Business of Fair Play

[Music] [Applause] so i've got to admit i'm actually pretty excited to get this talk matter of fact i think i'm it's fair to say that i'm inspired which is surprising because i don't think there's ever been a time in my life where i would have predicted that i'd be excited to be talking about business in any way shape or form but that's what's happening and the inspiration came from a fair play alliance symposium in london back in october of 2019. we had a round table discussion that went over a bunch of topics but towards the end of the discussion we really went pretty deep on one question which is how do we get companies to invest in fair play and while it was a very compelling discussion there was something about it that just

bugged me it just kind of stuck with me for a while and i really couldn't put my finger on it so i spent some time thinking about it and here's what my thought process went like i began to think well we're talking about fair play and i believe we need to focus on player dynamics for fair play so that means what we're really talking about is for lack of a better word selling player dynamics why does that sound so familiar and then it hit me is player dynamics the new ux design because i've heard these exact same questions asked many times before because i've been a ux designer for many years and especially in the earlier days we were asking the same questions and i heard many of the same questions and discussions about these challenges at conferences and also at riot games where i worked for quite a while so follow me on a journey a little bit i

started at riot games in 2011 and at the time it was a much smaller company the ux team was pretty humble i believe i was the third ux hire we had a total of five ux designers and we were trying to get a seat at the table and a seat at the table in ux design is probably the same as for many other disciplines but what we were concerned about is not just being embedded on a team but helping drive vision and strategy and helping the company work towards the future in a more comprehensive way and we learned a lot of lessons in order to make this happen maybe to earn our seed if you will now if we fast forward six seven years or so into the end of 2018 a lot has changed including the length of my hair as you can see and the logo of the company now that i think about it but at this point the ux team is much bigger and has

much greater presence not just across the company but at different levels of the organization and we're once again seeing a discipline that's maturing that's trying to get that seat at the table but is also trying to find its way within the organization then this one is called player dynamics and of course we move forward into today but player dynamics has had a presence at riot for quite a while though we didn't have the term at the time see not long after i joined riot i joined the player behavior team which was doing player dynamics work right but once again we didn't think of it that way we just were using what we had at the time and it's taken quite a while for us to mature this field not just a riot but in other places and it took quite a while for us to even get a name but this isn't unexpected because this is what happens in many fields so let's

see what's going on with ux design over the years some people when we look back to what caused or helped ux design as a discipline come about go really far back further back than i'm showing here on this timeline some have said feng shui was where it started i don't know about that i mean that seems pretty over romanticized to me but we can look back to particular books from the 1950s in particular companies work uh in the 1980s and we can look at products but it really isn't until the mid-90s than anyone was using the term user experience and that was coined by don norman at apple he actually coined it in a book of his that came out at the late 80s but he got the title at apple in the mid 90s and by the early 2000s people are really starting to use it we see books with the term user experience in it and then eventually we have a product that many people point to and say like that right that's that's a

great example of what user experience design is all about this is over the course of decades player dynamics though it might seem new it's actually been evolving in a very similar way i'm not going to go back to all the creation of games and how they evolved we're really looking at the time period where we had uh computer networks and people were playing um at a distance and so we can go back to the late 60s early 70s and see where this was starting to shape up people were figuring out what this meant then we can go to the 1980s with games like habitat which if you don't know about it that came from lucasarts and it actually was the world's first virtual community and it's a fascinating read if you find the paper that was written on it um from a behavioral perspective and just for the fact that there were tens of thousands of people who were playing in this world who were also paying by the minute it's pretty amazing now we fast forward to ultima online and we're starting to see

a lot of terms that we know today regarding behavior and some solutions they learned a lot of lessons and unfortunately we're still learning um i'm selfishly integrating myself into this timeline because because i can and um in pointing to league of legends and the player behavior team i'd like to think that we've done some pretty good work in this space so forgive me for the shameless self-promotion but even further and even closer to today we see the industry starting to get organized starting to figure out how can we collectively focus on fair play and this in particular is the fair play alliance and about that time we see that the player dynamics term has been coined now there's a lot in common and there's are some pretty big gaps from when we see milestones to when we actually even have enough organization or understanding of a space to give it a name and there are a lot of lessons that user experience designers have learned

that we can leverage so maybe it doesn't take us so long to get the seats at the table right to actually help people invest in this space but we do have to keep in mind that these are the early days for player dynamics and there's a lot that we still don't know that we really don't know but by leveraging these lessons i think it'll be much easier for all of us to help the lack of a better word sell player dynamics and what i would like to do for the remainder of the talk is walk you through some of these lessons that we've seen in ux design and that we've been using at riot in player dynamics to help the company grow and to help grow our own understanding and to affect the kind of change that we feel that we need to see within our company in the industry and there are five strategies that we're going to dive into the first is champion by doing now some may prefer the term evangelize by doing it's up to you which term

um makes the most sense i like a champion by doing rolls off the tongue and we're going to go through a few ways that i've seen this to be really effective like this is what we've we used with ux and what we've used for player dynamics so the first is you've got to find a way to do the work it's just that simple right you may not always get approval you may not always get buy-in and that's fine find a way to do the work and the best place to start is by seeking achievable problems right look for quick wins it's totally fine what you're trying to do at this stage is build confidence and build momentum and the people you're going to be building confidence with are partners you're going to want to find partners and you're going to need to be a good partner because everyone that you work with has something that they're accountable for and though you're trying to affect a change it means other people may have to change and you need to be patient recognize

what they're accountable for and work together like to achieve those goals figure out how you can help each other and be careful as you go not to do a few particular things don't push philosophy it's not gonna work it's it's gonna it's just gonna sound rude or people's eyes will glaze over i'm learning this the hard way and i get excited about the philosophical part so trust me don't push too hard on it though it might be helpful don't insult people with education slapping them upside the head with research to try and prove how they just are ignorant in some way it's not going to help you want to put this knowledge to use just don't beat people up with it and with that in mind don't focus on wrongs if you're going to be a good partner if you're going to help right don't focus on where people may have arguably screwed up what you want to do is solve the problem not the blame so be patient and try not

to get too worked up when things aren't quite going the way you want because what you're doing is trying to affect change change can be slow and sometimes painful so with that in mind you will find yourself in a position where you're going to want to fine-tune your strategy maybe find specific tactics that will work for your company and the question you need to start with is how mature is it how mature is my company in the player dynamics space and there are different levels and what i would like to introduce now is something that we've been using at riot games it's been very helpful for us to understand where we're at and where we may need to go so this is the player dynamics maturity model there are six levels one to six um arguably the first could be zero i'd be fine with that if you want to revise it but what we're looking at is is a way for us to evaluate where we're at and there are signs that you can see in these companies that align to

particular tactics that i've seen to be effective so the first level is skeptical that one's pretty easy to tell if your company's not doing anything and just doesn't think that this is a thing then you're probably in a space is fairly skeptical ceremonial is where a company agrees that this is important but isn't really investing anything in it they don't see that they should or it could be that you're at a company that has a franchise where there are pretty fixed expectations for what the next game is going to be and change could be a scary proposition provincial is where riot has been for the longest time where we had a single team on a single game that was originally the player behavior team and this um basically puts the burden on one team to be thinking about all of your your player dynamics concerns essential is a level that happens when your company begins to shift

its perspective from reactive to proactive and begins to look at player dynamics is something that every game team needs to be concerned about so now we're seeing multiple teams across the company cultural is where very few gay companies are where they have committed themselves wholeheartedly to it maybe they were founded on focusing on the space and societal is where a company has moved outward where now they're at a point where they're starting to create external programs maybe in schools high schools college etc where they want to teach some things to the community that they found viable that apply of course to player dynamics now if you've had a moment and hopefully i didn't go too quick for you to get a sense of where your company's at you may want to know what are some strategies that are helpful and here are some that um that i've seen work pretty good the first and this is for the skeptical companies is fly under the radar

you may not get investment at first and what you're going to want to do is go undercover find a way to do that work as i described come back with some results right a champion by doing essentially if your company is ceremonial what i believe is most helpful is look at what the company's already doing that others in the space are doing and show the likenesses uh the work may be accidental that's fine it just may be something to build on you may also look to other games like games or someone or company in the industry and say well here's something that they're doing that proves that because there are results that hopefully you can point to that that's safe that's safe for us to try and you can build some good momentum with this approach provincial your best bet there is to get really good at interventions to make sure that everyone understands what i mean interventions are those systems that help either proactively

deal with common forms of disruption or reactively reactively tends to be things like penalties and reports proactive tends to be those things that let's say like name check which prevents some inappropriateness from getting into the system you're going to want to get really good at that and that will take you a long way and once you hit that threshold where it's not enough you're going to want to develop a shared framework so essential again is where there are multiple teams around the company and you want everybody thinking the same way and working in a similar framework so that they can align but also make independent decisions across the org and for the last two levels i don't know i i i don't know any company that's actually made it to these levels yet at least in my opinion but i hope many of us do and i'm happy to race everyone to the top now let's say you've got a good sense of the maturity level of your company

and you know how you're generally going to operate what you what you really need to be thinking about now is a process right that you can use some way to show how you're going to go about doing the work and what i would like to introduce now is a framework and a process that riot has been using with increasing success over the last year or two and at the core of it is the ece framework and ece helps us answer the question how do we shape behavior at scale stands for environment consequences and encouragement and another way to think of these is you need to set the right conditions you need to provide the right feedback ideally in a timely fashion and help to identify and encourage the right kinds of behavior now with this at the core we need a really simple process that everybody can

use and this is the one that we have adopted and it's just five steps hopefully be pretty self-explanatory but i'm just going to jump in so we can see a little bit of what each of these mean and we're going to look at some examples of where we've been using these over the last so many months first step is to identify core values and that's about what your game values and you as a company because it all comes back to the values right people need to understand where you're coming from the game is coming from this is where expectations start and you need to get the learn to be consistent in your values and how you express it so start with identifying what your values are list them distill them down to the simplest form possible and then begin to think about how you're going to align everything towards them with your values in mind you're ready to define

disruption now a common question in player dynamics conversations is how do you define disruption everybody has a different meaning for it well not really one easy way to get what would be disruptive to your game is this formula ask yourself three questions what is the intended experience what are players expecting right particularly from the genre or if you have an existing player base what is disruptive to both of these this will get you really far in understanding what would be disruptive also keeping in mind your own values what have you stated to the community like what are you about right and what you see here is the list that we use when we were putting together the definition or excuse me the list of disruptive behaviors we believed um um would well let me rephrase it these are the things that we believe would be disruptive to valorent which is one of riot's newer titles and

this was pretty comprehensive and it told us okay great we know this is disruptive now we know also what to put into our reporting categories so the players would be able to say yes these are the things that we uh have seen and these are the things that we believe are also disruptive it wasn't telling us necessarily they agreed but we knew uh based on many other conversations and a lot of research that this was directionally where everyone was aligned the third step is to codify behavior expectations and the examples that you see here are from ballarat the left is what you see as a player uh the game and it's the top of the the pile if you will basically this is about um the the four things that you've you you're definitely agreeing to but it was of course a limited space so the full length version is on the their website

and there we list not only the expectations that we have for you uh in a pro-social way but also we get into the details about what will happen if you're exhibiting undesirable behaviors and this stage is really just about setting expectations so that we all understand what we're getting into but if you're going to affect change you're going to need to get targeted you're going to need to target specific behaviors and that's the fourth step and at this point you're starting to bring a lot of your thinking together you're using the ece framework because you want features that align to each of those you're going to look at the desirable behaviors and the undesirable behaviors and my recommendation is just using a big table to do both of these and you use the behavioral expectations you've set like in the community excuse me the community code that we saw from ballarat this is actually a version of what we did where we mapped out here are the the categories of disruptive behaviors these are the

specific things that we've seen and here are all the things that we believe we should build that will target those behaviors and we can use this to create um an understanding of priority so we want to map prior excuse me prioritize and then develop these features and naturally we're going to want to measure them and that's step five we need to measure and we need to adapt because we won't know going out the gate how something is going to or how successful i should say a feature is going to be for a particular audience now these are some metrics that you may want to start with but we're going to now get into the fourth strategy where we can have a framework that should help us get a better understanding of how we need to measure and the strategy is to arm yourself with data because you need to know you need to

know whether you're doing any good and you need to know how you're going to measure success and identify those areas where you may need more work so i'd like to introduce another framework that we've been using at riot that we call games good time attitude mastery engagement and social health these are the dimensions that we believe we need to look at as far as player dynamics in order to look at things holistically to make good decisions as companies and as product owners now engagement is probably the most familiar you you want to know whether you're losing players you're keeping players um all the usual things but good times helps us get a sense of are they really enjoying themselves what's the quality they experience attitude is about trying right and are they making an effort especially when it comes to changing the behavior that we've communicated to them they may need to correct a little bit on mastery are they getting better at the game are they growing are they learning

more about it which can make it easier when they're playing with others and social health is it's the community it's all at a community level now if you want to use this you can use a template the template does not come with stock metrics the point of this approach is for you to make sure you're not forgetting the dimensions that you need to be considering and to choose goals for that particular feature that aligns to that factor that dimension identify the signals you're going to look for and then you can end up with your metrics and here's an example of that in practice this uh something i put together that represents the chat restrictions feature in league of legends here are some goals some signals and some metrics now you may see similar metrics for a number of these that's fine and in practice you may find sometimes that you don't have goals for a particular area where you don't think it's um you might feel it's stretching a bit to

put in those uh to create some goals for let's say mastery for reports for instance that's fine that's fine this is just to help us understand that there are multiple dimensions and that we shouldn't forget them because there's a lot that we need to understand to affect behavior change all right there's one more strategy i want to show you a little bit about and that's prepare for misconceptions if you're a ux designer or if you know any then you probably have heard quite a few stories about the misconceptions in ux i won't go through all of those now i'll be happy to talk with you at some point about them for fun if you like but we're already seeing some misconceptions and player dynamics so let's take a look at a few and a few ways that i've responded to them sometimes just for fun the first maybe the most classic is well that's just the internet we can't help it that's what people on

the internet do but there's a problem we have a responsibility we didn't make the whole internet we're not concerned about the whole internet because no one company or team can control it what we're concerned about is our part of the internet so think about it this way people in our games wouldn't be having the bad experiences that they may be having in our games if we didn't put them in our games right to begin with and so that part of the world is ours and furthermore players are asking us to do more in this space the next and i i think this is a fair a pretty fair question overall is shouldn't a game designer just be doing this work of course of course they should i would say the same about ux design we should all be concerned about the user experience the thing is you do a lot of stuff can be really hard to focus on

everything if you're needing to focus on a particular part of an experience it's hard to think about the whole thing which is why we have ux designers so that they can keep that holistic perspective and what we've seen through player dynamics is it grows the same way eventually you're going to need to specialize so you can focus where you need to and make sure you're not losing the perspectives right that i'll bring out the most in your games and the final oh and this hurts oh god it hurts i heard this recently and decided to add it in at the last minute but the misconception is this is all too fluffy oh it burns because we'll talk about concepts like cohesion and how important it is and people will come back with things like it's too fluffy decades of science begs to differ we are not making this stuff up we're just trying to figure out how best we can apply it to games but all right let's bring it on home for those of us that are working in fair

play and in player dynamics we want to increase investment and there are five strategies that we've been using that i've seen to be effective that we saw effective in ux design and hopefully will save you a lot of time and effort champion by doing just get in a way just get in there find a way to do the work gauge the maturity level of your company which means figure out the right strategy for where they're at to help them move up that ladder find a process work it hone it with others so that you can have a reliable way to organize towards these goals and understand what you're doing get that data so you know if you're affecting change and we've proposed a framework for both this and the process that we hope will help and prepare for the misconceptions because they're going to happen that comes with the territory did with ux design and a will again for player dynamics and our work in fair play thank you very much