Emotions in Games

Authors and filmmakers who wish to evoke particular emotions in their audience often rely on the audience's ability to empathize with the characters portrayed in the narrative, and especially with the protagonist. The author sets up situations in which characters experience particular emotions in the hope that the audience will themselves have similar feelings, or at least understand why the characters feel the way they do. The author is in control of the characters' emotions, while the audience's emotions derive from sharing in those characters' feelings and experiences.

Game designers who wish to evoke particular emotions have it somewhat more difficult. Unlike books and movies, where the author is in full control of the protagonist, it is the audience itself that is largely in control of a game's principal character or characters. Although designers can script particular emotions into a game's protagonist by taking control away from the player or reducing the number of available choices, this can feel like cheating to a player who feels his or her character should be feeling something different; An author like Shakespeare can write Romeo such that he wishes to die upon seeing an apparently dead Juliet lying in front of him, but a game designer cannot force the player to wish the same for his character.

How, then, does a game designer create emotions? Several options present themselves:

• Atmosphere - Designers may encourage particular feelings in players by presenting them with emotionally suggestive images, sounds and music. This is all about transporting the player to an emotionally suggestive imaginary environment.
• Subject matter - Audiences can respond emotionally to particular subjects. Games can touch upon the human condition or deal with controversial subjects to evoke strong emotions. If done incorrectly it may earn a game more critics than fans, but done correctly it may perhaps be the most crucial element in crafting mature, dramatic game experiences.
• Gameplay challenges - The mechanics of games and competition encourage certain emotions in players. At the simplest level, these emotions concern the player directly rather than the player's character. In games that contain a narrative, these basic emotions can be modulated through narrative significance, in that overcoming or failing at particular challenges has specific narrative consequences designed to promote particular feelings in both characters and player.
• Other characters' emotions - Just like authors can evoke particular emotions by getting the audience to empathize with the characters he creates, so can game designers evoke particular feelings by getting the player to engage emotionally with the characters in the game. Unlike in books and movies, however, it is a mistake for designers to rely on the protagonists emotions, which are perhaps best left unstated.

8 top tips to enhance your game design document

How to make sure your GDD is relevant and readable for the entire team

Matthew Wiggins, CEO, JiggeryPokery

• Design docs are notorious for being out-of-date as soon as they are written, so I like to combine them with a log of discussions, playtests and decisions taken. This gives a deeper understanding of the intention of the design, helping with the many choices that will have to be made when actually making the game.

Des Gayle, founder, Altered Gene

• Do just enough design up front to get everybody started and failing faster. The days of the 50-page, static bibles for game design documents are done. Use an online collaborative tool like [Atlassian’s] Confluence so that discussions around features are open and everyone can see the “methods behind the madness”.

Tony Gowland, consulting F2P game designer, Ant Workshop

• Keep them short, cutting unnecessary words. I prefer bullets over well-written paragraphs – i.e. “Interactions: Swipe right to cancel” versus “Here the player can simply make a swiping gesture to the right to return to the previous screen”. People don’t read long documents, and an unread GDD may as well not have been written. 

Stephen Caruana, lead designer, Pixie Software

• Many aspects of your game are constantly evolving, especially considering today’s design and development zeitgeist. So treat your GDD as an in-flux record of your current understanding of the game; start high-level and get into further detail over time. It needs to be regularly maintained and, importantly, easily accessible to all the team.

Kris Skellorn, studio design lead, Playload Studios

• Don’t expect them to read it more than once. Do not show every edit to your documents to your team and expect them to re-read slight changes to the same features over and over. When writing drafts, circulate them amongst a smaller group of other designers, project owners and / or producers for review, before passing it out to the rest of the team. If you are lucky, on the average project, your artists and coders will read some of your documents at least once.

Lisa de Araujo, Block N Load producer, Jagex

• Don’t write design documents. Obviously you must document designs for your quality assurance teams and your publishers, but design docs are almost impossible to keep updated sufficiently to be useful for implementation. Instead, consider taking an Agile approach and break your features into Epics and User Stories. Agile Design methodologies are great for game design and tools like Jira make managing iterative development easy.

Matt Molloy, lead designer, Climax Studios

• As you prove and disprove feature statements via prototyping and expand upon their design, be as visual as possible. A picture really is worth a thousand words. But more importantly, the more creative and visual your design, the more likely it is that people will read it, understand it, enjoy it and offer feedback on it. It is part of your job to get everyone on the same page and invested – which a design wall-to-wall with boring old words will never achieve.

Mark Simmons, CEO, Freejam 

• The design document should be created with the core audience for it firmly in mind,contribute significantly to the conception process, and provide the audience with effective direction and specification that they need to achieve the creative vision. For example, in Robocraft’s case we created a lean design doc, with the high-level vision and objectives, for a relatively small feature set, to empower their creativity to achieve the build, measure, learn and iterate philosophy of agile development.

VR trumps 3D in terms of game design challenges, says Crash Bandicoot dev

"Naughty Dog just celebrated its 30th anniversary, so I’ve been at least 30 years in the games industry, and this is the single largest challenge. It also feels like an inevitability to everyone that uses it."

- Naughty Dog co-founder and current Oculus worldwide studios chief Jason Rubin.

What's more challenging than captaining THQ or developing Crash Bandicoot? Designing VR games, according to comments made by Jason Rubin onstage at the recent GamesBeat 2015 event.

Rubin has been serving as head of worldwide studios at Oculus for a little over a year now, and his GamesBeat chat with game industry personality Geoff Keighley touches on some intriguing details about how Rubin perceives his role at Oculus in relation to game developers -- and how it in turn sees game developers tackling VR in much the same way they once embraced technology like smartphones or 3D rendering.

"It took us a year of R&D to get to the point where we created Crash. A lot of what we did was determined by the hardware we were dealing with," said Rubin. "How do we make a character action game in 3D? How do we move that character action game into VR? [It's] very similar. I got that feeling that I hadn’t had sinceCrash Bandicoot – discovering the new."

Rubin goes on to highlight how he tries to sell developers on VR by pointing out that developers working on VR games right now are much akin to those who jumped into mobile games early, and were therefore in a better position to capitalize on the "mobile gold rush" that many believe has come and gone.

"'Remember when touch games first came out and people said it would never work?' A lot of the industry just ignored it, but a few developers decided to jump in at a time when nobody knew if there was a business there. Some of them became Rovio," said Rubin. "There was a lot of trial and error at Rovio, a lot of failed games before they hit Angry Birds. What they learned gave them the ability to get there. We’re now into multiple generations of learning and getting ahead. [VR] is the single largest learning curve I’ve ever seen in games."

His comments echo what many developers are experiencing as they try to unlearn rules of game design to work in VR and establish new ways of tackling common VR game design challenges.

'Uncharted' borrows from cinema to sidestep clunky game design

Developer Naughty Dog's games have always had a flair for the cinematic and that's due in large part to their presentation. The studio takes a minimalistic approach to how it delivers information to the player, eschewing ugly on-screen means of directing you where to go by using filmic techniques like smart scene composition and color to subtly guide the players from one area to the next. In the video below, YouTuber Mark Brown explores Uncharted 3's opening, breaking down how Naughty Dog pretty masterfully keeps players on the right track during the rooftop chase sequence without it feeling claustrophobically linear.

The techniques the team uses aren't exclusive to Nathan Drake's tales, either: The Last of Us features them too, and other studios have used lighting and visual landmarks to keep players on a deceptively discrete path. For example, Thatgamecompany and Eidos used similar methods for keeping folks moving forward in Journey and the recent Tomb Raiderreboot. If you dig the video, perhaps consider tossing a few bucks Brown's way via Patreon.

Konami sees profits nearly double as Phantom Pain ships 5 million

Konami's latest earnings report reveals a company enjoying an uptick in its fortunes, thanks in large part to its games business.

The company reportedly amassed 12.4 billion yen (~$102.7 million USD) in profits during the six-month period ending September 30th, nearly doubling the 7.4 billion yen (~$61.3 million USD) profit it earned during the same period last year. 

The vast majority of that profit was generated by Konami's Digital Entertainment business, which encompasses both free-to-play mobile hits like baseball game Jikkyou Pawafuru Puroyakyu (reportedly downloaded 16 million times in the 10 months since it launched) and PC/console games, most notably Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. 

Konami claims to have shipped 5 million copies of The Phantom Pain since it launched on September 1st. Roughly a month later Metal Gear chief Hideo Kojima reportedly left the company, leaving the future of the franchise -- historically a significant cash cow for Konami -- in question to almost everyone but Konami, which has previously outlined plans to hire new staff and make another Metal Gear.

PewDiePie blames YouTube Red on the rising tide of ad blockers

As YouTube rolls out its premium YouTube Red subscription service this week, popular video game YouTuber PewDiePie has taken to Tumblr to shed some light on its possible genesis by pointing out that nearly half of his audience uses third-party software to block YouTube ads.

While this is chiefly interesting to anyone studying the evolving YouTuber ecosystem, it's also a good reminder that paying to advertise your game on YouTube and other popular websites may not be the most effective marketing strategy.

"YouTube Red exist[s] because using Adblock has actual consequences," wrote Felix "PewDiePie" Kjellberg, after conducting an informal Twitter poll suggesting that 40 percent of his audience uses the ad-blocking browser plugin on YouTube. 

"It's a number that has grown a lot over the years, from roughly 15-20% when I started. And it's not unlikely that it will keep growing."

Kjellberg goes on to posit that people using Adblock are unlikely to pay Google $10/month for YouTube Red, which includes ad-free YouTube as one of its chief selling points. That hurts YouTube's bottom line, as well as the video creators (including game developers) with whom it splits revenue from ads and YouTube Red subscriptions.

Perversely, an uptick in the number of people blocking YouTube ads would seem to increase the value of having YouTubers actually play and talk about your game in their videos, reviving the question of whether or not it's ethical to pay for such coverage.

Batman: Arkham Knight will be re-released next week

Like the start of The Dark Knight Rises, Batman has gone missing. His most recent game, Arkham Knight, was a bit of a mess on a PC, so the caped crusader has had a few-months-long sulk while Warner Bros and friends patch it up.

We already knew that Bats would be returning to his crimefighting duties at the end of October, and now have a specific date. Arkham Knight is going back on sale on October 28, hopefully in a state where it, y'know, actually works. Here's Warner Bros saying as much in a new statement:

"At 10 am PDT, Oct. 28th, Batman: Arkham Knight will be re-released for the PC platform. At the same time we’ll also be releasing a patch that brings the PC version fully up-to-date with content that has been released for console (with the exception of console exclusives)."

That content comprises a Photo mode, Big Head mode, an Arkham Asylum Skin for Batters, and a choice of characters for the game's combat AR challenges. There's a huge list of stuff that been released for season pass owners too, including extra story missions, skins, and new tracks for Arkham Knight's beloved batmobile.

When the Pay to Win Button Backfires

What do you think of people who pay real money for advantages in multiplayer games? Things like more powerful weapons, higher level avatars, damage boosters, or experience point doublers? Do you curl your lip and look at them down your nose? Do you hate them? Do you hate them so much?

If so, you’re like many of the subjects in research conducted by Ellen Evers, Niels Van de Ven, and Dorus Weeda. The team presents its findings in a new article titled “The Hidden Cost of Microtransactions: Buying In-Game Advantages in Online Games Decreases a Player’s Status.”

The authors use social comparison theory and research on envy as a starting point for exploring how other players react to people who cough up cash to jam on the “pay to win” buttons. In short, social comparison theory says that in the absence of meaningful data on how well off we are or how well we’re doing, we habitually turn to comparisons with other people to form some kind of judgment. Am I hungry or too warm? I can answer those kinds of questions based on internal evaluations. But for questions about whether I make a lot of money or how good I am at the video game Rocket League? I need information about other people to place myself along a continuum. Having to make an upwards social comparison where I come out looking bad relative to someone can make me see myself as inferior. That’s unpleasant for me, but hey that’s how it is. It seems pretty natural for more powerful or capable players to have higher status.

But Evers, van de Ven, and Weeda argue that these social comparisons in video games are complicated by in-game purchases that give players advantages.2 When someone buys an advantage, it elevates their well-being, which makes me feel worse. And what’s more, the psychological effects of envy and perceptions of injustice can enter the picture if I don’t feel that they “earned” that advantage fairly.

This is the kind of potential reaction that the researchers were interested in. Each of the three studies discussed in their paper looked at a different game. One looked at people buying in-game boosters for Maple Story, a free to play, massively multiplayer role-playing game. One looked at the use of the gold versus real money auction houses that were, at the time, part of the action-RPG game Diablo III. And one considered people who paid real money to buy more powerful tanks inWorld of Tanks (a free to play, massively multiplayer action game) instead of earning them through in-game grinding.

The procedures for each study differed a bit, but the gist is that the researchers recruited players then asked them to imagine other players in their game who bought an item or boost that gave them an in-game advantage. They then asked players a series of questions designed to measure their attitudes towards that person and likely interactions with him. Did they respect the player? Did they envy him? Did they want him on their team? Would they stop to revive him or just walk past like a stone cold motherf’er?

The primary finding is that players who pay to win are indeed respected less by their fellow players. Players also viewed them as less inherently skilled. Conversely, players said they were more likely to respect others who earned what they had.

Second, players indeed felt some amount of ill will towards those who paid for advantages. They said they would be amused by the other person’s failure. They were less likely to say they wanted the person on their team.

But despite all this, one of the more interesting findings was that when confronted with another person who paid for advantages, players reported more temptation to spend real money themselves in order to even the odds. 

This paper is preliminary, relying as it does on self-reported survey data instead of actual player behaviors. But as far as I know it’s the first to directly examine people’s attitudes towards in-game purchases using an established psychological theory. There’s LOTS of ways to expand on the research here. Does envy cause increases in actual spending? Do players drop out of matches more if they get paired with or against those who pay for advantage? Could you do a content analysis of text or voice chat in games with these people to see if players try to lower their social status in response to perceived unfairness? Do those who pay for advantage have fewer people on their friends lists or get fewer friend invites? Do these effects extend outside of the game session itself to social comparisons facilitated by leaderboards, rankings, or achievement trackers?

Here’s to hoping for many follow-up studies.

The Game Design behind Rocket Jumping in Rocket League

Dave Hagewood, Founder and President, Psyonix

I started as a contractor for Epic Games working on a mod I designed for Unreal Tournament 2003. That mod eventually became "Onslaught" for Unreal Tournament 2004. After that, I grew Psyonix into a studio specializing in Unreal Engine technology and we worked behind-the-scenes on a lot of top games including:Gears of War, X-Com: Enemy Unknown, and Mass Effect 3. Eventually we were hired as the primary developer for Square Enix's Legacy of Kain-themed free-too-play game, Nosgoth.

In between working on these games we did our best to release original content, including the cult hitSupersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle Cars for PS3 in 2008. Years later, after we had grown in size, we released a completely updated version called Rocket League, which brings us to where we are now!

Rocket flying in Rocket League

In our PlayStation 4 and PC game, Rocket League, players control cars capable of both double-jumping and boosting; most advanced players learn to manipulate our physics model and "fly" by skillfully combining the two abilities. While we developed this mechanic almost by accident while designing Rocket League's predecessor, Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars, we love the way it adds depth to the game's skill curve and made sure to include it while building Rocket League.

The story of its design starts during SARPBC’s development, where we started out with a car that can jump that had a lot of air control. We were trying to figure out how to expand on this concept and, since lots of games have turbo boosters or pads you roll over that boost you forward, we tried some things like that.

But then we decided we wanted an actual player-controllable boost. We never thought about it in terms of being a "rocket booster" -- we thought about it as being a pure "max speed" increase or a boost of acceleration, like nitro.

Personally, I've always been a fan of real-world physics in games; rather than faking things behind the scenes, I prefer to keep the physics simulation as pure as possible. So we literally just applied a force to the back of the car, since the car is also a physics object, to create this turbo boost. Then, we created these pickups you could drive over that would fill you full of "boost" fuel that would allow you to go faster.

All this work was done before we even decided to try car combat in SARPBC; it was when we were experimenting with obstacle course-type gameplay, where you'd try to jump over long valleys and drive up ramps and see if you could make it past certain areas. While we were playtesting those courses, we started realizing that players could use the jump mechanic and the air control to pitch up, and then if they triggered the boost at that point, we discovered they could use the momentum from the jump to just rocket off in whatever direction they pleased. You could literally fly straight up, if you wanted.

Why: Because there's nothing like it

We fell in love with rocket boosting because it’s an interesting mechanic: it's not automatically going to work every time, and it does require a bit of player skill to pull off. For instance, if you're flying over the ball and you want to stop yourself with a rocket boost, you have to overcome that momentum -- you can't just hit a button and fly off in a different direction. You have to learn how to finesse it, and that was really cool for the obstacle course game we were originally trying to create.

Later, when we moved on to car combat, we kept it because it was such a cool idea. We were trying to figure out ways to fly through the air and shoot each other, and honestly, that was one of the reasons we even experimented with other game modes. The verticality that the rocket boost afforded us added an extra dimension to the game that we didn't want to get rid of. It made the game feel very unique, and we wanted to embrace that. 

We actually had another mechanic that was like an energy grappling hook you could fire, hit a ceiling and swing around the map. That was kind of cool and kind of crazy, but it felt super-limited in comparison to the rocket boost. The boost gave players the room to become so skilled at something that they really felt like they had earned the right to pull off these crazy advanced aerial maneuvers. It created "wow" moments where players would say, "Oh my god, I can't believe you just did that!"

With something like the grappling hook, players would default to the same moves every time; but with rocket jumping, this pure physics-based propulsion system allowed for a scaling of skill that made the game feel satisfying to master.

Results: Following the fun

Designing Rocket League's rocket-boosting mechanic was an interesting process; because it was so much more emergent than other games that we've worked on. Usually, we start out with a very concrete plan of what you want to do, but in this case we really started out with just a very simple mechanic: cars that jump.

We like cars that can jump. We know they're fun to play with. Even in the earliest stages of development, it was just fun to drive around the map, and that’s when we realized that we knew we were on to something

Looking back, we call this game design strategy "following the fun" -- trying to figure out what direction we can turn in that's actually going to make this game more fun, and what directions to avoid turning in so we don’t make it less fun. In retrospect, even some of the more obvious turns we thought we'd make, things like "we have to have weapons" or "we have to have grappling hooks" or whatever, we wound up avoiding because during development we realized they didn't actually make the game more fun to play.

As a result, we literally drove development towards where the fun was, until we ended up with the soccer mode that now forms the core of Rocket League. Rocket jumping is a critical mechanic to that mode because it affords players room to grow their maneuvering skills and outmaneuver other players. I think that’s a big part of why the game has the longevity that it does.

Her Story wins The Grand Jury Award at IndieCade 2015 awards show

Last night indie developer Sam Barlow's Her Story earned the Grand Jury Award at the annual IndieCade 2015 award show, which was hosted by writer/actor Ashly Burch and Hyper Light Drifter developer Teddy Diefenbach.

More accolades -- including the Developers Choice Award -- will be handed out at the end of the event on Sunday, but the list of winners from last night's event is worth noting, especially the fact that game developer and Purple Moon co-founder Brenda Laurel received a Trailblazer Award for her efforts to advance (among other things) virtual reality game design and the presence of games made by and for women.

Other notable award winners include XRA's Memory of a Broken Dimension (which took home two awards), Ben Esposito's Donut County and Robin Baumgarten's one-dimensional dungeon crawler Line Crawler. 

Here's a full list of this year's IndieCade award winners:

• Impact Award: Consentacle
• Visual Design Award: Memory of a Broken Dimension
• Audio Design Award: Memory of a Broken Dimension
• Technology Award: Fabulous Beasts
• Game Design Award: Line Wobbler
• Interaction Award: Tribal & Error
• Story / World Design Award: Donut County
• Grand Jury Award: Her Story
• Trailblazer Award: Brenda Laurel

The Power of Creativity: How Game Design Changes the Way We Think

Game designers, who must capture and retain players' attention and interest quickly, need to understand human psychology and culture

Every summer, fifty fifth graders converge on Manhattan for a week-long game design camp called Mobile Quest and magic happens. In only a few days, the familiar urban landscape is transformed. The mesh metal trash cans on every street corner become portals to a vast underground enemy fortress. The squirrels in Washington Square Park become spies burying secrets. And the huge central fountain becomes a sunken spaceship.

Of course, the fountain is still a fountain. But an important shift in the campers' perspective is underway. They are beginning to view the world not as it is, but as it could be. They start to experience every object as a possibility. They begin to sense in every encounter with the "real world" an opportunity to re-write the underlying value, function, or meaning of its objects in support of the games they are learning to design and play.

The mesh metal trash cans on every street corner become portals to a vast underground enemy fortress.

This shift in perspective is tremendously empowering, especially for young people transitioning into adulthood, with all its alien rules and expectations. It puts them in touch with their own creative power, their agency to act in the world, to participate, to choose. And because all this occurs in the highly collaborative context of a camp, they simultaneously realize that creativity, power, and agency have value only insofar as they connect to, engage with, and inspire other people. In other words, the fountain takes on the reality of a spaceship only because a group of kids was inspired to come together and agree to play the same game, to abide by the same set of rules.

This kind of empowerment is one of the first fruits of beginning to think and act like a game designer. There are other fruits as well. One of the sweetest comes from a game designer's tendency to see the world as a complex, dynamic, highly interactive system rather than as a collection of isolated things. It is the difference between looking out the window and seeing sky, water, trees, and birds and looking out the window and seeing all this with an understanding of its interconnectedness and interdependence -- plus how you fit in. This may seem like an advanced idea, beyond the reach of a fifth grader. In fact, kids pick it up fast with no problem. This may be because it is an idea naturally embodied in games, and games are a language kids speak.

A game is a complex system. It is a miniature world, in many ways analogous to the world we live in. The game occurs in a space or setting. It has its own physical laws or rules. It engages people or players, who generate outcomes by making choices and taking actions. Learning occurs largely by trial and error, and through this learning a clear goal or goals emerge. There is a sense of progress, a system of feedback, incentives, reward, punishment, reputation. The only difference is that the game world has been 100 percent designed, and it is an experience players can choose to walk away from. This means game designers must capture and retain players' attention and interest quickly. They must imagine how the game they wish to create will look and feel, then construct a system logic capable of delivering what they envision to a wide array of players in a wide array of situations. This requires game designers to develop a deep understanding of human psychology and culture. It also requires them to become keen observers, because chances are they will not arrive at a final design on their first try. They will have to test the experience of play produced by their design, a practice called play-testing.

Play-testing is done by observing players as they move through the world of the game. And this is where the kind of systems thinking practiced by game designers becomes really interesting. In play-testing, designers learn to move from the observation of some undesired outcome -- a player getting frustrated and walking away -- to a hypothesis as to what produced that outcome, to an alteration of game components -- adding more time or subtracting enemies -- to another round of play-testing and observation. The process is repeated again and again and again, until, as a whole, the game yields the desired experience of play. In essence, designers develop the skill of making small adjustments to complex systems -- made even more complex by the involvement of humans making choices -- in order to produce an envisioned result. For anyone looking to transform a large organization, or even to get something done in a small team, this will sound familiar. And how many of us wish we could have started practicing this skill back in fifth grade?

For many kids this is their first brush with systems thinking as expressed in a method of design. For many it is also the first time they recognize their creative potential. Together, these two experiences can produce a tremendous appetite for learning as kids seek to better understand the world we share in order to build better, more engaging games. Or as one parent, Wendy Woon, said about her son, "I've never seen him so excited about the possibilities and the process of going back to school!"

The Reason Why Final Fantasy XV's Main Characters Wear Black

It’s not simply because the color looks cool. Or because the characters hate pastels.

On the Final Fantasy XV forums, the game’s director Hajime Tabata answered a question as to why all four characters were in black. Here’s Tabata’s explanation:

The clothing worn by the four main characters is the official battle gear of the Kingdom of Lucis.

Noctis is a member of the royal family and the other three characters are parts of various Lucian national organisations and they are each wearing the specific battle dress relevant to their individual stations.

In the Kingdom of Lucis where our heroes reside, the colour black has historically been treated as a special colour. Because of this, the attire of the royal family and those in occupations closely tied to them are unified by having black as a base colouring. This part of the lore is the reason why the outfits of all four main characters are black. For the finished game we also intend on having their clothing having effects in battle and not just being a part of the world and its background.

And here I was, thinking these dudes were the biggest Johnny Cash fans in the Kingdom of Lucis!

Some Forming Social Game Theories

Feel free to add to this list, disagree or discuss. Thanks.

The player should:

• Return to the game to good news (game progress, new content, visits from friends, mail, gifts).
• Return to the game with a problem to solve (wilted crops, empty supplies, shifts to start).
• Have short-term problems to solve (in a session) and long-term problems to solve (multiple sessions). Longer term problems/desires may be aspirational goals, collections or quests to complete.
• Always be able to make progress on longer-term goals and complete short-term goals.
• Always know precisely what they need to do to solve all problems in the game. These things should never be nested or “discoverable” if you’re clever. That’s not to say that there shouldn’t be discoverable things and surprises. There should be (Pocket God comes to mind). However, the player shouldn’t be confronted with a problem that has no obvious solution – that equals a block and goodbye.
• Always have an aspirational goal on every screen, if possible (something they want – item/action gated by $, lvl, quest progress), and a clear understanding of what they need to do to reach it.
• Have genuine motivation tied into the core of the game which makes them want those aspirational goals (if I get X, it will help me do Y faster or will earn me more $)
• Be rewarded for every single click either visually, through XP, coins or some other measure of progress.
• Clearly understand how and why every change state in the game occurs. If an NPC suddenly becomes happy, why did that happen? Is it visually obvious? Is the transition from normal state to happy state clear? Is it rewarding? Does the player know what they did (or something in the game did) to make that happen?
• Feel like they have agency in the game. Through their direct action, something happens. Without them, it doesn’t happen. If you never plant crops, you never get results.
• Understand your UI instantly. If you need to explain it, you need to redo it.
• Have a pre-existing mental model of the game before they even play it. I know how a farm, a nightclub, a bakery and a restaurant run, at least at an abstract level. The less you need to teach people about the game, the better. This information should be pre-grokked before they even enter the game.
• Feel good about posting something in their feed. They believe what they’re posting will help them and help their friends playing the game, too.
• Have a “feel good” endgame state for a session. This is appointment gaming, and people want to feel like they’ve tidied up this session before moving on to the next. That means that they can finish or, in some cases, optimize until it’s not really optimum to continue anymore. If they leave feeling like the game didn’t really let them leave (because there was always something new to do), they leave in a sub-optimal and unsatisfied state and thus are less likely to return.
• Have clear dailies including friend grind, playspace grind and bonus progression, if applicable. What do I do everyday when I come back to the game? Do I know that I have finished what I needed to do? How do I know that I need to do it (and no, your last play session isn’t enough).
• Be reminded of what they need to do. They’re playing for 2, 5 or 10 mins at a time, and are possibly playing dozens of social games simultaneously. They need visual reminders of what they need to do to progress play in your game. Give them explicit and constantly visible goals, badges, or visual reminders of some kind.

• If you nerf their playstate or playfield, the player better understand why and feel like they could have prevented it (keeping their appointment, getting an item by x time or it expires, etc).
• Players want direction. Give it to them everywhere: tool tips, quests, pop ups, etc.

Getting Players to Return to Facebook games

Getting players to post to the viral channel is a challenge every game designer faces when he or she is making Facebook games. It’s known that players are most likely to post when they’ve just started a game, but what motivates returning players?

Four things:

• It helps me. There is a particular item or objective that is core to the progression of my game with which I need your help. Typically, the game allows you to buy your way around the “Ask Friends For Help” option. If I need your help to progress, short of paying cash, I’ll post it.
• I know it helps you. It’s key here that it actually does help other players. I am likely to post something to my feed if it gives you something I would want for myself. I understand the item’s value and scarcity. It’s also important to consider that over the lifetime of a game as well as the curve of player progression, the value and scarcity of an object may change. What I care about in an early game may not mean anything to me later on. Does that mean the viral messages should change? Not always, but catering to player’s needs and a player’s perceived value is critical. I have seen messages in feeds which offer stuff I have absolutely no desire for. There is just no reason I would click. Other times, I am prompted to post a feed which will give my friends something which I know has no value. Likewise, I am not likely to post through.
• It helps us both. Parody though it may be, Cow Clicker suggests players post a message to their feed. Anyone who clicks on the viral message not only gets “mooney” with which they can buy “clicks” to add to their “click” total, but also gives the original poster “mooney” as well. It is an example of a mutually beneficial viral which trades in the only thing that matters in the game – “clicks”.
• Pride. I will post if I am actually proud of what I have achieved, be it a quest, an item or something else. Generally, I am proud of this because I want to show off the great thing that I have done. Recently, I posted that I’d leveled to 17 in a game, because it took me quite a while. When I finish building the epic chapel I am working on in another game, I can assure you I’ll post about that, too.

Does this mean we should only include virals which fit the above themes? No. What makes one player proud could make another feel frustrated at the conclusion. For instance, an epic quest to gather a lot of materials could challenge and excite one player but irritate another. Likewise, some players abhor all forms of feed messages while others are happy to click through a wide variety of virals. In fact, there is a whole class of player for whom “playing the feeds” has become a pleasant meta-game to the game it supports. Of course, we also don’t want to limit a player’s viral opportunities, particularly when our games depend on it, nor do we want to overdo it.

Ultimately, your only defense against subpar virals is playing your own game. Do you actually feel motivated to click your own viral message? If not, why do you think others will? Are you aware of the click through? Have you investigated the good ones vs. the lame ducks to understand what hooks they’re using? Are you watching your competitors like a hawk? Remember, though, that you are only one player in your game. Watch how others play, too, particularly if their play style is different than yours.

Analyzing your own play, feeling the hooks in the game and watching the results via metrics offers the best chance of creating compelling virals which players feel motivated to click through.