Moves in Mind: The Psychology of Board Games

I think anyone who describes a consumer as an idiot should perhaps not be in the games publishing business. They should make games that they enjoy playing, and there's nothing wrong with that. Lots of people take up hobbies that they enjoy. But, if you're in the business of making games for other people, then one ought to attempt to find out what other people like. To me, it's very basic. Even if you throw away the profit motive, as an artist you want lots of people to understand and enjoy your work. Unless you believe they're too stupid to understand, say, modern art -- then therefore modern artists are making art for modern artists, and they don't care. As long as that's fine for them then that's great. If they don't make something that can appeal to someone like me who is uneducated, then I will be disinterested in their work. I assume that most people's egos would prefer a million people to love their game, to have said, "I spent 50 bucks and I'm proud to have done so because it was fun." as opposed to, "Oh… those are for other people."

 

Zeno Colaço

Zeno Colaço (Sony Computer Entertainment Europe)
Session Title: "From Pitch to Publish: Getting the Deal"
In his current role as Vice President, Publisher & Developer Relations at SCEE, Colaço is responsible for the day-to-day management of SCEE's European licensee community that has over 250 active developers and 40 publishers on the PS2 alone. This includes licensee relations, product planning and the development of strategic partnerships. Colaço and his team are a focal point for emerging talent and new businesses looking to break into interactive games.

What was your talk about?

My talk tried to give some guidance to developers about what I think publishers want in the next big games, and tried to coach developers on how to pitch their title to publishers. Granted, that's slightly outside my general remit, being Vice President of Sony's third party division, [which] really looks after the platform edge.

We at Sony don't believe that we're necessarily the best ones to tell people how to write games. The talent and the creativity are the people themselves, and what they want to bring to the table. I think it is important and necessary to treat game development as a business. Whether it's the developers themselves employing someone who's got some exposure to that [part of the industry] to represent them, or even a third party, it's becoming more important. Tried and tested methods are there. It's about hooking up to one of those and trying to deliver it.

I completely agree. As you probably saw in the panel, I felt it was something that needed to be said. Risk aversion is one thing, but "no new I.P.s" (Intellectual Properties) is going to lead to the death of great creativity. One thing that we do as a platform, and I'm sure publishers are looking at it as well, is that we want to try and help risky products. Something that pushes the genres on our platform, we tend to try and give a better voice to. We support many of these titles when they are coming out, sometimes even with a direct marketing contribution from the platform to the publisher involved.

I think developers should try to use and leverage the platform companies in the process of pitching. For instance, perhaps you're working on a title that is slightly different and is pushing a particular genre -- say, it's a music product. That is a smaller genre, but it might expand the platform's capabilities for some of the consumers. Clearly a music product is probably not going to do the same sales as a football product, but if that product were brought as a concept to my team, they would be happy to give feedback on how to maximize and broaden that genre. That meeting in turn could be used as leverage with a publisher who could get into early discussions with the platform company to say, "If we brought this to your platform, would you support us? Would you give us exposure in your catalogues, or maybe in your in-machine demo?" Or even, as I said, to request support for the marketing costs.

It's almost like incubating creativity in that way. But the developer has to [take the initiative] in the first place. The developer has to show some sort of originality to both platform [and publisher]. I think sometimes developers go straight to the publisher and miss out on the platform holder, and they then lose any leverage that the platform holder might have been able to give them.

 

Harvey Smith

Harvey Smith (Ion Storm Austin)
Session Title: "Systemic Level Design for Emergent Gameplay"
Harvey Smith is the project director on Ion Storm's DX2: Invisible War. He held the lead designer position on Deus Ex. Prior to that he worked as lead designer of FireTeam (an Internet squad game developed by Multitude, Inc.), and at Origin Systems, as a designer, associate producer and quality assurance tester on such games as System Shock, Cybermage, and the CD verson of Ultima VIII: Pagan.

What was your talk about at the GDCE 2002?

My talk was about what I call "systemic level design". After working on Deus Ex and seeing the contrast in the two different ways that we worked on levels (one was more systemic, one was more special case), it drove me to want to talk about when one was the right answer versus when the other one was the right answer.

We talk a lot about game interactions on a class-to-class basis. When the player does one thing in the environment, and it causes an interaction between two other game elements that provide a second order of consequence, that maybe the development team didn't predict. [The game] behaves in a rational way that surprises the player. We call that emergent gameplay.

The example I used in my speech was an enemy unit that explodes when it dies, and a bunch of containers that the player could open with explosive resources or lock picking resources. Players figured out that if they lead that enemy unit over to those containers before delivering the deathblow, that the resulting explosion would open the container. We call that emergent gameplay.

In your session you mentioned that Deus Ex players created ladders using the removable proximity grenades and climbed off the map. How do you then make the player finish the level and go where they're supposed to?

Ultimately our game is still a combination of special case moments and systemic moments. We still say, "Get to the exit" or, "Go talk to this guy" or, "Go do X". How you do accomplish those goals is more or less up to you, however. We reward you for goal completion, not goal completion methodology.

The sense of possibility that players talk about when they play Grand Theft Auto 3 -- or any game that tries to make a really in-depth environment where the world is not just full of one-to-one interactions that were prescripted -- is a very powerful thing. It's empowering to the player. The gameplay itself becomes largely about exploring the possibility space. So yeah, we think it's pretty innovative. As game worlds get more complex, keeping this angle going will mean that every game experience will be richer and richer.

 

Copyright © 2003 CMP Media Inc. All rights reserved.

   
CMP Game Group Presents:





Event Wrap-Up: DiGRA05
By Ren Reynolds
Gamasutra
June 27, 2005

URL: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20050627/reynolds_01.shtml

The industry panel for the session entitled Developers in Play: Changing Views on Game Creation.

Before diving into some of the many themes that permeated this year's get-together I should spend a short moment explaining what exactly a Games Researcher is and is not.

Games Researchers are predominantly academics with the odd hybrid professional/journalist/something-or-other who engage in Games Studies. Now, the exact definition of Games Studies is still a hotly debated topic (cf. bar talk above; or for a more sober discussion Espen Aarseth's Computer Game Studies, Year One) but at its core, games studies is the analysis of video games, gamers, and game culture from the perspective of social sciences such as psychology, sociology, communications studies, as well as my own field, philosophy. At the fringes, Games Studies embraces issues such as the process of game design but is very unlikely to be concerned with path-finding algorithms or triangle meshing techniques.

Having said this, in my experience most Games Researchers are fairly hardcore gamers and a few got tech. For example M. Eladhari is an ex-commercial game developer who now researches AI, emotion and story construction. J. Jull, one of the foremost theorists of games is also an indie/commercial game developer.

In short, Game Studies is the academic social study of games, gamers, and game culture.

Grrr, Arrg, w00t & other Emotions

The theme of emotion and games threaded its way through the conference this year. One paper that drew much attention was The Psychophysiology of Video Gaming: Phasic Emotional Responses to Game Events by a group of Finnish researchers.

In the study the group monitored a number of physiological indicators of positive and negative emotions such as skin conductance, cardiac interbeat intervals, and a range of involuntary facial muscle reactions, while subjects played a group of video games. The results indicated that players experience highly positive emotions when experiencing seemingly negative game events, e.g. the ball falling off the edge of the lane in
Sega's Monkey Bowling 2.

The data also seemed to indicate that in a first person shooter the strongest emotional reaction is not related to killing but to one's own death - a result that might have a bearing on the whole video game violence debate. More broadly the methods used by the team seem to be applicable to play testing and might provide some fascinating insights into what is actually going on in players' heads. The same group also presented a paper on using these insights with bio-feedback to create games that generate user selected emotional states, using so-called Emotion Knobs (Finnish humor or cruel translation - you decide).

Accompanying the Finnish presentation (mercifully given in English) was a paper by Montreal's Bernard Perron titled A Cognitive Psychological Approach to Gameplay Emotions which might have been subtitled: "Taking What We Know From Film Studies About Plot and Viewer Reaction and Applying It to Games." Again this was an applied
paper which tried to understand just how games and emotions interact. While the work lacked hard data, the numerous examples from games such as ICO, Resident Evil, XIII, etc. made the paper highly applicable to game design.

A scan of the proceedings reveals ten or so other papers dealing with emotion, player motivation, immersion, and one paper on the use of pupil dilation to measure arousal, which sounded scarily like Blade Runner to me.

The most significant emerging topic at DiGRA05 was Games and Learning. This is not surprising given the recent rise in interest in so called "serious games." Indeed, when

Participants came at this from every conceivable angle: level editing applied to art and design, teaching kids about infectious diseases, games and moral education and, to be completely self referential, game design theory as a game.

The most interesting thing about this trend is that we have moved beyond the simple notion that learning is restricted to simulation games like Sim City providing objective lessons in city planning. Today's scholars have expanded the understanding of what games can teach, how they act as learning tools and are gaining insights into how we learn. This work is complemented by the broad research into the meaning and interpretation of games as cultural artifacts by scholars coming from feminist, race
and queer studies traditions.  A theme that was discussed during coffee breaks was the refreshing thought that some people no long believe that making games which appeal to females equates to liberal use of the color pink.

The future of the IGDA meeting.

As I've already touched on, the process of game design featured in a smattering of papers this year. In addition to individual papers (such as this, this, and this.), the ever-energetic Eric Zimmerman conducted a panel on the relationship between game design and game theory, where the status of game design research and grand formalist theories of play were thrashed within an inch of their lives in a packed and increasingly sweaty room.

Immediately before this the IGDA's equally energetic Jason Della Rocca hosted a face-off between industry types, including EA's Steve Rechtaschaffner, and the gathered throng of pointy heads.

A topic touched on at both sessions was the perceived lack of access to game design in the raw that many academics feel. So if you or your company would like to be lab rats I'm sure DiGRA would be happy to hear from you, and as any H2G2 fan knows - it's

To close, I want to make sure that I have not left any non-academic with the wrong impression of DiGRA. There is a lot of content that is applicable to the business of computer games, but the conference has not turned into an academic/industry lovefest. Industry participation is very low, lower that I think it should be, and seemingly esoteric content is high. For example there were at least two papers dealing solely with the notion of the magic circle. The narratology vs. ludology war (a dispute so obscure even many games researchers have little idea what it's about) mutated into widespread denial that it had happened/meant anything or was still alive. For those that care, it still bangs away in the attic that the old gods thought they had locked it in. But all this is good, it's diversity, it's new ways of thinking about stuff, and heck, it's fun.

Mario. Pikachu. Lara Croft. Sonic. Pac-Man. Crash Bandicoot. Duke Nukem. Earthworm Jim. Pajama Sam.

What do these words have in common? The answer is simple—all of them are household names, but they're not famous actors from a Hollywood movie or some hit TV show. They're not Saturday morning cartoon characters (okay, some of them went on to that) and they're not the latest doll craze for kids. These are the video game heroes, the stars of the interactive screen whose marketing potential has kept them in the limelight for many years, and lined the pockets of their creators with green.

Many developers and publishers have tried desperately to create the next billion-dollar game icon, but a catchy name or cute look often isn't enough. So what's the secret? This chapter contains words of wisdom from many of those aforementioned creators. But that's not all we're going to explore here.

If there was a common theme running through this chapter, it would be "how to get your ideas down on paper." Some game designers prefer to sketch out rough characters or backgrounds on paper (or work with artists to do so); others draw sequential storyboards to help shape the vision and flow of the game or a cinematic cut-scene sequence; and in other cases, designers write fiction or game screenplays (usually for adventure games or RPGs where there's a lot of dialogue).

Design documents are often lengthy paper reports used to communicate the entire blueprint of the game, covering all its features, story elements, characters, locations, dialogue, puzzles, artwork, sound effects, music, and much more. These documents are usually designed in a modular fashion so they can be updated and modified if the design of the game takes a new form.

This chapter highlights how some of the more famous characters in the gaming industry were born, plus we talk with game designers and artists about storyboarding, script writing, design documents, and other ways to flesh out your hit game before you type your first line of code.

As a special addition to this lengthy chapter, veteran freelance game designer Daniel Greenberg (http://www.danielgreenberg.com) has written an educational and enlightening essay on interactive script writing. But wait—there's more—designer American McGee has provided us with the complete narrative to the beginning of American McGee's Alice.

When asked how to create such internationally recognizable and deeply loved characters, Miyamoto said it all boils down to the fun factor:

Making games "fun" is our only objective, and we're always making an effort to accomplish this goal. I believe that the creation of game characters is simply one of the processes to achieve this goal. If Mario games hadn't been fun to play, the character wouldn't be popular at all.

Exactly what makes a character fun? Is it solely appearance? A cute voice? Ease of control? Why do many game developers fail when trying to create the next Mario?

I'm not sure why some fail to create a memorable character. A player can emotionally relate to the video game character as his/her other self, which is the decisive difference from the characters in other media. Mario, for instance, can be a character with completely different meaning when he's driving a car and when he's jumping. The other design elements will affect the look and feel of the character.

Miyamoto recognizes that his characters are quite cute and family friendly, and therefore won't appeal to all kinds of gamers: "I think a number of game players feel, 'If Miyamoto's characters had cooler appearances, I could love them.' All I can say to them is, "I am sorry."

Where does Miyamoto find inspiration for his beloved games and characters? How exactly did Mario come to life?

The inspirations come from all over: my childhood adventures, the stories I heard growing up, the legends in Japan. After all, we can get inspiration from the ordinary things that everyone is experiencing in our daily lives, by looking at them from a different angle. In the case of Mario, back in or around 1980, when we couldn't reproduce sophisticated designs on TV game machines due to the technological limitations, I had to make his nose bigger and put on a mustache so that players could notice he had the nose. I had to let him wear overalls so that his arm movements became noticeable. Mario was the result of these rational ideas, plus the Italian design touch that I loved.

One last note: Miyamoto warns that designers may not be able to objectively comprehend how players will feel when playing the game for the first time, because the designer is so close to the project.