Breaking the Rules of Game Design

[Music] okay hello everyone I'm Kaitlin Brunel I have been in the program in the industry about seven years right now I'm at Naughty Dog although the ideas for this talk were developed while I was still at CCP so before I started a quick spoiler warning I will be spoiling a couple of plot moments chances are you've already heard of most of these even if you haven't played these games but fair warning so before I launch into the meat of this talk let me give a quick review of the major terms autonomy competence and relatedness are psychological terms used for increasing intrinsic motivation to play your game and well why am i focusing on these three there's actually quite a few statistics about how effective these three together are at increasing player in retention for instance these stats from immersive claim that MMO intention was much higher

in game two provided these three psychological needs in their study 46% of players who'd spent one month playing an MMO with autonomy competence and relatedness we're still playing that MMO nine months later by contrast eighteen percent of players who had spent a month playing an MMO that they self-described as fun we're still playing that MMO nine months later autonomy competence and relatedness has strong statistical results and they work in more than just games they've proven effective in education in sports in the workplace so what are they autonomy is feeling like you have options like you're in control feeling like you're responsible for the results of your own actions for instance why is Grand Theft Auto so popular it's not because any one piece of the game is totally flawless it's that you can do

anything you want once drive a fire truck okay go to the fire truck similarly everyone likes making silly pictures in Photoshop because you can create an and part of Legos appeal is just how open-ended it is competence competence is feeling like you're up to the task like the thing you're trying to make the character do it's what the character actually does on screen it's also associated with a feeling of mastery the player feeling like they know the strategies and they're good at the game now for instance people who never played a console game before will play Wii Sports because they feel like they're up to the task of swinging a Wii mote on the flipside people hate Microsoft words autocorrect because they think they intend to type it's not what actually appears on the screen the controls don't do what they intend so Microsoft Word is a badly designed game and now there's

actually a bit of a special case with competence where statistically speaking it has no effect without autonomy let's say I hand you a piece of chalk and tell you to write on the chalkboard probably all of you feel like yeah I have the skills to do this but are you motivated if I tell you to write the same line over and over probably not if I tell you to put anything we want on the chalkboard yeah now you've probably got some good ideas the Bettina's is all about human relationships feeling like you belong that you're part of something bigger that you have peers who will look out for you and that you're also responsible for their well-being and despite relatedness being all about people ironically NPC interactions are more consistently effective at giving positive relatedness unlike other players who might just yell at you for being a noob NPCs can every

single time have the reaction of wow you're that guy in save the whole town I can't believe I'm meeting you so to a quick shorthand for these terms autonomy is having options competence is feeling up to the task and relatedness is connecting with people so you might be asking why wouldn't we just want max out autonomy competence and relatedness after all you get a huge spike in player attention if you do and some games do you go this route take farm bill for instance you can plant crops in any pattern you want giving you autonomy the only skill is clicking so no one feels a lack of competence and your friends are relying on you to play and benefit from you playing and giving you relatedness so does that make farm role the pinnacle of game design now don't get me wrong it is very efficient at what it does but let me make a case

for deliberately denying the player autonomy competence and relatedness I'm going to compare two different scenes where autonomy is taken away in portal there's a scene where you have to destroy an inanimate box and quite a few people not everyone but quite a few form a sort of emotional connection with this box and so destroying the box is something they really don't want to do breaking the players autonomy in Portal 2 there is a scene where in order to advance the plot you have to put the villain back into power and a lot of people don't want to do this because they're angry with the villain breaking the players economy now here's the interesting thing people love portal scene and hate portals producing in both of these scenes you have your autonomy taken away but in one of these scenes the villain is making you do this heinous act and in the other the game designer is making

you do it which means in one piece the player is angry with the villain and the other case the player is angry with the game designer or alternatively they might just end up feeling like they can't relate to the main character either way you probably don't want the player hating your game design or hating a main character but the player hitting your villain actually yeah that's that's usually a retic success now some of you are probably saying well oh whoa hold on we're talking about autonomy how did we end up talking about villains in other words how do we go from talking about a purely game mechanical concept to a purely narrative concept so here's what's happening you start with a piece of game design in this case one that takes away of the player autonomy this causes a powerful emotion in the player anger at having their autonomy taken away and then we use trickery to get the

player to associate that emotion with a narrative and not the game design that caused the emotion in the first place this is a big deal this is an emotional storytelling tool that exists only in games but it's the only way to produce the emotions we want for game design I mean do we have to break autonomy because autonomy is something they really don't want to break I mean it triples our subscriber numbers could we maybe modify the scene of it so that it doesn't actually break autonomy what if there was some super secret way to save the Kuban portal would this be better well there's a couple of problems with that the first is newbies Newbery's aren't going to know there's a secret and therefore they're still going to feel

the autonomy loss the second is that eventually when the movies go online and talk about this scene they're going to hear no no no no no no you did it wrong you're supposed to save the cube and now all of a sudden they feel incompetent so now we're breaking two rules instead of just one so okay wow that didn't work do you really just have to break autonomy well the hold on why don't we just let people keep the cube no secrets now nobody loses autonomy or competence but now you've completely changed the emotional tone of the scene why be angry at the villain anymore why be sad at the scene now in short if we all want our game designed to to produce negative emotions to be harnessed in our narrative then we need to break rules so

now that we know what makes portal scene effective let's try to fix portal 2 scene the problem with portals 2 scene is why does the main character agree to the plans who's forcing her to do so I mean the main character gets ordered around by a potato why does she'll be the potato why doesn't she just make her own plans she fix this what you need is a stronger authority figure someone who can give the main character orders she can't refuse let's come back to portal 1 now given that we already have our formula villain that takes away your autonomy how can we improve the impact of this scene now the funny thing about this scene is that it has no real impact on a certain percentage of the audience some people when they play portal react it's

just an inanimate object sure I'll incinerate it no problem it would be a very different story if the cube was instead a cute robot with personality and seeming intelligence now that the walls in Portal are covered in graffiti from past test subjects leaving poems and tributes to the cube what would happen if you let people write their own graffiti what would happen if there were flowers in the scene that they can move around basically give the players a small piece of autonomy you're still breaking their autonomy the player still has no control over the big things they still have to kill the cube but they do have a small assignment on me or what kind of send-off they give the cube and how much respect they pay which theoretically will make them more engaged with the scene so enough

analysis about portal let's take a step back and look at the bigger picture here some of you might be wondering could we use the emotion in button produced by our game design to enhance something other than narrative and the answer is yes it could be used to emphasize a moral aprender Brathwaite for instance has games where you experience various historical atrocities such as a slave trade from Africa to America these games give you a history lesson they probably get you closer to understanding what people are really feeling then adding history textbook ever could because you feel your human rights being taken away through game play alternatively instead of narrative or morals you could give people strong feelings about an abstract concept this is most commonly seen in flash games that try to argue against a certain kind of game design let me give you an example this is a screenshot from

super press space to win now the only controls of this game are the space bar the game never gives you a choice about anything it's press space to buy a potion and press space to walk and she's a stat to upgrade when you only have one stat a lot of people playing this game with a o of course this is a critique of linearity in RPGs although actually I think the message is a little ambiguous I think another group of people would walk away concluding that linear RPGs actually do give them a lot of freedom a lot of autonomy and they just didn't notice it until you took that autonomy away but I would argue that impacting narrative impacting morals and impacting an abstract thesis are all pretty similar you're trying to convey a message and you're using game design to make the player feel exactly the way you

want them to feel so yes you could manipulate clear emotion any external idea but the tricks aren't basically the same so you might ask what about not going external at all could we map a negative emotion from one piece of gameplay to another piece of gameplay and the answer is yes you could make people dislike a well made part of your gameplay if you wanted to for instance for instance this is the fairy from Zelda who you know that you just stop what you're doing and listen to her and nobody likes to be told what there's to stop what they're doing so most players hate her and yet she's just a hint system that's usually a good game design but why would you want people to hate al only a part of your gameplay and by the way I'm not just being rhetorical here

in narrative there are villains that audiences love to hate well there ever come a point in games were there a game mechanics that audiences love to hate video games are a young evolving medium maybe someday audiences will gobble clamor for villain game mechanics but who knows alright so far we've only really done a dozen variations on one example and it produces one emotion let's expand our repertoire of emotions specifically so far we've only been messing with people's autonomy we can get different emotions by messing with their competence and their relatedness for comparison purposes breaking autonomy makes people feel controlled makes them feel like a pawn like they're being forced to do something against their will which in turn makes them angry against Authority and all of these feelings together naturally make people

want to start a rebellion breaking competence has a very different effect instead of making people want to start a revolution it makes someone feel helpless makes them want to admit defeat makes them what to ask for help relatedness is a bit less one-dimensional psychologically speaking of relatedness is the opposite of loneliness however when someone is in a state of relatedness and you take that away depending on how you remove relatedness they might feel grief or loss or homesickness so let's talk about bricking relatedness through game mechanics there are several ways to break up an existing relationship you can use death killing a character the player cared about you can use physical distance have the player go on a long journey far away from friends and family you could have the players friends and

peers reject the player of course reduction can go both ways you can make the player want to reject their friends and peers because it turns out their friends and peers are horrible like maybe they're Nazis or something and a couple of games use exactly that plot twist you know your friends are secretly Nazis but the vast majority of games just go for murder and it's easy to criticize this and say that game should broaden their reading horizons and they probably should but if they're a psychological reason why murder might be more effective to answer this question let me first go on a tangent about a psychological experiment in this experiment people were given electric shocks by someone in another room and like any given good scientific experiment it was a double-blind test with two groups one group is told that people in the other room were acting maliciously but they know pressing the button will cause pain the other group

is told that there's someone in another room pressing a button but they're totally innocent I don't know they're hurting anyone now it turns out malicious shocks freezing you've hurt innocent shocks don't well the first one does but the pain quickly drops off so why murder because it's malicious the malicious act is going to cause more pain so if we are going to use a murder scene how do you make sure we get the most emotional impact out of it one of the more important points is making sure people care about the victim and how do we do that we use gameplay we create a game mechanical relationship between the cat-lair and the victim but don't skip narrative either remember how not everyone cared about the cue from Portal because to some people it was just an

inanimate box so how do we create game mechanical relatedness in all the same way that relationships are built between humans you want to create trust and respect between the NPC and the player in that trust that the player will happily do the character a favor because I know that character will return that favor you want them to rely on each other maybe your main character can't fly and so relies on someone who can and she in turn relies on the main character for brute force you want them to feel like a peer to the player like they are working together towards something bigger so let's take a look at good eros now okay like her or hate her she's gotten more attention than any other video game death maybe there are game mechanical reasons for this let's analyze she gives

things to the player lore explaining how to defeat the bad guy goals that the player can do at the same time she needs your help and she will often fight by your side helping you and finally she dies halfway through the game not in the ending credits after the game ends after the game mechanical contract is over all the characters could die at the end of the game and at some level the player would not care but no heiress dies in the middle of the game when she's still needed for more lore more missions and more gameplay so we've been talking about how to make people care about a character so far we've used relatedness but what about using autonomy and competence after all autonomy and competence are good things to get people to care about pretty much anything so how do we increase player carrying through

autonomy one way is to use user created characters I like with the sims where players create lives and relationships for their characters if you tell someone to dream up a set of characters and events stories and relationships about them they're gonna be upset if you next tell them okay whatever your characters is now dead how do we increase player carrying through competence make them feel like they rely on this character to be competent like they're more competent at the game when they're using this character and actually Aerys does a little bit of this she is your healer and when she dies you lose all of her equipment and any experience you invested in leveling her up so so far all of these Apple abused have been strictly linear let's take a moment to talk about how to extend these

two nonlinear storylines remember all we're doing when using this technique is that we take a gameplay movement that produces a negative emotion in the player and pull the player into feeling that emotion about the narrative all you need for this is a small piece of gameplay and a small piece of narrative that you can really place anywhere in a nonlinear setting and you don't even have to pair the same piece of gameplay with the same piece of narrative you can mix and match just make sure that you have one of each what you don't ever want is intentionally bad gameplay that's not serving a purpose by driving narrative emotion let's go into some of the specific examples how might we do murder in a nonlinear setting find the character that the player seems to care about the most the player that it's a character that they were

coming to rely on for help for whom they're doing the most favors and then you kill that character a few games actually use exactly this trick already I believe Far Cry 2 does for instance what about coercion like in portal where the villain forces you to instigate the cue when you think about this you're taking away player autonomy and forcing them to do things how can this ever ever be nonlinear if the answer is to make the entire scene optional like maybe it's something that happens only for captured once you're captured you're on Rails for a bit but you don't need to be captured in the first place so every example I've given so far can be reduced to a single dramatic moment where something happens in gameplay and is immediately linked to piece of narrative

what about an emotion that takes time to build up for example the loneliness II get in games where there's just nobody around that you can talk to now first things first before how asking how to extend this to a nonlinear narratives we need to tie the game mechanical loneliness into a narrative portal once again gives us a fairly good example where not only are you lonely you know who to blame there is this robot running tests on you like a lab rat who won't let you leave not only that it's malicious the robot knows you want to leave and won't let you in order to pull off this kind of loneliness in a nonlinear setting you have to make an isolated section of the game that's all going to obey the same rules you have to decide from the moment you set foot on this island you lose all radio contact with your allies and sure

maybe you don't need to set foot in on the island at all maybe there's multiple routes you can go once you get to the island but you need a section of your game where the game mechanics reinforce emotion consistently regardless of player path there's also potential for going the other way around in a nonlinear story of dynamically detecting a loss of autonomy competence or relatedness and then harnessing that emotion for instance noticing the player is frustrated maybe they can't beat a boss and turn that frustration into a plot moment now we get to actually give an example of wreaking competence braking competence actually has several pitfalls the first is a psychological result that people just don't care about competence unless it's the situation

where they have autonomy as well if you force a player into doing something they're not going to care that much if they fail next feeling like you're terrible of the game makes people want to give up and quit and if they quit they never see your wonderful plot moment finally skill levels vary be extremely careful when you create an impossible task that people are meant to fail and make sure that people actually do fail it let's dive into an example and look at some techniques for solving these issues this is an image of a board game that Brenda brathwaite made for her daughter to teach her daughter about what really happened in the slave trade from Africa to America the Middle Passage her daughter had to sail as a boat of slaves across the ocean now each turn she rolled to died to see how much food was used on their trip and she was rolling really high and she said mommy

we're not going to make it what are we going to do and her mother replies well we can keep going and hope that people don't die or we can put some people in the water and that's had a powerful effect suddenly her daughter had a much deeper understanding of the historical event I started asking all kinds of great questions like did that really happen so I came home one day and you'd be gone and would we get together again on the other side all right let's break down this game design and analyze how it gets around the major pitfalls associated with breaking competence how does Brenda's game make sure that the player retains autonomy she gave the player choices during failure her

daughter has two terrible options burning or starvation but she has autonomy in fact this is the most autonomy she's had since they loaded up the boats and this is really noteworthy most games when you're not going to make it do the exact opposite they take away player autonomy your buttons don't even do anything your screen fades accruing to gray taking you away autonomy makes sure you don't care about failing and these games don't want you to care about failing this is exactly the opposite of Brenda's game Brenda wants her daughter to care about failing how does Brenda's game deal with players of higher skill level luck Brenda's game is not a game where you can sail through every time without problems eventually if you play this game enough you're going to run into a crisis situation where you have run out of food and you will have to make some

hard decisions how does Brenda's game deal with people who want to give up and quit Brenda's game has Angie yeah who could respond at the perfect time right before the player quits at the game out of frustration now okay obviously that's not adoption for most of us making electronic games in electronic games we basically need to do the same thing we've been doing for years guess what the player is feeling it also helps to just drag the seat out make sure that the player can see their impending game mechanical doom coming a mile away while they struggle against it so how could we modify Brenda's game now don't get me wrong I happen to think Brenda's game design here it's quite brilliant but not everyone is making a game about historical atrocities let's

say we wanted to modify the scene to have a more positive spin how would we go about doing that you could get rescued by another captain now think back to every rescue scene you've come across in a game chances aren't you barely remember them you feel like you didn't need rescuing and could have fought those enemies off on your own take away player competence first however and then players tend to feel gratitude we've made the player feel helpless which means they really want and appreciate help so ok maybe you're thinking of using one or two of these scenes and are now wondering how many of these scenes to use at what point in the game to use them psychology has a few more hints for us first don't overuse

these techniques the way human emotions work is that a corresponding chemical is released in the brain if the brain runs out of that chemical then you actually can't feel that emotion anymore this is why people always talk about creating the highs and lows in game design because the human brain literally cannot maintain a constant high state of emotion and yes eventually the human brain can refill its chemical supply but this takes time and this isn't something you can rely on your player doing another interesting psychological result it's a human memory is actually very easily overwritten instead of remembering what someone's face looks like every day for the past five years you just remember the most recent version and older versions of the memory literally get overwritten and this is already known in cinema where if

people like the final scene of a movie they usually say they like the entire movie so when sticking in the scene with negative emotions you usually won't want this to be the final scene of your game unless of course your goal is to have a sad ending and actually there are games that do you finish on a sad ending and a few is going to use some of these techniques next note psychological studies generally point to the presence of autonomy having this larger impact than the presence of either of the other two so this most likely means that losing autonomy will have the strongest emotional impact of three okay enough psychological tricks let's review the process from start to finish first you're going to want to choose a part of the narrative that you want to emotionally enhance next of all the

possible emotions you could use beside which emotion you want to add to the scene once you decided this emotion will dictate what kind of game design rule you're going to break be it autonomy competence or relatedness and then you use the emotion created by game play to enhance the emotional impact of your narrative and that summarizes a strategy at this point I'd like to open things up for questions oh also I've been asked to mention that yes we are hiring okay let's go to questions [Applause]

so how do you explain all of these ideas to your publisher I won't mean if your publisher pushing you towards having autonomy competence relatedness like I mean if they're not then you just say oh hey we're gonna have like you know a scene with a definite and those are really good at movies right it'll be great in game Freight like well you're talking about an idea that's that's possibly alienating for your player base and therefore alienating your revenue and that's that's something definitely something that they're gonna look at and of course I mean is is movies probably one of your strongest things that you can use as a common ground to go look we've had these tragedies and we've had these these upsets and I mean you can also point to other games that do similar thing it's like you can point to portal and look at how much the you know the way to cap companion cube became like an Internet map right yeah okay so

you were talking about player death and saving them kind of at the end and how they might be thankful and the 2008 version of Prince of Persia mm-hmm ellika would always save the player before they died and people ended up finding it as something not useful and something didn't like in the end they felt it was too easy and there was never really any sort of punishment for falling what do you think of that right well I mean if it starts to become expected after a while right like they'd be feeling gratitude is part of it as like the unexpected part is important it's not like okay I know this is going to happen it's like I feel helpless right like you don't feel helpless if you know that you are going to be saved no matter what right so you think it would have improved it if sometimes she saved you and sometimes she didn't

possibly I mean III don't I'm not actually I haven't actually played the game in question so I mean no but I think it's these are things best used sparingly as opposed to your player expects you to always do this yeah you have more examples of taking away confidence from existing games yeah I mean like specifically for the rescue thing like Megaman X has a scene in the very at the very start where you have this enemy that you basically can't beat and then you like you know you've got rescued by zero and then you know similarly I mean I sort of alluded to it in the picture but let's go back here far enough but I mean Super Metroid has you being rescued by a Metroid so and then there's also like gosh I mean

Brenda Bradford has done well I mean Brenda brass both games are just good examples of like they're they're full of this kind of stuff but I mean long Falls for each of us was a game where there is she's talking about the Trail of Tears and you have to you know she you know situation where 50,000 Native Americans were removed for displaced from their homes right and she actually has 50,000 game pieces and you know the first reaction is like me want me to move 50,000 game places are you crazy and then it's like oh my god they had they had to move 50,000 people that that's crazy right so yeah I should have just kept a note of like I I mean I went into this was like 50 examples and I paired it down to like three go ahead in terms of taking an odd autonomy autonomy thank you so I but taking away from the player

is it on do you think there's a key difference between taking it away so much that it you know it's a cutscene versus literally make buying off all their options that it's the only thing that they can do but they still have to do it yeah absolutely I think there's a huge difference between that like forcing the player to answer me at the Cuban portal would be it would be an extremely different scene if that was an FMB where it's just like oh why is it the main character doing that that's not what I would have done right like though sometimes it can be just as effective I can think of one game so maybe for your next speech would you kindly mention Bioshock yeah no and there's tons of games I could mention of course but yes just I just wanted to mention that you're talking about confidence and games and people wanting an example a great example is a heavy rain when you

have the option of killing the drug dealer if you kill the drug dealer you are in his child's room and therefore if you kill him you are incompetent as apparently human being as a moral human being however if you let him go you do not get the information that you need in order to save your own son so no matter what you make a decision in which you are not competent Oh [Music] go ahead one thing I had a question vote was the tech scene where you're in an unwinnable situation um is sort of a convention to seal audience a JRPGs right very frequently you'll find there's a boss fight somewhere then yeah a lotta - together the plot board mm-hmm and quite off the player actually knows they have to lose like it's usually yeah obvious that yeah the level gap is just so disparate right and does that take away from the ability

to evoke emotion when you know like well yeah well waste my potions because this is what I have to lose yeah well when you know it's just a scripted sequence then yeah I mean absolutely that takes away from emotion or like even just JRPGs if you're like I mean half the time when you play them you're you're you're suspicious like it's a spite a plot fighter is it not right and so I mean it's more effective that when yeah like you you would typically you feel like I should be one of them this why am I not winning this like yeah then you run the risk that players quit because they think oh I must have done something wrong right yeah I mean you have to you have to be careful to you know save them at the right time or cut off the scene at the right time rain thank you hey you probably knew it was coming over money yeah if I knew you were coming tonight I was gathering me from immersive I loved since one of our guidelines is autonomy I I love the fact that there's a talk on breaking the guidelines you know to that question about I thought there are a lot

of interesting points two things I wanted to mention one is that autonomy is technically not just about choice but coalition uh-huh and so one thing that we find we've found this I think I mentioned this to you yesterday yeah yeah in uncharted 2 that because you do a lot of things where like people are betraying each other and a lot of nasty stuff one of the things that emotional stuff gets people really engaged in the story and so even though so they volitionally they feel very bullish '''l about moving forward even if their choice is taken away and so actually the autonomy scores are maintained by that sensible right but the another thing I want to mention just as an example is left for dead where you really talk about getting your competence taken away and your autonomy is when you're incapacitated that was terrifying moments I've ever had those why I didn't play for very long it's too scary but when that NPC comes along and saves you we actually have done measurements we see this real surge in relatedness right okay because you matter mmm for the episode there's

there's actually this it's almost like there's one neat being traded off for another yeah no I think a lot of these cases like at least that the positive ones maybe not friend of brass weights board games but the positive ones you generally like like maybe you're losing in one area but you're gaming in somewhere somewhere else yeah absolutely [Music] okay well thank you everyone and don't forget to fill out your reviews that will be sent to you through email