Resources for delightful, rewarding experiences

game design
Written By Jocelyn Fung

This article is a collection of resources and philosophies that have shaped my game and product design practice over the years.

People like to hate on this Star Trek episode but I’d totally try this game it looks awesome.

 

Summary

The tl;dr if you just want the goods. My ramblings are below.

 
 
 
 
 

UX vs Game Design

I like to frame UX design as just one dimension in the multiverse of game design 🫨 I mean, game design is user experience design, isn’t it?

Game design is incredibly broad, imaginative, creative, surreal, immersive, delightful, rewarding, and fun. All of its nuances and theories can be applied to UX design in any industry.

The term “user experience” was coined in the 90s by Don Norman at Apple in its early days, but it was probably at least another decade and a half before it was used widely. That doesn’t mean it’s a new concept, though, as people have been designing experiences for others for centuries if not longer.

 
 

Norman (who wrote The Design of Everyday Things) went on to form the Nielsen Norman Group with Jakob Nielsen, who published the canonical 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design in 1994.

Twenty-five years later, they updated those heuristics for improving usability in video games.

Ironically, the updates aren’t very useful. Game UI/UX designers prefer to reference the original list instead.

Why is that?

The game heuristics are a copy of the original ten but re-described with examples from a wide variety of games.

That’s precisely the problem, though. There are so many genres, interfaces, and experiences that a single example of each heuristic is too narrow. Each one feels too anecdotal. For a more neutral approach, the original ten serve the purpose much better.

 
 

Also, game usability is inextricably tied to emotion and motivation.

When we design any products according to emotions and motivations, that’s when we can create meaningful and delightful experiences.

Celia Hodent, an expert in game UX and applied cognitive science, describes games as a learning experience. In her GDC talk, The Gamer’s Brain: How Neuroscience and UX Can Impact Design, she describes about how our brains process information (a simplified version) by perceiving through inputs and then learning by creating or changing memories.

The quality of processing is dependent on our attentional resources, which are dependent on the emotions and motivations we feel.

Emotion

If we consider all user experiences to be learning experiences, and learning is about memory, then designing for emotion is essential because we remember emotional events more than non-emotional ones.

Don Norman wrote another book, Emotional Design, in 2004, criticizing the lack of attention he gave to emotion and aesthetics in “The Design of Everyday Things” (which focused entirely on usability at the expense of aesthetics if necessary. Ouch).

“Emotional Design” includes proof that “attractive things work better,” which is something I’ve struggled to prove throughout much of my career. It’s a concept that most people believe to some extent, but it’s pretty difficult to quantify. Spending time to make something look great often took a backseat when pressed for resources.

But it’s the reason why the Mast Brothers were able to sell insanely overpriced chocolate wrapped in the most beautiful printed paper. In my opinion, it tasted like cardboard. It’s also the reason why wine labels work to impart a narrative not only about the wine but also about the person who’s buying it.

That said, aesthetics are only one facet of emotional design.

In games, we also design fun.

Catherine Price, a health and science journalist, defines fun as “playfulness, connection, and flow.”

Rahul Vohra, founder and CEO of Superhuman, has described fun as a blend of emotions, “pleasant surprise.”

I appreciate his take on design for emotion, which centers around joy. He refers to the emotion wheel created by the Junto Institute which beautifully expands “joy” into all sorts of positive feelings including enthusiasm, excitement, pride, and triumph. The positive side of the wheel, which includes feelings of love and surprise, contains emotions that widen the user’s experience.

Beautiful imagery inspires awe. Timely feedback evokes satisfaction.

He also employs the negative side of the wheel to target emotions to remove from the experience, like helplessness, anxiety, and annoyance. In other words, friction.

Vohra also talks about emotions and goals. When we design concrete goals that are achievable and rewarding, we elicit joyful feelings.

But “rewards” are not the same as “rewarding,” as we are all motivated in different ways.

 

Motivation

Celia Hodent describes motivation as the origin of any behaviour. It’s a complex concept overall, but we can use bits and pieces of motivation theories to help us design.

When something is interesting and enjoyable to us, those feelings incentivize us to complete a task. This is intrinsic motivation and it rewards us internally. Extrinsic motivation is when we do something for the sake of an external reward which is unrelated to the task itself. This is a difficult balance to strike in game design.

In the 90s, games researcher Richard Bartle attempted to describe gamers in his taxonomy of player types. His character theory plotted people into quadrants of Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, and Killers. It was super limited, though, as it only really referred to MMO players who are a pretty narrow segment of society. Since then, video games have evolved so much, and we now have better ways to think about player profiles.

Quantic Foundry Gamer Motivation Model

In 2015, researchers Nick Yee and Nicolas Ducheneaut created a new model of gamer motivations using data from a survey of about 200,000 gamers (now over 1.25 million). Watch how they did it in this GDC talk. I appreciate that instead of defining player types, they teased out motivations that roughly align with the five OCEAN personality types.

Some of their findings include data that debunked the idea that we need to design different games for different sexes. We do not: it’s a myth that men and women are looking for different types of games. We should be designing for the larger differences between age groups instead.

I find this chart a good place to start when figuring out how to structure the core of a game or product.

Side note: although Quantic Foundry has recently posted some analysis on transgender and non-binary gamers where they outline a distinct profile of motivations, it sounds like they could improve on identifying trans and non-binary people separately instead of as one group, and their method of collecting that data could be more nuanced.

I’ve written a case study on designing for player motivations (see here), where I used this chart to define the motivations from which the core loop could be nailed down. Once we settled on why people would play our game, we were magically able to sort out the resources, actions, and a high-level picture of the economy.

On that project, we went back on forth for a while on whether or not we needed to include an XP (experience) bar. That would appeal to the completion motivation, which sits closely to power in the achievement category. There was an assumption that the inclusion of an XP bar would trigger the Zeigarnik effect, where people tend to recall unfinished, interrupted tasks more readily than finished ones. Motivation to close your Activity Rings on the Apple Watch is an example.

 
Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash
 

Banking on the idea that a partially filled progress bar would universally drive users to keep playing in order to fill it and receive a reward, we were actually straying away from the reason someone would pick up this game in the first place.

When we re-framed everything from the lens of social and creativity motivations, the insistence on having level progression no longer made sense.

All in all, I think Celia Hodent describes motivations and rewards the best and I refer to her books and talks often. Each time, I understand more about user motivations and their influence on engagement and retention.

 

Equity

In 2013 I attended the 2nd Annual Feminists in Games Workshop at the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver, Canada. The incredible lineup of speakers included Anita Sarkeesian, who was still in the thick of vicious harassment over her Kickstarter campaign for the Tropes vs Women video series.

feminists in games 2013

One talk that really stuck with me was by Katherine Alejandra Cross, a sociologist specializing in online harassment. She presented her paper, Ethics for Cyborgs: On Real Harassment in an “Unreal” Place, which argues against the popular notion that anonymity is the cause of online harassment.

Rather, it’s the very design of online spaces that has created a lack of accountability, and we must restructure them in order to detoxify.

A version of that talk can be seen here, and she is also a regular contributor at Wired where she covers similar topics in her article, It’s Not Your Fault You’re a Jerk on Twitter.

 
 

I also love the Fair Play Alliance and the fact that they exist.

They’ve created the Disruption & Harms In Gaming Framework with the goal of operationalizing best practices to deal with problematic conduct in games. In particular, I’ve found their Community Management resource helpful for creating guidelines for online spaces like Facebook groups and Discord servers.

 
 
 
 
Jocelyn Fung
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