Designing for Multiple Minds: Crafting the Craft of Player Dynamics

[Music] [Applause] hi welcome to designing for multiple minds i'm kim i'm a long time game developer and researcher with a degree in cognitive science as well as a phd in ai today i run my own game studio stray bombay where we're currently working on a cooperative first person shooter prior to that i spent four years at riot games as the head of player behavior which later became the head of player dynamics where i worked alongside some pretty incredible folks including west you're going to meet momentarily 2017 i co-founded the fair play alliance which is an industry-wide coalition for fostering healthier player interactions is a core part of how we make games i'm also the current executive director much of my work and passion centers on why people do the things that they do and how this can help make us better game designers hi my name is west i'm a designer musician and the current head of player dynamics at riot games

and this is where kim and i met um not sure how many years ago at this point i'm also an executive steering committee member for the fair play alliance and have been designing behavior and social systems for a decade or more at this point i'm focused exclusively on helping to evolve the field of player dynamics and when i think about what i'm most passionate about in regards to games and music it's creating dynamic meaningful emergent experiences and that's what brings us here today the focus of today's talk is on two major elements first we want to introduce you to player dynamics and what we think it is today and talk a bit about why we think it is a unique and useful field and why we feel there's value in identifying an explicit discipline second we want to walk through our own design process in player dynamics including some design frameworks and strategies that we hope you will find useful outside of this talk of course this talk is short which means that we're probably going to do everything into service

so we invite you now to reach out later on if you'd like to learn more and we'll ask you to reach out again toward the end one thing that we want to stress if you're not already thinking this way designing for healthy interactions is a craft that requires effort and intention we know games don't design themselves and neither do player dynamics it has to be woven through the fabric of the game starting from ideation and it's worthwhile prefacing this with in some ways player dynamics isn't exactly new it's just gaming gaining momentum in game development it sits atop a great deal of research from cognitive science psychology anthropology criminology and economics and much more as well as the output of many multiplayer games out there that have helped us learn and grow in this space and the many the work of many folks who spent years working to understand the nuances of player behavior and of course you for the role that you've made have played in all of the above and just for being here to listen so we really want to start this talk by saying thank you and then we hope if nothing else we can inspire more people to continue to push the craft of player dynamics even further

so let's jump in all right now let's talk about what player dynamics is and the gap that it fills in design and i believe the easiest way to illustrate this is to compare player dynamics to a few design disciplines that most everybody will be familiar with namely game design and ux at the risk of grossly oversimplifying both disciplines let's say for the sake of discussion that game design is about play and that ux is about interaction game design is focused on developing the core play experience of a single player or small group of players ux is concerned with the end-to-end experience of a single user now when we look at multiplayer games in particular multiplayer experiences online things get more complicated many of the experiences that players are having aren't the ones we intended they're emergent through the interplay of people and systems

through collective and contextual behavior now because these experiences are unintended and emergent the outcomes can be unpredictable and at best they're delightful at worst they're infuriating or even dangerous and player emotions can become directed at each other as well as at game developers so it's not simple enough to say that the concern is undesirable local behavior local behavior shapes global behavior and vice versa and we must understand how a mix of humans and context shape the interactions within our online spaces and how this interplay can lead to desirable outcomes when things align right for everyone involved so there's a gap we need to understand how to ensure the quality of this interplay and it's this gap for which we've been crafting the craft of player dynamics and this is our definition today

player dynamics is the craft of creating products that help people play well together typically in games and in social systems we also have begun to think of this as interplay design and also designing for multiple minds so game design play ux interaction player dynamics or pd for short enter play and while it requires many of the same skills as game design and ux player dynamics expands our toolkit to excuse me to deliver higher quality interplay experiences okay so we've talked about the gap but now let's dig into what player dynamics is really all about who hasn't experienced this at some point jump into a game you say a friendly hello see who's there and this is what happens you know it can take many forms it can be a tiff over a role choice it could be a misunderstanding maybe somebody's hangry or it could just be a troll

you know games at the end of the day often make it hard to get along they lack a lot of the things that we have face to face such as body language facial expressions shared experiences and even repeat exposure with the same people they're often competitive by design and the stakes can seem quite high and players can arrive in the very same game with very different expectations these things when taken together a road trust and a lack of trust means that as humans we tend to assume the worst it quickly becomes us versus them even within the same team so your first instinct might be to focus on any behavior that disrupts the game and just remove those players this is a totally natural instinct especially as we want to protect the good players but like many things it's a trap humans will always be messy complicated creatures we won't all get along we won't all agree and sometimes we'll take it out on each other even when we shouldn't disruptive behavior isn't a problem we fix and just move on from we can't just remove all the bad actors and call it a day just as we think about

with human variation with other aspects of design we have to bring the same care and attention to the interplay portion and just as it makes no sense to ask when we'll have solved game design it also makes no sense to ask when we'll have solved player behavior if we have multiple players in a game then we will always need to design for that so player dynamics is really about designing to bring out the best in players as often as possible while creating robust ways to handle the inevitable to keep players safe and happy so let's just help everyone be friends then right it's not a bad instinct but it's lost it's also not that either friendship can naturally emerge through the game but we all know from day-to-day lives that friendship is complicated we don't always need or want the same things not all friends are great to play with and not all great people to play with are actually friend candidates in fact pushing social features can freak people out socializing can be work we may be adding undue pressure to players who feel like they have to be

social when they see the game as a place to escape well-intentioned social features can leave players feeling pushed out of their comfort zones that can feel like punishment we can play well together without making it about friends and let's face it we can't make everyone be friends that's just not how humans work so there has to be something else we think that great player dynamics is actually about cohesion it's about finding compatible players where everyone is on the same page or a team that at its best feels like a well-oiled machine it's just easy everyone has a meaningful role that complements one another everyone trusts that everyone else is doing their best you have a shared goal and a shared expectation of the stakes maybe you're laughing at your foibles or you're pushing each other forward to victory but importantly everyone feels personally and socially fulfilled cohesion is helpful because it helps us point to the goal without overburdening the concept of friendship and it naturally points to removal or minimizing disruptive behavior the big question is then how the heck do

you do that with strangers like kim said it is a really big question how do we do that with strangers how do we design for cohesion and these may sound like intimidating questions we totally get it we've been there but we've also learned a lot and today we'd like to introduce a design process to help this process is organized into three phases we're going to step through each one of them introducing tools and strategies and examples as we go and where we need to begin is simply understanding we need to do some research and what we're trying to understand is cohesion what that means in context who players are as humans and populations what are the conditions that are influencing them overall what are our interplay considerations and we're going to need some tools to do this and the first tool that we like to introduce is meant to help us get an understanding of cohesion and how it emerges when the

foundations are right it's called the cohesion ladder and it's a tool that we basically use as a set of lenses through which to assess and understand our games and efforts to improve behavior we really just move up the ladder from individual to interplay to emergent now while this gives us a general understanding of what cohesion means conceptually we are going to need a context so now we want to take our ladder and begin to use it as a set of lenses for the overall experience which we can visualize by using experience maps which is really one of my favorite tools when you create an experience map we recommend that you look at as much of the experience as you find useful don't focus exclusively on the core game experience because much of the game experience happens outside of what begins with pushing play now with experience maps

we can work as a group to figure out where we want to invest proactively or in the case of an existing game we we believe the opportunities are to make some changes and you've gone through that exercise right you're starting to understand cohesion in context right and you're beginning to see where you may want to focus so now you're ready to get more of a grip on player perspectives and we have more tools to share with you so the next tool are called cognitive bias lenses and they help us understand what's influencing players as individuals because we need to understand who players are as individual human beings so what biases are we bringing and introducing to the game on top of the ones that players themselves may be bringing to the table and which ones should we consider we also can use these lenses to identify which biases could negatively impact experiences right as well as those that we believe can help make

the experiences better so it's not just about what's bad it's also what can help things level up so all right let's put this to use and once again we're going to use our experience map let's say we want to introduce a bit more positivity into our game lobbies to make it easier for strangers to start off on the right foot you may want to use mechanisms like honor emblems that we've seen in league of legends or thank yous in overwatch because these tug on that lever they help people feel more positive about strangers because they recognize that others have valued them on a community level we also may want to check ourselves as game developers to make sure that we're not introducing um well mechanisms that can cause friction for players which would therefore cause friction for other players so we may want to take a close look at the curse of knowledge which essentially says that well we already know um too much in a way basically things are obvious to us

because of knowledge that we already have and if we were say designing a hud this bias could lead to frustration because players may be overwhelmed by the information that they're seeing but we wouldn't recognize that because our bias says that everything i need to know is right there now assuming at this point we started to get a good understanding of players as individual humans now we need to be thinking about players as populations and culture maps can help us do that culture maps are a way to visualize the differences between cultures and therefore help us understand what could be influencing players and their interactions regionally in this particular example we see how different cultures communicate this knowledge could be used to determine which features we may build that can help players chat with others who don't speak their native language well what about those patterns that transcend cultures well that's what this tool is for

behavior subgroups these are distillations of common behavior patterns that we may want to consider so the purpose of a tool like this really is to understand what trends and behavior are interesting and relevant for the area that we're focusing on and we could potentially use behavior subgroups to create more targeted penalties let's say to nudge players towards improvement where they can be nudged or maybe to isolate those a bit who we can't now with all our understanding we still need to put it to work we need to bring that understanding into our designs and one tool that we would like to talk about now is one of my personal favorites it's the multi-perspective prototype and i found them to be incredibly useful and this is an example of a prototype that i personally developed when we were developing the team builder queue in league of legends now what this tool helps us do is to essentially see through the eyes on

multiple people at the same time and to quickly iterate through possible solutions we can identify which actions we're concerned about which behaviors we're targeting and then we can look at how that may manifest to other players and what we may need to provide those other players in particular situations and with all that with all that research and understanding we may still need to bring it back to our company to make sure that others can benefit from the research and one tool that we would recommend is the one cheat and it seems pretty simple and it should be pretty simple because our goal is to provide a whole bunch of useful information at a glance and the example that you see here is a summary for ccgs just for the genre and for what we might need to be concerned about from a behavioral perspective like what players expect of this genre what are players going to expect of each other what are the behaviors that we can

expect to see and which ones are considered appropriate so we can provide all this information and much more in an easy to digest way once we get to the end of this part of the process all right thank you s so now that we're equipped with a sense of the world and our intended audience let's spend some time talking through some more specific design considerations really the central tenet of player dynamics is designing with the intention to foster healthy interactions a big part of this means figuring out what good looks like in your game so for example while in a competitive first person shooter killing each other may be the objective and celebrating those kills may be perfectly okay getting in the way of others ability to enjoy the game is intended or harassing other players because of how they identify for example is clearly not okay we also need to be thinking proactively and creatively so over the years we've landed on three pillars that we find particularly helpful to this end that i'm going to take you through so the first is to identify moments of truth these are the points that are in a

game that make or break the success of player interactions these can be high impact moments that might cause an argument such as a character selection screen or discussion strategy or they might just be more subtle adding up over time secondly we want to strategically reduce player to player friction even a small point of friction can undermine player interactions leading to frustration and blame among players of course there needs to be some friction in every game else it's not really much of a game but those points of friction should ideally only exist in service of the core experience so as with any aspect of game design you want to understand the trade-offs and be ruthless in addressing unnecessary friction to the best of your ability and thirdly make it easy to be good make the good thing easier and more fun to do than the bad thing provide tools and opportunities for players to be good to each other that feel like part of the game not tacked on later on and look for ways to help players develop healthy habits remove unnecessary avenues for

harassment strangers have little to no trust among each other so think about the ways you might be pushing them past their limits for example do you really need full chat or would pings work next we're going to take you through a survey of strategies that arise from these pillars from the perspective of key game elements and use some existing games to illustrate these points a key moment of truth centers around who you end up with playing with in the first place and so of course we have the problem of making matches clearly this is a space where we can address some player-to-player friction historically this has been some form of warm body human you're in you know or skill mmr elo with the bias being toward skill alignment is a predictor of match quality and while to some extent this is true you don't want new players being crushed by veterans for example it turns out it's definitely not the only predictor and it's definitely not the best predicting a good match between people is much much more complicated as you can see from this this huge and incomplete list on the screen

think of the time you agreed to play with your friend who's new to the game in that situation you were opting into a mentorship relationship or you know at least to be more patient think about a quick lunch match you were organizing maybe around some time constraints it was probably lower stakes maybe a more casual setting what about that time you were short a healer and offered to play it to help the team even though your mercy game required maybe some mercy and maybe you're just that person that can't resist commentating a clutch play you know what this all boils down to is that a good match really needs compatible players and what if we could factor in these needs and differences somehow it's time to ask different questions about what good looks like and how we get there and it's worth calling out that matchmaking is a really tough space i mean this these are difficult problems we're trying to solve mathematically you can run out of viable matches really quickly even with a huge player base and if you're not careful you can end up with incredibly long wait times you know we're trading on time match quality roll choice so we have to be very careful when we're adding complexity to matchmaking

but there's so many opportunities here if we start by revisiting core assumptions we need to think about the bigger problem and look for ways to augment not just our matchmaking algorithms but how we tap into player needs more effectively matchmaking algorithms aren't the only strategies for tapping into compatibility there are also opportunities in self-organization and self-selection modes for instance modes can help reduce player to player friction by offering players a choice that helps them find the right game players essentially opt in to a shared understanding before the game even starts now let's look at a couple of examples league of legends they have aram versus regular play minecraft players can create or have i should say a choice of worlds for worlds that they can create naturally creative or survival and csgo well it has a whole bunch of choices one particularly interesting option is arms race which is a gun progression mode so there's no pressure to choose the

right weapon or a composition so in that way you can't make the wrong choice but you still need to be pretty accurate like it's not going to handle that for you we can also help players by helping them find the right people to play with we can do this by supporting self-organization in and out of the game looking for group tools for instance like in discord allow players with similar goals or mindsets to easily find each other and this helps players bias positively towards each other as they anticipate shared goals and likes in short makes it easier to get along public teams in fallout 76 these offer bonuses that support team goals essentially player driven modes that reflect compatibility and alignment like you have a benefit from playing with this team that aligns to your own personal goals it's pretty cool we can also help players find the right job or role in the current gaming team

the team builder queue which we touched on a little bit earlier uh in league of legends though it's a sunset feature we uh i really bring it up because it was one that i worked on and the feature was intended to address player-to-player friction that was caused by the system not recognizing the intent of the players they wanted to play a certain way the system wasn't designed to support that way and we were seeing friction between players before games would even start and so the intention was reduce that friction now overwatch takes a similar approach while also serving as a neutral third party that provides gentle suggestions about role choice right makes it easier to get that alignment helps proactively reduce some of the potential friction and when we equip players with tools that meaningfully expose their intentions and let them better organize to fit their expectations we reduce friction and make it easier to be good because players feel more confident in

the type of experience they're going to have now let's talk about narrative your game's narrative can do a lot to frame how players think and talk about the game as well as their attitudes in-game and because of this you're going to want to think pretty carefully about the values and stereotypes you might be reinforcing within your game for instance when we're exposed to voice lines again and again we naturally absorb them and their message unconsciously and this can have a dramatic impact on inclusivity over time for example if you have characters that are making exclusionary comments but that doesn't mean things are all bad it doesn't mean that we can't manage the risk and avoid some of the potential trouble spots narrative in fact can do a lot to help with teamwork in borderlands 3 for instance we hear vault hunters again and again in every one of the

titles i mean it's a label that reinforces shared identity and shared goals and left 4 dead 2 characters you heal say thank you which is a great way to reinforce that sense of us that sense of teamwork that we're in it together and it really can help reinforce group alignment um by making those kinds of narrative choices now let's talk about how we can celebrate the values that we want to see in the game and we're going to spend a moment talking about overwatch overwatch keeps individual achievements which are important but it keeps them separate right it keeps them personal and not broadcasted right as part of the um the communication of what means team essentially we have me and we have team and it doesn't mean that those goals can't be the same but they're separated now you don't want to necessarily downplay personal accomplishment because you just don't want to play it

up at the expense of others and we want to make sure that we're conscious of the celebrations that are going to help you towards your goals to help you improve over time and we want to do this in part because when you are celebrating and you're feeling pretty good about yourself you're less likely to get angry at others and you have more personal resilience now the team view celebrates the shared goals and the teamwork without over emphasis on that how a player may have done poorly so for instance if two people are tied for gold the third person gets silver right biased towards celebration and overwatch also shows us that you don't need to make a kill ladder like this just reinforces them uh as the thing that matters right that the kills are the thing that's more important than us working together towards eliminations right which can be a combination of kills and assists once again separating the me

from the wii one last thing on overwatch the logo literally has a high five in it i mean that's that's a great example of reinforcing the sense of us right through narrative so i think of multiplayer games is entering into a play agreement i'm gonna do this you're gonna do that and as designers we often have high hopes for how the unenforced aspects of that agreement are worked out among players we hope that folks are going to cooperate and communicate where it matters where no one's going to be unnecessarily antagonistic or cheat etc etc but the theme of this whole talk is how difficult all of this can be so much of what we're talking about today centers around the question what if we could lessen that burden on players one major way we can do that is through mechanics level design and just general gameplay just as we use design choices in this space to affect individual play experiences we can bring the same intentionality to the player dynamics by looking at gameplay elements that

allow players to interact and express themselves and where these take place we can proactively improve how players coexist and influence each other this helps to contribute to a more healthy game atmosphere overall let's talk through some strategies for how you might think about this in your game of course many games are built around conflict as the core goal you're trying to defeat the other person or team or shared enemy however even in games where there's an expected level of conflict when we really look closely what we find is that there are often other sources of conflict creating stress among the players that are not contributing to the core promise of the game and this is particularly problematic when it happens among the same team when we identify those causes we then need some discipline in asking the question is this really necessary often these problems can be hidden among design choices we take for granted or that we just assume to be necessary or even biases we don't even realize that we're introducing think for a moment about how adding a competitive ladder changes player motivations for example expressions like table stakes features

make us lazy because we stop asking the hard questions you want to be explicit in calling out trade-offs you want to know what good looks like in your game and don't discount the role that good player interactions will play in achieving that a quick and easy example of this is loot sharing which is now a common practice in many games well limited resources can seem like a really great tool for getting players to discuss and share we know that's not actually how it tends to play out even among friends is discussing or debating loot really a key part of the game's value or if it is is it really getting the results that you want as we all know rarely is design choice universally good or bad right it's how these choices all come together to create the experience that matters if those choices cause conflict that conflict might interfere with your intended design goals i want to make it easy to be good another example body blocking and friendly fire might play a really important role in the game but they also introduce some friction and can be misinterpreted in the moment as

intentional as leading to arguments it's easy for any of us to forget how difficult spatial awareness can be especially for new players if these choices are important for your game and they might be think about how you might educate newer players or exercise forgiveness in some situations role choice as wes mentioned earlier is another hot spot players have expectations for how they want to play the game if a player is forced to play a role they're not experienced with or they don't enjoy they're likely to be distracted or self-conscious and they might just play poorly they may worry that they're going to let their team down they might even feel like their time is being wasted and that can be compounded if there's explicit leveling associated with that rule ask yourself can you pre-filter on roles that will help players start in a better mindset and if not can you help reduce the pain of playing off-roll all three of these demonstrate moments of truth ways to reduce player to player friction and chances to make it easy to be good in some cases just by removing the bad option

in addition to being intentional conflict points be intentional with positive interactions look for ways to create mechanics that are centered around players being helpful or just having fun together make it a positive atmosphere one strategy to this is to make everyone feel like a valuable contributor this means tackling the challenge of different skills asymmetrical mechanics multiple objectives different ways to achieve the same goals can all help when they're done mindfully and secondly think about reducing down to only positive actions if you look at the classic journey changing charging your companion scarves or uncovering the body language were really the only ways to communicate that removes many of the many that removes many of the avenues for poor behavior while creating a way to bond through discovery so bias toward the positive around shared experience make it easy or fun to be good people are at their best when they feel like a meaningful contributor so our goal is really to help make that happen asymmetry can help everyone feel like they have an important role to play and it can keep people focused on their own tasks and strengths

in the case of keep talking and nobody explodes one person is operating the defusing a bomb and operating with limited information and another person with the instructions is providing that guidance to that person diffusing you know they both have very valuable roles and they don't share the same set of information you want to be careful of course because this can highlight an ineffective player in a way that can make them a target for harassment or you know just feel crummy so you want to find ways to eliminate or reduce broadcasting poor performance and help players play to their strengths as much as possible but sometimes the role just isn't appealing to a player or you know might feel counter to the main promise of the game i think a great example of this is the support role a lot of players want to shoot people that's the core promise in a first person shooter and this is exaggerated by kda as the primary measure of achievement but there are ways to balance this out where you can truly celebrate more diverse outcomes and contributions get creative outside of kda and ensure that those alternative measures actually carry weight in the game

add more texture to roll so they feel meaningful and people feel capable of doing well on their own terms reduce the sense of getting stuck with a role i think overwatch's moira is a really interesting example she's a healer who retains the ability to be effective on the front line this gives some additional appeal for those who might dread support roles like myself but anyway again caution there's a balance here don't dilute the roles so much that they lose meaning a class-based shooter still needs its classes we can also look at the spaces themselves to help death stranding system for pinging thank you feels amazing if you put the time in to lay a huge road and then log in and receive a thousand likes it feels like an incredible reward if the system is super easy to participate there's no negative option plus it provides an outlier mechanic for when you do feel that gratitude so come bringing these all together it reinforces the good and encourages a more positive atmosphere which in turn leads to a more positive mindset you can also expose ways to play together even in single player

experiences games can create powerful moments of support and shared experience through summoning other players to your game for example or joining in other games such as dark souls dark souls is another interesting example because it also has the option to invade another's game this tension between a moment of help or a moment of terror during summoning helps set the intensity that is the hallmark of the series but imagine for a moment adding that to animal crossing you know the growing dread as the float plane approaches meanwhile you probably don't want someone to show up with just some exotic fruit and dark souls you know in short know what your game is and isn't and equally what healthy interactions look like in your game if it matters for example that players stick together then think about how your level design choices add or reduce tension toward that goal and finally sometimes we just need to have fun even if it has very little to do with the core loop don't be afraid to create systems specifically for bonding help players just have fun together star in a band together draw pictures throw balls

when we shared a laugh together we're far less likely to start a fight dances interactive emojis etc all of these things create a powerful language among players for self-identity connection and reciprocity research tells us that these are critical ingredients for allowing trust to form between strangers without it we're essentially asking players to get along when we've placed them at an extreme disadvantage we need to treat healthy interactions as important as any other design element to help games reach their full potential i recommend that every game with multiple players find at least one intentional feature or feature set that's just geared toward the positive interactions let me give you just a really quick story so back when the original destiny one launched i played the heck out of crucible i love crucible particularly 6v6 control and there's this one time that i was playing and that my entire team just goes and of course i'm left by myself super frustrated there's no way i'm going to win so i do the only thing that you would do in this situation of course which is i head over to one of the points and i just sit down and wait for

my inevitable demise and almost on cue the entire enemy team arrives but instead of taking that moment to destroy me and end the game they actually just sat down with me and we all just sat there to this day is still one of my all-time favorite game stories i couldn't see or hear them but you know i knew they were laughing i was certainly laughing and it was great and all of this was made possible because bungie somewhere along the way made a decision to let you sit down in the game things like this can become the language of connection they create meaningful moments they organically foster trust and reduce sniping they just make it easy to be good no matter how well we proactively design our games there will always be transgressions and in those moments we should be ready to intervene this doesn't mean however that we can only react to transgressions we can also intervene proactively by setting expectations requiring commitment and empowering players and that's what the third and final phase of our design process is

about now there are many ways to proactively intervene but unfortunately we don't have that much time we can't go into them all so the ones that i listed are what we're going to take a quick look at and these are ways that we are methods i should say that we recommend the first is set rules and established values in absence of rules communities will simply make up their own players will start to set their own expectations so it is important to make it clear in advance what the rules are and which behaviors are considered appropriate and meaningful by the game and also by the community now this is what fortnite has done with their code of conduct and valorent has done with its community code if you think about it you really have to admit that it's pretty unfair to punish players for transgressions that they had no way of knowing that they were committing so set expectations by setting rules and

establishing values in advance now requiring player commitment is another powerful way to proactively intervene let's look at a particular example guided games and destiny 2. every time a player joins a guided game they're required to commit to the guardian oath this commitment serves as a social contract as a team contract and it's sex excuse me sets expectations for members of the team this helps reinforce values and lastly empower players see we can also create tools that empower players to proactively intervene on their own behalf discord for example lets players add to a banned words filter list which ensures that these players only see words that they personally consider okay facebook's community tools empower streamers to define what's appropriate for the community which in turn empowers the developers to provide better support for the community

wants which means we help players help us help them now i'm willing to bet that when you first thought about what we discussed in this talk you were thinking about this next section you were thinking about reactive interventions hopefully uh you're surprised that that is in the bulk of the talk now reactive interventions are like fouls and red cards in sports they're guardrails of interplay to reinforce what's considered appropriate behavior though reactive interventions are insufficient for long-term behavior change and only deal with damage done they're still necessary right we're probably going to always need them and when we're talking about reactive interventions we're talking about things that might be familiar right penalties and reports um of players and we have a couple of examples we see penalty system or at least a penalty in xbox live and we see reporting categories

from heroes of the storm and even in these moments right even though we are dealing with a transgression there are still opportunities to help reinforce values and nudge players towards improvement we can do this through encouraging language and meaningful information helping to provide the right feedback and if you can help players see how they're improving well this is a major plus okay let's sum up because we've covered a lot of stuff today so our games are always going to have one thing in common humans we need to ensure that our design practices are taking into account what happens when we introduce multiple minds multiple perspectives goals desires moods interpretations expectations personalities etc etc all the rest of the complex tapestry that makes other humans so wonderful to play with if all we focus on is punishment we're never going to see long-term change players need help to get along in a game and it's up to us as the game designers to figure out how best to do that at a high level this is our recommended

design framework and the key goals within each one research and understand two design proactively three be ready ready to intervene we've also introduced a number of tools that we actively use in our own day-to-day design work and of course we haven't gone into a fraction of the detail these each deserve but we'd be happy to take anyone through them and we'd love to hear from you what did we miss what would you like to share what tools do you find helpful in player dynamics how can we help and also a super quick plug consider joining the fair play alliance which is a great place to share and learn from others who work in this space every day finally we introduced a number of design strategies that we've come to over the years with some examples which i don't have time to go back through right now the big question is where do we go from here we chose to focus today's talk on the design process and to lift up what we think player dynamics is today this framework and these strategies are far from perfect we're all in a key phase of field building with a lot of work ahead when we really think back to say the 70s

and 80s we didn't have the same mature understanding of game design of the many elements of game design that we do today and player dynamics is in a similarly nascent space we need to continue in investing and maturing our design language framework and identifying best practices we need to understand how can we effectively measure and assess cohesion or the impact of our interventions more broadly today as an industry which brings us to you our ask is threefold prioritize investment in excellent player dynamics experiment as much as you can and share everything you can we want to see you up on stage next year whatever kind of stage it ends up being you know at the end of the day we all win when our communities are healthy and happy these are all of the games that we've referenced during the talk we certainly don't speak for these games but we wanted to call out what we found valuable from the perspective of player dynamics as we were enjoying them of course there's so many more that we didn't talk about hopefully you'll seek out these folks to learn more about their design process and thinking in this space and finally

we'd be remiss if we failed to call out the tremendous work that has come before this talk and is going on right now the fair play alliance today has over 160 companies within it and over 200 individual members who are working in the space every day to close no game is perfect and some may have further to go than others but at the end of the day this is a challenging space if we're going to evolve as an industry it's going to take an intentional effort and that means lifting up our learnings and opening the door for others to continue to invest and mature both our tool sets and our mindsets let's continue to grow together on behalf of players and help our games reach their full potential we hope you'll join us on this journey because players are worth it thank you thank you from me as well