Game Design For Engagement & Retention: How to keep your players playing

[Music] [Applause] good afternoon everybody I hope you can all hear me I can see a bunch of hands that's fantastic okay so we're going to kick off we're going to talk about game design uh particularly around engagement and retention uh obviously that's why we're here it's part of this program we have about our monetization master class that we've been running and uh it's uh a part of the program this is the webinar where we'll talk about the principles and for those of you who are interested we also have a premium uh experience where you get to have a a workshop where you get hands on to try and test your own uh understanding and application of some of these principles uh just as a a little kind of hint uh I'm not going to specifically deal with examples in the real world with real games there's a reason for that well two reasons really one is it's a lot quicker to talk about the principles without that but secondly it's actually very hard to come up with

clean examples there's never a perfect um game that does everything in all of the right ways because every game experience is subjective and Rich and deep in its own right and has its own ways and means and what we're going to try and do is teach you some of the principles behind the decisions you're going to make to ensure that your game design is as effective as possible so that's what we're going to try and do uh we will um we'll probably have a few more people joining us so what I'll do is I'll start off gently um we got s such a lot to go through but I want to start off gently and just explain for those of you who may not know who I am uh a little bit about who who I am uh so I'm Oscar Clark I've been around in the industry for a very long time uh I've been working in games since 1998 and uh as part of that I've worked on uh mostly games of the service online experience expences and that's been on

mobile on PC and on Console I've done a lot of work as evangelism I've worked with the Pocket Gamer guys to host a lot of events and write a bunch of Articles um but obviously I'm here bringing you the experience that I've had designing and working and Consulting on games about game design and monetization um so with that in mind why don't we just get straight into it so I'm going to ask the most important question which everybody should ask before they're endeavoring into anything to do with the game and that is why should the player care honestly this is the most important question you know I don't mind that you want to make a game for yourself that's fine but why should the player care well actually it turns out that there's been some research and and Analysis about what actually makes people care about games there are things that we need to know in terms of understanding the um

essentially kind of like the wise and wherefor so we want to seek competence we want to seek completion you know we want control which is also kind of like um an element of Escape how we feel like we're escaping from our constraints of our world a game if you go by y Johannes hing's kind of principle about what in homo Ludas it's something is separate from the real world that's why we are not gambling that's why we are not work that's why to earn is problematic every time someone tries to do it we have to be separate from The Real World or we are not a game we're not playful and actually control is also another aspect with the rules aspect of games games generally have rules that we are exploring but then there's also things like Social Capital these are all massively important reasons why we play games and we should not underestimate their importance so um let's move on

that what there's another stage of this so obviously we're commercial game makers at least I hope we are I mean that's why we're here isn't it we want to be able to make games that are successful that are going to be profitable enough even if that's just to make the next game and hopefully a little bit more than that now um that means we have to understand why we pay as well interestingly they're not that dissimilar so we have to think about things like you know fear of missing out we have have to think about things like you know anticipation we have to think about abnegation I'm going to move myself over here so you can read that what is abnegation abnegation is when the player decides to put aside the things they should be doing like you know washing up doing the you know um read that particular book watch finishing off the Bear yes I haven't finished the the third series of the bear I will I will um but the thing is I choose to do that I choose to Abate the other I should be

doing you can't change that you can create the conditions where they're going to choose your game sure absolutely but at the end of the day we are not manipulating controlling players at least we're not going to be successful in the very long term if we don't fundamentally understand that it is a player choice to play your game and that's a good thing what we want to do is give them reasons to care reasons to want to do it and if we get that right what we do is is we build engagement retention is based on engagement and revenue is based on retention they are entirely connected we also have to think about the player life cycle the player life cycle isn't just a moment of um of play it's a ongoing engagement if you are trying to move away from what they did in hyper casual to have an instant moment of play and that's it if in instead what you want to do is to create

something which is sustainable that is going to hold an audience's attention if you don't pay attention to the life cycle of that player you're dead in the water and that means we have to take on board the onboarding process the leveling of enthusiasm that we'll see at that first install but how many people will be losing if we don't manage to grab them at the bottom of that pit of despair and bring them up and help them properly engage with the experience if we do that well we'll get to the point where we get retention where we sustain that audience over time and eventually eventually we may end up with what we call fandom now you'll notice I did not say whale whales do not exis in ag well that's not true but it's it's not useful whales is a useful term for gambling that's not what's happening in good games that's not what's happening in engaging play experiences because

games need to be separate from The Real World this is where we have fandoms we have audiences we are creating content and to maximize the impact of our content we have to remember that we're building for fans and if a fan can afford one pound a month uh they're just as important and valuable as a fan that can afford ,000 pounds a month don't give me wrong I like the fans that have ,000 pound a month they want to give toor game but if they're not doing it with the same open mind if they can't can't afford to do that we will cause ourselves greater damage down the line than we can imagine now that's because I want to have a sustainable long-term game that last years and if that's what you want then you'll see how we're going to tap into that by understanding the underlying design hopefully that makes sense so let's kick off the proper talk so what we going to start we're going to start by looking at um the core Loop now we all know what the core Loop is the cor Loop is

something that's pretty obvious we have a start condition we have a challenge we have a resolution the thing that we do and then we have a reward great that sounds nice and easy well um we also have to think about what the reasons why we play there are numerous reasons why we play we can look at you know what current players is feeling bored they need to relax they need to stimulate mind what need states are you is your game specifically trying to resolve what what are you tapping into in the player experience if you don't understand why people choose your game guess what they're not going to be thinking about your game the next time they're in that mood State again this is about tapping into life cycle and also you know what primary needs of players oh sticking there on the old um on the old slides hopefully it will take me back to where I want to go right so uh we're back to the cor loop we're going

to talk a little bit more about the cor Loop um so uh what we're going to talk about here is if the slides will work properly [Music] uh um so we're going to talk about how the [Music] game uh has has that start condition that that challenge that resolution getting that flow getting that understanding of how you get people from the point where you establish the principles about what the game is about that's massively important and this is going to be incredibly important when we think about first-time user experience we got to think about setting up a challenge an expectation and it's not just for now it's also for future play why would I come back where will that be so whilst you might in a first- time user experience think about making sure that the game's you know easy uh to play so you you see satisfaction and get something useful out of it if you don't explain how it is going to be challenging why I'm going to feel good playing it how it's going to scratch that itch you're not going to get that

but also understanding what the the role of rewards now what I'm going to try and do is explain the flow so it's not just about these specific things it's about understanding how you how the start condition moves us from a state of that kind of relaxation to a state of tension how it means that when we go from The Challenge to the uh resolution we're moving from anticipation to fear of missing out what are we make mess it up what if we don't get it right what if we don't get our reward but then also as we go from the resolution to the reward we need to move from that tension back to a sense of relief and importantly we must not completely satisfy the user's expectation we need to leave enough space enough anticipation for them to want to do it again and that is the thing that becomes really interesting because when we start thinking about that we start thinking

about the flow of a user as they start with the start condition and they move through anticipation through to tension and move through the challenge they move through the resolution stage and the fear of missing out back to the reward you can see how they can have this flow and if we get it right and we leave enough sense of fear of missing out we can encourage people to want to do the next step and that fear missing out can be a number of things it doesn't have to be a negative emotion it can simp be I think I can do this better next time it can simply be I want the next reward I want to see what's over the hill those things are really important we also need to make sure that we think specifically about um the first time user experience and that means making sure that that process when we start playing is simple really really simple keeping it simple teaching one thing the Nintendo method is the probably the most quoted version where I

introduce something I um essentially having introduce a a thing I then allow you to master it so get good at it I Pro then provide you with a challenge before I introduce any new Concepts then we want to encourage people to learn not by telling them what to do but by letting them play I'm a big fan of having triggers that tell you oh you didn't move the mouse this way which is the way you're supposed to move it therefore we'll prompt you but we won't do it immediately we'll let you we'll see what you do first before we tell you the tutorial steps now that's my preference not always possible particularly if you've got game systems that are new and Innovative but if you got a game system that already exists that people are already familiar with don't teach me how to do a Max three game again when I've already learned how to do it 300 times let me explore and if

I get it wrong then prompt me oh try this instead and do that in a positive way then we also need to think about kind of how we're feeding a craving how we're establishing the player's emotional desire to play how we're satisfying them in that process getting that that working is is incredibly important and then we move further forward into foreshadowing if your first-time user experience is not foreshadow shadowing why I'm coming back in 20 minutes why I'm coming back in an hour in 4 hours I'm not going to get the audience to stay playing my game it's just not going to work so first time us your experience is normally when I'm when I'm called in to rescue game 99% of the time it's the firsttime user experience which is the fundamental problem there are some exceptions but that's generally the the key thing um some other little Nuance

elements that you need to think about in terms of this process in particular success must feel attainable attainable really matters but it also you have to not be frightened of being you know the failure is a possibility I'm a massive fan of Mythbusters failure uh should always be an option H so success is not certain you have no sense of of achievement if you felt that success was certain absolutely massively important um but also failure mustn't feel unfair think about the flow of the game if it feels that the game made you fail the player will feel bitter and angry if the player feels they could do one thing differently and be better at the game they are going to feel more satisfied and more encouraged to play again and

that is what we're after here engagement starts with giving a reason to play again if we fail at that we are not going to get retention we are not going to have a live experience we're not going to have a sustainable audience massively massively important another thing I'm going to throw at you think about how you set up your game rules and systems can you put them into configurations can you set them up on server for example the the physics the the the the gravity the reaction time the amount of damage per second the amount of distance you travel the waiting time for a a weapon to reload or the waiting time for an object to respawn the uh movement rate if all of those things could be configured on the server you've done yourself a massive massive Advantage because you can test quicker without having to have a brand new build you can also create especially

if you set this up so you can schedule you can create game modes and configs without requiring another coder incredibly important now why am I saying it with engagement retention well if you think about the way you set up your rules for your game and you think of it with configuration in mind it's going to make it easy for you to think about what is going to make this repeatable mechanic feel interesting where are the powerups going to come from where are the engagements going to come from where's the reason to do it again and more most importantly where's the optimization going to come next thing I'm going to talk about very quickly is oh he says gone too far uh is making sure we don't assume that we're right there are lots of tools out there I've taken some very Scrappy examples because it's hard to share real stuff so I've just thrown these together as random things think about the funnel on on boarding you know use your data to analyze what's going on I can give you a

whole lecture on on data setup in fact we did some work for the information Commission office on best practice for data capture the age appropriate design code which is like the UK's kind of improvement on well improving uh you know next step on from gdpr uh so anyway I'm not going to go into how you set up your data that's for another time but set up your data use your data understand the flow of players through your experience make sure you can map that so you can see where the problems are and look at that Gap that Gap looks problematic I'm going to fix what it is that made that Gap work massively important because if you can get your funnels working as optimally as possible your chance of retaining and sustaining an audience goes up dramatically so again we're going to look now at you what we've done so far is talk about the first stage the core Loop I'm now going to move into the second stage where we're now going to talk at the layer above that which we

call the I call the context lots of people have other words for it some people will call this The Meta I don't think that's as good a a language for this um but yeah that that's one of those things that we um uh we were try to do I just noticed that there's a um um there's a few comments that have com up in the Q&A uh Captain I don't know if it's possible to unlock the chat apparently people can't use the chat system to post information if not don't worry we can use the Q&A I can see Jack asking in fact there's a couple Jack and Anonymous user asking if you'll get the slides we can make the slides available actually I think casual Gorly yeah you that um and uh I can talk about the config stuff in a that will be in a different session now so what all we're talking about at the moment in terms of config is just making sure that you think about how you can put your setup on your server so you can respond as quickly as possible hopefully helps answer some of those live questions now

I'm going to focus back on to the context Loop so we talked about the core Loop so the core based principle the thing that we do in the game the context Loop is is kind of like the why we do these things now here we're going to have things like um the uh you know the purpose sense of purpose as a sort like the equivalent of the start condition um we're talking about progression optimization and so on so forth but let's let's move on and let's let's talk about where this this model comes from from where this thinking comes from Fantastic book out there called hooked uh it's a great way of understanding habit forming Behavior it's not game specific there is one specific on games which is something like uh hooked on games I can't remember the uh the specific publisher but I'm happy if if offline people want to reach out to me I'm very happy to share these things um and um we'll we'll we'll send out we we you know people reach out to me I'll happily send out some links of books I find very useful this is a method you know you have a

trigger you have an action you have a variable reward you have an investment so if if people have an investment they're likely of continuing hey this looks pretty much like what we said about the core Loop we have a start condition a challenge a resolution and a reward our investment this is what happens very much with the the the context loop with the sense of purpose progression optimization and narrative so let's talk about those a bit more as well so we're going to start off in the context loop we're talking about purpose now what this means is are you setting out why the things that you do in this game the core Loop matter why are you doing them why are you actually thinking about them why are they important how you're going to make them operate thinking about that matters it's really really important um but once you've established that you need to show me how far I'm getting in that I need to see how far I've come how far I've got to go to if you don't tell me I'm going

somewhere in your gaming experience now classic example of this are leveling up ranking up opening new regions opening new chapters opening up new game modes but you got to establish why I should care what's my sense of purpose I'm only going to keep playing if I understand that and embrace that and if I can see where I'm going next I've only got to do one more thing to unlock the next level if I unlock the next level I unlock these opportunities that is massively motivational to sustain an audience to play so you know thinking about that the these are all all good things he says um but also we want to think about optimization one of the most satisfying things in a game is when I look at the framework and structures of the mechanics and I try to perfect My Method amazingly powerful motivation to stay playing amazingly powerful a to play the next game the next game the next game

now again another reason why this matters is it's also really interesting if you look at those games that are incredibly viral incredibly engaging incredibly sustainable they usually have some ambiguity in the best tactics so they become a point for debate they become a point for exploration they become you know something like magic the Gathering is probably one of the best examples I guarantee you somebody will tell you that the deck they've just made is the best deck in the world and it can't be beaten and then somebody will beat it that's powerful optimization tweaking establishing people's you know desire to play massively massively important and I think you know you know we underestimate optimization at our Peril massively important for building reinforcement engaging games and then there's a narrative tell me why I should care emotionally make me immersed in the

story games are incredible at telling stories and whether you've got a linear experience and by the way most of the design I'm talking about here is not about linear experience but if you got a linear experience or an ongoing play experience you can still tell stories you know you look at the way that scarim or or or Fallout tells these moments of story that make me feel immersed in the world that make me feel engaged they're incredibly sustainable because I'm find and discovering moments there are different ways to tell stories one of my favorite ways is to have community activities that then feed the narrative for the next season so let's fa say we've got three factions gold silver and bronze okay three factions we're fighting against Cerberus which faction did the most damage against Cerberus that month and that could be the big narrative kind of moment and then the next month we defeated cus we now have are exploring the river sticks we get to see what's

happening in the Underworld because of silver team who were the ones who unlocked it because they defeated Cerberus once and for all how do we know that because the silver team are the one that had the highest number of points what does that mean that means everyone on Silver team is getting a bonus reward because they all participated in that success so narrative can be incredibly well told it can be done in really interesting ways and don't get me started on the opportunity I think we have with long-term retention games where we use the same principles of soap operas in the way we tell the stories still not being done today but what I think is also important is to remind ourselves where is the emotion do you remember what we said last time when we looked at these four steps it's not just about the four steps it's about the emotional Journey we're taking people through we're taking people through from that

initial uh sense of purpose through to a progression and that's creating a sense of tension so going from relief to tension we're then going from that sense of purpose to optimization where we're then building that sort of sense of fear of missing out what if I don't get it right what if I don't optimize it properly and then going from there into the you know the kind of narrative side where I get this payoff this satisf action I still want to know more that's why things like so pop narrative are so powerful because what will happen next month next time um on on um game name X this could happen um you know you you'll never guess what happens next with so many techniques we can use to emotionally engage the player if you're just looking at your game design flat as a functional functional functional you are not going to keep your audience engagement means emotion it's important

to do I notice that um there's a few people talking about uh access to the uh recording yes we will be making a recording available to you all later don't worry have no fear and I'm sorry for those guys who are having trouble with power outages uh and these things do happen however okay so hopefully I've taken you on this journey I've got you thinking about the core Loop I've now got you thinking about the context Loop there's some other things about the cont Loop that's worth paying attention to which is oh you remember this uh life cycle the player life cycle this is incredibly important the player uh you the context Loop isn't just about today's session the core Loop is about the thing we do now the the the um the context Loop is about keeping me playing sustaining me playing so again we have to think about the transitions of the player not just the emotions but the transitions because what they're going to need from the game as they go from onboarding to engagement

from engagement to retention and from retention to fandom they're going to change how we build our sense of purpose how we build our sense of progression how we build our optimization and how we can augmented by updating through paid rewards through earnt rewards through various forms of exchange how those elements work to make the game richer deeper more engaging that's the stuff that turns into long-term sustainability incredibly important and I'm going to throw another term at you and that is the second time user experience now I mean not everybody will be aware of that um you know this is a technique that we use uh I'll let you decide you know if it's the right thing for you um the thing here is you as a player are not always in your first time mode what's it like when you come back

to the game what's it like when you come back for the third the fifth the 10th time you need to not just optimize the first time experience but if you really really want to keep people playing for the long term don't make them keep going through the same nonsense think about you know how many times you're going to pop up the reason to buy this new thing think about how many times you're going to say this is thing how are you going to remind them the thing that they may have forgotten when they were first starting how are you going to use your knowledge of their player Behavior to enhance their player experience these are really important things as long as you don't get creepy don't get creepy if you start tracking people at an individual level you can get into a very dark place very quickly and it feels creepy it feels weird we don't want to be that we want to be a delight to go back to we want to be given something that we oh I I forgot that was a possibility let me go for

that what are the moments of joy that you can put into this second time user experience so that as they keep coming back they have the best possible time and that will be different from new players so it's worth bearing in mind those things so where does this take us so how do these two things the core and the context Loop sit together it's really important to think about how the core and the context Loop work together the core Loop is a rapid action we're going to do multiple core loops and the core Loop will drive the context core Loop drives us into making sure that we can do the next thing and the next thing and the next thing and if we do the activity that's going to help us take our Pro purpose and progress and then we because we've played we've acted we've got our rewards those actions and rewards are feeding our sense of progression the interactions we had the failures we've had the successes we've had are going to drive our motivation around optim

optimization and the payoff in rewards can also be narrative narrative is a payoff so understanding all of those elements and how they fit together is incredibly powerful so what we're also going to Chuck in at you is just to sort of get you thinking a little bit about a couple of other areas so I don't want you to fall into uh the ethical pitfalls here I think it's really important that you be bear in mind privacy I you know it's massively important that people trust you you do not have long-term engagement with players over years if they don't trust you and if you want them to trust you you have to respect them you have to respect their privacy there's also some factors particularly around vulnerable players that you need to pay attention to and the first one is transparency we can avoid a a lot of the problems that we're getting we're faced

with a lot of the things that are making governments angry consumer trade groups angry with games if we simply apply a respect to privacy and a respect to transparency don't hide the costs tell people what the costs are if there are no costs then be clear about it don't sneak up on people don't put manipulative elements in there make sure you're clear about what people should expect and what you are delivering and why it's really important to be clear now now there is an interesting kind of conundrum here with the bait and switch style ads we've seen so the net result though is I would argue whilst there are some really interesting ads out there that are simple and have draw got drawn a lot of people into games when you completely change the game experience without taking the player on a journey with you that can cause damage but interestingly those same ads also have spawn new games because they helped identify by actually games that people wanted to play um uh s

you were asking a question here do I have any warnings or precautions for a game like uh sky that that's being developed uh blah blah blah blah um or streaming tell you what I'm gonna come back to that question at the end um and um I because I think there's some there's lots of layers in that let me let me instead let's go back to talking about player value another thing that's really powerful to avoid ethical pitfalls is to look at your monetization model specifically around player value what do players care about what do they want out of your game because if you focus on player value and if you look at the exchange mechanisms whether that's playing so grind whether that's watching ads whether that's paying money or part of subscription or battle pass if players don't get what they think is great you failed them if you focus on giving them things that are great and making them feel great you you're going to avoid most of the ethical issues and

the and the the concerns of manipulation because you're focusing on what they want which is should be a no-brainer um there's also another thing which psychologically is massively important make sure your game has moments you can break out there's two reasons one is it allows people to stop and pause and relax and rest it means that it can support their mental health it can means that they don't get into the stage where they get overwhelmed and it also means which is to your benefit that they don't burn out if people finish playing your game feeling exhausted by it they're not coming back so if we can create moments of breakout which create reasons to come back later we can actually have a more effective more engaging more sustainable experience and at the same time we protect potentially vulnerable people who maybe don't have the discernment to know when to protect themselves and break out from games we have a responsibility as designers to create

great experien for players but also not to create experiences which are traps for vulnerable people if we do that we end up with bad situations where we get legislation angled at us which is so swathing and so damaging that it even hits the games that are trying to do the right thing by players and unfortunately that's the situation we've seen over the last few years that's why we're in the situation where there's a an item in the World Health Organization talking about gaming disorder in my opinion however I'm happy to have a conversation about that with other people at another time okay so we've covered core Loop we covered context Loop let's talk about the uh Community or cultural Loop so the third layer I like I like consultancy 3 C's you got have three C's the con consultancy Loop what is that sorry cultural Loop sorry the cultural Loop the cultural Loop is thinking about the things that are not the game I think this is the true metag game this is what

metag game really means the stuff that's not in the game itself necessarily but affects the cultural context of the game the cultural circumstances of the game so what do I mean by that I mean thinking about lifestyle not just life cycle we've talked about life cycle but lifestyle is what am I doing right now for example am I waiting for a bus if I am trying to engage um the player um and I don't understand the moment they're in now the the things that they want from a game right now do you remember that chart we had earlier where we saw the reasons why people choose to play a game we're not cognizant of the motivation we're not going to be there and part of that is understanding the device they're using it now we're talking about mobile most of the time in our circumstance here however you think about a PC for a PC I've got to go probably to a den or pull out a laptop I've got to set up some things I might have to have headphones I might have a

whole bunch of other things there's a lot of setup and prep there's a lot of barriers to get started but that's going to have an impact on the kind of games I'm going to play same with a console if I got a console I'm going to switch my console on great it's going to hit the living room or the bedroom or wherever I've got it but if it's in the living room like for me I'm basically making an ownership play of the TV for that evening and my family are off there watching YouTube on their phones you know I I I do that I'm guilty I I I I own up to it but the the key thing I want to try and get across here is these things matter thinking about the cultural context then separately we can move on to the next thing cooperation how we cooperate in game massively interesting and that can can be in-game but it can also be through social media platforms it can be through forums it can be through Reddit any number of places how competition operates again massively interesting you know because compettion drives a different kind of behavior not every game is going to have

a direct competition I'm a big fan of asynchronous multiplayer U but you know equally not every game has to have multiplayer real time multiplayer games are my first love I admit but I'm a you know 50 plus guy whose reflexes are not great if I play a first-person shooter nowadays it's head shot I'm dead head shot I'm dead but I still have a love for those kind of games how do you make sure that works how does a competition work obviously one answer is you have a game like um World of Tanks which is basically Counterstrike for old people um so that's a joke I'm sure um the the guys at wargaming will be upset about me saying that but hopefully you get where I'm coming from there's another element here and one I want you to take very seriously and that is zeitgeist so you know to my mind Zeitgeist is all about thinking about the spirit in the wind the um the moment of of uh uh play the the things that I I'll

watch your game being played by someone else think about your audience's audience now I'm not just talking about Esports or or streaming any game if it doesn't think that the player is going to show the game off to somebody else and it has to look gorgeous it has to be immediately understandable it has to feel relevant if those things aren't done you're not going to get the most important part of marketing right now is that word of mouth that only happens through social platforms you need that and it also happens to be the magic formula that makes your trailers work deliciously so think about the Zeitgeist that you're creating I've got an anonymous question here uh player retention is one of the core Loops I've mentioned uh how do you implement a good mechanic to maintain a player's retention a game regardless of the game genre so this is where I'm saying we're trying to look at the the the game mechanics all the whole game in these three layers we get this the core right

we think about how the core so the start condition the challenge resolution reward how that feeds into the the context Loop so that's the purpose the progression the um optimization The Narrative we then think about how that fits into this wider Loop this this uh cultural Loop so thinking about that is massively for and again we need to think about the emotions of those so we need to think about how when we're going from that kind of Lifestyle fit to the um the cooperation side of things that we're getting that movement from relief to tension you know we're g to feel like oh am I am I doing the right thing how do I do this by how if there's no Stakes we're not going to care where's the stakes how do I get help from other people How can I feel like I belong there's a principle called social

identity theory in social identity Theory there's them and us the cooperation side of things is about the US I've got to have that tension to feel like I want to belong if I don't feel like I want to belong why would I bother so thinking about that is going to be massively important thinking about all that then translates into competition competition is essentially a form of cooperation but it's exemplified it's leveled up it's about amplifying rarify the air so I'm now putting my skill on the line not just whether I'm part of the group but now I want to excel in the group so think about what that means and how you're moving there from the anticipation of what the game can deliver you into that fear of missing out and again by having this sense of Zas being to show off look what I did look at this game being to show other people what ID did in your game that Zid gist moment that's where we

move from the tension into a sense of relief but also leaving me wanting more that's the fundamental thing I want to keep people thinking about it's always about a journey it is not about a moment so we' talked about that in detail we've talked uh we've talked about the uh the emotional side of that um I want to mention a little thing here so one of those elements that we can talk about regarding um the way that systems operate is to think a little bit oh actually I may have switched a little bit here uh no that's right I'm good um to think about things in terms of how you package your experience so for example one of the things I think is really interesting is thinking about why you get um eight hot dogs but six

buns now that's that doesn't what's that's got to do with context loops and cultural loops and so and so forth but it's actually an important factor that you think about the way your game operates if you always leave somebody with a sense that there's something I could yet fulfill I already own my eight hot dogs I have my eight hot dogs but I've only got six buns I have my six hot dogs and buns together I've got two hot dogs left well why don't I go get more buns well when I go get more buns I get six buns now I've got six buns and only hoot two hot dogs now I've got four buns left over I better go get more hot dogs that flow that M that always leaving an inbalance in your game is part of this emotional journey is a part of this route through the player experience it's part of leaving you something to anticipate in the next play I think that's incredibly valuable um I'm going to also talk about another

type of experience now we've talked about firsttime user experience we've talked about second time us your experience I want to throw in at you this now this is pretty Advanced very few games have the chance to do this but I think you need to think about the lapsed time user experience What on earth does that mean that means I haven't played your game for three months how can you get me to come back in I don't want to go back through the tutorial because in my head I remember perfectly how to play this but in reality I don't in reality I've forgotten how to play this game entirely but you need to teach me in a different way to get back in the game so I don't just go and throw my toys in the pram and get angry it's the game's fault that I don't remember how to play it so thinking about how you provide an easy return motivation re-engagement these rewards for coming back that can get people who established an experience playing the game so they can come back

and feel satisfied again that is a super power that takes you to the next level so I thoroughly recommend thinking about that andless remember engagement is retention retention is revenue that's what this is about and so how do these all fit together these all fit together this is a flow we've got the the second of the activity flurring around you know creating that driver going through the start condition CH this is the integrated way to think about your experience we've got the the the sense of purpose and progression that's driving that further forward but equally we've got the cultural Loop which is driving us with that longer term engagement we can't just deliver amazing experiences if we don't think about how these flow together and how each of them take the player on an emotional Journey where we can start off with a state of relief and relaxation

with anticipation and we can move ourselves from that state to a state of tension still anticipating and from that set of tension with anticipation moving that to fear of missing out and tension which is when we are so deeply involved in the game and then when we succeed that's when we move over to the um relief stage where we can move forward that is the place where you can really start to unlock the potential re-engagement and sustaining of that audience because at the end of the day we need to make sure that the players coming back in 20 minutes in an hour in two hours in four hours in two days in a week in a month in a year we want people to keep coming back if you haven't thought about these elements you are not going to sustain an Engaged audience but don't take my word for it don't take my insights my thoughts you need to use data that's why setting up

your servers in advance is important that's why I talk about setting up config in advance I want to know what config settings worked with which audiences when and how I want to be able to use that to forecast what next month's going to be look like what's next year is going to look like we can't forecast effectively if we don't know we've got a sustainable business and and being able to understand performance you know be a to do testing to be able to understand how we Eng Engage The Audience data data data data you know you need to use that data to provide you with a starting point and then apply your insights Your Design skills to deliver that effectively and that's it so we've talked about creating a core Loop we've talked about the context Loop and we've talked about the cultural Loop we've talked about why these ways of thinking about your game the ways of slicing your game and the player experience critically important and how it it's you

know it's so essential to really understand where your game fits in this process and if you but if you can do that if you can get that to work you're going to have a much better chance of sustaining and maintaining longer and longer term audiences and then that's where the lessons from the previous webinar by the way you can get that webinar it's on the website if you want to get a link to that we'll make sure that that's available you can watch other I'll give you Insight of that uh you will have missed the workshop unfortunately but if anyone's interested in that following up on that workshop at any point we're very happy to rerun that um so look at the techniques for monetizing but next time when we go into the uh the third webinar we're going to talk about game economy design so we're talking about the balancing systems we're talking about the components of you know maintaining and sustaining your game uh so those are the three topics this this has been about engaging retention design very happy to answer any questions that

people have but hopefully I've left you with these thoughts that I need to think about not just how my game mechanics work but how they drive a reason to replay and then once I've done that the context in which that replay happens so I can sustain it for a longer period of time and finally how the cultural fit for all of those play methods connects with the audience so you build fandoms audiences that sustain and they become your primary driver to find and sustain players so does anyone have any questions again feel free to use the Q&A uh for that uh I can happily talk through the um um you know other questions that arise I'm trying to sort of have a look through uh the comments that have made been before to see if there's any elements in there um I think

the question was about device oriented rather streaming oriented game um again it depends on what you mean by streaming um very few games are not connected if you're on a sustainable game and you don't have any data servers at all that's going to cause you some issues I wouldn't recommend it in this day and age however that doesn't mean I don't think you should be able to play offline and there are techniques you can do to make sure that for example when you start up the game you can get the server in the background always make it the background so the player can still act the server in the background can just check if the configurations in the game are up to date and if they're not download the latest ones and if you're smart about that and you've got schedule dates tied into the way those configurations are set up then you can upload things to the player in advance of when they should operate so they don't have to be online on the very day that they're playing that game and also

you can build in some safeguards and there's so many safe cards you will need to build in particularly if you've got Ina purchases now if you've got a pay up front game that's less problematic but there are still issues there um but there are lots of different techniques you can think about if you're going on that server versus non-server route but I would always suggest having a server you don't necessarily have to have it running continuously you don't have to necessarily have a multiplayer game to benefit from these techniques and yes I've tried to keep this at a relatively high level but this is where you've got the chance to ask questions and in particular when we go into the workshop uh next week uh sorry two weeks time Workshop is going to be in two weeks time that for people who are involved in that that Workshop we're going to take you through an example you're going to pick a game it's not going to be one of your games Well normally not you're going to pick a game that's well known and in groups we're going to work through each of these l players for that game and we're going to look at what that means and how we we

specifically apply these techniques in a purposeful way so if you really want to get into deep and dirty kind of like thinking about how to use this if you want that lower level interaction it's really important to make sure that you participate in that I'm very happy to do that um by the way just while I have the chance and I'll come to the questions in a second uh I think it's also just like I said I'm going to remind you that the webinar recording for the previous one is available I think um we talked about putting a link out somewhere um it's also on the Pocket Gamer website so easy to find uh and then uh We've also got tickets obviously for uh the um the session on the 28th um and not only do we have an early bird discount currently running till Friday we also have a specific code for you guys right now uh if you happen to use the code web 2 it's going to give you an extra 10% discount off but you

have to book it by Friday if you want the early bird discount that 10% should still work but then you it be against the full price so obviously if you want to get tickets now uh and there are very limited places on that one uh but if you want to get access to that then please feel free and as I say that's all going to be about being handson looking at specific examples of specific games and trying to make sure that you can apply these techniques hands on uh anyway back to the questions so I'm going to go back to questions um how do I tackle audiences if the games genre is very saturated the market oh there's so many things there right so the first thing there is you need to understand where the differentiation factor is so what is it that you're doing that is going to engage that player why I mean again it just reinforces the necessity of understanding why a player cares if you don't understand why the players going to care about your game you're not going to get there so that's

why it's it's incredibly important that you establish an understanding of the lifestyle fit of that player there may be an opportunity because you discover that let's say um what the classic what's the classic um over um uh over established let's say match three you got a match three game okay most match three games we're playing either when we're waiting for a bus waiting for a coffee waiting for a friend or sat on the toilet okay so what is it about that circumstance that can make someone choose your game first what's that about that circumstance that somebody can go I I want to do that one thing that's different you know a lot of those games are over established they're very they've been there don't get me wrong can still retains a lot of people's attention it's it's an amazing game um but what is the thing that you're bringing to the market sometimes it's going to be genre sometimes it's gonna be themes sometimes it's going to be a

subtly different way of playing a logical twist that is satisfying inherently so those are the things you need to think about the reason why that audience and you need to Define that audience you need to understand that audience you need to test against that audience and you need to prove that that context that that core game mechanic works one of the techniques we use is actually taken from the hyper casual world so what we do is we forget for the moment the context and the cultural Loop and we purely test three four five six different variations of the kind of mechanic we want to make playable we create a 30-second trailer of what that mechanic could feel like before we even build it and then we'll test that we'll test that usually through spending small amounts of money on a trailer 50 you know 50 a day for three days on metaal Google ads which variant has the most success

then once we've done that that's when we're going to apply the co the context doop we'll try three or four different ways of sustaining that player's purpose and progression on optimization and again test that test that get the one that works best and finally we look at the the the cultural fit and that often that's going to come down to the art that's going to come down to the narrative style but again it comes down to understand the audience and test hopefully that answers that question uh next up uh do you find applying this model uh to a successful to any successful game uh or have you found any so okay so as uh I think it was Rob uh so Roy was saying this is a high level description I'm trying to establish principles of working practice that can be applied to virtually any repeatable game now outliers do exist don't get me wrong H and often those outliers though are more about the focus

that you place where You' place that Focus but the principle of not just looking at the core elements of the loop which is what everybody does if you you can Define any game into a core Loop but to look at beyond the core Loop to look at the Nuance behind the core Loop by going from core Loop to context and from Context to culture you already bring your focus out and you be you're able to find the opportunities for scale and and um deeper engagement but more than that by applying the emotional journey by understanding what the emotions of the player are by caring what the players care about as they transition from step to step to step by taking them on this journey from rest with anticipation from anticipation and tension from anticipation intention to fear of missing out intention from that to

relief but still fear of missing out therefore I want more therefore I've got my hot dog economics desire to satisfy this untapped potential so I play again that is absolutely applicable to any repeatable game it's just what level do you look at applying it to this specific game hope that answers the question uh and then um uh the team I here are saying they're working on a sports game how do they engage uh their players if game play repetitive well exactly as I'm trying to describe but okay um especially with the sports game with mechanics rare don't really change how do I keep the comeback so there are two things to think about uh so data is content but also players are probably the best form of content so in a sports game where you got

repetitive play creating a context in which those players can see their functional ability where it can make it meaningful and actually that's really the heart of this why is this stuff meaningful we have a purpose because we need players to feel that the play was meaningful we have a sense of progression because we're going to see that that meaningful action did something meaningful in our long-term engagement with the game that it was worth us staying playing so thinking about those elements in your sports game and it could be the game doesn't change but much for example it might be uh shots on goal and that might be it you might be doing a flip uh I worked on a bunch of these where paper TOS star in fact one of the most funny ones was the one was based on crisano Ronaldo it was a licensed IP we had million downloads and zero players everybody just wanted to have the icon on their phone showing CH Cristiano Ronaldo they didn't actually want to play the game no matter

what we did no matter what efforts we put in there was just no way of rescuing in that game it's such a sad thing especially for the guy who made it I feel terribly sad for him he did a fantastic job he made a really nice game but we just couldn't shift the needle and that's again about understanding what the players value so in your point here you're making this sports game what do your players value how do you show that what their value is deled how do you show that what they value that's delivered is Meaningful and that can come through the data so what's their target score what's their you know their accuracy how do they rate against other people that can be realtime play that could be asynchronous play by the way I haven't said it three times already I'll probably say it again asynchronous play is fantastic um or it can be solo but if it's Solo getting data from what other people do is should be straightforward too so whilst you know the trou is so solo play

does not feel special in the same way that seeing how other people done one of the most powerful things I've ever seen in a game is with the original um episode one of The Walking Dead where you saw 26% of people said took the same action as you the rest took the other action and somebody else died that whether it true or not I don't care I felt I'd made a decision that was special make me feel special I hope that answers the question um okay on that note I think we are at time I am happy to take one last question if anyone wants to rapidly run at it but in the meantime I will go you know just remind you that obviously we have a number of uh other uh things that we've got going on uh we've talked about the um the upcoming Workshop which will be on the 28th and obviously sign up now

to get that discount now and to be able to take part in that we've also got an economy design webinar like this which we're going to do on September the 4th and we've also got that follow-up Hands-On workshop and again same principle here the webinars are going to give you a taste of the theory the principles and then you're going to get to try to apply it in the workshop so I thoroughly recommend you guys getting involved in that so with all said and done I think we are done uh you can get hold of me uh that email address I'm very easy to find on most platforms as aanus uh whether that's um uh the the platform formerly known as Twitter uh or whatever else um I'm also all over the place in terms of places like Discord and so on and so forth please feel free to reach out to me I'm very happy to answer questions um and uh obviously I hope that was useful and on that note thanks all

[Music]