Employing Value Chains to center the user

Player motivations as a focal point for creating meaningful economic flows and interactions

*Illustration of the core loop by* *Gustavo Rondon Linares*

Summary

For a brand new game, we were really stuck on how the metagame and economy would work.

We couldn’t agree on level progression, types of rewards and shop items, and how they would factor into everything.

I dug us out using the Value Chains method by Daniel Cook. I was able to establish the exact flow of the economy by anchoring feedback loops with player motivations.

*Daniel Cook’s value chain illustration (source*)

Project info

I was the Creative Director on this as-of-yet unannounced project (2023) and I worked closely with the Senior Producer and Director of Engineering to get this game off the ground.

The role of game designer had not been filled yet, so we met weekly to flesh out the UX, mechanics, economy, and core loop of the game. Brainstorming sessions were held with the team who were experimenting with several art styles and rapidly creating working prototypes in Unity.

Context

*Illustration of the asynchronous gameplay mode by* *Sonja Poon*

This game was hypothetically based on a popular family board game from the 80s that revolved around one team drawing pictures and the other team guessing what the drawing was.

Aimed at game subscription platforms, we were designing a multiplayer experience that would be:

casual
family-friendly
played together in real life or online

While the core mechanics were pretty much figured out (drawing, guessing, and scoring) we had yet to validate our assumptions about what the metagame would offer and how the economy would work.

Research

*Illustration by* *Gustavo Rondon Linares*

The initial prototypes were already fun, but we needed to generate meaning and purpose in the experience.

For the metagame, many of us assumed that players would progress through the game by earning XP, leveling up, and getting rewards, like many casual mobile games out there.

We had great ideas floating around for rewards and power-ups but we struggled with structuring them in a compelling way, especially as the player reached higher and higher levels.

It was hard to discuss the economy objectively and we were each projecting our own experiences and assumptions on how to create value in the game.

I consulted my friend Greg, a brilliant game design director who has taught me everything I know about the topic. I asked him how we could approach these economic flow questions and he told me to read Value Chains - A method for creating and balancing faucet-and-drain game economies by Daniel Cook.

The basic structure of a value chain looks like this:

Action ⇢ Input ⇢ Output ⇢ Anchor

The anchor forces us to think about meaning, which creates value.

Value chains connect the user’s psychological needs through motivations which act as anchors. Motivations include concepts like:

competition
mastery
destruction
community
creativity
power
completion
and more (I also discuss user motivations here!)

Just glancing at this list, I realized where we had gone astray.

By designing for level progression, we were not meeting the psychological profile of our demographic. XP and leveling up are implicit in motivations like mastery, completion, and power, none of which make sense for scribbling silly pictures with friends and family at Thanksgiving dinner.

You don’t play a game like this to master your drawing skills or score the most points. Scoring is part of the original board game, but in my experience, it’s usually ignored and definitely not memorable.

The point is to play together, express yourself (however terribly), and laugh hysterically.

Design

I used Daniel Cook’s syntax to map out the various actions, inputs, and outputs that we currently had on the table:

*Value Chains exhibit A (Global XP progression)*

Then, I discovered that removing anything related to level progression did several significant things:

it eliminated an entire layer of abstraction from the metagame
it changed the purpose of every interaction that actually made sense for our demographic

Now, instead of achievement and completion related motivations, the purpose had to shift. What I ended up with made sense for our demographic: camaraderie, creativity, and excitement.

I pitched this to the team and we came to a consensus: no more level progression!

Takeaways

I had a gut feeling that structuring our game like other (free-to-play) casual mobile games wasn’t going to work, but I didn’t know how to prove it. As a product destined for game subscription services, we were barking up the wrong tree.

Laying everything out in terms of value chains not only made it clear which path to take but would also theoretically make it easier to analyze the economy in the future.

The project was ultimately cancelled for unrelated reasons, but I came away with a solid method of demonstrating value that I’ll definitely refer to again and again.