Game Design

Why should UX designers care about games? (Part 1)

2012-10-04T00:05:09Z

Last week I tweeted this question out to the world. Here are some of the great responses I've received so far, and with more coming in every day it looks like I'm going to have to make it into a series! If you'd like to contribute to the next installment, just follow and tweet me.

Kara Behnke

@GameGodde55

Technology, Media, & Society PhD Program, University of Colorado Boulder

User experience designers must pay attention to games because the gaming industry has been perfecting UX design for decades. In fact, effective UX design is the heart of the billion-dollar gaming industry. Why? Games are structured information systems that guide users' actions and give them tools they need to reach specific goals. These systems provide users with immediate feedback on their choices and give them the support they need to progress forward to reach those goals. But game developers also know that UX design is not just about feedback loops and beautiful icons--it's an art in and of itself to perfect user experience design. The greatest games are so effective at immersing users (players) in the design that players don't even know they're interacting with UX design--usability (game play) is intuitive, feels natural, and flows unconsciously. Players know immediately when UX works or doesn't work in a game; they expect nothing but perfection. Therefore, developers know that effective UX design makes the difference between the AAA blockbuster hit or a million-dollar flop. Future UX designers would be wise to pay attention to the methodology and many hard-learned lessons from the gaming industry. Why relearn what's already been learned?

Shirley Man

@siuyee

UX Designer / Program Manager, Electronic Arts (EA Tech)

Game designers and researchers face the same challenges as UX practitioners, and they have been solving these problems with similar approaches.

Cross-platform games need to have responsive and adaptive front-ends; levels and maps are carefully crafted to give gamers a sense of orientation and progressive disclosure; in-game tutorials and hints need to provide just enough information to get gamers up to speed without overwhelming them; immersive user experience can be achieved by means of believable animations, audio, physics, lighting, camera angles and effects; gameplay mechanics, controller schemes and user satisfaction are tested and measured using a variety of techniques such as playtesting, eye-tracking, telemetries... etc.

If UX designers want to apply game design elements (aka gamification) to their work, they need to go far beyond just the use of badges, progress bars and leaderboards.

Cheryl Platz

@muppetaphrodite

Senior User Experience Designer, Microsoft (Server & Tools Division)

Games have acted as a graceful interface to complex systems for decades. Game designers take these complex rule systems and layer interactions on top of those rules in ways that can be tremendously rewarding. Think of the SimCity games - teaching people the difficulty of city planning in a way that delighted players. Here at Microsoft, those moments of "delight" have been an increasingly important goal (yes, even at Microsoft) and I look to my experience with those games when designing for complexity.

There is a tremendous amount we in user experience can learn from the world of game design: guiding human behavior, teaching new concepts, storytelling and communication, and the joy that humans find in progressive mastery. For those using natural interfaces, games are even more critical. Speech recognition has been in some games since the era of the Nintendo 64. Gesture in some form has been around since the Wii. The natural interface language "spoken" by our users will be learned within the context of gaming.

Of course, not all games do things 'right', but we can learn from the good and the bad. "Gamification" as a word may leave a bad taste in your mouth, but this is something deeper - understanding the "why" and the "how" behind successful games, not just a paint-by-numbers approach to game mechanics.

Cindy Ritzman

@iplayallgames

Senior Graphic Designer, DomainTools

Formerly Marketing Creative Director of WildTangent

Gamers have shorter attention spans. They expect action and interaction. Certainly not inaction!

Whether gamers are looking for hidden objects, exploding jewels, racing cars, shooting missiles or killing zombies, every gamer expects some sort of immediate feedback for the choices he/she has made.

I'm not implying that UX Designers should build in a points to encourage users to click buttons and turn tasks into games.

However, I do think that UX Design should bring in the dimension of perceived time and immediate visual feedback as a design tool. Keep forms simple. Don't overcomplicate choices. Ensure pages download quickly and work on the platform/browser the audience is using. Don't make someone feel like he has to jump over a bunch of hurdles to accomplish an obviously simple task. Help keep a process moving until that goal is accomplished. Provide help along the way.

If a user can't immediately engage with a website, chances are that user won't return. And most gamers feel the same way about their favorite games: they enjoy playing by actively accomplishing goals within rules that are understandable.

Companies who are tempted to collect customer data (with no benefit to customers), force customer to wait through splash screens, make customers read meaningless gobbledegook, make check-outs torturously slow and labyrinthine, and design pages that don't work seamlessly across major browsers are the real losers.

Kris Rockwell

@krisrockwell

CEO, Hybrid Learning Systems

Developing an engaging user experience (UX) is, obviously, a crucial component of building a successful game. The entire experience is what keeps the player fully engaged and any bit of weakness often leads to negative reviews and poor ratings. The use of proper game mechanics, storytelling and all contribute to the experience and can draw a player in and keep them playing (evidence World of Warcraft, Skyrim, Angry Birds, etc...). UX designers can easily draw from the game development "toolbox" and use these mechanics to build applications/experiences with similar effect provided that they are used properly and carefully considered during the design process. Much like building a game, however, these design elements are best implemented from a ground up approach rather than trying to "bolt them on" after the initial design has been completed. This approach will ensure that the game elements are embedded in the overall experience as opposed to being added as an afterthought that may serve to annoy the users rather than engage them.

Łukasz Tyrała

@lukasztyrala

Senior Interaction Designer, Pride and Glory Interactive

Games are about having fun. Some are complex, hard to master, contain hundred of pages to read or require lightning keystrokes; but all strive for low entry point, an easy to learn interface and perfect execution. Not all are for everyone, but anyone will find something for one's self.

Epic games make you smile, even when you think about them 10 years later. Some people change their wallpaper awaiting release of a sequel or stay awake until sunrise figuring out how to finish a level they are playing. All of that is true because games are all about experience.

Gamification might be a buzzword, but fun is an emotion that most of us strive for. Game designers do not care about KPIs, conversion rates or databases full of e-mails. They care about fun, and so should UX designers working on websites and applications - at least for 50% of the time spent on a project.

Sebastian Deterding

@dingstweets

Designer and Researcher, coding conduct

To me, the rising interest in UX circles in games is driven by a deeper shift "from usability to motivation," as Joshua Porter once put it: Especially online, business models transition from one-time transactions with consumers to continued participation of "produsers" contributing ideas, UGC, data, word-of-mouth etc. to your service - hence, companies need to motivate these contributions. Second, the core offering of many new product categories is facilitating motivation (think health, wellness, self-management, sustainability, employee engagement). And as utility and usability are increasingly commoditized, experience, emotion, motivation became the new market differentiators.

In parallel, our understanding of motivation itself shifted. As popularized by the likes of Dan Pink or Teresa D. Amabile, time and again we see that intrinsic motivation - the joys innate in an activity - is more important and sustainable than extrinsic motivation. And what intrinsic motivation drives the most passionate users? Here I take my cue from Kathy Sierra: It is not enabling them to do something (utility) or making it a little easier (usability) - let alone coupons or sweepstakes (extrinsic motivation). It is growing their competence in achieving the deeper goals they pursue with your product. In short: "Don't design a better X; design a better user of X." Don't give me a better camera - give me the experience of becoming a better photographer.

This, it turns out, is at the core of what makes playing well-designed games fun. As game designer Raph Koster puts it: "Fun from games arises out of mastery." Solving a puzzle, crossing a chasm, shooting an alien: Games are machines for producing interestingly challenging interactions that give rise to feelings of progress, competence and mastery. So as UX designers, we should care about game design because it shows how to design such intrinsically motivating interactions. It teaches us that motivation is no magic sauce you can 'just add.' Gameful design, as I like to call it, is restructuring an interaction into a tight loop of goals, actions, and feedback around the innate learnable challenge of what the user wants to get better at in using your product - scaffolded over time to afford lasting depth, variety, and a continual sense of achievement and progress.

The best we can take from game design are not patterns (by their nature transient, commoditized, and encouraging magic sauce thinking), nor methods (iterative prototyping is - or should be - as innate to UX design as to game design). It is, to follow Jesse Schell and Bill Scott, "lenses": Ways of looking at our design, questions to ask of it, like "How does it unfold over time?", or "How is autonomy supported?" There are many sources for learning how to design for motivation. But when it comes to mastery, game design is arguably the richest wellspring we have.

Jonathan Shariat

@jonshariat

User experience designer, www.uitogether.com

Before the iPhone and before the wheel, we learned how to survive by playing. Play is nature's way of making learning enjoyable, just as a lion cub learns how to hunt as it wrestles its siblings. By studying games we can extract those mechanisms that turn learning into fun. Usually learning new software is the very opposite of fun. Games not only mitigate that pain but replace it with joy. For User Experience Designers, play is studying natures own, perfected, human interface.

Ale Muñoz

@bomberstudios

Interaction Designer, Designit

In a former life as a game developer, I learned a couple of things that I try not to forget in my current job as a UX designer. Obvious stuff, but interesting stuff anyway:

Simple = good. Too simple = bad

There are really simple games that are truly amazing: Tetris, Lemmings, Canabalt, Tiny Wings... They are easy to understand, yet take some time to master and never get old. They are timeless because extreme care was taken when choosing features and tuning difficulty. They keep the player in the flow zone. Make them a bit more complex and the player gets frustrated. Make them a bit simpler and the player gets bored.

Likewise, the line that separates a "beautifully simple interface" from an "interface for dummies" is thin and easy to cross. Simplifying interaction requires great thought and extreme care.

Games are memorable

Ask gamers for their favorite old games and you'll get a long list of classic titles: Mario, Pacman, Donkey Kong, Monkey Island...

Do the same with users of desktop applications and you'll get blank stares.

Games are experiences that we remember. They make us feel joy, anger, excitement, fear... in a way that most computer interactions don't. In a sense, they are truly "User Experience", whereas Interaction Design is mostly "User Usage". Whenever I'm designing an interaction, I try to ask myself:

> Will anybody remember this in six months?

If we try to not only design interaction, but also try to craft a memorable experience, we'll increase our chances of emphatizing with our users and creating great design.

Ana Escontrela

@anaescontrela

Senior Interaction Designer, Tuenti

UX design is about building relationships between products and users. It's not just about how something should work, but what it means to the user's life. Building a relationship means creating a unique connection between users and product.

So far, UX designers have learned to understand the user's thinking and behaviour. But we have missed a key part of the puzzle: how do they feel? Because video games are focused on creating pleasure, they already know how to create memorable experiences and unique bonds with the user.

Connecting the dots between the two fields doesn't mean translating game elements, it is more like transferring principles. In fact, some dots are already connected. If you take a look at Nielsen's heuristics you'll find some points in common regarding the interface design. So, what have we missed?

It is *the gameplay principles* (storylines and winning strategies) that are such great tools for empathising with our users. Think about the possibilities of adding this layer to craft the workflow, at first run and with tutorials or complex tasks that involve several actions. Connecting every piece of our design to create a story definitely makes it more valuable. So, let's play!

Ana Redmond

@anaredmond

Founder, Infinut.com - Learning with Kids

For the last year, I have been building kid's educational games at Infinut.com. I used to build enterprise and consumer web apps. Many aspects that seem specific to game design can help make other apps friendlier.

Designing for the novice and expert

Games start with a low entry criteria, and gradually increase difficulty level for the player, keeping their engagement throughout. Enterprise apps usually have only two levels - tough and expert.

Feelings matter

Angry birds does not hide the birds emotion. We feel good getting rid of the pigs. Enterprise and consumer web apps today mostly hide any sense of achievement. When I hit the confirm button on an e-commerce site, I feel that sinking feeling of spending hard earnt money, instead of the joy and anticipation of a new thing coming my way.

Advocate for the player

That one seems obvious. But, so often, we end up adding more and more to please everyone, that we fail to please the only person that matters - the end user. After you design your first game, you'll have a much stronger voice for the user. Try it.

Binh Tran

@Vanbinh

Freelance Visual Designer

Games have always been one of the main sources of inspiration for me as a designer. Revisiting the older games from the past reveals insights on how to engage, motivate, and delight with simplicity and with strong storytelling (Legend of Zelda, Chrono Trigger, Super Mario Bros., to name a few). More complex games such as simulation (SimCity and Civilizations series) and role-playing games (EVE Online, World of Warcraft) are great examples of dashboard interfaces and control panels.

What makes games important to UX designers is that most of the elements that are crucial in our line of work (UI, interaction, storytelling...) have been designed, tested, and improved a very large and extremely engaged audience/community. The success of games is testament to their effectiveness.

A note to the Gamification Summit: Surviving the backlash

2012-06-20T02:12:04Z

This week, scores of designers, developers, marketers, and venture capitalists are meeting up at the Gamification Summit in San Francisco. Since it appeared in the pop design lexicon a very few years ago, interest in "gamification" has exploded worldwide.

But even as its popularity is surging, a growing cultural skepticism of gamification has started to emerge. There's a creeping suspicion that "gamified" applications are exploitative, cynical, ill-conceived, simplistic, and ultimately unsustainable. Thought leaders who have advocated for the social benefits of games and play are careful to draw a line between their own views and gamification. These are just a few examples:

Jane McGonigal declared in The New York Times that "I don't do 'gamification,' and I'm not prepared to stand up and say I think it works. I don't think anybody should make games to try to motivate somebody to do something they don't want to do. If the game is not about a goal you're intrinsically motivated by, it won't work."
Ian Bogost made his views reasonably clear in his blog post "Gamification is Bullshit", elaborating that "[The term] 'exploitationware' captures gamifiers' real intentions: a grifter's game, pursued to capitalize on a cultural moment, through services about which they have questionable expertise, to bring about results meant to last only long enough to pad their bank accounts before the next bullshit trend comes along."
Eric Zimmerman was a tad more subtle but no less critical in his keynote at GLS 7 asserting that "Stakeholders of all kinds are falling for fads like badges and gamification. Maybe we're barking up the wrong trees -- or even wandering in the wrong forest altogether."
Jesse Schell (a speaker at this year's Gamification Summit) expresses his concern that "A lot of times these efforts can have a kind of fake feeling to them, and it's one of the real problems these efforts have" in an online video

It must be said that all of these critiques do not come without very strong justification. We suffer a glut of implementations toting the "gamification" banner that amount to little more than points and badges tacked onto an underlying system that remains otherwise unchanged. These kinds of approaches will not survive because they do not value gameplay, so players will not value them.

It's hard to think that gamification is anything but overhyped at the moment, and that its cresting popularity isn't headed for a crash. Gartner's hype cycle illustrates how this happens predictably with hot new thing after hot new thing.

I happen to believe that games can achieve great things in the real world. I'm sure that a lot of people at the Gamification Summit believe that too, but the overwhelming noise in the current market makes it difficult discern which projects have the real potential to effect meaningful change. The world needs to move toward a post-hype discussion of how games can make a difference in people's lives. I'll offer a few suggestions for things that I believe are important to that discussion.

Conceive of these projects as games, first and foremost. Rather than creating things that are game-like or game-inspired, create things that are true games. You can't bolt game elements onto something that isn't a game and expect them to have the effect that an actual game would have. Much better to start with something that really is a game, through and through.
Value the quality of the player experience. More than anything else, games need to be designed to be enjoyed. This is, after all, the reason why people play games in the first place. It's not because they love your brand; they play because they value the experience. Designers should care about the design, and how it arouses feelings of engagement, fulfillment, pride, connectedness, and fun in players.
Put the interests of players before your own. Any successful game experience must work in service of the interests of the player before it works in service of the interests of its designers. There's an inherent selfishness to gameplay, and players will reject experiences that prioritize someone else's agenda. To the extent that any design trades off enjoyable gameplay in service of real-world objectives, it is ultimately shooting itself in the foot.
Focus on intrinsic rewards. Games must enjoyed in and of themselves, and not played only for the extrinsic rewards they offer. HopeLab's ZamZee, for instance, pays kids real-world rewards for the number of steps they take in a day. This isn't a game, because people would feel no motivation to play it if the bribes weren't there. A true game stands on its own, and offers its own rewards.
Do good. Much of the cynicism around gamification comes from its frequent association with the marketing of commercial products like Honey Nut Cheerios and Chicken McNuggets. Of course games can serve good too, as the impressive titles showcased at conferences like Games for Health and Games for Change demonstrate year after year. People are much more likely to have welcoming attitudes toward these kinds of games.
Let's stop talking about "using" games. I personally slip up on this a lot, but it's important to realize that this particular turn of phrase is very off-putting. It has a sinister ring of manipulation, and alienates players who don't want to feel like they're being "used" for someone else's ends.
Drop the "g" word. In addition to sounding graceless and faddish, "gamification" completely emphasizes the wrong thing. It implies an experience that is by its nature something other than a game, but dressed up to resemble one. It's also so imprecisely defined that it has been broadly applied to anything from Farmville to LinkedIn's profile completeness bar. This is not a useful term, because it can't make meaningful distinctions between meaningfully dissimilar things.

Taking these suggestions would muddle contemporary thinking around gamification to the point that it's not clear that it would continue to exist as a concept. Maybe that's a good thing. We can't get to the other side of the hype cycle, where the underlying idea finally finds productive mainstream adoption, without a major shift in the status quo. For games to realize their full potential to create meaningful change in the real world, maybe "gamification" has to die.

Can exergames increase physical activity?

2012-06-08T02:13:24Z

Earlier this year, a study published in the journal Pediatrics found that five games that are marketed with the promise of increasing players' physical fitness produced no actual difference in activity. 78 kids between 9 and 12 were given Wii consoles, and then one group was given a couple of exergames while a control group was given "inactive" games like Madden and Mario Kart. The kids wore devices to measure their physical activity, and they kept logs of when they played.

To be certain, the study was performed by a very accomplished group of researchers. The lead author, Tom Baranowski of Baylor College, is one of the most widely published researchers of health games. And this was a very well-designed study, printed in the foremost journal on children's health.

Nevertheless, the study should not be read to mean that games can't affect physical activity and can't have a positive impact on public health. That's because it didn't account for the most influential factor in a health game's impact -- its design. Five different exergames were included in the study:

Active Life - Extreme Challenge
EA Sports Active
Dance Dance Revolution - Hottest Party 3
Wii Fit Plus
Wii Sports

Although all of these games are marketed with the promise of improving health, there's no reason to believe that they're actually designed to do so. If they can be sold on the basis of perception alone, that that's all they really need to be commercially successful.

And I don't believe that these 5 games are sincere, well-informed efforts to truly motivate players to adopt active exercise routines. Dance Dance Revolution has players step backward and forward repeatedly, but the dances are not programmed with regard to the physical rigor of those motions. Many of the games in Wii Sports require very little body movement at all. Wii Fit has a few lightweight step routines, but the game as a whole doesn't promote the kind of sustained physical exertion you would expect from a real trainer's program.

Design makes all the difference. Yes, Baranowski et al. demonstrates that the designs of these five games in particular have no effect on physical activity. No surprise there, I don't believe that was the intention behind them. Games that are specifically designed to persuade players to get up and move, rigorously, on a long-term basis are much more likely to have a real imact on health. I don't know of any exergames that are doing this really well right now, but it's a great opportunity for designers who want to make a real difference.

Good game design in the real world

2012-06-03T13:47:43Z

This is an excerpt from an interview with me by Jenn Webb. You can read the complete interview on O'Reilly Radar.

In your book's introduction, you say, "I hope to start moving toward a post-hype discussion of how games can most effectively achieve great things in the real world." Who is leading the way -- or at least moving in the right direction -- and what are they doing?

There's so much really inventive work being done right now. Recently, I've been playing a lot of "Zombies, Run!," and I think it's kind of great. This is a game for smartphones that overlays a narrative about survivors in a zombie apocalypse onto your daily run. As you're out getting your exercise, you're listening to the game events as they unfold, and you can hear the zombies closing in. It's a great use of fantasy, and it plays as a true game with meaningful choices and conflict.

There's also a great group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that's developed a smartphone app called ARIS, which builds game scenarios into physical locations, and they've developed dozens of applications for it. One of them is being developed as a museum tour for the Minnesota Historical Center, giving people quests to complete by scanning objects in the exhibit and then using them to complete objectives in a story line. The museum is actually changing the way the exhibit is laid out to better accommodate the gameplay, moving away from the traditional snaking path to more of an open layout that allows players to move more freely between the interacting displays to solve the game's challenges.

Some of the thought leaders who I really admire include Eric Klopfer and Scot Osterweil at MIT, Ian Bogost at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Jane McGonigal. A common current among these thinkers is their emphasis on games themselves as a force of cultural transformation, rather than simplistic "gamification" of software applications that lead to little or no meaningful change.

Games at work

2012-05-30T11:10:45Z

This is an excerpt from an interview with me by Jenn Webb. You can read the complete interview on O'Reilly Radar.

How do you see the social media aspects of gaming seeping into day-to-day life --could social media based games some day have a place in job training or other areas of the workplace, for instance?

Games certainly can transform the workplace, though I want to caution that it's very easy to make the mistake of dressing up everyday work activities as games by just tacking on some points and badges. That's not game design, and people will recognize that it's not. In the process of failing, approaches like this generate cynicism toward the effort. Games need to be designed to be games first and foremost. They must be intrinsically rewarding, enjoyed for their own sake.

That said, I absolutely believe that games can work at work. As you suggest, for example, they have great strengths for training. Games create a safe space for people to test out their mastery of a set of skills in ways that aren't possible or practical in the real world. They can also help people figure out how best to handle different situations. Say, for example, that you created a game to develop management skills. You might allow players to assign values to their in-game avatars like "nurturing," "autocratic," or "optimistic," which lead to different behavior paths. Players could then examine how these traits play out in a situation filled with characters who have different values like "dependability," "autonomy," and "efficiency." A structure like this could not only impart insight about management styles, but also invite introspection about how an individual's own personality traits may lead to success and failure in the real world.

How mobile & social tech are changing games

2012-05-29T12:16:00Z

This is an excerpt from an interview with me by Jenn Webb. You can read the complete interview on O'Reilly Radar.

How are mobile and social technologies affecting game design and the evolution of gaming technology?

One of the really surprising things about modern smartphones and tablets is that they've turned out to be such credible gaming platforms. They open doors to new ways of experiencing games by giving designers access to touchscreens, accelerometers, cameras, microphones, GPS, and Internet connectivity through a single device. They also allow games to be experienced in new contexts, enjoyed on the train to work, in the minutes between meetings, and while you're out with friends. The traditional gaming model, where players sit passively in one place in the home and stare at a fixed screen, seems stodgy and limiting by comparison.

The funny thing about social technology is that before we had video games, gaming was almost always a social activity. You needed to have multiple people to play most board games, card games, and sports -- in fact, the game was often just a pretense for people to get together. But then video games made solitary experiences more of the norm. Now social technology is bringing gaming back to its multiplayer roots, but it's also going beyond what was ever possible before by enabling hyper-social experiences where you're playing with dozens of friends and family at once. Even though you may be separated from these people in space and time, you have an intimate sense of shared presence and community when you're playing. That's revolutionary.

Interview with Mike Ambinder of Valve Software

2012-05-25T04:33:48Z

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.

The first review!

2012-05-22T14:59:21Z

And it's pretty positive! (Breathing on fingernails; buffing fingernails on lapel.)

Read the review by Actual Insights.

"Playful Design" now available

2012-05-22T13:29:22Z

I'm massively excited to announce that my new book exploring how games can achieve great things in the real world is now on sale!

You can download and read the introduction for totally free. It really sets the tone for the book and gives you a sense of what it's all about.

Please reach out and let me know what you think by following @PlayfulDesign on the Twitters.

Happy day!

10 Tips for Building a Better Game

2012-05-17T13:47:15Z

The good folks at .net magazine have run an excerpt of John Ferrara's new book covering these ten important tips.

The book itself, we're thrilled to report, shipped from the printer just moments ago. You can order it now, both digitally (PDF, ePUB, and MOBI) and in paperback. Just keep in mind that the paperbacks will take a couple days to make it to our distribution centers in the US, UK, and Canada, not to mention Amazon's various warehouses.

In the meantime, you can get a taste of John's thinking from excerpt. Thanks so much to .net for working with us to make it available!

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.