ability to influence it in a positive way.

Do you think that video games have a place in the classroom?
Sure. There are a lot of challenges with games in the classroom. In general they're best suited for use outside the classroom because games tend not to work well under time constraints. They're better as homework. But there is a place for them in the classroom, and it's probably best when the teacher serves as a game master. So let's say you do a live simulation in class where the teacher sets up the situation then observes and augments it as it goes, with the goal of creating a teachable moment. That's something that simulations are really good at. Teachers know you don't just pour something into the student's ear, you have to pry their brains open so that they actually care. The teacher can use games to engineer that moment, and then drive discussion about how it could be done differently. I've seen this done a few times in training games for firefighters, doctors, and nurses, but it can happen almost anywhere. The key is to shift from games as a replacement for the teacher and to something that empowers the teacher.

Can games be persuasive?
Games are best at being persuasive when they're persuading you of the truth. They can be particularly good at illustrating complex systems. If you have an argument about whether a nuclear reactor is safe, people may or may not give credence to your words. But a simulation can prove that it is or isn't safe because you can actually experience it.

This property of games can also make them very useful in, say, political situations where people need to make decisions about complex systems that are difficult to understand. A team from CMU made a game called Peacemaker, intended for Israeli and Palestinean students. People on either side of the conflict tend to assume that the whole thing will go away if the guys on the other side just stop being jerks. Then the students get in the game and start working on solutions, and they discover that what they thought was simple is actually unbelievably complex. So it elevated their point of view on the conflict.

In your mind, what's the most exciting work being done in line with the ideas from your DICE presentation?
I like cool entertainment experiences that make people's lives better. Some of the charity-based ones are really interesting, and can even be meaningful and important. Looking forward, I'm really excited to see it incorporated in theme park experiences. You don't really see interactive vacations, and I think there's a lot that can be done there.

But many of the attempts out there are boring. There's a glut of self-improvement games that are just flops and failures. Most of them don't really get the idea of rewards. There's a great book called "Punished by Rewards" that I encourage everyone trying this to read. We have 30-40 years of psychological research proving that if you bribe someone to do something, people will come to despise doing that thing. Why? Because of the tricky nature of freedom: when someone pays you to do something, you're not doing it for the intrinsic benefit anymore. An awful lot of things that will fall into that trap.

You've been critical of Foursquare in the past. Do you take issue with its execution?
No, I think that Foursquare is inherently flawed. The challenge curve is messed up. It's very similar to Tamagotchi, and it'll probably will have a lifespan similar to the Tamagotchi. The game as it stands requires no skill. It also doesn't fit conveniently into your life; you have to fit your life into it. So if you're in random places at random times, you're going to lose at Foursquare. You can only win by engaging in boring repetitive behavior, and it's not fun to actually do that. You're always rating yourself against the most obsessed people in the world.

But wasn't Tamagotchi an important forerunner to other virtual pet games, like the Sims? Doesn't that show that there's some potential there?
Tamagotchi took a simple fantasy, the Sims turned it into an elaborate fantasy. When you think about it, almost all indoor games have some kind of fantasy component to them, even simple things like chess and checkers. Foursquare has no fantasy in it, so there's just not much to expand. If you take Foursquare and add fantasy, you get larping.

Fifteen years from now, what do you think games are going to be like?
The future of games is going everywhere. They're creeping into every aspect of our lives. Over the long term, one of the big trends will be game worlds with many points of entry. You won't only get into World of Warcraft from the PC, but also from mobile and console systems and maybe even in your car or in a theme park. I also think that speech, where you can talk to a game and it can understand and respond to you, will really change gaming by bringing in real expressive emotion.

Thanks so much for your time Jesse.

Can games bring real social change?

2010-07-25T22:35:50Z

I'm thrilled to unveil "Fitter Critters", a video game designed to teach 9-to-12-year-olds healthier eating habits. I developed this game in collaboration with a brilliant team* as an entry to "Apps for Healthy Kids", a contest sponsored by the USDA and Michelle Obama's "Let's Move!" campaign. The contest explores the potential for games to bring about meaningful social change, an idea of which I'm a proponent.

Our game combines principles of user experience design and game design, and plays like a mashup of Farmville, The Sims, and Animal Crossing. It has a strong educational mission (complete with a unit plan for teachers) and aims to persuade kids to change the way they eat. Over the next few weeks I'll be periodically blogging about how we built it and the objectives underlying the design.

In the meantime, please feel free to give it a try; I'd love to get your feedback. If you find it interesting and enjoyable, consider giving it your vote on the contest website! You can access the game at:

* http://www.appsforhealthykids.com/application-gallery/fitter-critters

Have fun!

* I would be terribly remiss if I didn't express my deep appreciation to Andrew Karetas, Bri Lance, Jim Chiponis, and Amanda Ferrara for their work developing the game.

Discussing the PlayStation Move with Sony's Dr. Richard Marks

2010-04-29T02:17:59Z

Sony's about to take a huge leap forward in motion control. This fall it will roll out the PlayStation Move, a wand-shaped motion controller that works in conjunction with a video camera (PlayStation Eye) tracking its position in space. The result is a highly precise, richly functional, and broadly accessible platform for human-computer interaction on PlayStation 3 (a great demo video is available here). The new device builds upon on ten years of research that also produced the EyeToy, an earlier motion control product that used only a video camera. I recently spoke with the inventor of both products, Dr. Richard Marks, Senior Researcher at Sony Computer Entertainment.

Would you call yourself a user interface designer?

Yes, although it's taken me a long time to describe myself in those terms. Traditionally I identified myself as an engineer or programmer. And anyway, I would describe it more as a user experience designer. My job is to come up with new experiences and see how they can be made into reality.

What does your team do at Sony?

Our charter is two-fold: To improve the existing experience, and to grow the entire market. That's not necessarily just your share; we also want to bring in people who don't traditionally play games.

What are some of the challenges of bringing in people who haven't played a lot of games in the past?

A lot of people are intimidated by the controllers on modern game consoles, which in PlayStation 3's case has two analog sticks and fifteen buttons. You think about the old Atari 2600, which had just one stick and one button, and that made it accessible to a lot of people. Fifteen is a whole lot more, and the average person who isn't a gamer feels like they can't possibly compete and don't even want to try. Many people also don't have super-fine physical dexterity and it's difficult for them to move a very small amount, as required by many games. So while we find that the medium of video games appeals to a lot of these people, they're just not very good at interacting in it.

That's one of the great advantages of motion control. Back in 2001 we made a demo with a camera tracking colored ball on a stick, and onscreen it projected a character over the ball. I had my 3-year-old son try it out, and he instantly understood that wherever you move the stick the character would also move. Even a 3-year-old can understand that, while using a controller or joystick to do the same thing would be completely beyond him.

What were some of the lessons you learned from your experience developing the EyeToy?

Something that was lost with EyeToy was a sense of accuracy. Once in a while you want that. The EyeToy could only register broad, coarse body movements, and its reliability would vary with the lighting conditions in the room. So the Move has a glowing sphere on the end of it, which the camera can track to within a tenth of a pixel. The PS3 system knows exactly where the PlayStation Move controller is in the room with great accuracy.

One of the mantras of the EyeToy was that there were no buttons. We could have had people using the PlayStation 2 controllers with the games, but instead we chose to just rely upon the person's physical movement in the room. I think that was a good discipline for us to work within and resulted in some really unique game experiences, but we came to realize that it went too far. It was very difficult to do things like navigating menus. You could only do that by waving your hands repeatedly over menu items to select them, then wave at another message to confirm that was really what you wanted to select. And while it was neat that you could work that way, it wasn't a great interface. A button is very fast, very reliable, and very abstract -- you can map it to anything you want.

Tell me about the physical design of the Move controller.

Well it's different from the Wii, which used a remote control paradigm. With the Move, it'll be more like you're holding a physical object that has a handle. It's designed so that it tapers in the middle then flares back out at the base, kind of like an axe handle. That creates an ergonomic advantage as well, because a smaller hand will naturally grip it at the thinner point while a larger hand will grip it further down, and in both cases that positions the thumb right above the button.

There's also an analog button on the back that's called the "T-button" and is used in some games like a trigger, but I prefer to think of it as a squeezer. It has a fairly long throw so you can control something really well just by squeezing, and that makes it feel very natural for grabbing and manipulating objects.

Do you think that a device like the Move has applicability beyond gaming?

Definitely. One of our favorite uses for the Move besides gaming is creating user-generated content. Just as a creation tool, it provides a lot more capability than anything we ever had before. We actually wrote a driver to send the data from the PS3 to a PC so our artists could use it in Maya, which is an animation suite they use to design games. Often in Maya you have to move things around and look at them from different angles and distances, which normally takes expert knowledge to understand the indirect controls. Using the Move, it's amazing how fast you can operate it. People are surprisingly good at positioning two controllers relative to one another. You can carve, extrude, lathe, grab points in a wire mesh -- it all feels very natural.

Fifteen years from now, how do you think people will be interacting with computers?

That's such a difficult question. A lot of people say we'll be controlling computers just through brainwaves in the future, but I don't really believe that. In my opinion, people want to use both their bodies and their brains. There's a somatic gratification you get when your whole body is involved in an interaction. Playing the drums in Rock Band is really gratifying, because your body's really taking part in it. That's also a big part of the appeal behind touchscreens, because touching something directly is more gratifying than just clicking a mouse.

I think the future is in interfaces that people enjoy using more. Where the mechanic is fun, or if not fun at least pleasing. Things have actually been going that way for a while, when you think about it. PC gaming, where you have to sit rigidly at a desk, has become less popular than console gaming, where you're reclined and relaxed.

Thanks so much for your time.

Send your questions about the PlayStation Move

2010-04-16T11:59:45Z

Next week I'll be interviewing Dr. Richard Marks, Sony's R&D manager of special projects, who developed the EyeToy, PS Eye, and PlayStation Move peripherals. If you're not familiar with the Move, it's a motion controller that uses a video camera to track a wand held by the player, creating a high-precision input device. A video demo is available here.

In the interview, we'll be discussing the process of developing entirely new models of user input and the applicability of innovations in game design to conventional interfaces. If you have specific questions along those lines, please do send them them as comments to this post.

Gamepocalypse Now

2010-04-11T20:46:27Z

Jesse Schell, author of "The Art of Game Design", has started a blog to expand on the themes of his February presentation at the DICE Summit. In that talk, he predicted that sometime soon game mechanics will become integrated into all sorts of mundane everyday activities. He expects that governments, corporations, and other organizations will discover power of games to shape human behavior. He's taken to referring to this as the "Gamepocalypse" (and occasionally "Brave New World").

The classroom as a game

2010-03-28T22:59:36Z

Lee Sheldon teaches game design at Indiana University. His methods are a bit unconventional. His class on building massively multiplayer online games is itself structured like an MMO. Students work in teams called "guilds", grades are awarded with experience points, and exams are boss fights that guilds work together to complete. He's recently started a blog on the class.

One of the themes I've been developing is that many things we do in everyday life are indistinguishable from games, but we're just not used to thinking of them that way. There's real value in that insight, because interfaces that cater to those activities can benefit from the same design principles that make games so compelling.

And the Nobel prize for video games goes to...

2010-03-21T20:28:28Z

One of the most interesting practical applications of video game design I've come across is FoldIt, a project out of the University of Washington that has game players folding chains of proteins. It's actually a lot more awesome than it sounds.

Biochemistry is hard. Protein molecules grow to extraordinary lengths, and can be folded into a dizzying variety of different shapes following a set of basic rules. And a single protein can have completely different effects depending upon the way it's folded. Fold one protein this way and you have a normal part of the human body; fold it that way and you've got mad cow disease. Unraveling the complicated effects of different protein shapes is an extremely important area of inquiry in modern biochemistry.

A rules-based problem with countless numbers of possible solutions? On the surface it sounds like a job for SUPERCOMPUTER! It's not. Computers certainly provide vital support through modeling complicated protein structures in real time, but it turns out that they're not especially good at figuring out how to twist protein chains into new shapes that obey all of the rules. I recently spoke with Seth Cooper, one of the developers of FoldIt, who told me that left on its own a computer "just kind of flails around, trying random moves to get the pieces to fit together." Since there are so many possible combinations to run through, this sort of brute force approach gets results very slowly.

On the other hand, human intuition can recognize patterns and anticipate strategies that are lost on machines. But human beings come with their own set of problems -- in particular, you need to give them a reason to do something. As Luis Von Ahn pointed out, you can motivate people with material things like money or goods -- but inexpensive and intangible things like recognition, praise, and social credit can often be just as effective.

And that's why the designers of Fold.it decided to make their human-guided protein folding interface into a video game. Making progress gets you points, points get you onto leaderboards, and leaderboards give you recognition. This simple formula has been sufficient to get tens of thousands of players to volunteer their time to a science which, in many cases, they have no background. Though it must be pointed out that it's at least conceivable that a by playing this game, you could actually win a Nobel prize.

White House launches games for health initiative

2010-03-14T21:45:34Z

Can video games get kids to go easy on the Lucky Charms? The Obama administration thinks they might be able to.

In a letter to attendees of the annual Game Developers' Conference last week, Michelle Obama issued a challenge to develop games that would educate kids about eating better and living healthier lives. Prize money will be awarded to the best entrants, as judged by a panel including Zynga's Mark Pincus and professional TV dancer Steve Wozniak.

Can this work? I absolutely believe it can, but I'm more concerned that it might not. Let me explain.

On the one hand, I fully believe that games can be used to bring about change in people. In his speech at the DICE summit, game designer Jesse Schell proposed games to get people to do anything from brushing their teeth more often to helping their kids with their homework. Popular games like WiiFit and Brain Age improbably get people to exercise their bodies and minds. Games are intimately tied to motivation, and can be powerfully persuasive ways to get people to do something or adopt a certain point of view.

On the other hand, I'm concerned that this competition (itself a motivational game!) might not be structured to elicit the best solutions. To be successful, a game must first and foremost be a game. If an educational mission (however noble) supersedes the gameplay, the experience can become heavy-handed and unenjoyable. I think there's a danger here that the prize competition could reward entrants that most conspicuously promote the healthy eating idea, rather than those that really engage the player. A game can't influence people if no one actually wants to play it -- call it "The Bible Game" problem.

But still, the White House is is doing something really significant by endorsing the idea that games can achieve real-world objectives. I think that's a sign of shifting expectations about the role games have to play in all of our lives.

Interview with Dennis Crowley, Founder, foursquare

2010-03-07T21:34:45Z

foursquare is a mobile networking application that broadcasts when users check in to various locations around a city. People can see which friends are nearby, and drop in to join them. One of the things that makes foursquare really unique is its use of game mechanics. It awards users badges for accomplishing goals like going out several nights in one week, or visiting a gym a certain number of times. The people who check in a given location most frequently can be crowned its Mayor, inviting other players to seize the title. The formula has generated a lot of interest, and in less than year since launch foursquare has grown to broadcast 1.5 million checkins a week.

I recently spoke with Dennis Crowley, foursquare's founder, about the incorporation of game components into its design.

Q: How would you describe foursquare?
A: It's something that makes cities easier to use and explore. It's a mashup of friend finders with city guides to locate interesting places, with a layer of game mechanics to incentivize you to explore the city in ways you otherwise wouldn't.

Q: Why put a game into foursquare, rather than just presenting it as a straightforward UI?
A: A number of years ago I helped create Dodgeball, which was one of the earliest friend finders. It worked via SMS, so you would just text where you were and Dodgeball would parse it, recognize location data in the message, and send it to your friends. One of the things we discovered from that experience was that it was only interesting when you have a good number of friends who are also using Dodgeball. But until that happens, how do you get people to use it?

In foursquare the game adds interest single-user experience, because when you check into places you can start earning badges and mayorships right away. For first time-users, that's very important. It changed the reason to check in. Then people ultimately discover the core application as they start to find their friends, restaurant reviews, and so forth. By that point, the game mechanic is intended to be secondary to that experience.

Q: Do you think some people are turned off by the presence of game elements in an interface?
A: There are people who say they don't take it seriously. But people don't really object to the game mechanics. When someone does feel turned off, it's more often about the competitive elements. Incentives like leaderboards don't appeal to everyone.

Q: How was foursquare received when it first went up?
A: We launched it at the SxSW conference in March of 2009 as something you could play while you were attending and use to socialize with other people. It was a really big gamble because we knew it was either going to be really good, or people would be laughing at us. That initial version was very game-heavy. You would get badges for doing things like traveling 25 miles out of the city, or for attending the first panel in the morning. As it turned out, it went over really big at the conference. Then the attendees traveled back to their respective cities to find there were more badges waiting for them there, and they continued playing it.

Q: What influenced the design of foursquare?
A: Legend of Zelda was an inspiration. You know how when you're out on a mission and you find something like the boomerang, and you get totally psyched? I loved that feeling when I was 8, and I loved it when I was 28. So why not make a real-life challenge where an everyday serendipitous experience can feel like uncovering the boomerang in Zelda?

I don't know if you're a Harry Potter guy, but I also thought of foursquare as a cross between the marauder's map and the Weasley clock. That idea of always having a map in front of you showing where everyone is really appealed to me.

It was also hugely inspired by Nike+, which connects your iPod to your sneakers and tracks your workout. It also connected to leaderboards where you could track yourself against your friends and set up challenges with them. That becomes a motivator to get out of bed in the morning and go running in the rain. That's very powerful, and we thought well hey, what if you could get people to go to restaurants, or to movies, or to explore different neighborhoods?

I also just really love the whole idea of the quantified self, of tracking everything that you do every day and turning it into numbers. You can make it so that everything you do in life creates points.

Q: Have you contemplated the applicability of game design to conventional user interfaces more broadly?
A: Designers are starting to realize that they can use game mechanics to get users to do things they wouldn't do otherwise. You could make a game out of seeing all of the Oscar-nominated movies before the awards, or seeing all of the bands your friends have recommended to you.

Of course those things are kind of trivial, but there are other things you could get people to do that become borderline important. You can use games to make people more rounded individuals, encourage them to volunteer more, get them going to the gym, or feel better about themselves. This year you've read x amount more than you did last year. Imagine if Nike+ placed powerups all over the city where you live, and you had to run over them to pick them up.

One thing I really liked about Jesse Schell's presentation at the DICE Summit is that he's nailed the idea of redemptions. Your daughter got an A in her class? Well that's worth 1000 points for each of you, and you can turn that into Obama bucks for a tax credit. Maybe something else you do could earn you a voucher that gets you into a club, or gets you a free movie ticket. That's a huge idea.

Thanks so much for your time, I wish you continued success with foursquare.

Send your questions for foursquare

2010-02-25T04:54:10Z

This weekend I'll be interviewing Dennis Crowley, creator of foursquare. We'll be discussing the decision to design what could have been a conventional UI as a game-based experience. If you have questions you'd like me to ask, please post them as comments to this blog.

Defining games (the cheapo way)

2010-02-21T23:00:40Z

Many books on game design have a chapter, usually early on, that wrestles with putting a definition to the term "game". Since that's something for which we all have a pretty intuitive sense, it's surprising how broadly our definitions of it can diverge. Try it! You'll find it's pretty difficult to come up with that ideal string of words that are true for everything we call a game, but which also clearly exclude those things that aren't games. For example, you might say:

"A game is a fun activity." Hmm, well I've been to parties that were fun activities but that weren't games. I've also played some games that weren't fun. When I was in fourth grade all of the boys in my class would spend recess simulating pro-wrestling matches, which I personally found to be just plain painful. But I'd have to admit that the shortage of fun didn't stop it from being a game.
"A game is a rules-based form of play." It's certainly true that all games have rules, no argument there. But so do computer programming languages, highways, and sessions of Congress.
"A game is a frivolous diversion from the real world." No, that can't be right. Militaries stage games to simulate conditions of war, which is about as far as you can get from a frivolous pursuit. A blackjack table is a game, but since the players are putting up real money it can have very tangible impact in the real world.

I think the difficulty stems from impulse to tackle the problem using a straighforward Webster's / OED approach, which only works until you find one example to the contrary. I vow never to try to do that. Instead, it's a little easier to describe the characteristics that, taken together, comprise a gameplay experience (sort of a cheapo approach). In the past, I've found some success with these three characteristics of all games:

Static objectives. One or more explicit, measurable conditions that all players are trying to reach.
Environmental constraints. The things and places that enable play. Think of cards, dice, checkerboards, and football fields. These set hard limits on what people can do: a deck of cards only has four aces, no matter how much you might need a fifth one.
Formal constraints. AKA, the rules. These are the intangible limits on what people can do. There's nothing that keeps the players following these constraints, except for the fact that they all agreed they would.

That's it. Those three things are true of any game under the sun. Also, anything where those three characteristics are present must necessarily be a game. You'll notice that makes it a pretty expansive way of thinking about games, and the characteristics could easily encompass things we wouldn't normally identify as games. Education, financial planning, and even work would be caught in a net that wide. That's by design! I really believe that many mundane, everyday experiences can be understood as games, even if we're not used to thinking of them that way. And in turn, they can benefit from the elements of design that make games compelling and enjoyable.

Jesse Schell (who wrote a fantastic book called "The Art of Game Design") gave a very future-looking presentation at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas last week, where he suggested integrating game design into the littlest things people do every day. Brushing your teeth. Eating breakfast cereal. Riding the bus. Reading a book. He suggests that all of these things can be detected through sensors and engineered to earn you points, achievements, or tax credits. Absurd? You bet. Schell's deliberately overshooting the mark to invite us to stretch our imaginations beyond the traditional, limiting definitions of "game". Somewhere short of remote toothbrush surveillance is a much more compelling way to do Quicken, Outlook, or Craigslist.

If Schell's proposals seem absurd, it's more because we're unaccustomed to them than because of any real-world barriers to actually bringing them to fruition.

Hunting for coupons at Old Navy

2010-02-15T18:57:48Z

Game experiences are slowly creeping into regular old user interfaces. A great example is OldNavyWeekly.com. On the surface level it serves as a normal circular, announcing big sales on the hip clothes. But it also prominently prompts users to "Click around to find hidden in-store coupons", playing as a kind of easter egg hunt.

In some cases you need to drag items from one outfit to another, like a pair of shoes or a heart imprint. In others you need to click a character that appears briefly onscreen, like a baby chick who periodically runs out of a basket (and it's actually really hard to catch the little bastard). For each find, you're rewarded with a coupon to print and bring to the store -- but you can only keep one, so in each case you need to decide whether it's a better deal than the one you already have.

Now of course this goes against the must fundamental, ingrained tenets of usable design, like making sure that users can easily find the things they want to find. So can this really be a good thing? I'd suggest that there may actually be a few ways that a game such as this one can be helpful to the retailer:

It couples the coupons with a sense of achievement. You had to invest effort and ingenuity to get that coupon, dammit, and that investment won't be fulfilled until you make use of it. If you don't, then the time you spent working on it could only be seen as time wasted. The more difficult the challenge, the greater the sense of obligation.

It commands greater attention. Games require active, participative engagement in the experience. Since anything onscreen could be a trigger, the user has to pay more careful attention everything. Eyeballs are good, but attentive eyeballs are much more likely to respond to ads. The game also also encourages repeated visits as it's redone each week.

It encourages free peer-to-peer advertising. You also have the option to gift one coupon to a friend via Facebook. That's great for Old Navy, because it comes with an implicit endorsement from a trusted friend. If it was worth sending, then the person receiving it must read it as saying "This is a great deal, you should check it out".

It invites users to think of themselves differently. Web users are often cast like the audience of TV or magazines, who use or consume information at the end of its journey and after it's fully formed. People playing a game, on the other hand, join in making the experience. This invites users to think of themselves as belonging to in-group, with a role to play as a part of the Old Navy brand.

I'm going to try to make contact with the site's designers, to ask them about the intention underlying the game approach and how well it's worked for them. If you have any questions you'd like to me to ask them, please feel free to add comments to this post.

Interview with Stone Librande, Lead Designer at Maxis

2010-02-05T02:31:53Z

I recently spoke with Stone Librande, who has worked as a designer on games including "Spore" and "Diablo III". Stone also leads an annual design workshop at the Game Developers' Conference and teaches a college course in game design. We discussed game design process, including a method of paper prototyping that UX designers will find both familiar in concept and new in execution.

Q: Tell me a bit about your background.

A: Before I went into gaming I was actually doing a lot of work in user interface design. I commercialized a technology that parameterized artwork and allowed users to quickly sift through thousands of drawings just by pulling sliders mapped to different characteristics. We found a lot of video game applications for it. Then I took a job managing a Web design team at a company called MPlayer, which was a social gaming network that was a little bit ahead of its time. But looking all the way back to my childhood, game design was always something I was interested in. Eventually I worked my way into Blizzard and from there on to Maxis to work on Spore.

Q: How was Spore's game experience created?

A: Well there were really two pieces to that. First, there was a high-level description from Will Wright. In one case, we were asked to make a game about cells swimming in a drop of water. Then there's the bottom-up design of the game mechanics. An important consideration in the cell game was creating the right balance of risk and reward. In any game you don't want it to either be too hard (which would become frustrating) or too easy (which would make the game boring). But everyone's different and we wanted Spore to have broad appeal to both casual players and hardcore gamers. The question is: How do you make an experience to fit many different tastes?

One way we approached that was by giving players opportunities to outfit their cell creatures with different pieces as they evolve. Novice players can finish the whole cell experience with just the basic creature design. You can get by while taking very modest risks, but you also won't reap great rewards from it. But for hardcore players, there's an opportunity to really dig into the game by experimenting with the effects of different pieces. They're invited to take a lot more risks, and they put themselves in more danger of failing. Since the traits they pick up in the cell game effect the later stages, those players who take on a greater challenge can also put themselves at an advantage and realize a greater reward.

Q: How do you guide players' behavior in games?

A: A lot of those ideas you learned in Psych 101 like reinforcement schedules are fundamental to game design. People are subject to the same behavioral influences as pigeons and rats. You can influence the players' behavior by attaching a meaningful reward to the actions you want them to take. For example, say you're designing a card game and you want players to try to collect three 3's. You could force them to do that by making it the winning condition -- there's your reward. Or you can make people pursue that same goal less aggressively by saying that three 3's are worth 3 points, while all other collections of cards are worth one point.

The most powerful reward you can give a player is a social reward. Intrinsic rewards are nice, but adding in a social component exploits people's basic competitive nature. If someone else has something that you don't have, you'll work really hard to obtain it. There's also a element of inclusion, of being part of an in-group that's tied together by the game experience.

Q: You gave a presentation at last year's Game Developers' Conference about paper prototyping. Tell me about how your method works.

A: First of all, the paper prototype is not a representation of the actual game, and it's not intended to be. That's not the purpose. Instead, the point is to ask and answer one simple question about the game you're working on. Second, it should be something that you can experiment with and iterate very quickly.

So for Spore's cell game, a key design question was figuring out the various creature parts that would be available to the player, and how they balance against one another. So I put together a board game version on paper. [See an image of the game board here.] I wrote up a large list of parts and their abilities, going big at first so we could test a lot of scenarios and then scale it back. Players would assemble a unique cell creature using different combinations of eyes, mouths, graspers and tails. The cell pieces have different game abilities. For instance, tails allow the cell to move forward and rotate. During the game, each cell would either attempt to eat the most green food tokens (herbivore victory) or to attack and kill the opposing cell (carnivore victory).

We ended up with 12 parts that were given away over the course of the cell game's five stages. We also defined the other creatures you'd encounter in each of those stages, ranging from harmless to more difficult as the player progressed through the game. That output was what made it into the final game. [See an image of the game output here.]

Q: Why do this on paper, when you could model thousands of different scenarios in one go using a computer?

A: I run a workshop teaching this technique at the Game Developer's Conference, and computers aren't even allowed into the session. Building prototypes with paper fosters team interaction. As people work on it, they'll start role-playing and getting into the characters of the game. They also develop a shared vocabulary for discussing elements of the game. If you did it with computers, everyone would just be working on their own and you wouldn't get that kind of interaction.

Q: What works best prototyped on paper?

A: You can't represent the full gameplay experience, that's just not practical. A video game like Spore has a lot of physics and math, and that just can't be done on paper. Input controllers like mice or keyboards are also really difficult to simulate. Anything that's too complex would just be misery to test. Similarly, if a user interface designer were prototyping the front end for a database, you could show what the form elements and buttons look like but you couldn't simulate the return of actual data. That's just too complicated to do.

That said, when you really abstract a design problem there's a lot that you can pull into a non-electronic prototype. In my workshop, I do an exercise where I have people build prototypes of existing video games. A few years ago one team decided to try doing Rock Band, and I was really skeptical that it would work. Surprisingly, they came up with a game that captured Rock Band's core mechanics. There were five players, one of whom had a shuffled deck of colored index cards. He would throw out the cards in sequence, and all of the other players had to dig through their own cards and throw down matching colors. When you matched the pattern, the moderator would give you coins. If you missed, he would take coins away. Players could support one another by throwing coins to band members who were missing their beats. Even though there was no music and there were no plastic instruments, the game really captured the Rock Band feel.

This is a really amazing method. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk, Stone.

Interview with Mike Ambinder of Valve Software

2010-01-30T05:33:48Z

Valve Software has designed top-selling games including Left 4 Dead, Half-Life, and Team Fortress. I recently spoke with Mike Ambinder, PhD, the company's full-time experimental psychologist, to discuss the professional practices that ensure high-quality game experiences.

Q: What's your role at Valve?
A: My job is to apply knowledge and methodologies from psychology to game design. That means performing statistical analyses, developing playtesting methodologies, conducting design experiments, a little bit of interface design, and investigating alternative hardware among other things.

Q: How can psychology guide game design?
A: Well for example, in the Left 4 Dead series there are several predetermined locations in the game called "drop points" where health items or weapons will spontaneously appear. To decide what's dropped, where, and when we considered reward and reinforcement schedules, which are elements of behavioral psychology. You can put things on a fixed schedule so that they'll appear at regular intervals. This makes the gameplay experience more predictable, and there can be real value in that. Or you can use a variable schedule so that you don't know what's going to show up or when it'll pop in. Variable schedules can create a higher rate of engagement in the game and make the experience more enjoyable as uncertainty of occurrence can increase arousal. A large component of the gameplay in the Left 4 Dead series is the use of these variable reinforcement schedules.

Q: How is testing integrated into the design process?
A: We're constantly playtesting. Our philosophy is to playtest as much as possible, and to start it as soon as we have a playable prototype. Of course our designers are experienced and generally make good decisions about gameplay, but we don't want to just assume we've got it right. Game designs are hypotheses, and every instance of play is an experiment.

Q: What's your standard testing method?
A: We use a variety of methods, but the most favored is direct observation of real players working their way through the game. I'm not a fan of the think-aloud protocol, in part because the constant prompting detracts from the gameplay experience and can introduce inadvertent bias, and in part because people can be really bad at explaining why they do what they do. Better to just sit back, watch, say nothing, and try to understand the player's actions. So quiet, direct observation is our preferred method, but we combine that with player Q&As, surveys, quantitative metrics, eyetracking, and design experiments, and we're investigating methods of measuring the player's emotional experience during gameplay.

Q: How can eyetracking help to inform game design?
A: Generally, you want to eliminate frequent long eye movements because they lead to fatigue. For example, if the area map is in the bottom right corner of the display and your progress through that map is shown in the upper left, you'll see the player's eyes transiting the screen a lot. The proximity compatibility principle tells us that things which are mentally proximal should also be physically proximal, and eyetracking can tell us which things are mentally proximal. By arranging related information together, you can reduce fatigue and make the interface more efficient to use.

Q: And how can you measure the emotional experience of gameplay?
A: This is still early on, but we're looking at biometric methods like EEGs which measure brainwaves, and EMGs which measure the electrical activity of muscles. But there are questions of their cost and efficacy. They're also both very intrusive methods, requiring either a cap that's wired into a machine or electrodes attached to the face. In testing you want to mimic the home experience as much as possible, and EEGs and EMGs both make it feel more like a lab environment. But new technologies are emerging that could change that. Remote detection of facial expression seems promising; these systems produce data along the lines of an EMG but only use a camera to measure muscle activity in the face.

Emotion can be viewed as a vector and measured along two scales: magnitude and valence. Magnitude describes the intensity of the emotion, while valence describes its quality (either positive or negative). You can measure the magnitude pretty reliably using something like heart rate, but understanding the valence is the tricky part. How do you know if that intense emotional response is good or bad? Of course you could just ask, but again that's not a preferred method because people don't describe their own experiences reliably and you're introducing bias into the response. Context is a better basis. If someone is getting killed repeatedly, you can assume that they're experiencing a negative emotion. However, to validate we'd love to have a system which quantifies valence in real time.

Once we can measure these qualities reliably, we can start asking what the ideal emotional experience should look like over the course of the player's interaction with the game. Maybe that would be something like a pattern of peaks and valleys that steadily rises over time, as opposed to a prolonged burst of emotion that's experienced all at once. That seems like a plausible theory, but we won't know until we've measured it.

Q: What are some of the design elements that you've found make better player experiences?
A: I can suggest a few things. First, the player needs to be able to understand the experience. If you die, you need to understand why you died. If you reach a decision point, you need to understand what the implications are of taking path A or path B. The designer needs to provide a sensible environment.

Variety is also really important. Don't give people the same monsters again and again, or force them to traverse the same levels over and over. There are obvious counterpoints to this, and the constructs of the game may dictate a lack of variety, so it's not a hard and fast rule (none of these are), but it is something we try and emphasize. The Left 4 Dead series is a great example, because you're always interacting with a new set of players with different skill levels and different tactics, and that will completely change the dynamic of the game. It doesn't play the same way twice.

Third, you want to provide people with a feeling of continuous advancement. People prize rewards if they increase in perceived value. They want to feel that the required level of skill builds gradually as the game progresses.

Finally, have the player make interesting choices. Which weapon should I choose? Which armor should I take? If these decisions don't involve meaningful tradeoffs, then you're probably not creating an enjoyable experience.

Q: How do you foster collaboration in multiplayer games?
A: Left 4 Dead is really designed to force players to cooperate. If you go out on your own, for example, you'll get incapacitated very quickly. The game doesn't prevent you from doing that -- it's a choice you can exercise, but it's inevitably a losing strategy. If you have other players near you then you can collectively put up a stronger fight, and when you fall then they can easily revive you.

Testing helped us improve collaboration in Left 4 Dead as well. In the original design, the thinking was that players would build awareness of each others' locations just through verbal cues, speaking to one another through a headset. But it turned out that in the midst of gameplay that doesn't work well. When a teammate fell and needed to be revived, the other players had a difficult time finding him or her. They needed another cue, so we introduced glowing outlines that appear around your teammates' bodies, and which are visible through walls. We found that really increased the players' situational awareness, facilitated cooperation, and created a better gameplay experience.

Q: What kinds of quantitative metrics do you use to inform design?
A: We work with tons of data. We can track any variable available in the game. We'll take information about where people die in each level, then overlay it on an image of the level to show whether people are dying in the right places, and in the right numbers. We can examine the growth in players' skill levels over time by any of various measures, depending upon the needs of the game's design. That may be a fairly coarse metric such as the ratio of kills to deaths, who gets the most kills, who stays alive the longest, and so on. Or you can apply several measured in combination to satisfy a very precise definition of the ideal skill level, such as players who have a moderately high rate of kills but who win a lot and stay alive for a very long time.

I really appreciate your time. I'd wish you luck, but with these kinds of practices it really doesn't sound like you need it.