Drives: Helping More Players Get from First-Taste to Satisfaction

[Music] okay hello everybody nice to see you all welcome back to GC or if you haven't been to GC welcome to GGC my name is Jason Vandenberg I am the design director at ArenaNet and so we're just gonna launch right in let's get going so we've got a lot to cover for the last eight years or so I have been embarked on an attempt to merge together all the stuff that we know about player motivation into one grand model it's settled on around the big five and I'm gonna take you through a real quick primer on what this was just in case you haven't attended first as who has attended a previous talk of mine on the engines of play okay good so I primers premiere was worth worthwhile okay so it began with the big five the big five is a personality model sort of

like the the witch Lord of the Rings characters are you tests that you get on you know BuzzFeed's right except it's accurate it has science behind it although you know those tests are surprisingly accurate I think from time to time right they're pretty good it has in it these five different motivations of different different domains of motivation and inside each of those is six facets individual facets that are spectrums of human motivation and at this point there is way too much data on that slide we are not going to be able to digest anything like this so along the way in doing research for variety of reasons we simplified the Big Five model turn it into neuroticism goes away if you're curious as to why you can come and talk after the lecture and then what we did is we looked for the motives that we're the most useful when talking about gamers that did a very nice reduction we were able to reduce it down to eight motivations which we then mapped into

gameplay preferences so the idea is if I'm interested in adventurousness I'm going to like games that have that kind of experience in it right and we took these eight and we turned it into the these are that these are what it maps to the four domains of play and we turn it into a chart because we're designers and we like charts especially if they're you know a two by two two by twos reveal the universes truths Man two Bertie's are the best and like many people when we were doing this this work we came to the conclusion that this kind of personality test is an excellent predictor of what I like to call taste which is when I sit down to play a video game what kind of game like ten to play it's not necessarily what I will play people will play a great deal of games but when I ask you what your favorite games are and they take this personality test we find a nice correlation between those two things so that's nice and that gives us archetypes we can sort of assign

characters to this to give us an idea of who Lee's each of these types of personalities and who they are we reduced all of that down to this nifty symbol so for the purposes of this talk this symbol stands for personality theory just in general so we can talk about personality theory in general so that's the first model in the engines of play and there's a GC talk on that if you're interested um the second part is this timeline which is the players journey um over time players encounter your game I've heard about it and then I I they try it out and then when they like it they continue to play it right and then over time they'll adapt it into their identity and they will become players of this game right I go from I've played this game to I play it and what we've learned is this what we've learned as this this personality theory personality theory does a great job of predicting the early experience of your game of your gameplay behavior but it

does a very poor job of predicting what will cause you to stick around right it doesn't predict whether or not you will buy the sequel so we need another model fortunately we have one self-determination theory very very good stuff this is predicted by a thing called SDT who's heard of SDT who is aware of the yes good okay good if there is if you get interested in this topic if you're interested in player psychology this is the model to study like this one is that the root foundation this predicts why what people really want out of your game what makes a game meaningful in your life this model is where we get the idea of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation okay so what are they real quickly autonomy is the universal urge to be causal agents of sorry I'm getting animation problem there Universal urge to be causal agents of one's own life which means I'd like to make choices I'd like to make choices to see those choices reflected in the world mastery is the universal seek to control outcomes and experience relatedness is just getting getting better at things

wow I need to turn off animations this is what I need to do well all right I will try to control the the rule unruly slide monsters okay um relatedness is that this universal want to interact and be connected to people so we like to have choice we'd like to get better at things we like to relate to other people fortunately this guy Scott Rigby and immersive as a group translated this into game terms which is pens so this does a great job of predicting the other side of the thing it does a great job of predicting what games you will you will stick around for and whether or not you will buy the sequel is does does your game satisfy autonomy mastery and relatedness cool all right so we have these two models we have a personality theory we have our timeline we have SDT so it was time of course to form player psychology Voltron we just put them all in one model that's

all we did it's just um so this is where we were this is the engines of play so I gave a talk in 2016 about how players move from taste to satisfaction and understanding the players journey is what the engines play is all about to give designers and developers a model that will help you understand what's going on in your players mind okay so we are far from done so so far also I want to throw out I have had the luxury of using existing data and existing models now we're gonna look for a we're gonna fill this hole in the middle of a model there's a there's a hole in the center but there isn't a great deal of data to go around on this so we're gonna venture out into some scary territory here the question that we're gonna answer in this talk is how do people get from one side to the other something magical happens when we go from I want to play this game to I'm becoming quite satisfied with playing this game and I'm gonna call this thing drives drives is the name that I have given to our more

chemical motives okay so what are we talking about here what is the thing so I have a coin in my hand here I'm gonna flip it sit heads or tails okay so you feel that feel that sense it's curiosity did you decide to feel curious just happened right it's curiosity who's heads by the way it was heads so good job guess heads you were right so I'm stimulating your curiosity drive there everyone has one some more than others right some of you may be like oh I don't feel it very much but it's there and it's not something we decide to have when we keep when we go around a corner carry out his curiosity is with us every day when we come around a corner curiosity is what is getting us to predict what we're gonna see around the corner or get us curious about what we're going to see when we go around that corner even if we know even if we've been there many times before so curiosity is a drive there are others

saving as an example collecting things all right those two hand a one dollar bill right who among you would say no we will all take the one dollar bill because what that say no right that would be fine right saving is also we wouldn't make a decision as to whether or not you want that if there's no strings attached then why would you not write it's reasonable saving is another one there are others vengeance right I punch you you punch me right back social contact right the drive towards social contact learning we like to learn we're gonna drive forward on things now at this point you may be thinking that I have gone mad I mean surely this is the most obvious topic in the world right I I mean is how can there be an entire GDC talk about you know what's what's in the box right I mean we know about this stuff I'm gonna roll the dice it's randomness is not stunning material right what the hell are you doing man I Berg I'm and what does this have to do

with the model all right well let's go back here's the thing I had long intended to add a section to the engines of play to add this section to the engine to play it's like an appendix right just like oh and then I'm just gonna add this part about drives right surely I thought right there has been a ton of research into this right that we're gonna just add drives to it I'm just gonna go and pull a little research off of the shelf and I'm gonna be done so I went to the research right and went out and went looking for the research now I did not find what I expected to find I was sorely disappointed if you are a research scientist interested in human behavior please for the love of all that matters just fill this library um it turns out I thought but why why is there so little there's some we'll talk about that in a minute but why right well give it some thought and some consideration and it turns out the whole concept of drives has some problems in it that makes it not a great target for

grant money and research time and academic attention let's it's it's there's some risky stuff in here and not always in the ways that one might expect here's one so addiction is related to drives you could be the research scientist who makes the claim and proves that games are addictive or tries to make that claim to prove that or proves that they're not but do you want to be that person do you want to be embroiled in that controversy would you want to be the center of that I know you would obviously you would you troll here's another one okay sex sex is another one sex is a drive very very powerful one what kind of reward is waiting for a researcher on the other side of attempting to study the sex drive Kinsey did this in the 50s and it ruined him right and his whole entourage so this is a dangerous topic maybe we would love to know we're all very interested of course but there's not a great deal of research that is conclusive around exactly what each of us are interested in bloodlust is another one we want to do some

research on bloodlust turns out there are not many white papers on this topic um who here has seen Forbidden Planet it knows the room knows about this story okay sci-fi classic by the way if you're interested in old people movies in this film a mad scientist has his brain boosted to the point where his deeper mind generates a monster which is spoilers Oliver so now you've seen the film what we're talking about here is the it'd um amazing piece of science fiction technology this was special effects and looks so good it scared the [ __ ] out of me when I was seven um monsters from the it'd what is the it'd so Freud was wrong about a great many things it turns out he was not so wrong about this idea of there being a super-ego and ego and an it deep inside our mind there's a large part of our brain that is occupied with dealing with how to chemically respond to our environment just keeping us alive and surviving right and it's creepy this part we are not necessarily in direct

control of our heed and even bringing it up in casual conversation is often a little bit unnerving okay so these are drives I don't think that I'm saying anything controversial when I say that they're probably chem as chemical as much as they are motivational right so I went looking so what did I find I found a lot of material on violence and videogames something like 95 percent of the white papers that you'll find or about violence and video games I think anyone who's been through the last 20 years not surprised by that there's some contradictory stuff on addiction and then there's not much there's exactly one reasonable model and it's this thing Stephen Reis who's a researcher came up with this thing called the 16 basic desires theory which is in the area of what we what I am talking about I don't want to go through all of these I want to let you know that this exists it's a it's an it's an interesting model but it is it is incomplete as far as taxonomy x' go scratch the surface a little bit and we

end up with some missing so we already used some of these in the talk but scratch the surface here and we're missing a few I'll throw a couple of examples out there ah is an example of one that got overlooked oh is the experience of you know wanting to witness beauty right they stand in front of the you know stand up from the Great Valley and go wow that's amazing right that experience of far cry pates here prediction here's another one prediction is the brain is constantly preoccupied with the eye with with predicting what is about to happen I think this is what happens when we watch a waterfall why are waterfalls and trees swaying in the breeze beautiful I think it's because our brain is constantly predicting what is about to happen and we're fascinated by the start slight deviations between what we think will happen and what actually happens right so prediction is something that we're constantly engaged in so there's more there's lots we can go through these right but that's compared now I hope I've anchored in you kind of what we're talking about this this sort of Route feeling let's compare these experiences to the stuff we talked

it about at the beginning of the talk the personality series stuff let's talk about our preference for fantasy or realism there's this facet in the big five called imagination right I mentioned it before and if you score high and imaginations are high you have a high level imagination if you're low it's called factor orientation high scores are more interested in their inner world than they are on the outer world in fact orientation people are interested in the outer world more so than their inner world this maps to a preference for fantasy and realism right so you know it predicts the play preference for if I if you're if you score high in imagination you're going to tend to be interested in more fantastic settings we get our Alex and Alice and Sam right you feel how different this is now we're talking about sort of higher brain stuff now we're talking about you have a choice over now we're talking about something that is a lot more comfortable for us to discuss and more uncomfortable to compare okay so to take some extreme example just to further illustrate the issue I think and the

reason why there isn't much research you know if these are drives how would you feel if I were to talk about our preferences and sexuality as a spectrum I don't mean your orientation I mean what you're into your kinks would you like what do you how many retweets do you think that slide would get okay this is what I mean by drives are are not comfortable for us to study academics feel the same way like I don't want to do and do a study of okay guys not a thing right there's another question how many of these are considered virtues family sure border maybe who among us would be proud to say I'm high in blood lust high in vengeance yeah I'm really a very vengeful person right yeah is he my design manager to

Rhian that ladies and gentlemen so how many of us would be comfortable in admitting and having a very strong drive towards power or vengeance and doing these studies right okay so drives live in this strange zone between what we would call physical reflex dodging right and what we think of as ourself as us right our drives are things that happen to us they are not us generally contrast this to things like for our desire for mastery for cooperation for fantasy these are things we would consider us instead of things separate from right so this is our topic for today the under studied under modeled subject of drives so how does this apply to game design right how what should we do with this information well I have a theory so

I mentioned at the beginning I will I will lay it out in some details now players use their personal tastes to guide themselves into our game they pick experiences they want based on what they have learned they like and on and those tastes are widely variable we are very very different in what we in our tastes right but they but they draw those those kinds of experiences these wear off quickly they wear off very very rapidly in the number of minutes if I like explosions right like yeah one explosion two three four okay fine I got it fine actually I can fine explosions boy right doesn't take long for that to wear off right and why do I keep playing when those explosions when I get tired of that because I do keep playing right I play for 90 minutes or more right I'm not alone and after this initial experience is satisfied what keeps me going here's a question so Scott Rigby showed that with his pens model that as time goes on as play goes on all players want the same thing they want autonomy mastery and relatedness and without those things that the long game players will walk away they'll leave right but

here's the thing getting there requires a higher investment of time before mastery can begin to be felt by a player they have to understand the rules and they have to have time to work them out before autonomy can begin to be felt I must see the outcome of my choices in some way before our relatedness can begin to be felt I have to have established some sense of my place in the community it takes time for that to occur it doesn't happen in 30 minutes takes a number of hours for this to occur so why do I stick around okay here's my theory between these two experiences between tastes and satisfaction is a place where boredom can take the player out right a game that does not reach out to help the player through the tough times will have a hard time convincing players to stick around long enough to get to the good stuff so drives are best used and this is how we use them today as in game design to

help the player cross the gap from initial taste to long-term satisfaction which is what I put in the title of the talk so I'm trying to get this point across use the using these drive satisfactions of all different types designers create breadcrumb trails of short-term high-value successes for the player right to carry them along now of course there's lots of ways to misuse this and I'm not gonna go into those because I'm not interested in those I'm interested in the positive values right but here's the thing every game you've ever loved and every game ever made does this this breadcrumb trail trail exists throughout right ok let's look at some examples so strangely enough of course oops me back up strangely enough most of you I'm guessing how many designers in the room wow what good producers racers

programmers audio people artists cool alright so most of you probably already know how this stuff works I mean we've gotten into the topic right we're all personally very familiar with how these drives sort of function but we will become better at understanding how to use these things in a day to day basis by going a little bit deeper and breaking apart these experience in more detail so that we can get our hands around so I want to take you on a tour through curiosity just to give you an example that I want I hope you can use as a way to then go and do this exercise this kind of thinking on your own if with with other drives that you're interested in your game design later on okay so curiosity is cool here's let's take an example we are exploring this place it's a regular City a grid of streets basically right just a simple grid I can predict that right so what's happening in the curious part of my mind

right at every corner I make guess about what I'm going to see but until I actually look around the corner and verify that the grid pattern has continued it's just an assumption if the designer wants to provide the player of regular breadcrumb trail of curiosity satisfaction what they need is surprises every so often right now it's not a it's not incredibly novel to think that I have to put unique and interesting variations inside a level design right you see what I mean by you already know this right if it was just an empty grid that was 100% predictable boredom would set in almost immediately okay so that's not terribly revealing but let's keep going and see what this can reveal for us what about a place like this every direction here is filled with uncertainty now me I will I love places like this I love exploring places like this whenever I think about exploration this is exactly what I think about and boy did I spend a lot of time in this particular forest it is easy here for sameness to slip in of course if the terrain isn't varied and if I get lost

we can be in trouble here but what works here is keeping sight lines short varying the the terrain and to give the player a way to every now and then pull out and sort of get a view of the lay of the land the moment I see something like this my satisfactory ASSA tea is satisfied until I reach a place where I really can't see what's ahead of me now maybe that's what the designer wants maybe the point is to focus on the light at the end there maybe there's an interesting object or a chest that I want to want to be sure that the player catches right or maybe this space is boring and you should do something more interesting with it right up to you in an environment like this curiosity now is gone it's totally sidelined right there is in fact going to be a desperate dearth of curiosity satisfaction you're not relying on that at all this is an endurance test anyone who's played a journey knows how important the heights of the sand dunes

were to convincing yourself that maybe maybe over this next one there'll be something Adele no there's nothing ok ok maybe over the next one maybe I'll say oh there's still nothing there right 15 times there's one thing a rock right curiosity is about the unseen right and I'm again not novel but we're breaking it down right getting trying to become conscious of something that is normally largely unconscious so we've established in some simple form how the drive satisfaction of curiosity functions on a second to second minute to minute basis right the players brain is a side process has a side process in it that is always generating these little bursts of curiosity about anything that into anything unseeable right in the world around them which is why horror games work by the way right this is you know in a situation like this I've had all of my curiosity sidelined except for that one corner around the hand at the end of the hallway and then all I have to do is put in a sound this is a little bit suggestive and now suddenly I can fixating on exactly

what's gonna be around the corner right making predictions about what I'm going to see this as many uses of this internal drive and again I'm just sensitizing you to the process the notion here is not that this is particularly but that this is how we an alert to analyze these experiences but let's go back to our our exploration we can say this we can say this way by chaining these little moments of curiosity satisfaction by creating breadcrumb trails of drive stimulation our players will be able to journey through our locations often multiple times without accumulating enough boredom to be driven away I want you to think about boredom is something that accumulates in players as they go right and drive stimulation the role of drive stimulation is to stave off boredom okay so why how does that work let's take it one step further freed from boredom the player can now stay a while stay a while and listen hey there was little call out

there they're sure they can come to understand the layout of a space their curiosity pulls them into nooks and crannies and encourages them to look at the place from multiple vantage points to reward them for making guesses and stuff and then along the way they're filling in their internal model of the world so that when a challenge appears suddenly they are able to fall back on this database that they weren't aware they were accumulating and experienced the satisfaction of mastery they mastered it painlessly by being drawn around the space hey it made we by placing all these small satisfactions that made this experience a pleasure and in fact if it was designed if it was designed well and depending on how well the designers did their job that experience was effortless for them okay so drives are the bridge between initial taste and long-term satisfaction cool all right

so how do I turn it into something more useful for that um what am I trying to do here what is the what is the goal I hope I buy now I've made over made my point so it's nice and clear first thing I want to do is you're familiar with Jesse's shells lenses the book of lenses yes if you haven't read that thing I want to give you a new lens right I want to give you a new lens the lens of moment-to-moment drive satisfaction I want you to think about these questions I want you to ask yourself as you're designing the game what are you providing your player enough variation and enough drive second a second drive satisfaction to carry the player from initial taste to satisfaction that's the that's this is one takeaway that I want you to have is there but is there something else like like could we have a tech sauna me because we have a list please it would be great if we could just have a list of all the drives that would be amazing right well we've got this one and I'm borrowing it like I'm using some of these in here but the problem is if they're the TLDR version of that is that

if there is a list of all of these I haven't found it if anybody knows of a list like this please send an email or reach out to me I would love to see it but as far as I can tell it has not been studied but that's okay because I'll hope I hope that a lot of what I've said maybe I'm rearranging the ideas in your head but it should make a certain amount of sense we know how these things work let's try a different approach let's ask ourselves this question is there anything new out there is there a drive is there a drive that you are not aware of potentially we have don't have a language for yet right that you should know about that can make a huge difference in your design efforts moving forward is there something that we have overlooked wouldn't that be cool okay the answer is yes absolutely tender my friend Dan Cooke asked me at lunch or dinner a couple months ago he was like what game design ideas have you encountered in last year that have

your mind and this is it this is the one for me okay ten and my friend let's go first I was introduced by this idea by the inimitable Bri code who has given multiple talks on the topic if what I'm going to tell you if you find this interesting I absolutely recommend that you go and look at her videos read her read her work on the subject there's lots of other people who are sharing this information who here has heard of tend to befriend oh nice a few we're getting there good we're gonna continue the presentation now okay so what is tender my friend in the year 2000 around dr. Shelly Taylor doctor and colleagues did a review of adrenaline research done during the heyday of fight and flight research in 70s although the fight and flight it's all the research that was done that established fighter flight as a theory happened in the 70s and dr. Taylor and her colleagues had

reviewed it they found that so most of the research had been done on rats by exposing themselves to stress like electric shocks right and then sampling their adrenaline levels right it was that's that's how it was done and this is how the fight-or-flight theory was validated the idea was we put crete these rats under stress and then there Dennard rental their adrenaline levels go up they get more aggressive oh this is the thing right basically so it turned out though that there was a bunch of data there was a bunch of rats in the study who didn't match the theory there was a bunch of noise in the sample in all of these tests and so they did what any reasonable scientist would do is they threw up the data it should come as no surprise that it was all the female rats that they threw the data ouch anyone who has been following the revelations about scientific research and help until today would not be stunned by this doctor's Klein dr. Taylor found this to be striking to say

the least because part of the reason they had gone on this re-examination in the first place was that from an evolutionary standpoint fight and flight doesn't come isn't complete enough to explain human behavior it kind of is incomplete as a theory let me explain to you what I mean the fighter flight model is based on this very simple assumption that when we sense a threat right a threat our body shoots adrenaline into our bloodstream and our heart rate goes up and our muscles we get ready to run or whatever right this is this is good it makes sense in to determine whether or not we're going to you know run away or battle the tiger good theory right seems to make sense and it applies to a lot of things here's the problem from an evolutionary standpoint when you apply the same fighter flight model to anyone responsible for a life for the life of another children in particular but any other person anyone who's responsible for someone else right this theory doesn't work out because if you're responsible for a life of another person and the tiger shows up and you run you

both die because you're slow the tiger is gonna catch you if you fight and then you lose the person that you were responsible for dies this is not a good adaptation so what do you do in this situation we are collective tribal monkeys so we we run into the situation a lot right this happened all the time when we were evolving right so caregivers are in a predicament one that the simplicity of fight and flight doesn't really resolve we need a better theory so attending my friend doctors Taylor were interested in this not an adrenaline but an oxytocin which because inaccurately called the love chemical but um oxytocin because oxytocin increases when we when we kiss her when we hug when we're in positive social situations the theory of tend to my friend is this the idea is that people especially women and we'll come back to that evolved social means for dealing with stress that involved caring for offspring and

protecting them from harm or turning to the social group for protection from offspring so this is the theory if a tiger shows up and you're responsible for the life of a child a better tactic is to yell for help hide and then do everything you can to care for and protect the other person that you are responsible for hoping that the dice go in your favor in the form of say a bunch of reinforcements this works this is a strategically sound idea what this means is evolutionarily it makes more sense for it makes more sense for caregivers to experience an increase in the drive to care when experiencing fear than it does for them to have an increase in the desire to fight tension stress increase in the desire to care and if you are responsible for the life of a child or for another right before the tiger shows up it means to your

great advantage to have already established a bunch of care and support network with as many other people as you can because while one caregiver right protecting a person is no match for a tiger 20 caregivers with a child right is just dinner right good to go so the idea is that stress and fear trigger in some large part of the population an increase in oxytocin not adrenaline okay that's the notion the adrenaline response still happens but in many people the oxytocin one wins okay so people develop if all the social means for dealing with stress that involves caring for offspring turning the social group cool all right nice now you might understand given the dominance of adrenaline and fight-or-flight gameplay in video games why this notion is but it is I think about putting this forward to you right I think this is a very interesting theory but before we go on I want to talk a little bit about the meta here because our subject today is

affectionately referred to as evolutionary psychology okay we're talking about the lens of behavior and evolutionary and by also by it's much less fun name gender determinism so gender determinism is of course the belief that humans that their behavior is determined by biological factors specifically gender right humans are very very good at detecting gender differences even when they're not there I mean there are plenty of gender differences but we're also really good at overextending our analysis let me give you an example of what I mean this is what dr. Taylor said right people leave all this means for dealing with stress and etc this is what was reported ha okay I

would like to demonstrate the mistake that's being made here so that we understand how this happens right agreeableness so I'm going back to the big five for a second one of the domains in the big five is called agreeableness hey agreeable this is what it sounds like are you an agreeable person basically do you love you friendly anyway right it's basically the thing and it has been widely reported that women are more agreeable than men sounds good fits our cultural expectations right and of course you know that's what the data says so cool here's what that actually means the dotted the dotted line here is women the solid line is men the scores in the bottom room you know one to five while it is technically true that on average women are slightly more agreeable than men right this idea misses the point there is a 10x greater variation between

two individuals of the same gender then there is between the genders okay two random people will be wildly differentiated much more so than the genders ever are this mistake happens again and again and again very slight differences are taken to reinforce cultural dialogue dialogues this gets us into trouble okay so if I haven't made it clear this is not what we're talking about men have oxytocin women have adrenaline this is not how this is not about gender however this does explain to me why I love this [ __ ] game so much oh my god whoa Wow okay because I mean it's got some violence in it right but it is almost all about tending to your crops into your pets and befriending everyone and filling up the little heart meters all the way to the way and you get this hits right so it's looking a different game this game and Diablo I mean when I land this whack on

the baddie right and this creature explodes into a billion gold coins right I get this weird internal release of pleasure it's great stuff right oh yeah the threat the imaginary threat has been relieved I fought my way clear of it right by the same token when I finally trigger the okay we are friends now cinematic and stardew valley and I learned that my favorite shop keeper here Pierre is actually a closet pothead and that he's really adorable about it I hope that's not spoilers because oh he's so cute he's like how do you don't tell anyone we are now imaginary friends I get this weird release of oxytocin I get this thing that happens in my head where I'm all excited right my my oxytocin system rewards me for creating a situation where I can rely on him if an imaginary Tiger shows up we're buds right it's cool okay why does this all matter to you guys as game developers you know how do we use this it's really hard for me to know but I can tell you

that when I shared this concept with my wife this is Lisa hi Lisa she stared at me for a very long time right and when when a tear finally slid down her face she said to me this theory explains my whole life she went on to explain that she had always felt like a chemical motivational outsider because we all know about fight or flight right when something bad happens to you you're supposed to want to run or attack but that had never happened to her in times of fearful stress my wife's response generally has been to think immediately about her loved ones instantly and for much of her life she thought that there was something wrong with her because this is what we call codependence but what if this is normal what if this is how we're wired what if this isn't a disorder what if it is perfectly normal

for a large portion of the population men and women to respond to stress and fear with an urge to Ward's caregiving and relationship building directly chemically without any training or socialization no role models required built-in I don't feel the urge to go into great detail about the game design implications I'm also not going to have enough time for that you are designers and developers your place in this world is to learn the truth I believe that your place in this world is to learn the truth and turn that truth and to experience for your players so that they can understand the world around them but I would like to tell you a story this is Brees story she's the one who introduced me to the to these ideas and since I will never be able to do a better job of telling this story than she does I will with her permission Thank You Bree you're amazing tell her story in her own words largely her own words okay so Brees closest friend is for cousin Kristina and she has been perhaps very she's been very

hostile to video games Tabriz love of video games for a long time I'm she's an art historian and not a and and when Bree would message her about stress and work she wouldn't offer support she would just be like you should get out of that stupid industry she thought Bree was wasting her life on video games and then one day she started to ask about games Kristina asked Bree about games and she was thrilled so she remarked recommended journey it seemed like a natural fit but Tabriz surprised Kristina didn't finish it she didn't like that there's this snake that can kill you it's not that it was too hard it was just that Kristina was deeply uninterested in being attacked at all in a game but it did intrigue her enough that she asked for more recommendations and so Bree offered her favorite game Skyrim Kristina googled it and texted her back like something like uh I don't know why you would think I would like this I don't like game oh don't watch Game of Thrones I don't like swords I don't like fighting I don't like dragons Bree told her that she

would hate the first bit with a dragon but then to just get through it and then give it a chance to get back to her with their thoughts but Kristina didn't get back to her not for three weeks three weeks later her cell phone rang now no one ever calls Bree because you know she doesn't answer but when she saw Kristina's name on the screen her stomach and she knew that there had to be some kind of family emergency she picked up the phone and Christina was crying she said Lydia died there's no Lydia and Brie's family Christina was talking about the character in Skyrim for three weeks Christina had been playing Skyrim obsessively and now she'd accidentally killed Lydia and she didn't have a recent save game she said through her tears that she didn't realize that you could develop an emotional attachment to a character in a video game at all she didn't realize you could create your character and exist as a version of yourself in a world full of characters whom you care about now of course Bree

had never realized that Christina didn't know this because she knew this so deeply having grown up with them Christina said to Bree that for all these years it wasn't that she didn't like video games it's that she didn't know what they were when people when breed tells this story at conferences people tell her they're Lydia stories we all have a Lydia story I do the truth is Christina stopped playing Skyrim after Lydia died because she really doesn't like swords or fighting or dragons and there hasn't been a game that has satisfied her since and Tim Gunn's words this is a design failure not a customer issue okay that's Brees story thanks Bree so as designers I believe that our place in the world is to learn the truth and to turn that truth into player experience the truth is that a huge component of our player base male and female gained more chemical satisfaction from the experience of real relationship building than they do from shooting a bad guy chemically the truth is that a

huge component of our player base male and female don't want to fight back or fight at all they want to care for something they want to see the effects of their care and improve the lives of their imaginary friends and there are many genres that are already exploring these ideas right but I feel it necessary to offer you these tools the truth is that the players come to our games because of what they see in the store window they like they are feeling they the state they have their taste and they like what they see in the wind they step in there right the dragons the swords the blocks and the jumping and the realism that's what they come in for but what they really want long-term is the satisfaction of mastery autonomy and relatedness but they don't want these things because they're bored self-determination theory came into being when a group of researchers started asking people working in all kinds of jobs whether or not the time they were spending at work was worthwhile whether or not at the end of

their life they felt they would look back on that time as fondly or as lost so boredom is one of the many things that can prevent people from reaching their satisfaction goals and drives are how we overcome that boredom a huge part of our job as designers is to present our audience with its the second a second drive stimulations that they need to get from initial taste to satisfaction and if game designers misunderstand or overlook key portions of our population if if they overlook chemical motivations that are a huge part of life for a huge amount of people in this world we leave out vast swathes of people that could be entertaining themselves with our software and our board games and our experiences and this is not just me standing up there being hopeful and idealistic this is the most recent science that I can find and I'm trying to bring it to your attention right the science tells us that people

are driven to make all different types of interactions in the games that they want to play your players want their drives to be stimulated they want to be curious they want to care for things they want to feel confronted right the question I want you to ask yourself as you move forward into the future is this one how can we expand the potential of our art form with these ideas what game design structures might we have overlooked because we were not aware of the full spectrum of chemical it's possible --'tis inside the human mind how can we as a group increase the expressive potential as game of games as a whole through new ideas that leverage these types of experiences in a better way and what else is missing from this behavior model what have I got wrong here right where where are we still getting it wrong if you know and if you think you know the answer to these questions please contact me I need to know where I've [ __ ] it up and thank

you very much for coming to the talk [Applause]