Why do we play games?

If your mother was at all like mine, you’re intimately familiar with this question. Why are you always playing these games?

As anyone that’s ever owned a puppy can tell you, we’re not the only ones that play. Oddly enough, the reason why is still a bit of a mystery in the animal kingdom, but we bipeds have put a bit of effort into figuring it out from the sapient side. What it boils down to is, games are fun, fun releases dopamine, and we really like dopamine.

Different people find fun in different acts–an entirely different topic–but each of these acts and motivators has something in common: they all require us to make decisions. For those that follow the blog, you know that we’ve touched on the importance of analytical and intuitive decision-making processes, and their value is undeniable.

We play games because we receive gratification and reinforcement of our self through making rewarding decisions–especially intuitive ones. As we observe measurable results from our decisions in play, we experience an affirmation of identity, and from there we can continue to grow. TED-talker Jane McGonigal goes so far as to even suggest that people that regularly engage in this structured growth tend to actually be better at solving problems.

Think about the last Legend of Zelda game that you played. You’re wandering around in a dungeon looking for the next clue. You try a few things that don’t get anywhere, but then you have a hunch. You use an item in a certain way you hadn’t before, or you come up with some unconventional solution, and you hear that telltale musical jingle that lets you know you just unlocked something interesting.

How does that feel? It feels awesome. You just made a decision, and you were rewarded for it. It’s like cooking without a recipe and finding out that you just made something delicious–it makes you feel like a bronzed Adonis. The next step is selecting the right Instagram filter for your food selfie, and you’ve just added a tasty dish to your repertoire.

From a design perspective, understanding this motivation is extremely valuable. How can we exploit that in our games?

(Responsibly) Create Opportunities for Players to Make Decisions

The most defining characteristic of a game is that it involves meaningful decisions. Decisions are our input into the game, the command prompt if you will. Mechanisms in the game take those decisions, often run them through an operation or two, and produce results. This is definitely something you want to be part of your game, unless you’re rebooting Chutes and Ladders.

The total number of decisions and options available to the player is what we call width. The key to determining your game’s width is finding the sweet spot in your game’s density index–how its accessibility and depth compare to its experience. You don’t want to overload your players with a wide buffet of options and outcomes if they’re just signing up for a stroll in the park…but you also don’t want your players to prepare for a space opera and find out that game’s play is linear.

Finding that sweet spot can be difficult, especially for newer designers. Thorough iterative playtesting–especially blind playtesting–is required to reach a proper density index. If you can forgive the shameless plug, we’d be glad to help you out with that.

The Positive Feedback Loop

Get resources. Spend resources on things. Use things to get more resources. Spend resources to get even more and bigger things.

A positive feedback loop can be thought of as a reinforcing relationship. Something happens that causes the same thing to happen again, which causes it to happen yet again, getting stronger in each iteration – like a snowball that starts out small at the top of the hill and gets larger and faster as it rolls and collects more snow.

In this quote from Canvas Design Concepts, we see the very word we’re looking for: reinforcing. Every time you make a decision that’s involved in a positive feedback loop, you experience gratification through your advancement in the game state–regardless of whether or not that decision was ultimately optimal. The mechanism itself actually becomes the reward, making a positive feedback loop a powerful and elegant tool.

Of course, any designer worth his or her salt probably raised an eyebrow when another buzz word showed up in that quote: snowball. Runaway victory can be a problem. The best way to confront this is to make sure that all players have equal access to the positive feedback loop, and that their mounting the gradient does not exclude other players from doing the same. Catchup mechanisms also work very well alongside feedback loops–but that’s a topic for another day.

Provide Subjective Rewards, and Provide Them Often

Ever play a game where you couldn’t quite tell how well you were doing until the end? I don’t mean through transparent scoring, I mean in a game where you didn’t really know what you were accomplishing. For me, that game is 7 Wonders. While I enjoy the game, I don’t really know what’s happening or who’s winning (military struggles excluded) until we get to the end. We tally up points, and I say “Ah! It looks like my engineering sets paid off!”

As such, I don’t find 7 Wonders as gratifying as it could be. Now, consider its cousin, Sushi Go. After each draft, you score points, compare Maki Roll counts, etc. You’re given a clear metric by which you can evaluate your own performance. The more often you can measure your performance in a game, the more opportunities you will have to feel gratification.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you should keep a running tally of points–in fact, you seldom should. The key word here is subjective rewards. You want the player to feel good about their abilities to take actions in the game. There is no more perfect example for this than Dominion.

In Dominion, and deck-builders in general, you intuitively sculpt your deck over the course of the game with tools to acquire bigger and better things (what we now know as a positive feedback loop). As we’ve mentioned before, this is a model that beautifully supports gratification because you get to reap the rewards almost every single time you take your turn. You are combining the tools you chose to acquire, and you get to see exactly what kind of buying power and flexibility you’ve earned. Even though Dominion is lacking in interaction, this is exactly why it became the sensation that it is–and exactly why so few other deckbuilders are able to depart very far from the model.

Intuitive vs Analytical

Here’s a topic that we’ve covered quite a few times. For those that haven’t caught up on their summer reading, intuition and analysis are different processes by which we make decisions. If you find your way home using a compass and a map, you’ve navigated an analytical decision matrix. If you find your way home by following the trees and landmarks that look familiar, you’ve navigated an intuitive decision matrix. Analysis is based on emprical evidence or rough statistics; intuition is based on how we feel and value things.

So, which is better? It depends entirely on your game, but understand that you have the power to suggest–not require–players employ one method or the other. This is power of suggestion is just another tool in your belt.

Intuition is definitively more gratifying. There’s no question about this. If you find your way home with a map, you feel like you know how to use a map. If you find your way home using your gut, then you feel amazing. This is because analysis measures only our ability to analyze; intuition measures the sum of our understanding. When you’re rewarded for making correct intuitive decisions, you receive affirmation that you’ve done a pretty good job of being a person so far, and that’s an incredible thing that we get to deliver to people as game designers.

Players use intuition in a great majority of games. This is, in part, because designers know the value of managing and distorting predictability in their games, forcing players to rely on our understanding of the unknown. What card will come off of the top of the deck? What will my opponent do? What will my opponent think I’m about to do? There are often too many factors to consider, so we go with our instincts.

This isn’t to say that analysis doesn’t have its place. There’s a definite gratification in correctly playing the odds, or visualizing and executing a transparent-but-tricky path to victory. Outmaneuvering and outsmarting an opponent is very rewarding, and the strongest gamers and strategists supplement their instincts with analysis when applicable. As a whole, however, analytical gratification appeals (and is accessible) to a narrower audience.

Design Exercise

Consider the game you’re currently working on.

How can you guide players to experience greater gratification?

How can you guide them to experience gratification more often?

Does your game employ a positive feedback loop?

If not, could it support that kind of structure?