Exit Points - Putting Down the Game - Extra Credits

last week I mentioned exit points when talking about Humane design and I realized we haven't actually talked about those before we really should though because exit points are an essential design concept exit points are the places where the player puts down the game either for the night or forever this is a vital thing to understand for designers of Perpetual games like MMOs and free-to-play products but it goes far past that exit points are incredibly important to practically every experience we design now in last week's episode about Humane design I tried to stress the importance of intentionally including exit points in your games so that your player has an easier time putting the game down when they've played for too long but at the same time in order to design an experience that flows well and provides the most engagement you also generally want to minimize the number of unintended exit points you have that's the subtlety of Humane design it requires that you do everything with intentionality it doesn't ask you to make your product worse or to make it less engaging instead it asks that we use our design

techniques in a carefully thought out responsible way so as I dig into this I'll be talking a lot about how to minimize your unintentional exit points but then in the spirit of Humane design I'll also talk about how to add good exit points back in So exit points the biggest exit point in most single player experiences is death or other failure States when do you stop playing a game for the day it's rarely in the middle of a run usually it's when you die and sometimes when you quit for the day you just never pick that game back up again so how do we avoid this when designing well the answer is actually pretty straightforward it's all about minimizing the amount of time it takes for the player to jump back into the game consider a game where every time you Die the game spends 5 Seconds showing how dead you are and telling you oops game over and then slowly fading to Black and then taking five more seconds to load your last checkpoint before finally letting you try again compare that to something like Super Meat Boy where you're back in the action instantaneously no delay at all it's

just run run run run run run oh no okay I'm alive let's go run run run run run run run run run run that rapid fire respawn is the only way Super Meat Boy gets away with being Super Meat Boy most players are going to put up with far fewer deaths in the game over fade to black loading screen scenario before just deciding to exit the experience and do something else save points are another common exit point in single player games and they're usually one of the most Humane types of exit point when used properly they don't damage the flow of play but they do say hey it's okay to stop now if you want you have to be careful with this though because if you don't also have an autosave on quit feature in the game save points can potentially create a scenario that demands the player make it to the next one before exiting without consideration for whatever the player may have to do in their life outside the game levels or stages are fairly good and Humane exit points as well their only downside is that they artificially divide up your experience so they aren't always appropriate for some games object jees

are often an exit Point as well when a player completes an objective or a quest that can be an easy place for them to put the game down now say as a designer you want to avoid the scenario for game Flow reasons in that case all you have to do is make sure that one objective leads seamlessly into the next we've all had that player experience where we go up to an NPC and turn in a quest and that NPC gives us another one and although we were planning to quit once that first Quest was done well all right one more Quest then again maybe as a designer you want to give the player those exit points in which case simply don't have your objectives chained from one to the next like that in multiplayer experiences or Perpetual games designing good exit points is a little more complicated one of the most common unintentional exit points is when players run out of things to do I know that sounds obvious but many game developers actually do this to themselves it's why MMOs which launch without any late game content lose all of their most active players and evangelists more humorously it's actually how some free-to-play companies shoot themselves in the foot with pay walls many of you have probably run into

a point in a game where you hit a pay wall and if rather than paying you tried to stick it out and see if you could get around the pay wall only to find that there really isn't much else you can do engagement drops off and you eventually just don't go back to the thing you've probably also played free-to-play games where you were able to Simply Play and play and play until finally you yourself felt like spending money on the game this has designed dangers of its own but unintended exit points aren't one of them any arbitrary delineation in your game that the player can turn turn into a personal objective will also serve as a single session exit point for example a player will often decide to stop only once they've leveled up or once they get to the next rank in the ladder or once they get to a new Zone if you want to have a little more control over the flow of their game sessions and get around these unintended exit points you can try and figure out what these personal objectives might be and make it so achieving one of these personal objectives triggers new quests or designer driven objectives so for example when the player levels up you could immediately pop up new quests on their screen to give the player

something new to do and divert them from exiting finally in competitive games the end of every match is a potential exit point for the player if you want to keep that exit point from being a permanent one as a designer you have to assess what makes a play session satisfying to a player and do what you can to make sure that the player only leaves after a satisfying session if winning a game is what makes for a satisfying session you can do things like give additional rewards for coming back from a losing streak leading players to want to continue playing until they get another win if on the other hand you find that you need players to quit when they start losing because players on a losing streak tend to be the ones that just quit the game for good you could Implement something like a livees system where you can only get so many losses before you have to take a break and with all of these games if you want to do some Humane design you can invite the player to leave at a natural exit point maybe during a loading screen after a death between matches you could just gently say something like hey buddy you've been playing for like 6 hours now you want a soldier on or call it a night or maybe just show the local time on your loading screens so players can

realize when it's 3:00 a.m. truth is even though those sorts of messages encourage players to quit for the night they may actually lead to longer retention as it may help to keep players from continuing to play out of frustration or anger possibly keeping them from resenting the game the next morning and giving them a better experience with your game overall thus keeping them invested in the game for a longer period of time so yeah that's exit points you will find many many more as you work on your own designs but I thought it was worth calling some of these out not only for the designers trying to C better flowing games but also so that as players you can start to see the tricks designers use to keep you playing and more easily avoid these traps if you find that the game is simply trying to keep you on the treadmill or wasting your time either way I hope it helps and we'll see you folks next week [Music] oh

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