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Playing games with UX
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10. WHAT PARENTS THINK
52% say that video games are a positive part of their
child’s life
66% believe that game play provides mental
stimulation or education
61% believe games encourage their family to spend to
time together
59% believe that game play helps their children connect
with their friends
ESA 2012
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13. State of Flow
Csikszentmihalyi
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
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22. “I think I can
make an entirely
new game
experience, and
if I can't do it,
some other game
designer will”
Shigeru Miyamoto
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24. Go forth and make awesome
games
Sarah Lacy
www.utopianworldofsandwiches.com
@sarahofsandwich
Editor's Notes
Hi I am Sarah, I lead a double life. By day I am a UX designer and by night I make computer games.
My friends and I started a games company called Utopian World of Sandwiches. Among other projects, we have made a game called Chompy Chomp Chomp for the Xbox. Here is me and my friends at Games Britannia.
Here are some people playing the game at Eurogamer.
Here is a crowd that gathered at Play Expo. We ran tournaments for the game at all these events.
And Mario and Luigi playing it
UX designers seek to make people’s lives better, games will make people’s lives betterIn my relatively short lifetime we have seen huge leaps in technology and gained so much knowledge about neuroscience and psychology.As UX designers we are at the forefront of these changes. We are on the brink of a new era of understanding, we have new high tech ways to fulfil the needs of the people that we create for. I love being a UX designer. Right here, right now. We are only at the beginning.The only constant throughout all this change is question that we ask ourselves. “How can we create meaning and purpose for the people that we create for?”After a lot of pondering over this question I came to the conclusion that computer games were the best medium for me to explore the answer.The first Nintendo console came out 2 years after I was born. In my lifetime I’ve seen graphics go from tiny white dots on a screen to fully realistic representations of alternative realities. They have gone from something that only one generation plays to something that every generation plays. The average gamer is now 30 and over 48% of gamers are now female. This was very different when I was young. I was unusual as a young girl gamer in the 80s.
We hear a lot of stuff about how bad games are. How kids get addicted and violent and they don’t leave the house so they get fat and they have no friends. But recent studies have shown that there are all sorts of benefits to playing computer games, from cognitive to social to emotional.
One study took place in Texas, where gamers were asked to use the same equipment as surgeons to perform virtual surgery. Gamers performed better than surgeons. They measured the improvements in motor skills; hand eye coordination, spatial perception. One of the earlier studies was into the benefits of Tetris on spatial awareness. People were better able to spin shapes round and fit them together after playing tetris, they saw changes in people’s brains. Not very surprising that one ;) The emotional benefits have also been researched extensively. Popcap who made Bejewelled blitz actually commissioned their own study into the effects of the game on clinical depression. It showed that people who played the game showed a 57 percent reduction in depression symptoms. Some researchers in New Zealand actually designed a game to try to cure depression called SPARX. About 44% of those who played SPARX recovered completely from depression, compared with 26% of those in regular treatment, a significant difference.There have been studies into the social benefits of games. Contrary to popular belief games actually help people to relate to each other and make friends. A study done at BYU in Utah showed that girls who play games with their parents are less likely to be aggressive, have psychological issues and are closer to their families.
The perception of gaming among parents really has changed, here are some stats from the ESA this year on what parent’s believe about games.Most of the people who make games do not aim for them to have these effects initially. They just wanted to make a fun good game. Imagine if they did. Imagine if they set out to design a product that would bring people together or to make people feel more fulfilled and accomplished? Would that make them even better experiences?
Here is a family playing our game at Game City.When we started out we set out to just make a game. It was going to be a platform game. But that didn’t seem to come together. I realised I needed to think about it like a User Experience designer. I wanted to understand the context that it would be played in so we thought very hard about what the purpose of our game would be. The basic human need we wanted to fulfil was a sense of belonging. We knew that games have the power to make people closer and we wanted to make a game that would do that. The best memories that we have of games are the ones when we played them with our friends and families. We wanted to make a game that would make people laugh together, scream at each other; something that grown adults could play with their small children. It was not just about creating a game for us, once we had this purpose our game really came together. So what makes a good game experience? In order to understand that we’d have to think about what an experience is. An experience is something that happens to someone. It can be crafted or guided, but we know it isn’t something that is concrete or absolute. A great experience is something that makes you feel alive, fulfilled. Life is short and time is precious. A great experience feels worthwhile; it feels like you have spent that time wisely. A great experience has a life beyond itself. It is something that can have stories told about it after it happens. Books and films and websites are consistent, permanent experiences. You know what you are getting once you have used it once. When you watch a film for the 5th time, it doesn’t suddenly change. A game is different. The gamer is in complete control of the experience that they get. They are a participant in the outcome and no two play-throughs will be the same. In any one game session a gamer can feel happy, sad, frustrated, bored, angry. It is the sense of immersion and engagement that a computer game designer needs to maintain.
When we play test Chompy Chomp Chomp we often have people come out with strange and obscene combinations of swear words. We have named it Gamer Tourettes because it seems so uncontrollable and uninhibited, we’ve even had people refuse to play it in front of their children because they know they won’t be able to control the swear words that come out of their mouths. This is a good outcome from a play test. Their inhibitions are so low because they care about the game more than they care about what people around them might think. Imagine if you were user testing an interface and that happened. It would not make for a successful user test! All of these things make people feel closer, playing together, laughing together and losing their inhibitions. The Laughter is an interesting one. We’ve seen complete strangers laughing at the game together, and talking to each other because of it.
A part of why I do this is my fascination with people, how they feel, why they feel it and what makes life worth living. I’ve thought a lot about why a game experience is so fulfilling. During my time researching UX and game design there are a few bits of knowledge that have really stuck with me that I am going to share with you now.Cheeksentmihiye wanted to understand what made life worth living. One of the things he studied was a state he called “the state of flow” this is when people are doing an activity that is the exact right balance of challenge for the amount of skill that they have in the task. He mainly studied composers and artists, but it applies very well to computer games. When people are in a state of flow they are focussed, concentrated, they have a sense of inner clarity, a confidence in their capabilities; they describe a sense of serenity (no worries about oneself), sense of time, and the feeling that you feel part of something larger. The people who he spoke to described it as Ecstacy. He described it as a step into an alternative reality. Once you get to that point of entering a different reality, it is feels almost like you don’t exist. He named this experience the “flow experience”.We can only process a certain amount of information at a time. When you are involved in an engaging activity you don’t have enough attention left over to pay attention/ is body and identity disappear. You don’t have the capacity to be aware of your life, your identity, your problems and concentrate on the challenge that is in front of you. When designing a computer game you have the opportunity to actually craft an experience that can induce this state in people.
Daniel H. Pink wrote a book called “Drive” where he looked into what motivates people. He talked about Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. These three things apply to computer games more than they do to any other medium. You have these things when you play any game, but I think understanding this really helps to frame how you can design the game experience. Autonomy in a game would be the ability to do anything you feel like doing because you want to see what would happen. No one is telling you what to do. A game is a series of unnecessary challenges that you choose to undertake. The other day I was playing Minecraft and I decided to build a tower up to the clouds, just so I could put my head in them.
This one is fairly obvious. People play games to win. Everyone wants to be the best, Everyone wants to be very skilled at a game.
Games give you purpose. You believe you can make a difference in the world that you are in. That you matter there, that you can change the destiny or direction of the game world. It is a sense of purpose that people don’t get in their normal lives. It is generally a heroic sense of purpose.
This made me think of Joseph Campbell’s a Hero’s journey. He discovered a narrative pattern that could apply to pretty much all adventure stories. Basically the protagonist starts in their ordinary safe world, then something happens and they get taken to a world far away, they go through ordeals and trials and then they return to their ordinary world having become more mature and having undergone a transformation.A game is an adventure in which the player is the protagonist. Imagine this… every time someone picks up a game, they are going on an adventure and coming back with that reward and sense of personal growth every time they play.An adventure is an on-going process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defence) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth). With a game you are safe, you are capable and you are rewarded for your efforts. It is intrinsically rewarding to play a game, the reward comes from within you, it is the most satisfying type of reward.
When you play a game a lot of things happen inside your brain. Your brain is full of neurotransmitters that get released when you find yourself in certain circumstances that can be created by a computer game. He talks about Positive and Negative Affect, which is the way that your emotions affect the way that you think. I have found this particularly interesting when designing a game experience. When you are in a state of negative affect, feeling anxious or stressed the neurotransmitters focus brain processing. Focus enables us to concentrate on a task and work until the job is done. With negative affect you are likely to see the details. With a game this would be useful to know about when you want your players to focus on getting a task done, when they already know what the task is.When you are in a state of positive affect the opposite actions take place. Neurotransmitters broaden processing, muscles relax, the brain attends to opportunities offered by positive affect. Positive affect allows you to be more easily distracted however it arouses curiosity, engages creativity and makes the brain into a more effective learning organism. With positive affect you see the bigger picture. This would be useful to consider when you want your players to explore, create or improvise.Dopamine controls the motivation system, it causes you to want things, to be motivated. According to recent research it is opiod that gets released when you feel pleasure. You are in a constant cycle of motivation and reward. All of this feels really good.
So how do we make a good game experience?So a simply put a game is a way to frame the player’s experience. The frame is a way to evoke emotion. It isn’t about making it easy. It is about making it the right level of challenging to the level of skill that the player has developed. It’s about driving engagement in a holistic way using all the tools you have at your fingertips. From narrative, to sound, to character design. A good game is intrinsically rewarding, you get positive emotions, stronger relationships, a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging and meaning that you don’t get with any other medium.The framework consists mainly of 3 things; a goal, rules and feedback. Within that framework the player improvises, learns to understand the rules and seeks to master the game.A goal is what provides the sense of purpose. The goal in Chompy Chomp Chomp is to have the most points at the end of the game, out of everyone in the room.
The rules are how the players can achieve the goal. The rules add the challenge, by limiting what is possible the players have to think creatively and devise strategies to overcome them. If you could just get to the goal without any rules there would be no fun at all.
The feedback is what allows lets the player know that the goal is achievable, gives them the motivation to continue and helps them to understand what the result of their actions are. At the end of the game it is also the extrinsic reward that they get; in Chompy Chomp Chomp the leader gets a crown on their head and at the end of the game they get to the top of the podium.We wanted to make a game where failure was fun. Failure generally is fun anyway, that is what makes a game good. We wanted to make it feel achievable for anyone to win, and that even if they didn’t they still had a good time. I guess this was more important for a multiplayer game, but really failing can be fun as long as you get a sense of progression, that you are becoming more skilled and better at it. In Chompy Chomp Chomp we added slightly more advanced elements like multipliers so people could develop their strategies over time. We have some scary good Chompy experts!
This is Shigeru Miyamoto, he made games like Mario and Zelda. When I listen to him talk or read his quotes he sounds like a User Experience designer. His games are experiences that he engineers and every single one is a new opportunity to craft a new experience.
The idea of experience design is a lot broader now than it ever has been. The experiences that we will deliver to people in 10 years time will be completely different to the ones that we create now. This is why we focus on purpose, vision, context and the emotions that our users experience. These are the things that will endure when everything else changes. Our game could still be just as fun on an old ZX spectrum as it is on the Xbox.As experience designers, we are emotion architects. We create and develop vision. We seek to innovate. All of the things I have learnt can be applied to UX design and game design.What I came to realise during this whole journey, is that I was not actually leading a double life. Game design is experience design.
I can see games potential to make people’s lives better. They are emotional immersive experiences that help you to become the person that you have the potential to be. As UX designers you have the skills to make amazing games. I hope this has inspired you to give it a try. Thank you.
