Exploration in Games - Four Ways Players Discover Joy - Extra Credits

We have a human drive to explore. It's exciting. It's exhilarating to find something new, to push the bounds of what we already know. That's why we use this concept in games so often. There are entire games based around the concept of engaging you by letting you explore. In fact, many extraordinarily successful games are based around this idea. But sometimes we get stuck thinking only in terms of geographic exploration. When really the joy of exploration in games can be found in so many other ways. So today we're going to talk about some of those ways and how we encourage the player to explore within our games. But first I want to deal with a bit of semantics. As a game designer, James generally prefers to call this form of engagement the joy of discovery rather than exploration. We talked about it way back in our episode on the aesthetics of play, but I think this change in language helps us think more broadly about how we apply this type of engagement. After all, what is the engagement behind discovery? It's simply the joy of finding something new. Whereas when we talk about exploration, many people immediately jump to simply

thinking about geographic exploration. And exploration of geography is just one aspect of this joy of the new. So with that in mind, what are the various ways we can discover within games? Well, since we already brought it up, let's start with geographic discovery. Games like The Elder Scrolls series, World of Warcraft, Far Cry, pretty much any open world game capitalize on this to a great degree. The joy in geographic discovery is simply in finding new places and the exciting inherent pull in the wondering of what's over that horizon. But this is also the most expensive form of discovery to create in terms of development because it requires creating a huge world full of interesting and varied places to find. Whether that involves handcrafting that world or developing procedural technology refined enough to generate truly interesting places, it's always going to cost a lot of money and time. So let's look at some others. Let's discuss mechanical discovery next. Mechanical discovery happens when the player finds or comes to better understand new elements or subtle facets of a game's mechanics. Unfolding games, which we've talked about before, clearly focus on this sort

of discovery. But, if you've ever had one of those moments where a light bulb turns on in your head and you suddenly see the ramifications of the way a game's mechanics interact, where you suddenly discover a new strategy or advantage by gaining a more thorough understanding of how the game plays, and that makes you just want to dig deeper into the mechanics and figure out all the wondrous ways they interact, that's mechanical discovery. You'll find it in everything from Dark Souls builds to the evolution of StarCraft play to Battlefield tactics. This one's the least expensive form of discovery to create, but it's also the most difficult from a design perspective. The next type of discovery is content discovery. This is like geographic discovery, but it involves finding new stuff in the game rather than finding new places. If you've ever scoured the world to find a new type of Pokémon or taste an internet rumor to see if there was actually a way to catch Missingno or something like that, you've experienced the hunger for this type of discovery. It's also one of the core elements of trading card games. If you find yourself rushing to see spoiler lists or excited when you open that first box just to see what's in the new set, that's content discovery. But,

it goes beyond that, too. If you're playing a game like Pillars of Eternity and you want to find out what choices you might have missed out on because your stats were too low, that's because of the inherent mystery and joy in content discovery. The cost of adding content discovery varies greatly from game to game, but with some careful design thinking, it usually ends up being cheaper than geographic discovery. Lastly, I want to talk about narrative discovery. The Dark Souls franchise is famous for relying on this, but really, anytime the entire narrative of a game isn't automatically presented to you in the course of play, it's an opportunity for the joy of narrative discovery. Finding out something new about your favorite characters or uncovering more about a world you love is rewarding. And when you find yourself combing ancient ruins just for the hope of finding some new piece of lore, it's for the joy of narrative discovery. One word of warning about narrative discovery, though, having branching narrative paths seems at first like a great way to add narrative discovery opportunities to a game, but they may actually be counterproductive for that goal. This bit's really too complex to get into

here. It may deserve an episode of its own at some point. It's something James and many of his designer friends still debate all the time, but I think about it in terms of Telltale's The Walking Dead. When you played The Walking Dead, did you actively go and try to find out what was behind all the branching choices? What all the options were? The results that they'd have led to? If so, did learning that feed your sense of discovery, or did it in some ways diminish the sense of wonder about the game's world as you came to understand its boundaries? Yeah, this is really too much to get into here. And I don't mean this to knock Telltale's games at all. We love The Walking Dead. We did like three episodes about it. But we could easily do an entire episode on this trade-off that comes with dialogue choices. Suffice it to say that there's an open debate in the design community as to whether dialogue choices add or take away from specifically a sense of narrative discovery within games. For now, we're of the opinion that they could do both, depending on how you use them. Anyway, moving on. I do want to emphasize that the joy of discovery is as much in the hunt for something new as it is in the finding the new thing. But that joy has to be crafted by the

designer. Early on in your experience, you've got to reward exploration, and as the experience progresses, you have to give the player new tools for exploration and new insights into how to explore. To use Pokémon as an example, giving the player great balls when up into that point they've only had the standard Pokéballs, reinvigorates the player's sense of exploration, gets them to go back and hunt in previously explored places, reinstilling a sense of wonder to those places, and providing them a new and exciting tool to explore with. At the same time, having NPCs give players hints about where to catch special Pokémon, or telling them that certain conditions must be met in order to catch certain Pokémon, not only helps the player to find those Pokémon, but gets them to start thinking about all the possible ways there might be to find special Pokémon out there. Thus, getting them excited about exploring and actively involved in the joy of discovery. Tons of games do this and I'm sure you can all think of some great examples. Anyway, I hope that helps give a perspective on exploration in games or discovery as I think it's better called. When you're crafting your games, if you decide to build one around discovery, be

sure to think past mere geography. Think about all the other ways you can deliver on this awesome form of engagement. And remember, there are more types of discovery than I've listed here, but I'll leave you to discover those on your own. See you next week.